3 Roman Retail Landscapes - Investment, Profit, and Place - Oxford Scholarship

Roman Retail Landscapes
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

Investment, Profit, and Place
Steven J. R. Ellis
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198769934.003.0003
Abstract and Keywords

This chapter examines the socio-economic motivations behind the shaping of
retail landscapes in Roman cities. It is about who opened retail outlets, as well
as why and where. After critiquing some of the normal methods for illustrating
the locations of shops and bars, including the conventional distribution plan
itself, as well as questioning the economic rationality of operating tabernae, this
chapter argues for the value in complicating our otherwise basic understanding
of why urban investments were made in the places we find them. Rather than
accepting profit as the single motivation to urban investment, a range of social,
economic, and political motivations are considered as an explanation for the
ultimate shape of Roman retail landscapes. Thus beyond discussions of space
and urban topography, the subject of this chapter is investment.
Keywords: investment, economy, spatial studies, urban topography, houses, patronage, freedmen,
landscapes, tabernae, shops
One of the central aims of this book is to better understand the socio-economic
motivations behind the shaping of retail landscapes in Roman cities. Who opened
retail outlets, and why and where? Simple though these questions may appear at
first, the best attempts to answer them immediately encounter both complexity
and circularity. Who opened a shop or a bar is a question often corrupted by
anachronistic and mistaken views on status and social stratigraphy. Why they
were established is normally limited to singular, basic assumptions of financial
motivation. Where retail outlets were opened is then readily imagined as a
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product—our retail landscape—of the basic social and economic agencies behind
urban investment, preserving in their spatial patterns how the location of each
shop or bar was either (and incongruously) purposefully planned or
indiscriminately placed. Our way into these questions—indeed our critique of
them, as well as our need to complicate the picture—is the distribution plan,
which lays out for us a top-down view of the locations of our subjects, our dots
on the map. Such plans allow us to identify certain patterns in the spatial
distribution of shops and bars, but they should also prompt us to question how
those dots came to be there in the first place. The aim of what follows is to
complicate what is our otherwise banal and overly-simplified understanding of
the association between retail and place, with the hope that any new insights
might help to integrate the topic with richer and more sophisticated studies of
Roman urbanization. Thus beyond discussions of space and urban topography,
the subject of this chapter is investment. More particularly, it is about identifying
the multiple motivations, whether complementary or seemingly irrational, (p.
86) that caused urbanites from across the socio-economic spectrum to invest in
and maintain, even over generations, urban retail outlets.
The Distribution of Retail Outlets at Roman Cities: Typical Patterns,

Traditional Readings
One of the more conventional approaches to understanding investment in retail
outlets has been to plot the locations of shops at those cities where they survive
in some abundance, typically at Pompeii and Ostia.1 Given that we can normally
learn so little about the functions and histories of each specific retail outlet, to
plot their collective distribution holds much promise for exploring some general
spatial trends in the shaping of Roman retail landscapes. We should expect their
distributions to reveal rich seams of information; for an interdisciplinary urban
historian like Spiro Kostof, interested as he was in the context and setting of
cities, the distribution of retail was nothing less than a “critical assignment.”2 As
plentiful as retail outlets may appear to be across most Roman cities, any
nuancing of their locations should at once allow us to ask a range of questions
about their socio-economic role in urban life.
The plotting of retail outlets is not especially complicated, with many of the
spatial patterns immediately clear in even partially surviving Roman cities.
Whether we plot shops in general, or bars (even their types) where we can
identify them, their distributions are more or less the same. Shops and bars are
almost always to be found in the areas of greatest street activity and movement:
they line main roads, watch over street intersections, and gather near gates and
public monuments. This is true for early sites like Marzabotto (and if we extend
our view to the Greek world, Olynthos), later ones such as Sagalassos, and is just
as much true from one region to the next: from Baelo Claudia to Nora to Side
(Fig. 3.1). Pages and pages could (p.87) here be lost to documenting the many
examples. And while the clearest patterns reveal themselves at the more fully
exposed sites of Pompeii, Ostia, and Timgad, still the surviving sections of sites
Page 2 of 34
like Grumentum or Thibilis, or even altogether smaller settlements like Velleia

Romana, show that as much must have been true for them as well. If we focus on
Pompeii for the moment, and on the bars alone—partly because they refine our
survey, but also because, as we will see, their counters are an important factor in
the layout of the bar and its location—then we find that no less than 85 percent
were located on a main road and/or intersection (Fig. 3.2).
All of Pompeii’s principal

thoroughfares were lined with
bars, while a full two-thirds of
the city’s ninety-six
intersections were fronted by
one of these food and drink
outlets, sometimes two. So
magnetic was the draw of the
intersection that, when the
choice was available to property
owners, the clear majority
chose to convert the street-side
room that was closest to the Fig. 3.1. The shops fronting the
intersection into a bar. For the decumanus maximus at Baelo Claudia.
few that had the choice of Photo: S. Ellis.
which of their front rooms
would be converted to a bar,
most chose that which was
closest to the (p.88) (p.89)
intersection.3 Even those
further removed from an
intersection preferred to locate
their bar on the side of the
property closest to that
confluence.4 It is because of this
opportunistic element in the Fig. 3.2. The distribution of bars at
investment of a shop in an area Pompeii; indicated as Types A, B, and C.
of heightened urban confluence
—preferably on a main road,
better still at an intersection—that we see every effort being made to widen the
street-front door to frame an attractive sales counter. Here the counter would
strike the eye of passing foot-traffic, with buyer and seller each as aware of the
other as possible. The result is that in all of the Pompeian bars located at
intersections, but with street-front entrances from both streets, the counters
were positioned inside the doorway of the wider and likely busier of the two
roads (Fig. 3.3). These activities and movements along the street thus had an
important impact on the placement and configuration of the bar and its counter,
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to the extent that certain patterns of ambulatory movement throughout the city
are reflected in retail outlets;5 we will see in Chapter 6, however, how that
system (p.90) would develop differently, from the later first century CE, to a
new impetus in the making of urban space.
Given these strategies for

