WHAT IS A CIVITAS AND WHAT IS A CITY?

Large settlements are difficult to define and describe in a few words. Working in the English language, we use two distinct but interlocking words, ‘town’ and ‘city’, to denote them, and we tend to seek definition in terms of the very vague criterion of relative size (towns are larger than villages, and cities are larger than towns), but at the same time we maintain in our usage confusing and contradictory terminology denoting administrative status. Cambridge, for instance, is the ‘county town’ of Cambridge-shire, but the much smaller settlement of Ely is the local ‘cathedral city’. In scholarly prose some of us even attempt to introduce criteria of economic function (‘towns’ should be involved in ‘non-rural’ activities). Our definitions of ‘town’ and ‘city’ overlap, and our definitions of ‘town’ shade off at the lower end into the category ‘large village’, without any hard and fast dividing lines being possible.

The Romans, however, had an immediate and precise understanding of the term civitas. The empire was made up of a patchwork of hundreds of civitates (or poleis in Greek): territories each ruled from a local capital-town by an aristocratic council (the curia or boulē). For various geographical and historical reasons, the size of these civitas-territories varied greatly from region to region – in Gaul, for instance, they were tiny in the south-east and very large in the north. The nature and size of the capitals of the civitates also varied greatly. Some, particularly in the east, were famous and ancient centres, already equipped before the Roman conquest with a long history and splendid buildings (like Athens, Antioch and Pergamum).