Greg Woolf (UCLA): “The Ripening Cities”

Professor Woolf’s Sather lecture series on The Rhythms of Rome explored the seasonal cycles of Roman society, the annual pulses of energy and torpor, the expansion and contraction of imperial power, the alternation of periods of frantic mobility with an annual disconnect that fragmented social networks and left governors, armies, and distant provinces to fend for themselves, in short the project of stretching an imperial society over spaces that swelled and shrank with the seasons. This lecture, the second in the sequence, considers the annual rhythms of growth and shrinkage in the greatest cities and in the smallest ones, their transformations in scale and texture and the human mobility this entailed.