1 Introduction To Roman Retailing - Oxford Scholarship

An Introduction to Roman Retailing
The Roman Retail Revolution: The Socio-

Economic World of the Taberna
Steven J. R. Ellis
Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780198769934
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198769934.001.0001

Steven J. R. Ellis
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198769934.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords

This chapter introduces the topic of retailing in the Roman world and outlines
some of the important developments in its study. It establishes why the focus of
the book zooms in from retailing in general to the retailing of food and drink in
particular; thus from shops to bars. Another aim is to demonstrate the scope of
the study, which is an in-depth analysis of specific shops and bars at Pompeii on
the one hand, and on the other a broader survey of the retail landscapes of cities
throughout the Roman world. Essentially this chapter provides the theoretical
and methodological framework for the book, while also arguing for the value of
it in the first place.
Keywords: archaeological excavation, field survey, urbanization, context, Pompeii, subaltern studies,
sub-elite, retail, tabernae, shops
The use of the term “revolution” in the title of this book might strike the reader
as something of a provocation. That is in part the intention: to connect the world
of Roman retailing to some of the same instruments that underpinned Ronald
Syme’s influential thesis about the extraordinary social and economic
developments that transformed the Roman world under the first Principate.1
Indeed others have framed their studies similarly, triggering Syme’s concept of a
Roman revolution as (an overly but necessarily simplified) shorthand for the
complex mechanisms that shaped various parts and periods of the Roman
world:2 we are now familiar with consumer,3 alimentary,4 economic,5
architectural,6 urban,7 and cultural8 revolutions, much of them essentially
interrelated. Most of these revolutions build upon Syme’s ideas to frame major,
fundamental developments in Roman social structure, and are thus as equally
Page 1 of 29
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All
Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use.
Subscriber: University of East Anglia; date: 16 March 2020
hinged to the political events surrounding the transition from Republic to

Empire. Whether any or (p.2) all of these phenomena justify the weightiness
inherent in a word like “revolution” will long be debated, but not here.9 My own
use of the word is clearly relative in scale and not intended to compete with,
much less match, concepts as immeasurable as a cultural revolution. But my
principal aim in this book is to at least demonstrate the extent to which Roman
retail space—both as an ancient artifact as well as a topic for particularly recent
study—can be seen as a fundamental cog in the social and economic mechanics
of the Roman city. More than mere allusion, I hope its use in the title—and not
least in the book it describes—prompts a more meaningful connection than has
traditionally been drawn between the role of urban retailing and the otherwise
more sophisticated studies on the socio-economic shape of the Roman city. One
of the principal aims of this book is thus to validate the use of the term
revolution with Roman retailing; indeed we will meet with not a singular Roman
retail revolution, but rather successive versions over time that each and
collectively demonstrate the essential place of retail in the Roman city.
The first of these Roman retail revolutions, however, relates to the study of the
topic itself, which has only recently been tackled with the same kind of vigor
normally reserved for subject matter of a more elite or monumental character.
For in spite of the ubiquity of retail spaces across all Roman cities, and not least
the centrality of consumption to urban life, relatively little had been written on
the topic of urban retail. Even some of the most recent surveys and compendia
on Roman history and urbanism exclude the topic of retailing altogether.10 And
while the more broadly defined topic of “commerce” tends to grapple with
regional trade and its wholesale patterns, paradigms, and movements between
settlements, the related activity of retailing within these networks is typically
beyond focus. If and when engaged, the topic has rarely graduated from
“everyday life” studies; its lessons remain trivial at best, banal and stripped of
complication. Others have taken a more tunnel-vision approach to urban
retailing, imagining Roman street-scenes in which there were (p.3) “relatively
few actual shops.”11 Paul Veyne, for example, believing there to be “more
sumptuous homes than there are shops” at Pompeii, could ask: “[w]ere the rich
in Pompeii more numerous than the poor?”12 Roman retailing has thus remained
conspicuously absent from the veritable mountains of published studies on
Roman urbanism. This is not to say that efforts to study Roman retail outlets
have not been made over the last half century or so, but they are rather to be
seen as false starts. Tonnes Kleberg and Verena Gassner, for example, have each
contributed important studies that focused on shops, but their efforts were not
followed up by sustained contributions from others.13
It is in this light that the more recent efforts to engage with Roman retail
landscapes prove to be of the highest value.14 The recent spike in retail studies
can be deemed revolutionary not simply for its existence, but rather for the scale
and potential diffusion of its contribution. We now have studies that treat both
Page 2 of 29
the textual and material worlds of the taberna in more interconnected,

sophisticated ways. Rather than overview these contributions here, my intention
is instead to demonstrate their importance throughout this and the following
chapters. Even so, one final and related point to be made is that while it has
become customary in introductory chapters to highlight the gaps that exist in
the subject matter, and how the filling of these has served as the catalyst for the
writing of the book in the first place, my own motivations have instead been to
engage with these latest studies while further demonstrating some of the many
ways that research on Roman retail can contribute new information about the
Roman world both specifically and generally.
Beyond the development of their study and their enormous yet still untapped
potential to inform us about the shape of urban life, the retail revolution refers
also to the episodic development and currency of retail outlets in antiquity. The
ultimate ubiquity of Roman tabernae, after all, has led some to consider them as
a “hallmark of Roman urbanism.”15 But their numbers came neither gradually
nor evenly but in waves, in revolutions. We will see, for example, that investment
(p.4) in the construction of urban retail space underwent three specific and
significant spikes. We will chart their unprecedented rise in number in the
second century BCE, their increased specialization in the early Empire, and their
homogenization throughout the empire from the later first century CE. The
Roman retail revolution is thus not just about their concept and form, but their
incomparable currency across the Roman city; so much so that the Roman urban
streetscape will come to be dominated more so by shops than by any other
singular kind of building. Wherever we count them—whether at vast and
relatively well-preserved urban sites, or at partially preserved smaller ones
where the focus of recovery has aimed at more monumental architectures—
shops often make up the majority of all types of urban space. At Ostia shops
number in the 800s, while at Pompeii the number is in the 600s. The roll-call
remains in the hundreds for the best-preserved cities in Roman North Africa;
more than 320 for Timgad, while just the fraction of exposed Dura-Europos and
Volubilis yields closer to 160 and 140 respectively. The frequency of retail outlets
carved into the Forma Urbis Romae, which make up the most common type of
building, reminds us that as much was true for Rome itself.16 At other partially
excavated Roman cities—such as at Herculaneum, Alba Fucens, Saepinum, or
Lucus Feroniae—shops are a key urban feature. These numbers reflect just the
structures alone: retailing from temporary stalls, or even within the demarcation
of a strip of sidewalk or intercolumniation of a public building indicates just how
pervasive and fluid the activity itself could be.
To quantify the ubiquity of shops across the countless towns and cities of the
Roman world thus brings us to numbers not just in the hundreds but securely in
the thousands. At one level, a statistical or social study of all the masses of shops
dotted throughout the Roman world, particularly if we could determine the types
of things they sold, or even just their chronological range, could potentially lead
Page 3 of 29
us toward important discussions about the urban economic conditions of

