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REVIEW BY JOHN BINTLIFF
This is a rather frustrating volume, although we need to know more about ancient Thessaly, a land of fertile plains in north-central Greece.
The book focuses on 22 ancient cities in western Thessaly, typical for the developed Greek city-state (walled lower town and acropolis, regular street plan, public buildings). The author makes a convincing case that the rapid foundation of such planned towns during the 4th century BC resulted from imposed urbanisation by an external dominant power: the Macedonian state.
A large part is taken up by a useful catalogue of urban sites, while a third discusses Western Thessalian urbanism between the Late Bronze Age and the Early Byzantine period. Unfortunately, these Hellenistic cities have very limited archaeological and topographic research.
A problem emerges from what this reviewer considers a strange opinion on the normal appearance of cities: ‘Central to the book is the hypothesis that cities are not organic in their development but synthetic creations highly dependent on political subvention for their initiative and maintenance’ (p.1). This counters existing knowledge on the origin of global cities and, in particular, the rise of Greek urbanism, which was widely occurring from the 7th century Archaic period onwards in Greece. This naturally leads the author to dismiss counter-evidence for complex settlements and elaborate forms of Western Thessalian political organisation before the 4th century BC.
While not denying Rönnlund’s argument for a striking phase of advanced urbanisation, sponsored by the Macedonians, his discussion introduces unsettling details of an organised political system with central places from the preceding Classical 5th to early 4th centuries BC, and even for the earlier Archaic period of the 7th-6th centuries BC.
The Homeric Catalogue of Ships, probably reflecting centres of elite power in the Archaic period, names nine ‘kingdoms’ or aristocratically run communities for Western Thessaly. By Classical times, there are more than a dozen centres minting coins and identified with a locality, and here the author admits ‘there must have been some kind of central place associated with the community even before the population was urbanised’. By now Thessaly is a federal state, with component districts providing quotas of forces for the army, which already in Archaic times had conquered a large part of Central Greece.
There is only one excavated pre-Hellenistic larger settlement discussed in detail: Kalathia. It had paved streets, shared-axial buildings, possible communal structures, an agora, stoas, pottery, and metal production. For Rönnlund, this must be just a village.
Despite the author’s dismissive image of a pre-Hellenistic landscape composed of dispersed villages and marshes, the evidence above appears to challenge the notion of an undifferentiated rural society. The fact is, there is no reliable evidence on the development of regional settlement from archaeology, so this volume’s thesis is premature when it comes to the pre-Hellenistic situation.
Nonetheless, the book is a step forward in researching early historic society in a neglected region, and should stimulate more detailed research on the ground.
The Cities of the Plain: Urbanism in Ancient Western Thessaly
Robin Rönnlund
Oxbow, £42
ISBN 978-1789259926
