There seems to be a widespread misconception that, after 476 AD, civilization just disappeared from the Mediterranean world and all the cities of the ancient world were totally abandoned. That’s not what really happened. In fact, all the most famous cities of the classical world survived after the so-called “fall of Rome.” People didn’t just leave or die out and leave all the cities completely barren.
Cities like Athens, Sparta, Alexandria, and Rome have long, fascinating post-antique histories and are even still populated even today. In this article, we will explore what really happened to these cities after the so-called “fall of Rome” and the “end of antiquity.” The true history is actually a lot more interesting than the popular narrative about civilization just totally collapsing.
A review of the misconception about ancient cities being abandoned
Most historians assume that ordinary people realize that cities like Rome were never completely abandoned, but I have seen many questions on Quora that seem to suggest that many people are under the impression that these cities were just abandoned in ruins and forgotten. For instance, here are some questions that I have seen on Quora:
- “When did ancient Sparta become completely abandoned/perish?”
- “What happened to Sparta?”
- “Is modern Sparta still in existence in Greece today?”
- “What destroyed Alexandria?”
- “Was Rome abandoned after the fall of Western Rome (476 AD)?”
- “Was the city of Rome abandoned like a ghost town after the fall of its empire in 476 AD?”
- “What happened to the rest of the Romans after the Roman Empire fell, and why didn’t anyone gather the rest of the Romans and try to rebuild?”
- “What happened to Rome shortly after the Fall of the Western Roman Empire?”
- “What was Rome like in the medieval age, from the fall of the Western Empire up until it rose again in the Renaissance?”
- “When were ancient cities like Athens, Sparta, Alexandria, and Rome totally abandoned?”
Seeing how so many people are asking questions about this, it seems to me that I should write an article about the post-antique histories of famous ancient cities to remind everyone that these cities still exist today.
Athens
At the height of Athenian power in the fifth century BC, it is estimated that the entire region of Attike, which includes the city of Athens, probably had a population of somewhere between 250,000 and 300,000 people.
A population of this size may seem small by modern standards. After all, the metropolitan area of the city of South Bend, Indiana has a population of around 318,586 people. By the standards of the fifth century BC, though, Athens was simply enormous. Its population was at least five times the population of most other major city-states. Athens was perceived by people in ancient times as a megacity.
In early August 338 BC, a coalition of Greek city-state led by Athens and Thebes were defeated by the forces of King Philippos II of Makedonia in the Battle of Chaironeia. Athens was forced to join the Corinthian League, which was led by Makedonia, effectively bringing Athens under Makedonian rule. Athens tried several times to reestablish its independence, but these efforts were all doomed to failure.
Despite no longer being independent, Athens remained one of the largest and most important cities in the Mediterranean world throughout the Hellenistic Period (lasted c. 323 – c. 146 BC). It was renowned throughout the ancient world for its many philosophers, schools, and impressive monuments. People from across the Mediterranean travelled to Athens to study.
The Romans officially annexed Athens along with the rest of Greece in 146 BC. They later declared Athens a “free city” and its inhabitants Roman citizens. The Roman emperor Hadrian (ruled 117 – 138 AD) visited Athens several times and instigated massive building projects there, ordering the construction of a large number of temples and sanctuaries, a library, a gymnasium, an aqueduct, and a bridge. He also ordered the completion of the Temple to Olympian Zeus, which remains one of the more impressive monuments in Athens today.
The third century AD was a period of great instability during which the Roman Empire was devastated by many civil wars and invasions. Athens was sacked by the Heruli in 267 AD and considerable damage was done to the city and to its inhabitants before the sackers were finally driven out by a group of Athenians under the leadership of the statesman Dexippos. Many of the city’s monuments were damaged, but the city itself survived.
ABOVE: Imaginative illustration from Archaeology Illustrated of what the city of Athens might have looked like in the first century AD in the time of Ploutarchos
In 395 AD, the Visigoths under the leadership of King Alaric I sacked the countryside around Athens and the port of Peiraieus that sustained it. Nonetheless, Alaric I spared the city of Athens itself, which capitulated to his demands. He left Athens shortly thereafter, heading south for the Peloponnesos, where he sacked the cities of Sparta, Argos, and Corinth.