setting up shop-fronts to
intersections and main roads,
we equally see the presence of
tabernae near busy public
amenities like the public baths,
while others face onto some of
the principal entrances to the
Pompeian forum. Outside of the
macellum itself, shops once
lined the eastern length of the
forum, at least prior to its Fig. 3.3. The bar at IX.1.15–16, Pompeii.
Augustan-era remodeling.6 That The counter fronts onto the more
they were removed as part of a principal via dell’Abbondanza.
monumentalization of the space
has been taken as proof-positive
that these kinds of properties were no longer tolerated.7 Varro, for example,
speaks of an increase in dignitas being attached to the forum once bankers took
over butcheries.8 Even if that were so, the many fora with tabernae known
elsewhere—both before and after the Principate—show that any evidence for
their removal cannot reflect a widespread phenomenon; not just shops but bars
line the fora at Alba Fucens, Lucus Feroniae, and Luna (Fig. 3.4). Retail outlets
were thus not only close to the center of Roman cities, but also integral parts of
them. The tabernae built into the podia of temples, for example the Temple of
Castor and Pollux in Rome from at least the second century BCE,9 or those into
the so-called Twin Temples at Carsulae,10 demonstrate the normalcy with which
retail investment could be intertwined with monumental (and) religious space.
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While retail outlets were mostly

located in highly visible places,
they could also be found along
minor streets, even closed-off
ones, as Janet Delaine has
shown for Ostia.11 This is not to
imagine that tabernae were
everywhere. It is rather to
acknowledge a welcome
complication: that location
alone did not dictate shop
distribution, and that—critically
—the choice of location was not Fig. 3.4. The several bars fronting onto
so simply made. The plain fact the forum at Lucus Feroniae.
is that despite patterns in the Photo: S. Ellis.
collective distribution of
tabernae, the best-suited street-
fronts were not always given over to retail. We have thus to consider other
measures, or to at least attempt a more critical reading of the distribution of
retail as we see it.
One approach might be to consider the density of shops or bars, which would at
least mitigate some of the discrepancies between (p.91) differently exposed
cities, large and small. In this way the insula, not the city, could serve as the
common denominator, allowing for more meaningful comparisons between the
163 bars at Pompeii and the 12 at Herculaneum or the 10 at Lucus Feroniae; we
should want, after all, to find ways of interrogating and integrating as many
urban sites as possible, not just (parts of) the largest and most common ones.
Counting particular property types per insula could also help us build richer
comparisons within different parts of the same site. Comparing the number of
bars per fully excavated insula at Pompeii with those at Herculaneum (Fig.
3.5),12 for example, reveals the sites to have had more similar retail landscapes
than might otherwise be expected; the differing scales of preservation and urban
completeness lends to the general impression that Herculaneum was a city of
fewer shops than (p.92) Pompeii. The data show instead that there were nearly
two bars for every fully excavated insula at Pompeii, a statistic that matches,
almost exactly, the circumstance at Herculaneum; the more precise numbers are
1.9:1 for Pompeii, 2:1 for Herculaneum. These averages muffle, of course,
differences across each city. After all, 27 percent of all fully excavated insulae at
Pompeii were without a bar (twenty of the seventy-four insulae). Thus we can
compare the ratios of 2.7:1 bars at Pompeii’s Regio VII (from fifteen fully
excavated insulae) with the 1:1 at Regio II (nine fully excavated insulae), or the
2.1:1 at Regio I with the 1.6:1 at Regio VI (from nineteen and seventeen fully
excavated insulae respectively). In any case, these statistics remain expressions
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of the density of bars, not explanations for them. And so the fundamental
question remains: to what extent did location factor into the construction of a
shop or a bar?
(p.93) How to Complicate

the Picture: Dots on Maps,
Agency, and the Motivations
Behind Retail Investment
To some degree it is our
familiarity with the distribution
plans of one type of building or
another, indeed our expectation
of them, whether of bars or
shops or large houses, that has
led to some banality in their
explanation. For as sure as we
find places of Roman retail
echoing the timeless
commercial values of location
location location, still it is Fig. 3.5. The distribution of bars at
worthwhile to question whether Herculaneum.
their distribution was ever that
The base plan comes from Monteix 2010,
simplistic. We should rather
pl. III, with kind permission of N.
prefer—even want—to
Monteix.
complicate the picture, given
that the causes and agencies
behind urban investment in retail will have invariably resulted from a range of
complex decisions. Such a challenge has been taken up by the proponents of the
so-called “spatial turn,” developing a range of approaches—from data-driven to
purely theoretical—to understand the spatial organization and connectivity of
Roman cities.13 Since the pioneering work of Henri Lefebvre in the 1970s,14 the
study of Roman cities has incorporated—or rather, turned toward—a “big data,”
statistical approach with the rise of electronic databases and GIS in the 1980s,15
followed by what might be considered (a return?) to more socio-historical
approaches in the 1990s.16 A continually heightened engagement with spatial
syntax analysis has framed a good many of these approaches.17 As popular as
these studies have become, and as much as we should continue to welcome
them, the challenge to their practitioners is to avoid jettisoning what we know of
Roman culture in favor of a spatial logic that can be predicted by the most base
set of ideals. That is, the necessary reductionist framework of space syntax
analysis can readily distract us from an innumerable set of tolerable yet
otherwise irrational cultural norms that were embedded in the shaping of urban
spaces; these are of course the interesting—even important—ingredients in the
making of a city.
Page 6 of 34
(p.94) Through space syntax analysis, for example, we can convince ourselves
that the proximity of one bar or shop to the next was of importance because of
that distance alone; similarly, the draw of a Pompeian fountain is commonly
related to its proximity—based on its radial distance—to the next.18 Concepts
like “least cost path” analysis, otherwise so effective for plotting movement
routes across vast territories, are here applied to urban environments with
minimal concern for the countless complexities of urban life: in this view,
distance and proximity are almost all that determines the retail market of a
shop. In reality, the distance between one bar and another was measured in
minutes, even seconds. Certainly other socio-economically charged factors like
quality and reputation, and social and familial networks, will have caused
customers to bypass nearby outlets to shop at others. Difficult though they might
be to identify, these complexities are no less the essential ingredients to urban
retail, much closer to the rule rather than being the exception for most retail
networks of any period.19
Nevertheless, as much as we should aim to identify other factors in the

