Quote:
Originally Posted by bennelson
While the Romans did have outlying cities (and excellent roads!) They didn't have urban sprawl the way we do now. I had heard that once a Roman city got to a certain size, they actually had a bunch of people go out to start a completely NEW city. How nice and orderly of them.
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It was the ancient Greeks who practiced that form of colonization. Rome the city had a population estimated in the 1 millon range, and practiced its own form of urban sprawl. Moving people was impractical, given the technology of the time, so they moved grain instead, shipping it to the city from great slave-worked farms in Egypt, Sicily, and North Africa. This had its environmental effects, which still exist today: compare climate & vegetation in those places pre and post-Rome.