One of the striking features of ancient Mediterranean urbanism is the capacity of individual cities to weather all kinds of shocks from earthquakes, floods, droughts and crop failures to calamities with a larger anthropogenic component such as sieges and shifts in political gravity. This is all the more remarkable given the environmental precarity that is now a standard feature of our accounts of ancient Mediterranean life, and also the mass of ancient testimony that suggests real anxiety about the fate of individual cities. I will be looking at these issues in relation to resilience theory of various kinds. Resilience theory was developed in the 1970s to investigate why some ecosystems were better able than others to withstand external pressures. It replaces a stress on equilibrium systems, increasingly recognised to be rare in nature. In the hands of sociologists, geographers and psychologists the concept has been made broader (and shallower) as a means of describing forms of sustainability that depend on adaptive capacity. Resilient systems "absorb shocks", "spring back", or simply "adapt" to new environments. Today not all kinds of cities are regarded as equally resilient and this idea is worth exploring for antiquity too. This paper will ask where resilience is to be located and which elements of ancient society were more able to withstand external shocks. In particular it will examine the role of urban networks and systems in promoting resilience in the ancient world.
Greg Woolf is a historian and archaeologist specializing in the Roman empire. He has published on various aspects of the ancient economy, on ancient literacy, on Roman religion, on late prehistoric Europe and on ancient history in the very long term. His current projects include work on migration and mobility in the ancient world and on the resilience of ancient cities.
Dr. Woolf has degrees from Oxford and Cambridge and between 1989 and 1998 held fellowships at various colleges in the two universities. In 1998 he became Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He has held visiting positions in Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United States. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, of the Society of Antiquaries of London and of the British Academy, and a Member of Academia Europea. Since January 2015 he has been Professor of Classics in the University of London and Director of the Institute of Classical Studies in its School of Advanced Study. He is also an Honorary Professor of Archaeology at University College London. From July 2021 he will take up the Ronald Mellor Chair of Ancient History at the University of California, Los Angeles.