establishment of a retail outlet, none of them need deny the importance, even
centrality, of location. Studies of clustering, for example, have long shown us
how certain types of businesses will attract others of the same kind.20 It is a
simple concept, demonstrable across countless urban layouts both ancient and
modern, that each business builds a market for others, a confidence in the
space, and ultimately a localized culture for that trade. The socio-economic
phenomenon calls to mind the modern retailing principles of “Hotelling’s Law,”
with which most of us will have some experience via specific shopping
“districts.”21 The ancient evidence itself is found not only in the density patterns
of identifiable structures along certain streets or within specific neighborhoods,
but also in (p.95) familiar toponyms. Rome had its carpenters quarter, scythe-
makers street, potters on the Esquiline, and fruit-sellers on the via Sacra.22
Likewise, Pompeii’s Vicus Saliniensis suggests that the northwest quarter of the
city was associated with members of the salting industry.23 Enough of these are
known to imagine the many others now lost.
The underlining point is that these distribution outcomes, clustered or

otherwise, present us with spatial patterns that are no less real, but for that
reason deter us from more careful autopsy of the agencies that underpinned
them. At issue might be the very distribution map itself, given that the purpose
of plotting places is ostensibly to simplify our understanding of urban
topography. For it is their clear success in doing just that—i.e. illustrating the
outcomes of, in this case, urban investment in retail—that brings a significant
cost: the plotting of dots on a map to reveal a bird’s-eye-view of recognizable
patterns of property locations can mislead us into imagining the city as
something of a carte blanche, an open and available space onto which these dots
were once either rationally or indiscriminately placed. Through these
Page 7 of 34
distributions we risk imagining some kind of “master plan” behind the

organization of a city.24
If we want to better understand the place of retail in the Roman city, both
figurative and actual, then we should target our interests on the motivations
behind investment in tabernae. Essentially, can we move beyond—or rather,
come back a step from—our demonstrations of the outcomes of retail investment
and attempt an explanation for them instead? Deeper interrogation of the
agencies behind urban retailing comes not without its problems. To pry apart the
motivations driving urban investment from the spatial outcomes of that
investment risks winding us around in circularity: did shop owners/operators
establish their business because of the location of their property, or did they
purchase or rent a piece of property to open a shop because of that location?
Especially problematic are the built-in set of modern assumptions that are
applied to ancient attitudes about retail investment. The first of these is choice:
whether we see shops and bars being built with the original construction of the
building in (p.96) which we find them, as later additions to those structures, or
even as their own, independent constructions, our explanation for their
existence will often assume some free choice behind their location. Indeed in
some circumstances choices based on idealized notions of space and location
seem to have been more freely made: from among the richest houses that
opened shops at Pompeii and Herculaneum, the majority of them were those
located in high-traffic areas. But of course not all investments in retail were
made by the rich. For those less financially secure there must surely have been
other economic and social decisions, possibilities, and complications: location
will not have been the only factor.
The second of our ongoing assumptions is stickier still, dealing as it does with
the social logic of space. For while there has been, as already discussed, a
strong tendency to tune out the complex cultural charges that underpin the
social organization of urban topography, on the other hand certain cultural
constructions have been readily (mis-)used to explain the spatial order of cities.
Ideas of zoning, for example, have proven both popular and polarizing,
particularly when applied to notions about a “moral geography” having shaped
the topography of a Roman city.25 As a practical measure in the spatial
organization and development of cities, zoning is itself not unimaginable: we see
its structuring principles in the siting of industries on the outskirts of cities, in
the placement of burials beyond the pomerium, and in the semi-private
construction of temples on processional routes. Some mixture of social and civic
zoning patently dictated and accepted the locations of these urban entities.
Meanwhile, the many controls placed on retailers through the Imperial
sumptuary laws demonstrate the extent to which commercial activities, if not the
very existence or location of tabernae, could be tightly monitored.26 But moral
zoning and moral geographies are very different things. The idea that a city
could establish and maintain an effective form of moral zoning by excluding
Page 8 of 34
certain types of building from certain areas has been roundly criticized, for
Pompeii as much as elsewhere. Some have argued that the concept of a moral or
immoral (p.97) space—whether for bars or brothels—is both anachronistic and
misguided,27 an ideological fantasy not otherwise reconcilable in the
archaeological record. Others have found moral zoning to be a concept only
remotely possible under a specifically communist regime.28
Nevertheless, the underlining principles of moral zoning, founded as they are in

the idea that elites ought necessarily to have avoided trades, are deeply
entrenched in studies of Roman urbanization. While a century ago Tenney Frank
could imagine a city in which the “leading citizens of Pompeii…did not scorn to
draw their livelihood from shops and booths if only the accumulated profits
summed up large enough,”29 others—championed by Maiuri, Rostovtzeff, and
Finley—have since anticipated a far greater disconnect in the involvement and
physical distance of elites with trade.30 The absence of bars from very specific
parts of the city, such as the stretch of the via dell’Abbondanza that led to the
Pompeian forum, for example, has prompted some support for exclusion in
particular places, perhaps explained by processional routes.31 Elsewhere, the
very identification of shops has been changed to suit their location: Lawrence
Richardson, for example, found it “almost unthinkable that a row of shops
dealing in fruit and vegetables could have opened on so fine a gallery [as the
Pompeian Macellum], so perhaps one should think of these rather as offices.”32
The pendulum has, since the 1990s, generally swung back toward Frank’s
earlier estimation that financial profit could serve as the key justification for
elite involvement in trade.33 So even while the concept itself of simple shops
being juxtaposed with sumptuous houses can presently be described as
“disturbing to the modern viewer,”34 the profits from them seem to have been
welcomed enough to justify their presence; for Damian Robinson, the elite
motivation was to “maximize the potential of the space in and around their
homes.”35 The communis opinio thus accepts that (p.98) there were a series of
social anxieties surrounding retail trade, but that these were tolerated,
effectively subordinated by a sense of “economic rationality”: principally
profit.36
Shops and/in Houses from Humble to Haughty

