The Aurelian Wall and the Refashioning of Imperial Rome, AD 271–855 by Hendrik W. Dey (review)

The Aurelian Wall around Rome was begun in 271 by the emperor Aurelian; with a total length of 19,000 meters, its construction was a massive undertaking. In later years, as Hendrik Dey eloquently argues, not despite but because of declines in population and changes in leadership in Rome, the Wall continued to be augmented, maintained, or restored and became a powerful symbol of the city as well as an instrument of military defense. Dey’s book tells the story of the Wall from its construction until the ninth century and has two overarching themes: that at most times the Wall was considered more a statement of power and authority than a practical defensive structure (although it could only have such symbolic weight because of the perception of its defensive function), and that the Wall was so big that it had an impact on everything to do with life and administration in Rome. Dey deploys a huge variety of sources to explore the practical and the symbolic meaning of the Wall simultaneously, and the result is an extremely rich and fascinating analysis of ways that one exceptional man-made structure affected Rome on both practical and ideological levels.

Dey’s first theme unfolds throughout the book and is grounded by a detailed explanation of the various phases of the Wall’s construction, including discussion of scholarly controversies and recent archaeological evidence. This allows Dey to establish dates and then to interpret them in the light of textual evidence and history. The Wall was built in the 270s, at a time when Italy was threatened by barbarian invasions and city walls were being built in various parts of the empire (Dey’s discussion of the chronology of walled cities in the late Roman empire is very clear and useful). A wall around Rome thus made military and political sense, but the huge size of the Aurelian Wall, and the path that it took, cannot be explained solely by military practicality; it also had to do with Aurelian’s desire to consolidate and reorganize his authority at Rome in the wake of a local revolt. In the early fifth century, also a time of barbarian threats, the emperor Honorius augmented the Wall in order to protect the city against invaders, and included Christian decorative motifs as a way of making a statement about Christian imperial authority. Dey’s acceptance of the date of 401 for Honorius’ work on the wall leads him to suggest that the slightly later Theodosian Wall at Constantinople was a response to the imperial initiative at Rome, thus perhaps more symbolic than necessary. By contrast to the first two cases, the time of Charlemagne was a period of relative peace and prosperity in Italy; nevertheless, Popes Hadrian I and Leo III also made major restorations to the Wall. Dey argues that this was not particularly for defensive reasons but to show that the popes now controlled Rome and were able to mobilize the men and resources necessary to get the work done; he links the wall-work with Hadrian’s new formulation of the temporal sovereignty of the popes, part of which was intended to show outsiders (Charlemagne, but also pilgrims) that Rome was still impressive. The clincher to Dey’s argument comes at the end of the book, when he notes that no work on the Wall is documented between 855 and 1157, even though there was major political and military instability in Italy in the tenth and eleventh centuries; he argues that this was because throughout that period, no ruler in Rome could command the necessary resources to take on such a large-scale project.

Some parts of the book are necessarily speculative. In addition to describing the Wall, Dey seeks to understand why it took the path that it did, and how its construction affected life in and around Rome, on...