History and archaeology of Byzantine Asia Minor (review)

168 Short Notices Huizinga finds 'maidenly coyness', he sees a 'mingling of detachment and involvement'. H e attributes to this character, not Huizinga's faded aestheticism, but toughness, 'undaunted tenacity' and 'restrained passion'. If anything, Augustijn's final emphasis on the 'individualism and spiritualization' of Erasmus's piety undervalues his own evidence for the sociabdity of his outiook. Bruce E. Mansfield Sydney Foss, Clive, History and archaeology of Byzantine Asia Minor, Aldershot, Variorum, 1990; cloth; pp. x, 324; R.R.P. £42.00. Clive Foss is especially associated in the minds of Byzantinists with controversies over die fate of cities in Late Antiquity. What happened to them in the Dark Age of the seventh century? Foss argued in his Harvard doctoral thesis, material from which has formed the basis for more than one book, notably Byzantine and Turkish Sardis (Cambridge, Mass., 1979) and Ephesus after Antiquity (Cambridge, 1979), that the archaeological evidence shows conclusively that the Persian raids of the early 600s in Asia Minor and then the overwhelming incursions of the Arabs less than half a century later left the economies of the ancient cities as shattered as their buildings and that they never regained the scale and dimensions they had enjoyed in late antiquity. Although not everyone has agreed with him, Foss's careful argumentation has refocussed all recent discussions of urban life in middle and late Byzantium, and indeed in the medieval Meditenanean generally. This aspect of Foss's work is represented in Papers I and II in this volume, on the Persian invasions and Constantine Porphyrogennetos' list of Byzantine cities in Asia Minor respectively. Paper VI is an important survey of late antique and Byzantine Ankara while papers III-V and VII-VIII deal with aspects of urban life and civic careers that are revealed by the epigraphical evidence. Papers IX-XII deal with another significant element in the archaeology of this region. Foss reports on the results of foot-slogging (and land-rover breaking) field surveys around the hinterland of Sardis and Halicamassus (Bodrum), the traces of ancient sites that he and his companions recorded and the identifications that on-the-spot inspection made possible. A U the papers republished here demonstrate Foss's belief that to begin to understanddevelopments in late antique society it is essential to combine the archaeological with the written evidence. Neither can stand alone. Elizabeth M . Jeffreys Department of M o d e m Greek University of Sydney ...