Efforts to show that Pompeii’s many shops could be built within houses, even the
largest of them, have helped to recast the city as one in which retail investment
was eagerly sought. In part the collective motivation to associate shops and bars
with houses of all classes has been to discredit the thesis—whether Ciceronian
or Finleyan—that elites avoided trade, with the evidence on the ground being
amassed to pin urban investments on the power of profit; notably this conclusion
does not itself entirely deny the moral castigation associated with retail trade.37
Gassner was the first of several scholars to take a specific interest in the
statistical occurrence of shops among Pompeian houses, but it was Wallace-
Hadrill’s survey of houses in Regions I and VI that prompted a more ongoing,
Page 9 of 34
wider discussion on the matter, after he demonstrated that more than two-thirds
of them showed obvious signs of economic activity.38 More than 50 percent of
the finest houses in his survey—thus those with an atrium, peristyle, and some
surviving form of decoration—contained shops. What distinguishes those that
had shops was neither their size nor structure, but their location: they were
mostly those that lined the main streets.39 Approaching the numbers by way of
the retail outlets themselves, Pirson was able to estimate that just 30 percent of
Pompeii’s tabernae were structurally “independent” (which is not to say they
were not still built as part of a household’s investment portfolio), and while 45
percent were built within a larger complex, a further 25 percent were built into
houses. Of those he estimated to be rented (p.99) out by houses, 56 percent
were part of the economic portfolio of the elite; 11 percent were attached to
mid-range houses, and just 2 percent to his lowest category.40 However we cut
them, these numbers are conservative; they represent only the most obvious
cases of shops being built as part of the domestic structure, not also those that,
while physically independent, were part of the domestic economic portfolio
itself. Likewise, it is impossible to calculate how many of Pompeii’s bars were
not built as household investments; as we learned in Chapter 2, their direct,
physical connection to a house was based on how many rooms the bar required.
The small handful of bars built into patently non-domestic spaces—like the
street-fronts of bath-houses, or even the macellum—are, if anything, conspicuous
as isolated examples.
Exceptions abound, as for most everything to do with Roman urbanism, but even
the many houses devoid of shops and bars remain too few to overturn that which
we can learn from those that kept retailing portfolios. The matter is not simply
limited to economic opportunity, nor the pressures of social status. After all, just
as we see bars and shops filling the fronts of many of the smaller houses, still
very many equally sized houses went without; six bars occupy the relatively
modest building plots of insula VII.3 at Pompeii, yet not a single bar counter
serviced the six comparably sized properties inside the Porta Stabia entrance to
the city at insula VIII.7.
More suited to statistical analysis though the Pompeian data may be, principally
for their abundance, the overall trends we see there for investing in retail
outlets are hardly unusual. Closer inspection of other Roman cities reveals much
the same picture, if more so as noteworthy examples than as statistical patterns.
In Rome itself, on the Palatine, five shops front the grand atrium house on the
corner of the via Sacra and Clivo Palatino.41 Another five shops take up the
entire frontage of the atrium house found on the northeast slope of the
Palatine.42 As more and more of these houses come to light, we become less
surprised to find them fronted by retail spaces. Further afield, at Volubilis, for
example, the best preserved area (the northeast quarter) is riddled with shops;
only two houses in this sprawling neighborhood are without them. The House of
the Labors of Hercules, covering about 2000m2, has as many as eight shops, (p.
Page 10 of 34
100) while the so-called Gordion Palace, considered by some to have been the
governor’s residence, was fronted by no fewer than twelve. Indeed the entirety
of the Decumanus Maximus on which this house faces presents an almost
unbroken line of close to fifty shops (see Fig. 6.17). At Vaison-la-Romaine, a row
of some ten shops, built into the eastern front of the House of the Silver Bust,
line the main cardo (Fig. 3.6). And of the largest houses at Timgad, all are
fronted by shops; one of the most conspicuous examples—not least because the
shops communicate with the house via doorways—is the House of Sertius,
thought to have been owned by M. Plotius Faustus who we know was widely
engaged as equestrian army officer, local magistrate, and priest.43 At places like
Vulci, which retains so little of its commercial and residential fabric, we still find
that the enormous House of the Cryptoporticus was entirely fronted by retail
outlets.
Some cities boast significant

suburban areas for statistical
analysis. At Delos, for example,
Monika Trümper found that
about a third of (p.101) the
houses included tabernae.44 Of
the shops, some 53 percent
were built into the lowest
category of houses, 25 percent
into the next category, and 22
percent into the most elite of all
Delian houses. As elsewhere,
multiple shops were built into Fig. 3.6. Colonnaded line of shops
the original phases of house fronting the House of the Silver Bust at
construction, especially those Vaison-la-Romaine.
on the busiest roads; up to five Photo: S. Ellis.
shops, for example, were built
into the original construction of
House III Z on the busy Rue 5.45 Just 6.5 percent of the 387 Delian tabernae
exposed for study were fully independent structures.46 Whichever way we count
them, wherever we map them, and whatever our tolerance may be for the
distance between property lines and the doors of shops and houses, the reality is
that we find shops, even bars, not just near houses, even the most elite ones, but
veritably within them. Tabernae are such a canonical feature of the atrium house
that it would be rather easier to count the examples that are without them than
to continue the current roll-call. And while we can surely register some basic
socio-economic distinctions in the houses that invested in retail, such as between
Pompeii and Delos, whereby the Delian examples were more commonly
associated with economic portfolios of a seemingly reduced level, still in
whichever direction we extend our search—as into classical Greece, or across
Page 11 of 34
vast cultural territories from Empuries in the west to Dura-Europos in the east—
the results are much the same: shops are abundant, they gather along the
busiest thoroughfares and confluences, and they are more often constructed
from the street-side parts of houses whether humble or haughty.47 But plotting
the presence of retail along the fronts of large houses, and pinning the
investment in them on profit, only provides part—perhaps not even the principal
part—of the causes behind their establishment. Still alive is the assumption that
economic rationality, typically limited to financial gains, dominated the
interconnected reasons for why and where people invested in urban retail. There
thus remains some profit in questioning, or at least complicating, this most basic
premise: were financial gains—whether through rental or retail returns—the
principal motivation for investment in urban retail?
(p.102) Profit and the Economic Portfolio: The Rationality of Rental and
Retail Returns
“I’m getting every last petal out of these flower arrangements” (Cic. Fam.
16.18)48
Peter Garnsey once wondered how Tenney Frank and Michael Rostovtzeff could
have so readily overlooked urban rent as a source of income for wealthy
Romans, placing their gaffes somewhere between “mere oversight” and the
equally common reluctance to accept the connections between elites and
trade.49 In more recent decades, rental income has instead been singled out as a
financially viable motivator behind retail investment.50 For good reason: most of
the urban population of Imperial Rome, at least, depended on the availability of
rental apartments, the payments for which can be estimated as “exorbitantly
high.”51 While not every Roman city was as densely packed with rent-paying,
transient outsiders as we see at, say, Ostia,52 still most of them were made up of
buildings not owned by their inhabitants. Whether through the renting of
apartments or tabernae, the distinctions between which are so intractable as to
be unhelpful,53 the returns (reditus) of vast sums of money are known to have
attracted elites to urban property investment. Cicero, for one, and despite all his
bluster about engaging in such things, let out shops, and if his determined letter
to his freedman Tiro is anything to judge by, he pulled every last petal, or coin,
from them.54
How much of a return, precisely, is a matter of conjecture; there is much about