Meanwhile, while all this was happening, Athens was slowly being Christianized. Christianity was first introduced to Athens in the first century AD. Over the course of several centuries, many people in Athens gradually converted to Christianity. By the end of the fourth century AD, most people in Athens were probably at least nominally Christian, but practitioners of traditional Greek religion still made up a large minority of the population and Athenian Christianity was significantly influenced by earlier non-Christian practices.
As I discuss in this article from March 2019, many traditional Greek deities continued to be worshipped as Christian saints. For instance, as late as the late eighteenth century, people in the village of Eleusis outside Athens were still venerating a statue of “Saint Dimitra,” who was said to control the harvest and was said to have had a daughter who was abducted.
Meanwhile, many Greek temples in Athens were converted into Christian churches. For instance, the Parthenon, which was originally built as a temple to the virgin goddess Athena, was converted in late antiquity into a church of the Virgin Mary. Likewise, the Temple of Hephaistos in the Athenian Agora was converted into a Christian church to Saint Georgios Akamates.
In late antiquity, Athens’ population and importance gradually declined, but it remained distinguished for its intellectual culture. The Neoplatonic Academy in Athens was arguably the most respected educational center in Greece. Indeed, the Neoplatonic Academy remained something of a last bastion of Athens’ ancient heritage; as late as the sixth century AD, long after most people had at least nominally converted to Christianity, the teachers at the Neoplatonic Academy were still openly practitioners of traditional Greek religion.
In 529 AD, Emperor Justinian I (ruled 527 – 565 AD) cut off all government funding for the Academy and forced the openly pagan philosophers associated with it, including Damaskios of Syria (lived c. 458 – after c. 538) and Simplikios of Kilikia (lived c. 490 – c. 560 AD), into exile. As a result of Justinian I’s actions, the Neoplatonic Academy was effectively shut down permanently.
ABOVE: Modern photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Parthenon on the Athenian Akropolis. Originally built in the fifth century BC as a temple to the goddess Athena, the Parthenon was converted in late antiquity into a Christian church dedicated to the Virgin Mary.
Athens was not one of the most important cities in the Byzantine Empire as a whole, but it was still one of the most significant cities in Greece during the Byzantine Period. Notably, even after the Byzantines lost control of most of the Balkans in the early seventh century BC, the region of Attike remained firmly under Byzantine control.
Eirene Sarantapechaina (lived c. 752 – 803 AD), the wife of Emperor Leon IV the Khazar who later went on to become the first woman to rule the Roman Empire as sole empress in her own name for more than a few months, was from the prominent Athenian aristocratic Sarantapechos family. The fact that she was chosen to be Leon IV’s wife illustrates the continuing relevance Athens had in Byzantine politics even in the ninth century.
Athens actually grew during the Middle Byzantine Period (lasted c. 867 – c. 1185 AD) due to it being a center of trade. After the western European knights of the Fourth Crusade sacked the city of Constantinople in 1204 AD, they established the Duchy of Athens, a Latin kingdom which ruled all of Attike and Boiotia. The Duchy of Athens survived until it was conquered by the Ottoman Empire in 1458, shortly after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453.
ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the Latin states established in Greece after the Fourth Crusade as they appeared in around 1210 AD
During the Ottoman Period, the population of Athens fell into steep decline. In 1833, the year before Athens became the capital of Greece, it is estimated that it had a population of only around 4,000 people. For comparison, the estimated population of the small, obscure town of Sullivan, Indiana—which few people outside of Indiana have ever heard of—was estimated in 2018 to have been about 4,097 people. In other words, by the early nineteenth century, Athens was a cow town. Nonetheless, the town still existed and there were still people living there. At no point was the city ever completely abandoned.
The Greek Revolution (lasted 1821 – 1829) resulted in the establishment of the modern nation-state of Greece. In 1834, Athens was chosen to be the capital of modern Greece—not because it was an especially important city at the time, but rather because of its historical significance. As a result of it becoming the capital of Greece, Athens’ population suddenly began to grow as more people moved there from throughout Greece. By 1870, the population of Athens had risen to around 44,500 people, ten times the number it had been only a few decades prior.