particular places at particular times. Better still, any identifiable trends over
time and across and between regions could expose some of the factors that
contributed to the economic conditions and the retail health of Roman cities.
There is a danger here, however, in approaching shops in such an en masse,
monolithic way, whereby: a shop is a shop is a shop. (p.5) We can risk simple
presumptions that the countless rows of shops were all doing much the same
thing, or even where distinctions can be drawn between different kinds of shops,
that those variables might have been equally shaped by the same economic and
cultural factors. The sheer range and complexity of retailing as an industry
means that the study of shops in general, or even of “shopping,” can thus seem
futile or beyond reach. There are simply too many tabernae that covered too
much of the world of consumption.
To a good degree, of course, Roman shops were just that: similarly structured
tabernae with obvious commonalities in the ways they retailed. Critical
differences hinge, however, on what exactly was being sold. So while a gem shop
could be located in the same kind of taberna as a shoe shop, they each operated
under vastly separate socio-economic systems. Studies of the directory records
for retail landscapes in nineteenth-century Britain, moreover, demonstrate just
how pronounced the differences can be, for example in the locations and
movements of various types of retail outlets over time.17 None of this is to
suggest that too little can be gained from studying retail at large. But some
appreciation of the distinctive sectors of the retail industry is sorely needed. Just
as the study of atrium houses requires different approaches from the study of
apartment dwellings, or the study of fulleries from fish-salteries, so too should
the many and various parts of the retail industry demand not just nuance, but
careful distinction and focus.
The variety of commodities for sale in the Roman city was enormous,18 and
equally so the range of retail spaces from which to sell them: from temporary
stalls thrown up in a portico to massive, monumental complexes like Trajan’s
Markets in the center of Rome. At the most ephemeral level, the peddling and
hawking of goods was an omnipresent feature of the Roman city, whether in an
itinerant or more situated form. Libanius could complain that “no space is
without some handicraft” and that “if a man gets possession of a little strip of
space, it at once becomes a tailor’s shop or something of that order.”19 His scene
recalls Martial’s complaints of the (p.6) encroachment of shops onto porticoed
sidewalks,20 something that was sanctioned by Domitian in 92 CE. We can see it
ourselves in two first-century CE reliefs from Rome that show retailing in a
portico: in one a discussion of prices occurs, in the other the display of fabrics
and cushions (see Fig. 6.18).21 The more regularized, or even developed version
of this form of retail can be seen in the temporary stalls of periodic, seasonal
markets.22 While these types of stalls could be regularly located, their temporary
usage speaks to a flexibility in response to fluctuating local economies, an
Page 4 of 29
important outcome of which was that they could barely have left a trace of their
presence just moments after a day’s activities, much less in the archaeological
record. Distinct areas of cities yielding rich coin finds have been used to pinpoint
these markets, even if the nature of those coin distributions is more complicated
than is often appreciated.23 More notable exceptions for temporary retail spaces
can be traced, if not with great clarity, in the many cuttings made for stalls into
street-side colonnades, or into the colonnades fronting public spaces such as the
Quadriporticus at Pompeii.24 Otherwise, we find demonstrably more
archaeologically secure markets in the macella found near the fora of most
cities, for which there already exists a voluminous and rather healthy
bibliography.25 These were central components for the cities where we find
them, and while the majority of products sold from them were doubtless
seasonal, the stalls themselves were year-round retail spaces.
At the other end of the scale we find retailing among multi-functional and
monumental building complexes. Bath-houses, for example, are known to have
retailed in at least food and drink.26 And as sure as some food and drink outlets
will have traded in sex, so (p.7) too do we see purpose-built brothels retailing
in food and drink.27 Moreover, retail was not just a part of one of the most
monumental complexes in all of Rome, Trajan’s Markets, but the many scores of
single-room tabernae altogether defined it. Indeed the 170 or so tabernae built
into the six levels of the complex were considered to be so many that their very
identification as retail outlets was called into question almost immediately after
their discovery.28 Yet even if we were to dismiss from our roll-call the many
outlets that honeycomb Trajan’s Markets, still the broader point to be made is
that the opportunity to retail goods was practically everywhere throughout most
Roman cities. Even the very ways in which retail was enacted—from barter and
exchange, to monetary transactions and even auction—illustrate something of
the full range of commercial experience in the Roman city and how difficult it
can often be to identify and delineate its many forms.29
Finding Focus: From Shops to Bars to Shops