the size and shape of these economic portfolios that we cannot know,
particularly scale; rents in Rome, if Suetonius is not (p.103) misguiding us,55
were as much as four times those found in cities elsewhere across Italy. But even
the most conservative estimates are striking: from his shops at Puteoli alone,
Cicero generated some 80,000 sesterces annually.56 Afer could endlessly gloat to
Martial of the 3 million he yielded annually from his rental of urban and rural
property.57 Even if the returns from rural activities were the more gainful, still
the inclusion of urban rents alongside the rural ones means that such sums
Page 12 of 34
could hardly have been generated from just a handful of tenants operating
tabernae. For some of these scenarios we have to imagine property ownership
by the score, perhaps even by the hundred and, as for Cicero, invested across
multiple cities. Even with questions about the camouflaging of trade-based
profits aside, the sources are unanimous in trumpeting the significant incomes
that the renting of apartments and tabernae could generate for their owners.58
For as many Ciceronian-like landlords as there must have been (he was hardly
an exception), still we should anticipate that many, many more will have boasted
more modest but not insignificant property portfolios. And so, equally, a good
many of the shops we find in cities will have been owned not by distant
magnates but by more modest, local investors. Enter Gnaeus Alleius Nigidius
Maius,59 whose status as a neighborhood landlord would be little known to us
were it not for the survival of some rental notices painted on the outside of the
Insula Arriana Polliana at Pompeii (Fig. 3.7). The notices themselves detail much
about the process of renting a taberna cum pergulis (shop with upper room), and
have repaid most efforts to read the process of urban tenancy in them. Much has
already been said about these notices, and of what they illuminate about the
Roman entrepreneurial hunger to generate income from urban property; we
ourselves have already met with them in Chapter 2.60 The whole system seems
so economically rational and familiar that it has hardly warranted much inquest;
that “(l)anded elites were dependent upon capital income from rental
properties” is beyond question.61 Common is the assumption that the principal
motivation to retail investment was pecuniary.
(p.104) Though we might

reasonably expect that some
financial returns on rents were
“exorbitantly high,” still we
must question whether they can
have always, of necessity, been
financially very worthwhile. The
rent on a single shop, after all,
cannot have been more than the
income generated by the shop
itself. From another
perspective, if rent generated Fig. 3.7. Shops flanking the central
substantial income, then the entrance to the House of Pansa (Insula
returns from retailing must Arriana Polliana), Pompeii.
have been even greater. The Photo: S. Ellis.
system is essentially simple:
rent will have been paid from
the returns of retailing; if the retail income was less, rent could not be paid,62
and the business collapsed. Obvious though this most basic economic principle
may be, the importance here is that by accepting, as we surely must, that retail
Page 13 of 34
income was higher than rental income, then we are left with an equation in
which the income—whether retail or rental—from any given taberna can hardly
have been very lucrative; the vast majority of shops, after all, retailed in petty
things. While we might more fairly reconcile, if not guarantee, the expectation of
enriching returns with the handful of (p.105) luxury shops on the via Sacra in
Rome,63 most rental returns on tabernae cannot have eclipsed the surely limited
yields of a grocer, cobbler, or lamp-seller.
In this reality we must scrutinize any idea that such modest financial returns
alone could have so readily motivated the owners of these largest houses to
invest in tabernae. The lamps for sale in the shops at III.2.3 and VIII.5.8/11 in
Pompeii, and B8–G2 at Dura-Europos, for example, will probably have sold for as
little as one as each.64 How many lamps must these shops have sold each day to
meet the rent and/or satisfy the economic portfolios of the elite houses in which
they were installed? And if we accept that a glass of the most expensive
Falernian wine went for one denarius, and sausage and cheese for just one as
(see Chapter 7 for the pricelist from the bar at IX.7.24–25), we are left with the
question of how many and much of all these things was needed to be sold to
ensure that the opening and ongoing operation of a shop—or worse still, the
rental of one—was a sound, fiscal choice? What could the five shops that fronted
the House of the Faun (VI.12.2; Fig. 3.8) have been selling to make them a
financially viable investment? We could just as necessarily extend the inquiry
into production and industry; to do so would surely underline the present point.
How lucrative was fulling? Were the profits from laundry enough to singularly
explain the presence of a fullery attached to the House of Menander (I.10.6) or
to another attached to the House of the Citarist (I.4.25), two of Pompeii’s largest
houses? Indeed, a third of all dye works and as many as half of the fulleries have
a direct connection with an elite property.65 For Robinson, they were
“undoubtedly…a financial asset and should be regarded as part of the economic
portfolio of the upper class owners.”66 He is right, of (p.106) course, that they
yielded returns, but to what extent were these amounts singularly satisfactory?
Apart from asking how much

