Greg Woolf is Director of the Institute of Classical Studies in the School of Advanced Study of the University of London, where he also holds a chair in Classics. Between 1998 and 2014 he was Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews and before that held fellowships at various Oxford and Cambridge Colleges. He has a BA from Oxford and a PhD from Cambridge. He has held visiting positions in Brazil, France, Germany and the US, and is an Associate Fellow of the Max Weber Kolleg in Erfurt.

He has held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship and is the recipient of an Anneliese-Maier Research Prize from the Humboldt Foundation. He is on the board of a number of international journals and monograph series, and is a member of the British Museum Trustees’ Research Committee. Professor Greg Woolf’s research focuses on the history and archaeology of the ancient world at the very large scale. He has published on culture and imperialism in the Roman provinces, on ancient literacy, on the Roman economy and on late prehistoric Europe. Together with colleagues he has edited volumes on literacy, libraries, women in Roman cities, encyclopaedism, religious individualism, and on the city of Rome. His current projects include books on urbanism and on mobility, and ongoing collaborations on ancient library culture and on ancient sanctuaries. Professor Woolf is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, of the Society of Antiquaries (London), and of the Academia Europaea.

Mediterranean Urbanism in Perspective

Cities came late to the Mediterranean Basin despite its proximity to two of the world’s earliest urban cultures. When they did come they were very different to their Near Eastern predecessors and contemporaries. Neither diffusionism nor secondary state formation offers much of an account of these contrasts. This paper considers some of the origins of the human impulse to engage in urban experiments, and asks why Mediterranean urbanisms were generally so small scale AND exceptionally so grandiose.