Wow, Mumford sort of hates them... he grudgingly acknowledges their technical brilliance at engineering and the manipulation of huge masses - of people, commodities and cultures, but his vitriol for the Roman state and the moral collapse that went with it is aggressive.
The early Roman city was not so different from other conurbations at the time, among the many Greek colonies spread through Italy and the Etruscan settlements they followed. It was later that the might of the Imperial Empire had spread around the Mediterranean that Rome really developed it uniqueness and originality in the ancient world - the city of the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus.
Rome acted as a huge magnet, dragging in people, ideas, food, commodities and even victims for the gladiatorial shows. Mumford says that it quickly became a parasitic relationship, with Rome - the focus of the Empire - leeching from the productive gains around its regions. The population of Rome, the mob, were largely housed in horrific tenements up to 10 stories high, the product of profiteering land owners. Mumford argues that as the metropolis grew, engorging itself on the feast of Empire, the conditions for many of its inhabitants worsened as the density increased. These vast tenements blocks fermented anger, resentment and revolt periodically and the ruling elite, rather than solve the fundamental problems with social equality, better housing and genuine justice, (predictably) opted to buy the population off with bread, circus entertainment and glamourous shows of military might.
Mumford's argument is that the brutalising affects of the urban metropolis lead to a culture that revelled in seeing other's humiliation, torture and death as a distraction from their own. While your life may be horrific, at least you're not being torn apart by lions... It was also a visceral experience which allowed the population to experience a touch of the 'real' as a distinction from the shallow materiality of Roman existence, which glorified the body and little else. He also likens this to today's culture - again considering he was writing in the 1970's - of searching for visceral experience in sport, violent films, porn... and the gratuitous and hypocritical exposition of people in tabloid press. We all love to hear and read about people's humiliations and failings..."they deserve it"... why is that?
So, as with the decaying Greek cities, which increased in grandeur as their moral life collapsed, Rome glorified itself with stadia and circuses, and other incredibly dominant public buildings as the vitality and energy which had originally propelled it to expand, died away.
