By AD 200, many cities of the Graeco-Roman East boasted great colonnaded main streets often executed in the fashionable Corinthian order with its elaborate column capitals. At some sites not overlain by modern towns, these colonnades have in part survived or been re-erected. An iconic example at the Hellenised early Arab oasis city of Palmyra, Syria, became the target for symbolic partial destruction by Da’esh in 2017. Another, chosen by Ross Burns for the cover of his new book on the origins of such “exercise[s] in urban stagecraft” (p. 5), is the great porticoed main street of Apamea in western Syria, which originally ran arrow-straight for almost 2km across the city. That at Antioch, buried under modern Antakya, Turkey, ran for 3km, and in Burns’s view vies with the main axes of that other great Hellenistic metropolis, Alexandria, on the Nile delta, as the probable archetype of this Roman-era architectural concept. Both of these date to the turn of the first millennium, but such majestic thoroughfares were largely a phenomenon of the later first and second centuries AD. As Burns explains, they visually opened up, unified, and made yet grander, cityscapes already replete with splendid sanctuaries and market places, public baths and theatres, to which they were usually a late addition. Creating them often involved enlargement of existing routes, but still caused major disruption, with piecemeal construction taking generations (some schemes, including at Palmyra, were never finished). Accommodating existing monumental structures could also make their courses crooked. Still, they enhanced or created de novo central routes for commerce and ceremonial processions, separating carts and pack-animals from pedestrians, and providing spacious, lofty flanking galleries for business and leisure, now sheltered from sun and rain.

Burns, an historian and archaeologist rather than an architectural historian, is an adjunct professor at Macquarie University, Sydney. In this new work, through examination of multiple examples and consideration of their potential sources of inspiration, he seeks to identify the origin and reasons for the spread of this spectacular architectural fashion, which in the first two centuries AD became almost de rigueur for important cities of Rome’s Greek-speaking provinces from Asia Minor through Syria and the Levant to Egypt and Cyrenaica. Yet this fashion never caught on in the Latin-speaking West, even in other Mediterranean provinces or, curiously, in the heart of Hellenism, the Peloponnese. Why the difference?

The possible inspirations and history of the rise of colonnaded urban axes are examined in the first four chapters. Specific cases illustrating the evolution of the phenomenon are presented in the subsequent quartet, with the third set of four chapters covering the massive programmes of the early second century, plus a consideration of why this form remained confined to the East. The conclusion examines their function, funding and the trend towards uniformity during the first two centuries AD, “and questions whether they could really be described as a tool setting a ‘Roman’ stamp on the great cities of the eastern provinces” (p. 4).

Why were colonnades apparently not adopted in the West? Burns is clearly right that eastern cities had greater experience of, and wealth for, urban development than the generally much newer urban centres in the Western provinces. He also notes the vigour of architectural expertise and innovations in the East in the period. The suggestion that climate was also a major consideration does not convince, however, for much of the Western Mediterranean was just as sun-blasted.

Burns is also undoubtedly right that a fundamental driver for such monumentalisation was intense competitiveness between cities, through the agency of their wealthy ruling classes who also vied amongst themselves for prestige through the creation of the grandest cityscapes. But it is less clear that he has fully identified the dynamics of this competition, which “By the second century […] had assumed the proportions of an architectural arms race” (p. 232)—perhaps a more telling metaphor than Burns appreciates. He remains convinced that schemes like colonnaded streets were in some way about the eastern cities engaging with Rome. Certainly, the emperor was the highest source of patronage in the second century; benefaction was bestowed in part through access to the finest building stones from Egypt and the Aegean, increasingly an imperial monopoly. Nevertheless, Burns concludes that these phenomena “require a “more than Roman” explanation” (p. 319).

The explanation is, however, perhaps fundamentally other than Roman. It was instead about continuity of Hellenistic-era competition between the city-states of the region, now pursued under Roman hegemony, but not in Roman terms. Formerly, rulers and aristocrats, cities and states of the Eastern Mediterranean region had competed for power and prestige, not least through the fiercest means of all: warfare. If imposition of the pax romana facilitated undisturbed economic growth, generating the wealth needed for great building schemes, then reciprocally, eliminating war removed a primary theatre of competition. Under Rome, eastern oligarchs and cities still competed for honour and status, but rather than through clashes of arms it was now through trying to out-build each other. Further, this continuing competition, materially expressed through evolving Greek architectural traditions, was still seen in explicitly Greek terms through adherence to Hellenistic cultural norms and practices that owed nothing to Rome. On the contrary, Hellenising culture, especially paideia (Greek education), was internationally prestigious, and adopted and adapted by the Roman elite. Indeed, under Roman rule there was an overt revival of Greek literary culture, the Second Sophistic, climaxing around the same time as urban monumentalisation, both arguably aspects of a single, larger phenomenon. The eastern fashion for colonnaded streets was not about Roman imperial norms; it was primarily about establishing cultural and political status within a still-Hellenistic world, albeit one encapsulated within a Roman universe.

Burns’s book does not clearly establish the origins of the colonnaded streets of the Roman empire’s eastern cities, and opinions may differ on why they became so widespread; nonetheless, this a welcome and valuable study of a remarkable architectural phenomenon.