Clearly some focus is essential to approach a more detailed and thorough
understanding of the rich and multi-faceted world of Roman retail. First, in the
chapters that follow I am mostly interested in retailing activities and retail
investment of a more independent nature. That is, the point-of-sale retailing that
occurred within buildings, or parts thereof, that were constructed or converted
—normally through private enterprise—for such dedicated activities. These types
of retail spaces—typically tabernae, or shops—demonstrate a commitment to,
and confidence in, an urban economy on a more individualized basis. As we will
come to see, they are also more securely identifiable as structures. Further, and
as opposed to temporary stalls at one level, or large and typically centralized
complexes like macella (p.8) on the other, a focus on tabernae allows for a more
directed study to be made of the socio-economic motivations behind the private,
(probably) independent investment in the retail industry; in any case, good
Page 5 of 29
contributions have already been made to those farther ends of the retail
spectrum.30 This is thus not a book about trade, per se. And though the topics of
trade and retail should normally depend on each other, the focus here will more
often cover intra-urban, point-of-sale transactions more than extra-urban,
regional production and supply.
Second, I mostly focus on a more specific part of the retail industry: that is, the
retail sale of food and drink. The motivation to focus on food and drink is at once
necessary: after all, whereas Keith Hopkins could count some eighty-five
different trades at Pompeii, Hans Eschebach and Müller-Trollius could list over a
hundred different types of shops, workshops, and production spaces alone.31 But
it is also a more meaningful limitation than it is arbitrary. It is without
exaggeration to say that, after language, no other human activity is as common,
and accountable, and as culturally charged as eating. It thus stands to reason
that a study of the emergence of a retail economy in comestibles, with all of its
subsequent developments over time, can have an enormous potential to explore
and delineate complexity in consumption, as well as to reevaluate standards of
living, particularly for the full spectrum of the Roman social structure. And to be
clear, by “food and drink” I mean the retail sale of prepared and/or cooked items
for immediate consumption, more or less, on the premises or in the immediate,
street-front environs. This is to distinguish this part of the retail market in
comestibles from that of, say, “groceries” that were probably intended to be
prepared and consumed elsewhere. This focus on food and drink, rather than on
the retail sale of things more generally, also serves as something of a
compromise. For while it is helpful to narrow the scope to a particular type of
retail outlet, still that form was more common than any other type of individual
shop; Pompeii, being our largest sample, shows that of the 600 or so shops
across the city, some 163 were dedicated to the retail sale of food and drink (see
Figs. 2.18 and 3.2).32
(p.9) Moreover, of all the many types of shops that are otherwise only
imaginable, none are as readily identifiable in the archaeological record as the
food and drink outlet. Their signature, defining feature—the masonry sales
counter, the vast majority of which included fixed cooking hearths—were at once
utilitarian features, enabling the production, display, transaction, and
consumption of food and drink. For all of the countless shops that survive the
archaeological record, no other fixture provides as clear a picture of their
retailing activities as the counter. So while we will explore, especially in the
following chapter, how all of them, bars and shops alike, are typically identifiable
by their wide, street-front entrances, only those equipped with masonry sales
counters can be effectively identified because of this particular feature. It
remains for the following chapter to test the validity of how such counters can
identify a bar from a shop, and to show how these definitions can bring focus
through not just a more manageable sample, but better still a more meaningful
one. Because each part of the retail landscape will have responded to social and
Page 6 of 29
economic stimuli in different and particular ways, the approach here should help
us to explore Roman retailing in some greater depth and sensitivity than is
normal.33
As necessary as this concentration on a particular part of the retailing industry

proves increasingly to be, still any such limitations and definitions must remain
flexible. After all, any concentration on one form of retail is surely to be more
meaningfully contextualized when balanced against the broader retail
landscape. To that end my intention is to zoom in and out of the retail ambit as
necessary, and as the invariably limited evidence requires, between shops more
generally and bars more specifically. Each of these subjects informs the other.
Some discussions and subject matter, after all, are better dealt with via a study
of bars alone, others through shops more generally. Even our very definition of
“commercial” space demands some flexibility: Jennifer Baird has rightly called
the distinction between commercial and domestic space a “false dichotomy,”
given the reality that people will have lived where they worked.34 Shops can be
defined as houses,35 just as brothels can have served as bars.36 The point here is
to (p.10) demonstrate that complexity and multi-functionality in the use of
Roman space, and not least of tabernae, is not simply a challenge for
archaeologists and historians, but rather a characteristic that is better to be
appreciated than disregarded.37
Two final matters require clarification before moving further. The first concerns
my choice of words in labeling tabernae and shops, bars and food and drink
outlets. While we will explore the use of different Latin words in the following
chapter—like popinae and thermopolia, for example—and how their
(mis)application to a variety of specific archaeological structures has
(mis)shaped our understanding of retail, for the moment some clarification is
needed about my own use of labels. As a matter of definition, I refer to those
tabernae with masonry sales counters as food and drink outlets and bars,
interchangeably, just as I refer to tabernae as shops and vice versa. The shop or
taberna is typically the street-front property, usually with a wider entrance than
that of a house, and sometimes attached to a house or to other such spaces of its
kind (Fig. 1.1). The bars and food and drink outlets, albeit structurally the same
as shops and tabernae, are normally distinguished for having been equipped
with a service counter (Fig. 1.2). Beyond (p.11) convention, the
interchangeable use of these terms is simply for the fluidity of the text. They are,
moreover, fairly standard in Anglophonic scholarship of the topic, and are
intended merely as shorthand. While they convey an obvious and intentional
sense of activity—bars referring to the retail sale of food and drink, and shops to
typically generic (and usually indefinable) retail spaces, still they are not meant
to imply more modern associations with the use of these terms. Much in the
same way that we accept that a Roman “house” need not have functioned like
Page 7 of 29
one of our own, our expectation of a Roman “bar” need not carry the same
anachronistic expectations.
The second clarification

concerns the people themselves
as subject, and how best to
define them. This is sticky
territory. While we will more
fully reevaluate the status, role,
and social relationships of
urban retailers in Chapter 3, it
is worthwhile here to at least
preface the complexity that will Fig. 1.1. Two shops flank the central
underpin these social entrance to a house at Saepinum.
structures. Typically, those Photo: S. Ellis.
involved in retail line up at the
lower end of the overly
simplified binary division of rich
and poor, elites and commoners,
haves and (p.12) have-nots.
What we call them is important,
but as with the structures
themselves it is again
imperative that our social
definitions remain flexible.
Throughout this study I will
refer to those engaged in the
retail industry interchangeably
as “sub-elites” and “middling
groups,” even though those Fig. 1.2. Food and drink outlet with
involved in all parts of the retail masonry counter built into the street-
industry could be customers, front room of the house at I.3.3, Pompeii.
retailers, or investors in these Photo: S. Ellis.
outlets, all of whom covered
practically every grade of urban
social class.38 I use these shared terms to define a large, complex group of
people who were clearly not elite, much in the same way that we generally apply
a shorthand definition of Roman or Italian or Gallic without expecting too much
cultural precision in that identity. Still we should expect the majority of those at
the point-of-sale to have come from the (intentionally vaguely termed) middling
groups of society.39 This is not to suggest an anachronistic “middle class”
somewhere between commoner and elite.40 Some will have been slaves or plebs,
the humiliores, others freedmen or freemen. In most circumstances we can
expect them, our sub-elites or subalterns, not to have been of the elite class of
Page 8 of 29
any given urban community; or in the Gramscian school of thinking, we might

prefer to imagine them as a social group who lacked relative political power with
respect to the immediate, localized ruling class.41 Terms like “commoners” and,
perhaps worse still, “ordinary people” are appealing to some cycles of
scholarship but are to my mind less helpful:42 these definitions tend to strip our
subjects of their diversity, complexity, and interest. And while we can list a good
many instances of ancient authors referring to sub-elites as a singular group,43
in reality they constituted an enormous but disparate proportion of the urban
demographic, certainly socially stratified, but flexibly so. Just the numbers alone
can render our systems of division unworkable: we are, after all, talking about
(the) 98 percent of urbanites not controlling civic administration, religion, the
military, or the economy, etc.44 (p.13) As we will explore more fully, the
challenge is ultimately not in defining which class of person engaged in the
retail industry, but rather in which ways all classes of people did.
Finding Context: Retailing Landscapes Over Space and Time

