It’s hard to escape cities these days, both in reality (by 2100—covid-19 or other pandemics permitting—maybe as much as 75 percent of humanity will be living or existing in one) and in a ferocious multiplicity of imagined projections. “Sin,” “ancient,” “epic,” “world,” “imperial,” “consumer,” “pre-industrial,” “shadow,” “globalized,” “drifting,” “invisible,” “migrant,” not to mention “imaginary”—these are just some of the epithets I’ve recently seen bestowed on monographs, novels, movies, and comic-strip cartoons of which the second term in the title is “city” or “cities.” As the co-editor of an academic monograph series in which Arjan Zuiderhoek’s The Ancient City recently appeared, and as the author of a forthcoming article on “urbicide” (the killing of cities and citizens) in the ancient Greek world, I have some considerable skin in this particular game. But my expertise, my learning, are nothing compared to those of the author of the work or, rather, the massive tome under review here, The Life and Death of Ancient Cities.
Professor Greg Woolf is, as we Brits say, “Oxbridge-educated,” with a first degree from Oxford and a doctorate from Cambridge. He is a former professor of ancient history at St Andrews, currently the Director of the Institute of Classical Studies at the University of London, and will soon relocate to the United States to take up a post at ucla. He is a historian, as opposed to a mere ancient historian, of a very broadly comparativist bent, but with a special expertise