Today, the municipality of Athens, Greece has a population of roughly 664,046 people—more than twice the number of people that lived in all of Attica in the fifth century BC. The Athens metropolitan area, meanwhile, has a population of roughly 3.781 million people, making Athens the largest city in Greece by far and one of the largest cities in Europe as a whole.
ABOVE: Venetian woodcut from 1686 showing the Athenian Akropolis with the city beneath
ABOVE: The Bazaar in Athens, painted in 1821 by the Irish painter Edward Dodwell
ABOVE: The Entry of King Otto into Athens, painted in 1839 by the German historical painter Peter von Hess, showing the population gathered to meet the newly-arrived king of Greece
ABOVE: Photograph of the city of Athens from the Akropolis taken in 1862, only a few decades after Athens was chosen as the capital of Greece
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a typical street in the Plaka district of central Athens, taken in 2007
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Odos Aioulou in central Athens, taken in 2009
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the city of Athens as it looked in 2015 when viewed from Mount Lykavittos
Sparta
Even in antiquity, Sparta had far fewer people than Athens. It is estimated that, at its height in the fifth century BC, Sparta probably had a total population of somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 people. That’s including not just male adult citizens, but also women, children, perioikoi, and helots. For comparison, the population of West Lafayette, Indiana was estimated in 2018 to have been somewhere around 48,308 people. By modern standards, ancient Sparta at its height would be considered a small town. By ancient Greek standards, though, Sparta was a big city.
After the Spartans defeated the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War in 404 BC, Sparta briefly became the dominant power in the Greek world. Sparta’s hegemony over Greece, however, was broken only a few decades later by Thebes. In July 371 BC, a coalition of Theban and allied forces led by the Theban commanders Epaminondas and Pelopidas decisively defeated Spartan forces in the Battle of Leuktra.
In the following decade, the Thebans invaded the Peloponnesos, liberated the helots who had been held by the Spartans as serfs for hundreds of years, and founded the city of Megalopolis in the region of Arkadia in the central Peloponnesos as a counterbalance to Spartan power in the region to keep Sparta from ever gaining hegemony again.
The Thebans won another major tactical victory against the Spartans in the Battle of Mantineia in July 362 BC, but their commander Epaminondas, who had engineered Thebes’ rise to dominance, was killed. After Sparta’s repeated losses to the Thebans, the city sank into irrelevancy. Sparta was eventually annexed by Rome in 146 BC at the same time as Athens.
ABOVE: Modern photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the ruined theater of ancient Sparta
Curiously, starting in around the first century BC, Sparta seems to have become something of a tourist trap. The local villagers seem to have attracted tourists from all over the Roman Empire by holding a bizarre yearly festival in which they would brutally whip local teenaged boys on the altars of Artemis Orthia. The boys, in turn, would try to show no pain in order to impress the onlookers and prove their manliness.
The Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (lived 106 – 43 BC) describes how he himself visited Sparta and saw this macabre spectacle for himself. He writes in his Tusculan Disputations 5.14, as translated by C. D. Yonge:
“The boys at Sparta are scourged so at the altars that blood follows the lash in abundance; nay, sometimes, as I used to hear when I was there, they are whipped even to death; and yet not one of them was ever heard to cry out, or so much as groan.”
Later, Cicero notes in his Tusculan Disputations 5.27, in Yonge’s translation:
“Spartan boys will bear to have their bodies torn by rods without uttering a groan. I myself have seen at Lacedaemon troops of young men, with incredible earnestness contending together with their hands and feet, with their teeth and nails, nay, even ready to expire, rather than own themselves conquered.”
The Greek writer Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 AD) evidently visited the Spartan village and saw this bloody ritual as well. He writes in his Life of Lykourgos 18, as translated by Richard J. A. Talbert:
“This tale is certainly not incredible, judging from Spartan ephebes today. I have witnessed many of them dying under the lashes they received at the altar of Artemis Orthia.”
Considering that our accounts of this peculiar whipping ritual come exclusively from non-Spartans who visited the town as tourists during the time when it was ruled by the Roman Empire, it is quite possible that the locals staged this ritual in order to cash in on their town’s ancient reputation.
