Aesthetic Maintenance of Civic Space
The 'Classical' City from the 4th to the 7th c. AD
By (author) I. Jacobs
In the Roman period, construction and maintenance of civic monuments and infrastructure were regarded as the normal duty of well-off citizens. For the subsequent centuries, encompassing the 4th to the 7th century AD, changing social and political conditions within the Roman Empire assumingly resulted in a severe reduction of expenditure and concurrent loss of sentimental and aesthetic attitudes towards public space. This book challenges this assumption.
In the Roman period, construction and maintenance of civic monuments and infrastructure were regarded as the normal duty of well-off citizens. For the subsequent centuries, encompassing the 4th to the 7th century AD, changing social and political conditions within the Roman Empire assumingly resulted in a severe reduction of expenditure and concurrent loss of sentimental and aesthetic attitudes towards public space. This book challenges this assumption. It reconstructs how cities of the Eastern Mediterranean in late antique and Early Byzantine times represented themselves towards outsiders by assessing the care given to urban fortifications, streets and squares, decorative and religious monuments and, finally, statuary. Thereafter, the architectural changes that distinguished these centuries from previous times are discussed. The book then evaluates the identity and motives of the diverse initiators of interventions, as well as the skills and work organisation of the actual constructors. Finally, the priorities of the users of public space, as well as their responses to it, are explored.
- By (author) I. Jacobs
"This is a substantial text with a wealth of detail on many aspects of the urban infrastructure and looks at buildings from construction, through maintenance to decay, dismantling and reuse. [...] [Jacobs'] triumph is the synthesis of so much material from diverse regions of the Empire in a way that will make the book a useful starting point for much research on the late antique city." --Gareth Sears,, Journal of Roman Studies 104 (2014)
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