Aristotle, for example, insisted that Babylon was so large that, two or three days after it had been captured by a foreign army, some parts of the city still hadn’t heard the news. In other words, from the perspective of someone living in an ancient city, the city itself was not so entirely different from earlier landscapes of clans or moieties that extended across hundreds of miles. It was a structure raised primarily in the human imagination, which allowed for the possibility of amicable relations with people they had never met.