ABOVE: Illustration of the infamous Spartan whipping ritual from the 1911 novel The Coward of Thermopylae by Caroline Dale Snedeker
Sparta was sacked 396 AD by the Visigoths under King Alaric I and, although the city itself survived, many of its inhabitants were killed or sold into slavery.
The region around Sparta was slow to convert to Christianity. A passage from Konstantinos VII Porphyrogennetos’s De Administrando Imperio states that many people in the region of Mani, which was located near Sparta and ruled by Sparta in antiquity, still practiced traditional Greek religion as late as the ninth century AD and were only converted to Christianity during the reign of Emperor Basileios I the Makedonian (ruled 867 – 886 AD). The passage reads as follows, as translated by P. A. L. Greenhalgh and Edward Eliopoulos:
“Be it known that the inhabitants of Castle Maina are not from the race of aforesaid Slavs [Melingoi and Ezeritai dwelling on the Taygetus] but from the older Romaioi who up to the present time are termed Hellenes by the local inhabitants on account of their being in olden times idolators and worshippers of idols like the ancient Greeks, and who were baptized and became Christians in the reign of the glorious Basil. The place in which they live is waterless and inaccessible, but has olives from which they gain some consolation.”
By the thirteenth century AD, Sparta had become a massively depopulated backwater village with a total population probably only in the few thousands. In 1249 AD, the fortified city of Mystras was built approximately eight kilometers to the east of Sparta. Mystras quickly grew, causing Sparta to become less significant in the region and its population to decline further. Nonetheless, despite being a tiny, insignificant place, the town still existed and there were still people living there.
After the Greek Revolution (lasted 1821 – 1829) there was a movement to rebuilt and repopulate Sparta. Today, the city of Sparta has a population of around 35,259 people, making the population of modern Sparta only a little smaller than that of ancient Sparta.
There are still people living in the region around Sparta who speak a language known as Tsakonian, which is derived from the Doric dialect of Greek, the dialect spoken by the Spartans in antiquity. Tsakonian is rapidly dying out, though, since it is being replaced by standard Demotic Greek, which is derived from the Attik dialect, the dialect spoken in ancient Athens. Here is a YouTube video of a man speaking Tsakonian.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the city hall of the modern city of Sparta
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a street packed with cars in the modern city of Sparta
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a street in the modern city of Sparta
ABOVE: Modern-day statue at Sparta of a Spartan warrior with the famous words μολὼν λαβέ (molṑn labé; “Come and take them”) written underneath in honor of the Spartans who died fighting the Persians in the Battle of Thermopylai in 480 BC
Alexandria
The city of Alexandria was founded (or at least renamed) in around 332 BC by Alexander the Great. The city flourished throughout the Hellenistic Era as the capital of Ptolemaic Egypt. It was home to the famous Library of Alexandria, which, as I discuss in this article from July 2019 and this article from February 2020, is, unfortunately, the subject of a large number of misconceptions.
At its height in antiquity, the city of Alexandria is estimated to have had a total population of somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 people, making it significantly larger than classical Athens was in the fifth century BC and vastly larger than the city of Sparta has ever been.
In 48 BC, during Julius Caesar’s siege of the city of Alexandria, his men accidentally set fire to the docks. The fire spread throughout the city and destroyed a large part of the Library of Alexandria’s collection. The Library itself, however, evidently survived in some form after the siege. Meanwhile, the city, which was damaged by the fire, was rebuilt.
The Romans annexed the city of Alexandria along with the rest of Egypt in August 30 BC following the suicide of the Egyptian queen Kleopatra VII Philopator, whom we know in English as “Cleopatra.” (Popular legend holds that Cleopatra killed herself by allowing an Egyptian asp to bite her on the breast. In reality, as I discuss in this article from August 2019, this story is almost certainly apocryphal. It is far more likely that Cleopatra either drank poison or cut herself on the arm and applied poison to the wound.)