While the aim of this study is to focus on a particular part of the Roman retail
industry, still the spatial and temporal scope of the book is unusually broad. The
intention is to draw on as much information from as many sites as possible. For
even if some sites yield much more—and of course more useful—information
than others, still there is a good deal to be learned from all of them whether
singularly or in total. The handful of shops at Tharros on the Bay of Oristano, for
example, as much as those at Seripola on the Tiber, will prove these sites to have
been much more densely occupied than is normally imagined or accepted. Those
at Conimbriga in Lusitania will show us how rapid the spread of a first-century
CE retail culture could be, while the shops high up in the Kheneg hills of
Numidia, at Tiddis, with their retail doorways providing entrance only through
their left sides, are highly unusual. It is perhaps the straightforward fact that we
can engage with more and other sites, whether bigger or “better,” that we
should strive all the more to do so;45 there is of course a convenience to
convincing ourselves that it is unnecessary to engage with the sites we have not
yet seen. One outcome is that our focus is clearer when contextualized. For
Ramsay MacMullen, it is through datasets of statistical significance that we are
able to substantiate the patterns and their changes over time, and “changes are
the stuff of history.”46 Still, to reach too far into the scholarship of other periods
comes not without its warnings, particularly in that there are mostly indirect
patterns of urbanism between, say, the Roman period and the Middle Ages.47
Nevertheless, and when within reason, a wider approach can (p.14) promise
bigger patterns and prompt difficult but better questions: why should, for
example, the early second-century CE shops of far-flung Volubilis in Mauretania,
Baelo Claudia in Hispania Baetica, Glanum in Gallia Narbonensis, or Sagalassos
in Pisidia have a set of certain commonalities, yet all be so different to those of
the Vesuvian cities from barely a generation earlier?
Page 9 of 29
The aim for this book is thus to move beyond the often banal, mainstream
comparisons that are traditionally limited to the Roman urban triad: Pompeii,
Herculaneum, and Ostia. Those sites of course feature, and necessarily so given
the richness and abundance of their data, but their contributions are arguably
brought into a more meaningful context—and perhaps even a more detailed
focus—by the inclusion of many more urban sites regardless of the quantity and
quality of their data. To that end, I field surveyed the retail landscapes of over
100 Roman urban sites (Fig. 1.3 and Table 1.1). The urban field survey aimed to
cover as much of the Roman world as feasible, but with some effort to target
those more densely “urbanized” areas: principally Italy, North Africa, Gaul, and
the Eastern Mediterranean. Given the often poor state of preservation of retail
outlets at most sites, even Pompeii (apart from the few postcard favorites), the
field survey is imperfect. Some of the shops in the field survey were only partly
excavated, or have since been reburied or consumed by vegetation; in some
cases the extent to which they could be field surveyed changed dramatically
over the course of this study. Even so, the archaeological remains of several
thousand shops from more than a hundred Roman cities form the foundation of
this study.
Still, and naturally, not every site or shop is accounted for. And while attempts
were made to consult the archival or published records of sites not field
surveyed, many of these efforts proved unrewarding. The principal challenge
here was one of scholarly (dis)interest; it might still be fair to say that the vast
majority of scholarship on Roman cities remains fixated on public, monumental
structures and the elite fabric of the handsomest houses and most lavish tombs.
Masonry counters, and in some cases even the shops themselves, are still only
rarely and inconsistently reported and published. The fragmentary and
opportunistic state of the secondary literature on Roman retail outlets means
that any systematic study of them has to rely on field research to not just engage
with their detailed forms, but simply to identify them in the first place.
(p.15)
(p.16)
Fig. 1.3. Distribution of sites covered by

the field survey. Those marked by “•”
were field surveyed by the author; those
Page 10 of 29
with a “◦” through archival and published

sources.
Table 1.1. List of sites covered by the field survey
Page 11 of 29
Region Site Field surveyed Counters present Sided thresholds present
Italy
Aeclanum •
Alba Fucens • • •
Assisi • •
Carsulae • • •
Cosa •
Cumae •
Egnazia • •
Ferentium • •
Grumentum • •
Gubbio • •
Herculaneum • • •
Juvanum • •
Kalé Akté (Caronia) ◦
Lucus Feroniae • • •
Luna • •
Marzabotto •
Minturnae • • •
Page 12 of 29
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single
chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of East Anglia; date: 16 March 2020
Monte Iato ◦ •
Morgantina • •
Nora • •
Norba • •
Ocriculum (Otricoli) • •
Ordona/Herdonia • •
Ostia • • •
Paestum • • •
Pietrabbondante • •
Pompeii • • •
Porto Torres • •
Puteoli/Rione Terra • • •
Rofalco ◦ •
Rome • • •
Rusellae • •
Saepinum • • •
Selinunte •
Seripola • • •
Page 13 of 29
Sorrento • •
Terracina • •
Tharros • •
Tuscolo •
Velia • •
Velleia Romana • •
Venosa •
Volsinii (Bolsena) ◦ •
Vulci • •
Iberia
Baelo Claudia • •
Cartago Nova ◦ •
(Cartagena)
Clunia ◦ •
(p.17) Conimbriga • • •
Empuries ◦ •
Italica •
Lucentum (Alicante) ◦ •
Medellin • •
Page 14 of 29
Merida •
Pollentia ◦ • •
Gaul
Alesia •
Ambrussum ◦ •
Cadenet (Vaucluse) ◦ •
Fréjus ◦ •
Glanum • •
Lattara •
Olbia de Provence ◦ • •
Paris (Lutetia) •
Sénèmes (Martigues, ◦ •
Bouches-du-Rhône)
Toulon (Var) ◦ •
Vaison la Romaine • •
Vienne/Saint-Romain-en- •
Gal
Africa
Banasa •
Page 15 of 29
Bulla Regia •
Carthage •
Chellah •
Chemtou • •
Cyrene ◦ •
Djemila • •
Dougga •
Hippo Regius • •
Kerkouane •
Khamissa •
Lambaesis • •
Madaure •
Makhtar •
Musti • •
Nabeul •
Oudna •
Pheradi Maius •
Sbeitla •
Page 16 of 29
Tebtunis ◦ •
Thaburbo Maius •
Thibilis • •
Thysdrus •
Tiddis • •
Timgad •
Tipasa ◦ •
Volubilis • • •
(p.18) Greece,
Dalmatia, Danube
Aquincum ◦ •
Athens •
Butrint ◦ •
Corinth •
Delos • •
Messene •
Olynthos ◦ •
Philippopolis ◦ •
Eastern provinces
Page 17 of 29
Aphrodisias •
Aspendos •
Cremna •
Dura-Europos ◦ •
Ephesos • •
Heraclea ad Latmum •
Hierapolis •
Laodikeia •
Magnesia ad Maeandrum •
Miletus •
Oinoanda •
Patara •
Pergamum •
Perge •
Priene •
Sagalassos • •
Sardis • •
Scythopolis ◦ •
Page 18 of 29
Side •
Stratonikeia •
Tlos •
Xanthos •
Page 19 of 29
Finding Detail: Pompeii as a Case-Study