money was needed, or
expected, to impel urban
investment in retail, we might
rather ask: what other
motivations must there have
been? In looking for some
alternative rationalities to retail
investment, the point here is
not to strip away the financial
viability of each shop. The very
abundance of shops, tied as
they were to economic and urban growth spurts, as we will see in the following
Page 14 of 34
chapters, and not least their Fig. 3.8. Shops flanking the central
abandonment as towns failed, entrance to the House of the Faun,
serves as a strong defense of Pompeii.
the economic system. Profit
Photo: S. Ellis.
existed as much as it was so
obviously welcomed. We see it
spelled out, indeed cemented—piece-by-piece—into mosaic; messages like
“lucrum gaudium” (“profit, joy”: CIL X 875 at VI.14) and “salve
lucrum” (“welcome profit”: CIL X 874 at VII.1.46) are, after all, hardly
ambiguous.67 But it must have been a system of investment that can (p.107)
scarcely have been built upon lucrum alone. And just as Nicholas Purcell has
now brought into question economic reward as the singular motivation for
operating agrarian, income-producing property (particularly Imperial estates),
based on concerns for power and order, at an urban and more modest level we
should equally call into question these most fundamental economic assumptions
of profit and investment in tabernae.68 Was it that so many of these elite houses
were simply land rich, cash poor? Was the cash crucial, or even enough, for
“financing their political activities”?69 Or could these returns have served, as
Frier has explored, as something of a “hedge against the catastrophes” that
could seasonally decimate rural production and profit?70 If we can avoid, for the
moment, the common conclusion that Roman shops were securely profitable,
and instead consider that a good many of them were essentially economically
irrational, we should find ourselves with better, more interesting ways in which
to explore and explain the investments made in them.
To be clear, the relatively recent shift in our collective view of urban investment
is now critical to the ways in which we understand the socio-economic
organization of the Roman city. The patrician once imagined by a Maiuri or a
Jashemski, who kept a comfortable distance from the world of retailing, is now
(re)cast as an investor, if not socially engaged with all things retail then certainly
tolerant of them.71 But there was one essential provision: that the financial
profits stacked up high enough. Can we swing this pendulum further still? Can
we move beyond profiteering as the monolithic motivator to urban investment
and instead explore a more plural set of strategies? None of what follows denies
that profit was an important part of the strategy for urban investment in retail,
nor do I argue that this motivation cannot be recognized in the ultimate location
of a shop in an area of prime real estate; indeed, the system I prefer relies on
these very concepts. My aim is to seek a richer, more layered explanation, and
one that hopes to be better informed by the “string of compromises between
individual rights and the common will” in (p.108) the establishment (and so
location) of urban investment.72 The intention is to reimagine the Roman retail
landscape as a space in which social and political motivations partly exceeded,
and at times acquiesced to, the lure of reditus.
Page 15 of 34
In simplest terms, the discussion here proves less of a model for Roman retail
investment than it is a call to a broader and more (culturally) contextualized
reconsideration of retail investment. I hope to review, even re-center, some of
the social and political motivations to opening a shop or a bar, regardless (or
perhaps precisely because?) of the social and financial capital of those who
invested in them. Reciprocity of support often underscored the deal: elites,
though of varying financial clout, provided the essential capital and broader
economic networks to freedmen so that they might invest in or maintain a shop,
a munificence not otherwise out of character for an elite empowered by social
kudos. Freedmen in turn provided the critical socio-political support, and not
least information, that fueled their own sizeable urban networks. It is a system
of urban investment that anticipates an interconnected community whose socio-
political currency could considerably outweigh the small-change returns from
rent and retail.73 Patronage and politics for capital and investment. It is also one
that might help us to understand why there survive only the two rental notices of
Nigidius for an urban landscape that is otherwise intact enough to boast
hundreds of electoral slogans from similar, street-front contexts. In this regard,
those rental notices are not only richly informative for what they tell us about
the rental arrangements of retail outlets, but equally for the rarity of their type—
certainly the need for them, if not also the system of reaching beyond one’s own
network—at large.
While such an arrangement between patron and freedman might seem to explain
only the investment in shops by the richest houses, we can ultimately explore—
indeed, preferably so—the extent to which it influenced investment in shops of
more modest economic portfolios; the shops we excavated at the Porta Stabia,
after all, have no apparent connection—proximal or otherwise—to a socio-
politically charged, elite house. They demand a different or somewhat modified
explanation, prompted not just because of my own invested interests (p.109) in
these particular establishments, and their place in motivating the writing of this
very book, but because they reflect so many other retail spaces of the Roman
world that lack the evidence for who owned and operated them.
Swinging the Pendulum of Retail Investment: From an Avoidance of Trade,

to a Hunger for Profit, to a Plurality of Motivations
For many it will by now be clear that my present ideas are in no small measure
influenced by the stable of Belgian and Dutch scholars who have contributed so
much, rather recently, to our understanding of the socio-economic role of
freedmen and of capital for urban investments.74 Thanks to them we can now
start from the secure knowledge that freedmen dominated the daily operation of
the retail industry. Henrik Mouritsen has outlined the abundance of epigraphic
information that points to how an “overwhelming majority” of freedmen were in
control of urban commerce and production.75 Outnumbered by slaves though
freedmen were in the urban demographic,76 still it was the freedmen running
the shops and paying and collecting the rents. And even if the so-called
Page 16 of 34
“epigraphic habit” skews the inscriptional evidence toward an inflation of

