It is often suggested that new thinking brought by Christianity spelled the end of ancient ideas of the city. Three Christian authors of the fifth century -- Orosius, Augustine, and Salvian -- have much to say on cities and citizenship. Despite the shock of the sack of Rome, all three are convinced of the value of Roman citizenship, and respond resiliently to the troubles of Rome and other cities of the empire. Augustine’s treatise, the City of God, while offering the Heavenly City and a citizenship in faith as the ultimate aspiration, see it as entangled in the terrestrial world of cities. Salvian is scathing about the moral failings of the city elites, to which he attributes the divine wrath of barbarian devastations, and vividly portrays urban corruption, but in a plea for better cities rather than abandonment of cities.

Historians must tread carefully when they deal with both modern and ancient slavery, for every time they brand the practice as an archaic form of domination, it reappears adapted to new ages. Although most of the modern world, since the nineteenth century, has strived to make the ownership of one human being by another illegal, slavery keeps returning in the most insidious ways. At the turn of the century, when modern societies claimed to have finally gotten rid of it, slavery began to resurface, masquerading as free labour all across the globe (and not just in the Global South), bringing the need to discuss and to enforce policies against ‘practices similar to slavery’ back to international forums. It is striking that while this notion of an ‘insidious return’ has recently appeared in studies on rural slavery in the ancient world, it seems not to have influenced ones focused on late Roman Gaul.