Under Roman rule, the city of Alexandria became less important. Under the Ptolemies, Alexandria had been the thriving capital and a wealthy and powerful empire. Under the Romans, it became just another city with a long, prestigious history. In the second century AD, the city of Alexandria declined further in importance as the city of Rome grew less dependent on Egyptian grain.
ABOVE: Imaginative modern illustration showing how the artist imagined the fire of Alexandria in 48 BC might have looked
In addition to being a major intellectual hub, the city of Alexandria was also a major center for the Jewish diaspora. The Jewish Middle Platonist philosopher Philon of Alexandria (lived c. 20 BC – c. 50 AD) is probably the most famous representative of Alexandria’s very large Jewish community. Alexandria was also an important early center for Christianity from the middle of the second century AD onwards. It had a very large Christian population and it was the home of the Church Fathers Klemes of Alexandria (lived c. 150 – c. 215 AD) and Origenes of Alexandria (lived c. 184 – c. 253 AD).
The city of Alexandria suffered a number of calamities as a result of the political chaos and instability of the third century AD. In 270 AD, the forces of Queen Zenobia of the Palmyrene Empire captured the city of Alexandria from the Romans. In 272 AD, the forces of the emperor Aurelian destroyed a large part of the city in effort to recapture it from them. Aurelian’s forces completely levelled the entire Brouchion quarter where the Library of Alexandria had been located. If there was anything left of the Library at that time, it certainly would have been destroyed. Later, in 297 AD, the emperor Diocletian sacked the city of Alexandria again, causing even more extensive damage.
Somehow, despite these repeated sackings, the city of Alexandria survived and people continued to live there. A massive tsunami devastated the city of Alexandria in 365 AD, but the city survived. In 619 AD, Alexandria was captured by the Sassanian Persians under Khosrow II. The Romans under the emperor Herakleios recaptured the city from the Sassanians in 629 AD, but the Arab armies of the Rashidun Caliphate under the leadership of the general ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ captured the city again in 641 AD after a fourteen-month-long siege.
ABOVE: Gold nomisma of the emperor Herakleios, who recaptured the city of Alexandria from the Sassanians in 629, only to lose the city to the Arabs in 641
Alexandria remained under the rule of Arab Muslims for centuries afterwards. For much of this time, the majority of Alexandria’s population was probably still Christian, but, over time the population gradually converted to Islam. Christianity never totally died out in Egypt, though. Even today, according to Pew Research Center, Christians still make up about 5% of the total population of Egypt. The vast majority of these Christians are Coptic Christians, although some are Eastern Orthodox, some are Roman Catholic, and some are even Protestant.
In October 1365, Peter I of Cyprus led the so-called “Alexandrian Crusade,” which sought to capture the city of Alexandria from the Mamluk Sultanate. The Crusaders sacked the city and held it for three days before abandoning it to be retaken by the Mamluks. On 22 January 1517, the Ottoman Turks under Selim I decisively defeated the Mamluk Sultanate in the Battle of Ridaniya and conquered all of Egypt, including the city of Alexandria. Alexandria remained under Ottoman rule for centuries thereafter.
In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt. He seized the city of Alexandria on 2 July. A British force invaded Egypt in 1801 and, 21 March of that year, the British won a major victory against the French in the Battle of Alexandria. From 17 August to 2 September, the British laid siege to the city until it finally fell to them.
In 1805, Muhammad Ali (lived 1769 – 1849) came to power as the Ottoman governor of Egypt. In 1810, he inaugurated efforts to rebuild the city of Alexandria and restore it to its former glory. Many people moved into Alexandria from elsewhere in Egypt, while many Greeks and other non-Egyptians came to Alexandria and took up residence there as well. The city’s population has only grown ever since.
ABOVE: The Entry of Napoleon Bonaparte into Alexandria, painted in 1812 by the French painter Guillaume-François Colson
At various points in history, large portions of the city of Alexandria have been damaged or destroyed. The city has suffered many sieges, sacks, fires, earthquakes, and other catastrophes, but, in spite of everything, the city itself has survived. At no point in the past 2,300 some years since the city was founded in c. 332 BC by Alexander the Great has the city of Alexandria ever been completely abandoned.