Although I believe it is essential to engage with the bars and shops from across
the Roman Empire, and covering several centuries, still there is a necessary,
unapologetic focus on Pompeii throughout much of what follows. There are good
reasons for this. The first is simply a matter of quantification. With 163 bars at
Pompeii, not even Ostia, which itself has the second highest number of surviving
premises, 33 in total (which is itself almost three times as many as the next most
(p.19) abundant, the 12 at Herculaneum), can come close to sharing in the
amount of data available from Pompeii (see Table 1.1). To crunch the numbers in
another way, 62 percent of all surviving bar counters are found at Pompeii;
indeed, a full 80 percent (or 208) are from the triad of Pompeii, Herculaneum,
and Ostia combined. But the other 53 or so shops with counters still have much
to offer. As we will see in later chapters, it is not enough to pin these high
numbers on the unique destruction of the Vesuvian cities alone. After all, this
cause does little to explain the presence of bar counters found elsewhere: rather,
why do some non-Vesuvian cities have them, yet others—indeed most—do not?
Beyond numbers alone, there is a qualitative value to focusing on Pompeii. While

it is increasingly easy for Pompeianisti to lament the state of preservation of
Pompeii—the site itself, of course, as much as its relatively dismal record of
publication of even modern excavations—the city still has immeasurably more
and richer datasets than any other Roman archaeological site. Of enormous
value to the study of Pompeii are its archival holdings.48 Whether handwritten
notes from the earliest excavators listing finds and describing paintings, or
detailed photographic records of buildings from discovery through to the
present, these records serve often as our only documentation of parts of the city
long since lost, or soon to be. Only through archival records can we learn
anything of the two bars to the north of the forum—VII.5.14 and VII.5.17—that
were demolished for the construction of the modern tourist restaurant, or that
the efforts to replaster shop counters can be traced back at least as early as
1780.49 The bombing campaigns of World War II are another reminder of the
essential value of archival records.50 Still, the archives are not without
significant problems—most of the records are riddled by mistakes and
inconsistencies, even lies; those who have waded through the original daybooks
of Pompeian excavations typically (p.20) emerge disappointed (on which, more
below).51 And if these concerns hold for the archives on Pompeii’s houses—
indeed, their focus is mostly there—then they are all the more so for the retail
outlets; the archives on Pompeii’s shops are paltry by comparison. But
regardless of these caveats, the Pompeian archives constitute a veritable mine of
information, and certainly by comparison with practically every other
archaeological site of the Roman world.
Without denying the spiraling issues of the site’s decay, in spite of the nearly two
centuries of exposure and neglect—which is a longer period than the vast
majority of Pompeian buildings ever existed in antiquity—the fact remains that
Page 20 of 29
we can still account for no fewer than 163 bars at Pompeii. Some may scarcely
survive as a few unplastered, mostly reconstructed walls with a sales counter
that has been stuck back together in modern times, while others retain the full
layout of the property, from the street-side room to deeper storage and kitchen
and dining areas, along with a good degree of surviving wall-paintings, an
epigraphic record, and not least the decorated shop counter itself. However poor
by contrast to the most handsomely decorated and appointed Pompeian house,
there remains much that can be gleaned from the many Pompeian bars and
shops; scholars more familiar with other Roman cities are the first to agree.
Richer still is the fact that these shops and bars do not just survive in greater
numbers at Pompeii than at Herculaneum or even Ostia, or equally in greater
detail than those from Velleia Romana or Olbia, it is that they survive within a
more complete urban context than at any other Roman city. We can thus do more
with them, whether that is to determine the types of building in which they once
opened, or to plot their distribution across neighborhoods, or to even place them
and their study within a richer history of scholarship; more than a site of
discovery and description, Pompeii is a city where ideas of all kinds have long
been tested. The Pompeian retail outlets thus have context, whether urban or
regional, historical or academic. But as incomparable as I may portray the
Pompeian examples to be, they are not. Much can still be done to relate the
surviving remains from one city to another, and to draw on all of them for a more
contextualized vision of the retail landscapes of the Roman world. After all, and
(p.21) regardless of the scale or quality of any given dataset, if the retail
landscape of a town in the Sarno valley can be of any interest to us, then why
not also those of the Rhone, Tiber, or Lycos valleys?
The only thing thought to be missing of the city itself is a healthy historical
record. Convention holds, for example, that Pompeii “played an unimportant part
in contemporary history; the name of not a single great Pompeian is recorded.
The ruins, deprived of the interest arising from historical associations, must be
interpreted with little help from literary sources, and repeopled with aggregate
rather than individual life.”52 It is a view passed down from each generation of
Pompeian student to the next, almost proudly in a bid to bolster Pompeii’s place
at the pinnacle of urban archaeological sites.53 Much of that notion is fanned by
the now exhausted trope that ancient literature was written by elites, for elites,
and that all other classes are either absent or misrepresented in them. But as
Carlo Ginzburg so amply illustrated for the sixteenth century, we do not need
our texts to have been scripted by the sub-elite for them to be informative about
the sub-elite.54 The same, more lateral and annalistic vision must hold for
Pompeii: focused though the textual information normally is on the capital, still
the sources speak to an urban, cultural milieu in which Pompeii was an active
participant.
Page 21 of 29
Whether we field survey within and across regions of urbanization, or focus on a