freedmen numbers,77 on account of their relatively greater hunger for posterity
through epitaphs and dedications, some balance to any such bias can be
restored from their omnipresence among transactional items like tituli picti and
seal stamps. The wax tablets of Iucundus, for example, reveal a full 83 percent of
witnesses to commercial transactions to have been freedmen,78 a domination
also mirrored in the tablets of the Sulpicii.79 Whether through amphora stamps
or seal stamps, whichever the medium (typically epigraphic), and wherever
these sources exist, freedmen show up in the highest numbers: Mouritsen posits
that some (p.110) 50–60 percent of the entire Pompeian epigraphic corpus
concerns freedmen alone,80 while for Puteoli John D’Arms has estimated a ratio
of freeborn to freedmen of 1:16.81
Once we move on from freedmen as statistics and meet with them instead as
urban agents, our studies of the socio-economic agencies of former slaves
become increasingly highly charged.82 That we know of some, even many, who
reached financial peaks, even dizziness, slips us into conversations about
entrepreneurialism and upward mobility. Add to that the fact that freedmen
could themselves own slaves, for which they were the target of literary invective,
and we start to see how much of a special effort needs to be made to not draw
anachronistic conclusions about their role in all of this.83 One consequence is
that their relationships to their former owners, their patrons, are as difficult for
us to untangle from skewed notions of status, power, and social stratigraphy as
they will for themselves have been dynamic, complex, and non-transparent. Not
even the legal definitions, shaped by the Rutilian reforms of 118 BCE, help us to
delineate a strict and binding code between freedman and patron.84 But
elements of these social and economic relationships are not beyond us. That the
manumission of a slave produced a freedman or freedwoman who could maintain
a legal and social connection to the patron, for life, is certain. These affiliations
were mutual, built on a cultural understanding of bond and obligation. This is
not to pretend that our freedman was now an equal member of his manumittor’s
family, much less to imply some kind of emotional or familial closeness or
amicitia among them. The clearest expressions of these relationships were
instead—or at the least—economic, and through them we can begin to
understand how and why the freedmen came to shape the retail landscapes of
Roman cities.
(p.111) While we are still far from knowing the full costs associated with
investing in a shop, safe is the assumption that they were considerable.85 The
real estate alone must have demanded a decent sum, certainly beyond the
financial capacity of most freedmen. Tenancy was thus more than a likely
scenario, but an altogether inevitable one in the establishment of a taberna or in
the installation of a freedman to operate it. Whatever those costs, the financial
support needed to set up a taberna went beyond real estate and tenancy. The
investment will have included—or rather, demanded—buying into the complex
Page 17 of 34
knowledge networks associated with any given trade; one cannot simply start
retailing in ceramics or clothes or comestibles without a familiar understanding
of those markets and of the many nodes that made up such networks. Any
successful engagement with supply chains constitutes a considerable financial
outlay, and will normally speak to some prior and ongoing fiscal investment no
less significant than the purchase of the property itself. Something of the
Mediterranean scale of these networks can be found scratched into the wax
tablets from the House of Caecilius Iucundus (V.1.26) in Pompeii, and nearby
Murecine; these attest to the business links between Pompeii and Puteoli, to
arrangements made with merchants as far away as Spain.86 More than fertilizing
commercial partnerships at local and regional levels, these networks will have
presented opportunities for the pooling of human and capital resources.87
Through them we might even see how the construction of a counter, albeit not a
considerable expense, marble-clad or not, speaks instead to a confidence in a
specific form of retail trade that can only have been guaranteed—against, for
example, seasonal volatility and competitive challenges—through financial
investment in sourcing the product from, and negotiating with, its economic
network, its movement and storage, as well as an ultimate commitment to one
form of retail over another.88 The financial investment in retail thus involved
much more than giving up a street-front room of a house, or even (p.112)
purchasing one, and tearing down its front wall for a wide opening and throwing
up a counter.
The costs involved in opening a taberna were thus real and hefty, as ongoing as
they were (un)certain to fluctuate. Any accumulated peculium through slavery
would hardly have amounted to the capital necessary for the depth and breadth
of this kind of urban investment.89 The capital, then, will normally have been
realized in the economic portfolio of a patron. So much has already been made
of the patron’s responsibility in this economic dynamic.90 The once upwardly
mobile libertus, free to make the best of it, was in reality still very much
dependent upon the former master. Trimalchio is our most commonly imagined
protagonist, standing not so much for the majority of nouveau riche, but for the
luckiness and tastelessness of new-money’s new-found heights. But it is his
glaring success that blinds us to the foundations upon which his fortune was
built, his fabulous financial strength that shields his relationships to those in the
wings who once, and in certain ways must still have, supported him. That any
such freed slave could have established himself without dependency on his
patron seems more and more unlikely. The more realistic circumstance is one
that reimagines the long-held view—shared by many but really championed by
Maiuri—that the shape of Pompeii was the product of vulgar upstarts who
squeezed out the traditional gentry by polluting their noble homes with boorish
shops, “as if to launch a final and triumphant attack against the whole edifice
after having completed the conquest of some of its less important rooms.”91
Wilhelmina Jashemski made little attempt to disguise the extent to which even
Page 18 of 34
her own readings of the city were elitist and anachronistic, lamenting how the
“resident of a modern city who has seen fine old homes gradually transformed
into rooming houses and places of business immediately recognizes a similar
deterioration in residence neighborhoods taking place in Pompeii.”92 Not only
were elites critically involved in this very process, no matter their practical
distance, they fronted the equity for it too. In this way urban investment was not
much different from that made in the countryside; rural (p.113)
entrepreneurship demanded just as much of a financial “push” from the elites.93
We could readily catalogue, ad infinitum, the literary, epigraphic, even

archaeological examples of patrons having financially supported their
manumitted slaves. And while the benefits of these networks to the freedmen
should be easy to anticipate, for our present purposes it is equally useful to
consider the reciprocity that fueled the complementary interests underpinning
these relationships.94 As institor, after all, the freedman acted as something of a
business manager, an agent, on behalf of the patron, very much to the benefit of
the latter.95 But it was a deal that could often involve usufructuary rights to the
necessary property in which these activities took place, very much to the benefit
of the freedman. Thus at the broadest level, urban investment was an outcome
of an entwined system of mutual benefit, at least financial but also social and
political. More often these benefits are to us, as then, overshadowed by
obsequium—the unequivocal and legally binding duty, deference, and
compliance that was “owed” by all freedmen to their patrons.96 This well-known
power-dynamic, dressed as it is in large and lavishly decorated houses, readily
masks the political vulnerability—or at least the essential competitive networks
—of the elite. Pauline Ripat has shown how our familiarity with the top-down
power structure denies the very real power that the non-elites could have.97 It
was a network in which “those with the closest and most numerous contacts
with subcultures and communities not their own enjoy greater importance, and
thus power, than their less-well connected peers.”98 But these connections were
dynamic and demanding of curation. It was a system that fed on communication.
In exchange for capital and economic resources, freedmen returned information.
There can be no way of fully calculating which was the greater prize in all of this
mutual benefit: each return was critical to the survival of its recipient. Even if
not everything went to plan, as when the household’s earliest secrets of the day
could be let loose before (p.114) dawn,99 still the leaking of information in the
other direction was only possible precisely because of that very network. In this
way the essential reciprocity of benefit between patron and freedman was itself
scaffolded by a web of interlaced urban networks: social, economic, and
political. While the networks are difficult to disentangle, we can at least
recognize their nodes, if not always what connected them, in all areas of city life:
they are found scratched into the wall of a brothel,100 cast into a bronze tablet to
list a town’s free citizens,101 painted in red on the street-front of a house to show
support of a candidate.102 Roman cities—whether well-known (to us) like
Page 19 of 34
Pompeii, megalopoloi nearing the size of Rome, or minor settlements like

