Art and Social Identities in Late Antiquity

Hendrik Dey (PhD Michigan 2006) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Classical Archaeology at the University of Aarhus. He writes on the project that he is undertaking as part of the ‘Art and Social Identities in Late Antiquity’ programme:

My current book project is tentatively entitled Authority, City Walls and the Making of Late Antique Society. I depart from the premise that the city walls which sprang up in startling numbers throughout the Roman Empire beginning in the second half of the third century were the most costly, most visible and indeed the most life-changing structures of their time. They are also, oddly, among the most understudied elements of late-antique material culture in modern scholarship. Yet the experience of living in massively-fortified urban enclaves fundamentally altered what it meant to be Roman and a citizen of the Empire, in ways not only practical (distribution of settlement and monumental topography, road networks and patterns of movement and communications, etc.), but also and perhaps above all conceptual, symbolic, and ideological. Though this is true for the entirety of the Empire, my focus will be on the western provinces, which differed markedly from the east not only in their general historical trajectory, but also in the traditions of urban living and ‘urbanization’ which prevailed there. In my view, the majority of the city walls built in the provinces of Britain, Gaul, Germany, Spain and Italy over the course of the later third and fourth centuries were erected on the initiative of the Roman emperors themselves, not only for the purpose of defending the Empire and its cities, but also and probably more importantly to enhance the presentation of the imperial majesty and to redefine the traditional balance of power and patronage in the provinces. The construction of city walls was one of the most ostentatious contributions to the increasingly hierarchical, authoritarian structure of late-antique society: it was a particularly dramatic way of making the influence of the emperor and the imperial administration more and more pervasive, and thereby of compelling the inhabitants of the empire – from the richest to the poorest – to negotiate their social identities in new and often dramatically different ways.