singular site here or there, still if we are to better understand the development
of retail in the Roman city then a deeper, more detailed and localized view is
essential. For just as Andrew Wallace-Hadrill has justifiably contended that the
remains of just a single shop from Herculaneum can bring the world of Roman
commerce into focus, surely the excavation of a neighborhood of them can
amplify that story yet more.55 To this end, I undertook archaeological
excavations of ten separate but neighboring properties at Pompeii, all of which
operated at least one form of retail outlet—close to twenty shops in total (Fig.
1.4). These excavations, part of the University of Cincinnati and the American
Academy in Rome’s Pompeii Archaeological Research Project: Porta Stabia,
targeted the urban development of insulae VIII.7 and I.1, a large neighborhood
just inside one of the principal entrances to the city, the Porta Stabia (p.22)
(Fig. 1.5).56 This was a patently middling neighborhood, the largest of any at
Pompeii to be devoid of a single atrium-style house. Instead, more modest
residences, hospitality businesses, and retail outlets characterized the area. The
excavations were undertaken between 2005 and 2012, yielding an
unprecedented range of new data for Roman retail outlets that includes
everything from the types of commodities they produced, imported, and sold, to
their changing use of urban space, the fluctuations of their (and their
neighbors’) economic portfolios, and how so many of these aspects developed
over time and in response to local, regional, and Mediterranean-wide currents.
The incorporation of the mountains of data that come from excavating so many
shops across a Pompeian neighborhood has its obvious benefits for
understanding the micro-histories of these buildings and how they developed or
changed over time. It is an approach (p.23) (p.24) that has aimed to redress
what has become too rare in the archaeology of Pompeii and Roman urbanism
more generally: that is, the reconciliation of results from archaeological
excavations with the relatively more frenzied research activity on urban socio-
economic histories. These activities and their publications otherwise exist in
disconnected, seemingly parallel universes, with studies of a more synthetic
nature rarely engaging with the dry data derived from excavations and
fieldwork, and very much vice versa.
Page 22 of 29
Conclusion
What follows is thus a book
about retailing in the Roman
world that draws from a rich
supply of new archaeological
data on a scale that is both
regional and local. It is an
approach that at least hopes to
bring some balance to the study
of Roman retail, a topic more
traditionally dominated by a
limited selection of textual
sources. But rather than Fig. 1.4. The neighborhood of the Porta
champion one sub-discipline Stabia (insulae VIII.7 and I.1) under the
over another, I hope to excavations of the University of
demonstrate the necessity of Cincinnati.
engaging with both textual and Photo: S. Ellis.
material culture in different but
equally critical ways.57 The
more conventional approach to
Roman retail studies has been
to target familiar citations that
speak to a Ciceronian disdain
for all things associated with
the world of the taberna.58 It is
in the bar that we find our
lowest classes—whether
assassins, thieves, or runaway
slaves—caught up in gambling,
prostitution, and drinking.59
Instead of drawing from the full Fig. 1.5. Insulae VIII.7 and I.1 at Pompeii
historical record and what it with locations of the excavated trenches.
might imply—even, or
especially, indirectly—about the
place of retailing in Roman urban life, it is the same, direct mentions of bars (as
popinae or cauponae etc.; see Chapter 2) that dominate our discourse. These are
the low-hanging fruits of retail studies, plucked for their unfiltered face-value
and readily swallowed whole. But as effective as these passages were for
denouncing one’s character—better still that of an emperor—by catching him
(p.25) out in a bar,60 to what extent did they reflect the broader realm of social
thinking about retail?
Limiting our inquiry to the derogatory sneers of ancient authors toward retailing
as a custom merely limits our expectation for what we can learn about the
Page 23 of 29
topic.61 This is an approach that conjures a checkered social landscape, a

“community of low-life types whose social life centered on the brothel in much
the same way that the social life of the elite was focused on the curia or the
basilica.”62 Bars are in this way imagined as dens of iniquity, serving some kind
of “spirit of carnival.”63 Some, maybe many, will have surely sold sex and alcohol
and addiction—the cocktail of which is reckoned to have “destroyed many
families”—but others, maybe even the majority, were as likely to have based
their businesses on cooked food and a street-side conviviality;64 recognizing one
of these establishments from the other in the archaeological record will normally
be impossible. But the temptation to breathe life back into ancient cities by
casting them with refined nobles and sloppy drunks, our heroes and villains, has
merely perpetuated the popular but hopelessly unreal myth of Pompeii as a “sin
city.” My intention is not to deny the ancient authors their voice. Neither is it
necessary to correct them, nor mark them as misconstrued. We need not doubt
that a Seneca or a Cicero could regard retail trade with anything but derision.65
But neither should we be so easily convinced by them.
The demonstrable risk that comes from limiting our approach to only the most
direct avenues is that we anchor the study of Roman retail to the trivial realm of
“everyday life” studies. Such simplistic readings strip the subject of
complication, devaluing it against the more “highbrow” themes of
monumentality and wealth, networks and systems, economies and social
structures, elites and power.66 This limits the meaningful integration of the
subject with the more valued, (p.26) indeed more sophisticated studies on
Roman social life. It also roots the subject within Roman studies alone,
minimizing the opportunities that should exist to connect the study of food and
drink to those in, especially, later periods. In spite of the not unreasonable
complaints of scholars of late antiquity and the medieval periods that retail is
also undervalued in those disciplines,67 even so those areas enjoy a much richer
scholarly dialogue on retailing and the consumption of food and drink for which
some healthy interaction could occur with Roman-period studies.
My own approach is not to elevate unnecessarily the social status of shops, of

shoppers, and of those who operated and owned them. Neither is it to rid the
ancient world of its class divisions as based on economic or cultural guidelines.
It is rather to more reasonably reevaluate the role that retail played in the
shaping of cities and societies. There are several steps to that end. First,
Chapters 2 and 3 provide a detailed archaeological analysis of tabernae and bars
across the Roman world. Whether small, single-room joints or large, multiple-
roomed complexes, it becomes increasingly clear that the range of retail outlets
reflects different levels of investment in the urban economy. Taken collectively,
the spatial and functional patterns in these various types of outlets reveal retail
landscapes; often described as distribution plans, we might better see them as
products, or “outcomes,” of a set of complex agencies in urban investment.
These reveal much information about the social, economic, and even political
Page 24 of 29
motivations behind the development of economic portfolios and the creation and
maintenance of the retail network.
Chapters 4, 5, and 6 chart the development of Roman retail outlets from a more
chronological perspective. Just as we see developments to Roman cities as
episodic, so too do we see the construction of retail outlets as a product of urban
growth spurts. These are our “retail revolutions”: the first of them, triggered in
the second century BCE, is characterized by the earliest en masse construction
of a specific, identifiable form of retail architecture; the second is pinned to the
urban boom of the early Imperial period, when we see the sharp rise of a more
specialized form of retail architecture (and notably the (p.27) masonry sales
counter that marks the arrival of the identifiable food and drink outlet); while
the third flourishes from the early second century CE, and is marked by not just
another spike in numbers, but in a more homogenized, standardized version of
the Roman taberna. At every stage a new townscape emerged—physically,
socially, and economically—with each development reflecting the inherent
integration of the retail fabric into the broader urban tapestry. The ultimate aim
of this book is to better understand those developments and to find new ways of
integrating the study of Roman retail with the Roman economy and urbanism
more broadly. Urbanization is more often measured through its “most important”
elements: the monumental public buildings and their institutions;
(infra-)structural systems and site-wide urban layouts; and not least the noblest
of houses. It remains now to examine the extent to which retail outlets
contributed to the story of the Roman city. (p.28)
Notes:
(1) Syme 1939. On the impact of his thesis, see the many good contributions in
Heuss 1982, and Millar 2000. More recently, the fullest treatment is found in
Wallace-Hadrill 2008 (cf. the review of Osborne and Vout 2010); also Alston
2015.
(2) On the effective use of such a loaded term, specifically a cultural revolution,
as “shorthand” for the “transformation of metropolitan Roman culture,” see
Woolf 2001b, 175. That it can be just as effectively applied to multiple, even
overlapping periods, consider: Hunt 1996, 225; Wallace-Hadrill 2008, 346.
(3) On a consumer revolution: originally McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb 1982.

