On Thursday, February 20th, Transylvania University hosted Greg Woolf, a renowned ancient historian and archeologist who was recently appointed the director of the NYU Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. On Thursday night, Dr. Woolf gave the 2025 Collis lecture to a crowd in Carrick Theater, titled “The Environmental Sustainability of Ancient Cities.”
Woolf received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Oxford in 1985 and graduated from the University of Cambridge with a Doctor of Philosophy in classical studies in 1990. Woolf taught ancient history at many institutions, such as Oxford, the University of St. Andrews, the University of London, and UCLA before assuming his current position at NYU in January 2025. In his scholarship, Woolf has examined material culture, urbanization, and religion, as well as looking at how all three interact with imperial systems, especially the Romans. When introducing Dr. Woolf prior to the lecture, Transylvania professor Dr. Frank Russell emphasized how Woolf’s 1997 article “Beyond Romans and Natives” was an inflection point in the classics discipline, helping shift discussion of Roman imperialism from the shadow of modern debates on colonialism to a more nuanced discussion of cultural exchange. Both Russell and Woolf added that the content of the lecture was related to topics explored in Woolf’s recent book, The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History.
Woolf opened by explaining his main goal behind the research that led up to the lecture. His goal was to contextualize Roman cities in historic debates over naturalness versus unnaturalness in environmental sustainability. The works of ancient writers like Juvenal and Galen have cast Roman cities in a negative light, with Woolf comparing them to the works of more modern writers like William Blake who criticized urban life during the Industrial Revolution. And while the pollution and industrialism of the nineteenth century that angered authors like Blake existed in the Roman period – evidence of high lead emissions during the imperial period can be found in Greenland’s ice caps – this resulted from the industrial-scale mining that largely occurred in rural areas of the empire. As for urban areas of the empire, Woolf argued that Roman cities were far closer to sustainable ‘green cities’ than the polluted dystopias that they are often portrayed as in literature.
This is an argument that makes quite a bit of sense when considering the limitations of the ancient world. Roman urbanism reached its height around 200 CE, with hundreds of small cities forming around the empire, along with a handful of megacities. The limitations of transportation meant the materials for building Roman cities were usually locally sourced, both from nearby forests and quarries. Roman cities were also circular economies, with archeology showing that older structures were consistently harvested for materials in newer structures. As for supporting the needs of the citizens of megacities, Woolf turned to their surrounding rural areas, or what he refers to as their hinterlands. Woolf argues that rather than Roman megacities creating the ancient equivalent of suburbs, megacities only formed in areas with rural hinterlands that could serve as breadbasets for their citizens such as the Italian peninsula and the Nile and Orontes river valleys.
Woolf brought up many other points to support his argument for Roman sustainable urbanism, such as the trend of more green spaces appearing in Roman cities over time, the distinction between the biological waster of cities and the chemical waste of mining activity, the Mediterranean brushwood that served as a quick growing source of fuel for cities, and the – albeit traditionally undesirable – biodiversity that came with urban growth in the form of fungi and rats. In a Q&A session after the lecture, Woolf conceded that this Roman urbanism relied on the imperial system surrounding it, the same one that undertook the extreme pollution-causing mining and based much of its economy on human slavery. Overall, Dr. Greg Woolf gave a fascinating lecture that brought to light the initially surprising, but in hindsight clear environmental advantages of urbanism in the ancient world.