The city of Alexandria is still a thriving metropolis even today. With a current population of around 4,616,625 people, it is currently the second-largest city in Egypt, the ninth-largest city on the African continent, and the fifty-seventh largest city on Earth. It is known as the “Pearl of the Mediterranean” and it is home to numerous colleges, schools, universities, libraries, and museums. It is a vital economic city in part because of the oil and natural gas pipelines that lead there from Suez and in part because of its role as Egypt’s largest port city on the Mediterranean.
ABOVE: Satellite photograph taken in March 1990 of Alexandria and the surrounding land, retrieved from Wikimedia Commons
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of cars on the Stanley Bridge in Alexandria in September 2010
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of cars on Alexandria’s waterfront in September 2006
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the exterior of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the modern Library of Alexandria, established in 2002
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the interior of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the equestrian statue of Alexander the Great in the city of Alexandria, taken in 2010
Rome
Like Athens, Sparta, and Alexandria, the city of Rome has been continuously inhabited ever since antiquity. It has never been completely abandoned. The city of Rome was famously sacked twice in the fifth century AD, first by the Visigoths under King Alaric I in 410 AD and then again by the Vandals under King Genseric in 455 AD. Both of these sacks, however, were remarkably restrained as far as ancient sacks go and neither resulted in the complete destruction of the city.
The Visigoths basically just wanted land where they could settle—land which they were eventually given. Most of the buildings and churches were spared and, although many civilians were harassed, many valuables were plundered, and some people were sold into slavery, most civilians were spared and the city was not destroyed.
The sack of Rome by the Vandals in 455 AD was significantly more violent than the sack of Rome by the Visigoths nearly half a century earlier. Nonetheless, by ancient standards, the Vandals were still remarkably restrained. The Vandals did not burn the city, nor did they slaughter its inhabitants. They did damage some of the buildings in the city (hence our word vandalism), they did take some civilians as captives to sell into slavery, and they did plunder many valuables, but they did not destroy the city.
People often say that the western Roman Empire fell in 476 AD. That is the year when the Germanic warlord Odoacer captured Ravenna, which was the capital of the western Roman Empire at the time, and deposed the emperor Romulus Augustus. What is often left out is that Romulus Augustus was a sixteen-year-old puppet ruler installed by his father Orestes who wasn’t even recognized by the eastern emperor Zenon as legitimate.
ABOVE: Imaginative nineteenth-century illustration of Romulus Augustus relinquishing the crown to Odoacer. Romulus Augustus’s deposition has taken on a mythical significance far beyond its actual historical significance.
The guy the eastern emperor did recognize as legitimate was Julius Nepos, who held was ruling Roman Dalmatia at the time under the title of western Roman emperor. Julius Nepos actually continued to rule Dalmatia until his death in 480 AD, four years after Romulus Augustus was deposed.
Another thing you don’t often hear is that, after Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustus, he promptly proclaimed his loyalty to the eastern emperor Zenon and proclaimed himself Roman client king of Italy (i.e. rex Italiae) under Zenon’s authority. Odoacer thereafter governed Italy in much the same manner that previous Roman emperors had—that is, until he himself was murdered by Theodoric the Great, the king of the Ostrogoths, who proclaimed himself king of Italy.
Much like Odoacer, Theodoric and his Ostrogothic successors ruled Italy in much the same manner as the Roman emperors had. Indeed, for this reason, many historians of the Roman Empire tend to see the deposition of Romulus Augustus by Odoacer as not being quite such a significant era-defining event as it is often portrayed.
In 535 AD, the general Belisarios, under the orders of the Roman emperor Justinian I, instigated a massive campaign to reconquer all the territories that the Roman Empire had once ruled in Italy. The campaigns went on for years. By the end of Justinian I’s life, his forces had successfully reconquered all of Italy—but at an exceptionally high cost. The Roman campaigns to reconquer Italy were extremely bloody and destructive and ironically may have actually done more damage than the more famous Germanic conquests.