Thereafter see Woolf 1998, 181–205; Wallace-Hadrill 2008, 315–55.
(4) On an alimentary revolution: Purcell 1994, 664–5. Also Tchernia 1986, 58–60.
(5) On an economic revolution: Kay 2014.
(6) On an architectural revolution: Meiggs 1973, 133–45; Ball 2003, esp. 24–7.
Page 25 of 29
(7) On an urban revolution: originally Childe 1936, and more fully 1950; about
which see Smith 2009. Also Laurence 2002.
(8) On a cultural revolution: originally Wallace-Hadrill 1989b; 1997; 2008;

Habinek and Schiesaro 1997; Woolf 2001b; Spawforth 2012.
(9) In a critical review of Wallace-Hadrill 2008, Osborne and Vout 2010, 241
claim his use of the term made for an “audacious title.” Wallace-Hadrill himself
knew his title would “invite debate” (2008, xix).
(10) There are far too many volumes on the Roman city, Roman architecture, and
the Roman economy that exclude any treatment of retail as a topic to (unfairly)
single out one or two examples; all of them are easily found.
(11) Knapp 2011, 48.
(12) Veyne 1987, 134.
(13) Kleberg 1957; Gassner 1986.
(14) Even if this list is limited to books alone, still it is an impressive line-up:
Monteix 2010; Mouritsen 2011; Holleran 2012; Magalhães de Oliveira 2012;
Mayer 2012; Flohr 2013; Tran 2013; Hawkins 2016; Wilson and Flohr 2016.
(15) Purcell 1994, 661.
(16) On tabernae being the most common type of building on the marble plan,
see Reynolds 1996, 153, 155.
(17) Scola 1982, 165.
(18) Apart from any number of things once sold, Holleran 2012, 113–58 has
demonstrated the range of activities that can be associated with tabernae, from
commerce (as shops), to production (as workshops), and service (as barber-
shops, medical spaces and pharmacies, fulleries, bakeries, bars, groceries,
administrative spaces, and as housing). See also Pirson 1999, 19–20.
(19) Lib. Or. 11.254.
(20) Mart. 7.61.
(21) Galleria Uffizi, inv. nos. 313 and 315. On which see Kampen 1981, Cat. III.
56.
(22) On which see De Ligt 1993; Frayn 1993, 1–9; Delaine 2005, 31–2. For the
longer history of stalls, particularly for the Middle Ages, see Kostof 1992, 96.
(23) For a recent example see McCormick 2012, 53, n. 11; on the problems of
delineating commercial activities based on coin distributions, see Ellis 2017.
Page 26 of 29
(24) Eric Poehler and I have documented the hundreds of scarring patterns that
speckle the colonnade of the Quadriporticus to reveal the density of activity in
this area; some of the scarring was evidently from temporary stalls. See Poehler
and Ellis 2013; 2014.
(25) On macella see De Ruyt 1983; Frayn 1993; Láng 2003; Palmieri 2010;
Poupaki 2011; Cristilli 2015.
(26) For the vending of food at baths, see Seneca Ep. 56.2.8 (he complains of the
cries of drink-sellers, mixed with those of the sausage-seller, the pastry-seller,
and the hot-food hawker). See also Quint. Inst. 1.6.44; Mart. 5.70; 12.19; 12.70;
Sen. Ep. 122.6; Juv. Sat. 8.167; Philostr. VA 4.42. For some archaeological
evidence, see Garbrecht and Manderscheid 1994, Vol. A 52–3, 68, 71, 118–19,
123, 128; Manderscheid 2000, 500. See also Yegül 2010, 19–20 on eating and
drinking in baths.
(27) On brothels and food, see McGinn 2013.
(28) First questioned by Lugli 1929–30, 527–51. Cf. MacDonald 1982, 78, n. 16
who, based on analogical reasoning to the shops of Ostia, has little doubt that
these were mostly shops. For a good summary, see Frayn 1993, 16–17;
Meneghini 2003, 228.
(29) On cash, credit, and barter, see Saradi 1995; Harris 2006; 2008; von Reden
2012, 279–83.
(30) See, in this chapter, notes 22 (on stalls) and 25 (on macella).
(31) Hopkins 1978a, 72 (a number generated largely from consulting the CIL IV
and Della Corte 1965); Eschebach and Müller-Trollius 1993.
(32) Some of these were a little outside the walls of Pompeii, but within close
enough proximity to be fairly considered as part of Pompeii’s retail landscape.
See Chapter 2 for clarity.
(33) For similar reasons, Purcell 1994 once warned of the dangers in
(mis)treating the “masses” as a singular construct.
(34) Baird 2007, 431. See also S. P. Ellis 2000, 78–80; Pirson 2007, 468–9.
(35) S. P. Ellis 2004, 47.
(36) McGinn 2013.
(37) DeLaine 2005, 45 rightly views this complexity as a key characteristic of the
commercial spaces at Ostia.
Page 27 of 29
(38) For the history of defining the “sub-elite,” see the recent essay by Perry
2016.
(39) See Scheidel and Friesen 2009 on the place of middling groups and middling
wealth in the Roman economy. Also Courrier 2014.
(40) On an imagined Roman “middle class,” see Hill 1952 and, surprisingly
recently, Mayer 2012. See also the convincing critique of Mayer 2012 in Wallace-
Hadrill 2013.
(41) Gramsci 1975; Green 2002. See also the publication series Subaltern
Studies.
(42) For example Knapp 2011, 3.
(43) Will 1991, 184, n. 183.
(44) The figure of 98% is of course an approximation, one that refers to common
parlance about a twenty-first century non-elite. Even so, the figure is not without
merit; see, for example, Killgrove and Tykot 2013, 28.
(45) On the value of comparative approaches to urban sites, see Keay 2010, 27–8.
(46) MacMullen 1990, 8.
(47) For caveats to comparative studies between the Roman and the Middle
Ages, see Callmer 2007, 233.
(48) Laidlaw 2007 remains the best overview of what is available. See also
Monteix 2016.
(49) For the replastering of the counter at VI.2.5, see PAH I.1, 311–12, July 13,
1780; not unrelatedly, we know from Venuti 1750, 111 that marbles were
removed from a counter at Herculaneum as early as 1740. Regardless of these
activities to restore counters, the archives show that in no case was a counter
entirely built out of fancy; on which see Ellis 2005, 36–7; Fant, Russell, and
Barker 2013, 185–6. Cf. Monteix 2010, 94–5.
(50) For a plan of the bomb damage: see Descoeudres 1994, 49, fig. 32; also
García y García 2006.
(51) Wallace-Hadrill 1990, 150; repeated in Wallace-Hadrill 1994, 65; explained

