The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) Read Online Free PDF Page B

150,000 and 400,000 17 —operated a system of government scaled for a city-state, with elected consuls, or su fetes, a senate, and a general assembly. This constitutional format was usually dominated by the commercial aristocracy. Slaves and servants did the dirty work, soldiers and sailors fought, priests propitiated, but the wealthy ruled. 18
    As was true with their Phoenician forebears, Carthage’s stubbornly commercial character contributed to its fall. It lacked any broader sense of mission or rationale for expansion other than profit. Even as they maintained ties to other colonies, the Carthaginians did not seek to incorporate into a coherent empire. They remained, first and foremost, a nation run by business interests. 19
    In the world of antiquity, a metropolis designed for business was no match ultimately for a city built for conquest. An ideology based on profit and narrow self-interest could not stand up to the imperial vision that would dominate urban history until the dawn of the modern era.

PART TWO
     
    CLASSICAL CITIES IN EUROPE
     

CHAPTER FOUR
     
    THE GREEK ACHIEVEMENT
     
    During the earliest period of urban history, Europe was a backwater, home to primitive, fiercely contentious people. The earliest evidence of cities close to Europe was in Crete, an island off the Greek mainland. Here the long-oared ship served to bring critical trade goods, notably olive oil and tin, the latter needed to make bronze implements and weapons. Enriched by this commerce and by ideas brought from Egypt and Mesopotamia, a distinct urban culture emerged here. 1

     

CRETE
     
    Like many Near Eastern civilizations, the Cretans worshipped the Earth Mother as a principal deity, but their cities expressed a new kind of spirit, one that later would help define the classical urbanity of Europe. The island’s principal city, Knossos, was home to both a vibrant commercial culture and a highly naturalistic art. Secure in their island redoubt, the city’s light, airy houses stood in stark contrast with the darker, more somber domiciles common in the Near East. 2
    Crete awakened the Greek mainland to the possibilities of urban civilization. The rough adventurers of archaic Greece now experienced the comfort and affluence of a successful trading city. 3 By the sixteenth century B.C., Crete’s power was fading, likely the result of natural disasters and invasions from hardier, more warlike people from the Greek mainland. 4

     

MYCENAE: GREEK PRECURSOR
     
    Building on the accomplishments of Crete, the first builders of major cities in Europe, the Mycenaeans, displayed many of the basic patterns that would characterize Hellenic urbanism for the next millennium. Warlike and contentious, they fought with one another and with foreign peoples throughout the eastern Mediterranean; the most celebrated conflict of this time stemmed from the war with Troy, as described by Homer in The Iliad.
    Their contentious spirit also was a reflection of the country’s environment. The rocky country of Greece, with its chains of mountains and compact valleys, promoted political fragmentation and discouraged the creation of sprawling city-empires. Generally the sea provided the only convenient avenue of expansion. Early cities such as Athens and Thebes began to colonize surrounding islands, including Cyprus, Melos, and Rhodes. Trade took them even farther out, as suggested by the tale of Jason and the Argonauts, to the forbidding reaches of Europe, all the way to Jutland, in present-day Denmark, where precious amber was procured. 5

     

THE CLASSICAL POLIS
     
    In the twelfth century B.C., barbarous, warlike nomadic invaders destroyed most major Greek settlements, including Mycenae itself. Trade collapsed, cities were abandoned, and a dark age ensued. It took four centuries for Greek urbanism once again to flourish. True to the past patterns, Greece remained an archipelago of small city-states, tiny countries anchored around an urban core and its