ABOVE: Mosaic from the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy of the Roman emperor Justinian I, who ordered the devastating Roman reconquest of Italy in the sixth century AD
The population of the city of Rome did decline significantly during Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, partly due to the severing of the grain supplies from North Africa and Egypt. The city of Rome is estimated to have most likely had a population of somewhere around 1,250,000 people at its height in the first century AD. By the early sixth century AD, the population of the city of Rome is estimated to have declined to somewhere around a couple hundred thousand people.
Over the course of the sixth century, more people left the city of Rome and moved out to the countryside. By the end of the sixth century, the population of the city of Rome was in the tens of thousands. Even with a population somewhere in the tens of thousands, though, Rome was still one of the most populous cities of the early medieval world, so, even in the Middle Ages, Rome was still a tremendously important city.
Rome retained a great deal of symbolic significance, since people remembered that it had been the original capital of the Roman Empire. Rome also remained the seat of the Pope. When the Frankish king Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire on 25 December 800 AD by Pope Leo III, the coronation happened in Rome, illustrating the immense cultural significance that the city still had. Throughout the remaining part of the Middle Ages, people continued to live in Rome.
During the Renaissance, there was a major effort to beautify the city of Rome with new monuments, statues, and works of art. Old monuments, such as the old Saint Peter’s Basilica, were torn down and replaced with bigger, newer, more impressive monuments, such as the new Saint Peter’s Basilica and Saint Peter’s Square. This wasn’t an effort to repopulate a city that had been totally abandoned, but rather an effort to glorify a city where people were already living.
In modern times, the city of Rome has only grown ever more prominent and populous. In 1871, shortly after the modern unification of Italy, Rome was proclaimed the capital of modern Italy. Today, the metropolitan area of Rome has a population of roughly 4,355,725 people—well over three times the population of the city in the first century AD.
ABOVE: Woodcut of the city of Rome from Hartmann Schedel’s Weltchronik, published in Nürnberg in 1493, depicting how the city looked during the Late Middle Ages
ABOVE: Painting of a Carnival celebration in the city of Rome from c. 1650, painted by the Dutch Golden Age painter Johannes Lingelbach
ABOVE: Painting of the Piazza Navona from c. 1730 by the Dutch painter Hendrik Frans van Lint
ABOVE: Painting of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini from c. 1730 by Hendrik Frans van Lint
ABOVE: Modern photograph of the city of Rome, from Encyclopedia Britannica
Conclusion
Contrary to what many people believe, neither Athens nor Sparta nor Alexandria nor Rome was ever completely abandoned. These cities all still exist today and they all have fascinating post-antique histories.
I think that at least part of the reason why so many people are not aware of the post-antique existences of these cities is because scholars of ancient history don’t often go to great lengths to stress that these cities continued to exist after ancient times because they assume that most people already know this. Thus, when people read books or watch documentaries about ancient history and they all end with 476 AD, people assume that the ancient cities were all just abandoned after that point.
Perhaps ironically, the fact that these cities have been continuously populated since ancient times and are still populated today actually makes it harder to study them because the cities have layers and many of the ancient remains are buried under modern buildings. Oftentimes, when they are trying to build a new building or road in Rome or Athens they end up finding ancient ruins underneath where they were planning to build.
In the city of Rome there is a church known as the Basilica di San Clemente al Laterano. The exterior of the church is built in the Neoclassical style and dates to the eighteenth century. The interior, though, is decorated with Baroque art from the seventeenth century and Renaissance art from the sixteenth century. The plan of the building is Romanesque, dating to the twelfth century. The decorations behind the altar, which are of similar date, are in the Byzantine style.
If you go down to the basement, though, you find that the basilica was built on top of an earlier Roman basilica dating to the fourth century AD. Down another flight of stairs, you find that that fourth-century basilica was built on top of a second-century AD Roman villa that may have been used as a house church. Across an underground street from the villa is a second-century Mithraeum, built out of an earlier private home.
Underneath the villa, though, there is another building: a Roman industrial building, possibly the imperial mint, dated to the Flavian Period (lasted 69 – 96 AD). At the very bottom level are the remains of the foundation of a building, perhaps a home from the period of the Roman Republic, that was destroyed in the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the interior of the Basilica di San Clemente, showing its bizarre mixture of Neoclassical, Baroque, Renaissance, Romanesque, and Byzantine elements
