The ‘ancient city’ has been defined as a distinct type of organization. Comparison of Rome, 2000 years ago, and Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, 500 years ago, should provide an effective test of the concept.
Rome and Tenochtitlan ranked among the world’s largest cities. Both had grown rapidly but, civic grandeur and cosmopolitanism notwithstanding, both were fraught with uncertainty. They projected their troubles onto other peoples far and wide. Does the comparison between these unrelated cases offer general insights for urban life and international relations in other regions or eras?
After accounting for their respective histories - concentrating, for Rome, on the four centuries of the later Republic and the earlier Emperors and, for Tenochtitlan, on the last century and a half before the Europeans’ fateful arrival - we shall devote the rest of the first week to Rome and most of the second to Tenochtitlan before comparing the two cities again directly. We shall follow the same method for both: after sketching out the social structure and accounting for the economy on which the populace depended, we shall assess the mode of municipal administration and the ideas that public order depended on before considering the inhabitants at leisure and how they took part in rites and worship, public or private.
Although Tenochtitlan’s lay-out and density was quite unlike Rome’s, it transpires that, amidst huge disparities of wealth and status, civil and economic security and probably civic and local identity were at issue in both. Unstable balances between these conditions caused anxiety and jealousies. The issues were reflected spectacularly in the prisoners and animals performing in Rome’s amphitheatres and in the slaughter of slaves and prisoners of war atop the Aztecs’ pyramids. Did either city or both, by these means or others, manage the stresses effectively?
