Fellow at New York Historical to research his next book, New York 1860.
His latest book, World Cities in History: Urban Networks From Ancient Mesopotamia to the Dutch Empire, has been called “the definitive worldwide analysis of pre-industrial cities.”
Leon applied the “Page 99 Test” to World Cities in History and reported the following:
Page 99 of my book, World Cities in History, can tell us a lot about the savage inequalities of a point in time: the early Roman Empire and the cities that linked it together. It does not do what the rest of the book does, which is broadly explain how power worked in historic urban networks, so-called golden ages when cities expanded in scope, size, and reach.Visit Joshua K. Leon's website.
But the page is representative of the book. We learn that this was a high period for urbanization. The urban network linking the Roman Empire consisted of 1,800 cities housing perhaps ten million people. Still, they were a minority, dominating the imperial hinterlands that fed them with, for example, grain from Egypt. We learn that local democracy had deteriorated, with a few rich people controlling urban planning through direct financing (in the form of liturgies) rather than deliberation and taxes.
On this page, a new section starts that begins discussing how the Roman Empire reached this point through force, diplomacy and myth. Augustus reconstructed the state on the national narrative written by the poet Virgil. None of it was really true, but it spoke to Augustus's revolution in urban life that he framed as a restoration to times past, down to the city's mythological founding by Trojan refugees.
In the myth, women pay dearly for the construction of their new city-state. They are abducted from rival tribes and married off in order to populate the city—because in ancient times, population was power. They were pawns in Rome’s expansion, dealt like currency in city mergers that enlarged the state. Constant wars of course reflected the recent past of the Late Republic, until the newfound stability of Augustan rule.
That was the myth. The bottom of page 99 hints at the reality of Augustus the city builder. He does not come off well. He sought to Make Rome Great Again with very real legal codes intended to restore the supposed female chastity and piety from those simpler agrarian times. Clearly, he was legislating based on myth, rather than reality, yet the human consequences of Augustus's crusading to reshape the city would have been palpable. For the vital details, you'll have to turn to page 100.
--Marshal Zeringue
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