more fully in Wallace-Hadrill 1995, 40–3. Monteix 2016 addresses some of these
concerns.
(52) Francis Kelsey’s preface in Mau 1907, v (though written in 1899).
(53) For references to Pompeii in the literary record, see Castrén 1975, 25–6.
Page 28 of 29
(54) Ginzburg 1980.
(55) Wallace-Hadrill 2011, 290.
(56) For select publications, see Ellis 2011c; 2016; 2017; Ellis et al. 2011; 2012;
2015; for a more complete bibliography, see <http://classics.uc.edu/pompeii/>.
(57) Some effective strategies on navigating both archaeological and textual data
can be found in Hall 2014, 207–19.
(58) Kleberg 1957. On the elite disdain for plebs, see also MacMullen’s “Lexicon
of Snobbery” (MacMullen 1974, 138–41).
(59) For example, Juv. Sat. 8.171–8; Amm. Marc. 14.6.25; Hor. Sat. 2.4.62; Epist.
1.14; Cic. Phil. 13.24.
(60) Relevant passages include: in the Historia Augusta: Verus, in comparison to

Caligula, Nero, and Vitellius (Verus 4.5–8), Commodus (Comm. 2.6.3–7),
Gallienus (Gall. 21.6), Celsus (Tyr. Trig. 29.1), Ingenuus (Tyr. Trig. 9.1), Marius
(Tyr. Trig. 8.9), Postumus (Tyr. Trig. 3.4). In other authors: Claudius (Suet.
Claud. 40), Nero (Tac. Ann. 13.25, Suet. Ner. 26–7, Cass. Dio 62.14.1–3, Philostr.
V.A. 4.39–42), Vitellius (Suet. Vit. 13.3). For Otho getting about the taverns as a
youth (Suet. Otho 2.1).
(61) Most recently Donahue 2015, 190–3.
(62) Dyson 1992, 176.
(63) Toner 2009, 110.
(64) Toner 2009, 109.
(65) Sen. Vit. Beat. 7.3; on which see McGinn 2004, 243–4. Cic. Off. 1.150 on the
inherent dishonesty of retail trade; on which see Brunt 1973, 26–34.
(66) On the weakness of “daily life” studies, see Purcell 2003, 331; Grig 2017.
(67) Shaw 1982, 171 laments the neglected status of retail studies by historians
of nineteenth-century Britain. See also Scola 1982. For questions about the
immoral role of retailers in the medieval period in Britain, and the continuation
of these views into at least the eighteenth century, see Davis 2012.
Access brought to you by:
Page 29 of 29

1 Introduction To Roman Retailing - Oxford Scholarship

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

1 Introduction To Roman Retailing - Oxford Scholarship

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

An Introduction to Roman Retailing

The Roman Retail Revolution: The Socio-

Print publication date: 2018

An Introduction to Roman Retailing

Abstract and Keywords

hinged to the political events surrounding the transition from Republic to

the textual and material worlds of the taberna in more interconnected,

us toward important discussions about the urban economic conditions of

Finding Focus: From Shops to Bars to Shops

As necessary as this concentration on a particular part of the retailing industry

The second clarification

any given urban community; or in the Gramscian school of thinking, we might

Finding Context: Retailing Landscapes Over Space and Time

Fig. 1.3. Distribution of sites covered by

with a “◦” through archival and published

Table 1.1. List of sites covered by the field survey

Region Site Field surveyed Counters present Sided thresholds present

Kalé Akté (Caronia) ◦

Region Site Field surveyed Counters present Sided thresholds present

Region Site Field surveyed Counters present Sided thresholds present

Region Site Field surveyed Counters present Sided thresholds present

Region Site Field surveyed Counters present Sided thresholds present

Region Site Field surveyed Counters present Sided thresholds present

Region Site Field surveyed Counters present Sided thresholds present

Region Site Field surveyed Counters present Sided thresholds present

Finding Detail: Pompeii as a Case-Study

Beyond numbers alone, there is a qualitative value to focusing on Pompeii. While

Whether we field survey within and across regions of urbanization, or focus on a

topic.61 This is an approach that conjures a checkered social landscape, a

My own approach is not to elevate unnecessarily the social status of shops, of

(3) On a consumer revolution: originally McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb 1982.

(5) On an economic revolution: Kay 2014.

(8) On a cultural revolution: originally Wallace-Hadrill 1989b; 1997; 2008;

(11) Knapp 2011, 48.

(12) Veyne 1987, 134.

(13) Kleberg 1957; Gassner 1986.

(15) Purcell 1994, 661.

(17) Scola 1982, 165.

(19) Lib. Or. 11.254.

(20) Mart. 7.61.

(27) On brothels and food, see McGinn 2013.

(35) S. P. Ellis 2004, 47.

(36) McGinn 2013.

(42) For example Knapp 2011, 3.

(43) Will 1991, 184, n. 183.

(46) MacMullen 1990, 8.

(51) Wallace-Hadrill 1990, 150; repeated in Wallace-Hadrill 1994, 65; explained

(52) Francis Kelsey’s preface in Mau 1907, v (though written in 1899).

(54) Ginzburg 1980.

(55) Wallace-Hadrill 2011, 290.

(60) Relevant passages include: in the Historia Augusta: Verus, in comparison to

(61) Most recently Donahue 2015, 190–3.

(62) Dyson 1992, 176.

(63) Toner 2009, 110.

(64) Toner 2009, 109.

Access brought to you by:

You might also like