Cities are problematic spaces for late-antique scholars to navigate. The Roman government regularly constituted itself, in terms of political ideology and administrative habit, as a collective of cities. One need only glance at the Tabula Peutingeriana to appreciate how the Roman political imagination could flatten the diversity of landscapes on three continents to accommodate a vision of the Empire as an extended network of “urban” sites. Nevertheless, the relatively small portion of humanity that experienced urban culture on a daily basis did so in different modes. Accurately capturing the urban experience is a problem faced by any scholar who would study the Roman city. For the “afterlife” of these cities, especially in the early-medieval west, scholars additionally must grapple with acute debates about the continuity or discontinuity of the Roman urban habit.

Hendrik Dey’s new book, The Afterlife of the Roman City, handles these difficulties with consummate skill and finesse. Afterlife traces the development and maintenance of monumental architecture used to stage the adventus in cities from the 3rd through the 8th century. Dey naturally focuses on the kinds of cities associated with rulership—imperial and regional capitals, royal cities, communities connected to political patronage)—as he shuttles from cities of the former western provinces to Byzantium and the Umayyad state. The result is a panoramic study of a discrete—but vibrant and consequential—thread in the lived experience of the urban environment that testifies to the durability of an urban political tradition that persisted in conversation with dramatic changes to that environment. The book’s narrow focus well illustrates the particularity of continuity in a landscape of change and it models how we might conceptualize continuity and change in specific social, political, economic and religious modalities. Indeed, Dey’s stated purpose is to avoid sweeping claims of “structural upheaval or cultural continuity” (p. 8) and to refrain from “the use of ‘continuity’ and ‘catastrophe’ as analytical constructs” (p. 249). Afterlife thus circumvents the understanding of Roman cities in teleological terms and permits a new appreciation for the pageantry of urban life in the early Middle Ages.