Aeclanum—were not communities of social-patchworks with binary oppositions
between the classes. Distanced though a politically active urbanite might have
been from the social world of the plebeian, they were not entirely divorced from
it. Social stratigraphy of course existed, so much so as to be one of the very
hallmarks of Roman society, but the distinctive groups were each more
dependent on the other than repellant. As intermediaries between patrons and
society,103 freedmen were themselves politically active if not themselves political
protagonists. The social and political information—the rumores—they could
provide the patron, the local support they could garner and foster, in many cases
must surely have eclipsed the financial returns on rent and retail; patronage and
power beyond profit.104 At whichever point those socio-political benefits met
equilibrium with the economic ones is difficult to know, just as it is difficult to
readily measure the social, economic, and political value of patronage between
the networks of, say, the House of the Ceii (I.6.15) and its nearby neighbor the
House of the Menander (I.10.4).
To more fully understand the motivations behind retail investment we thus have
only to elevate the socio-political value of the shop. This aspect can never have
replaced economic interests, but will have in (p.115) most cases proved as
equally necessary. How willing we are to accept these interrelationships
between rich and poor depends on our willingness to read beyond the texts that
more often engage us, as well as to accept the apparent contradictions that
come from doing so as a normal representation of social behavior. Just as we
need not deny Cicero’s invectives against the lower classes that frame a
separation of the social orders, there can be nothing so unusual in his brother’s
electioneering treatises that impress upon the essential importance for the
politically active to make meaningful connections with men of all social
grades.105 This is not to suggest that the connections across the social classes
were closer than they were; we are not talking about friendships,106 rather the
place of socio-economic and socio-political networks in the formation and
operation of urban retail landscapes.
How far can we take these socio-political motivations? At one level, I do not wish
to push such a model beyond its own indefinable limits given that, after all, not
every politically active household can be shown to have had investments in
retail. Still, we can be just as certain that the models based on profit alone are
yet less tenable for the almost countless elite houses that undoubtedly invested
in the retail landscapes of every Roman city. At another level, to place some onus
on the socio-political factors in retail investment makes for a system that need
not necessarily have been limited to the politically active. The central tenets of
social power will have had currency for those further down the ladder yet high
enough on those rungs to be interested and able.
Page 20 of 34
It is in this light that the renowned “bakery scene” from the House of the Baker
(VII.3.30) can be brought into greater focus (Fig. 3.9).107 Long viewed as a
simple but detailed and well-executed depiction of a baker retailing his loaves to
some customers from behind a counter,108 it has in more recent years been
significantly, and convincingly, recast.109 Found as it was in a tablinum, a space
directly tied to the salutatio, the scene itself might rather be one of patronage,
albeit one that was carried out—if not inappositely—in a retail outlet. (p.116)
That the man handing out the bread is seated behind the wooden counter is
immediately noteworthy, his striking comportment all the more emphasized by
the way in which the three other figures appeal for their loaves. That he wears
an all-white, demonstrably long tunic, whereas they are clothed in darker,
shorter cloaks was surely significant; whether we can call his a toga is not
perfectly clear, but the distinction between his appearance with those on the
other side of the scene is clear. The man might also be seated—lending him yet
(p.117) more authority—on what would be a high, cushioned bench, the edge of
which seems to protrude from under his left side, but it is difficult to know with
certainty. Any hesitation we might still have in landing on one interpretation or
another—on the selling of bread or the display of patronage—is at once
excusable; as regular as each practice will have been, rarely do we see either
committed to a visual display, much less one that achieves this level of detail,
even quality. Also worth noting is that the house itself can hardly be measured as
an elite one. Size alone gives that away, being not much more than 200m2. While
it has an atrium and tablinum, these can be safely described as modest. Its
owners gave up no space for a shop. The (otherwise) plain decorations are
another indication; indeed their simplicity serves primarily to amplify,
intentionally or otherwise, the setting of our principal characters. But if we buy
that this was a scene of patronage, then the house in which so proud a
presentation of socio-political power is displayed was itself decidedly less
ambitious. If we can at least pin the scene and all it represents on the efforts of
the owner to build identity, could we be witness to something that is at least
approaching patronage, not simply aspirational but actual: a kind of “middling
munificence”? Just as we should expect a range of munificence, expressed
through the construction of arches and amphitheaters, but also street-side
benches and drainage systems,110 so too should we expect some breadth in the
socio-political stations of those active in the system.
Page 21 of 34
The sharp social and economic

differences between the taberna
and the domus, real though
they most certainly were, have
carved a physical and
conceptual divide between
them; the lived experiences
between one and the other are
reckoned as worlds apart. But
this common trope in which we
offset the elite house from the
smoky bar, the noble from the
pleb, is the low-hanging fruit of
urban studies. Essentially we do
not need to reach far beyond
this branch of urban inquiry to
find a different urban reality,
one in which the social historian
routinely accepts an
interlocking social system. The Fig. 3.9. The so-called “bakery scene”
guiding certainty in the study of from the House of the Baker at VII.3.30,
the Roman bath-house, after all, Pompeii (MANN inv. no. 9071).
or even of politics and
electioneering more broadly,
unflinchingly anticipates the essential connectivity between the social orders.111
Someone like Cicero or Pliny might lead us to imagine necessary divisions
between (p.118) rich houses and disreputable tabernae, and so a separation of
the people normally associated with each, but they can also describe the
normalcy of urban circumstances in which these same people interacted cheek-
by-jowl; the nub of Cicero’s Senian bath scene,112 for example, or Pliny’s
similarly set bath at Rome is that the different orders could share the same
urban spaces and social experiences.113 For every example in literature that
suggests some social distance between residential and retail space, we can just
as easily cherry-pick others that speak of contiguity; even Cicero’s de Officiis
and Seneca’s de Beneficiis are riddled with protreptics for how beneficia (gift-
giving) and liberalitas (generosity) could bind unequal social groups. Examples
of similar circumstances flood the archaeological record, with some of the most
obvious expressions found in the shaping of the burial precincts that line the
main streets into every Roman city. The inclusion of freedmen burials in the
family plots at Pompeii, marked by columelle as well as their inclusion in
inscriptions, serves as an eternal reminder of their status as members of the
familia. By no means equal, their place in the family plot nevertheless
Page 22 of 34
underscores the patron’s obligations through life by a continued bond into the
afterlife.114
All of this intrinsic connectivity should have long been obvious from the shops
themselves: from their locations with and within houses, and not least from their
unavoidable prevalence. Elite identity was not narrowly defined by the ways in
which the luxurious city homes funneled their prized occupants into secluded
inner sanctums, securely removed from the din of the city. It could be just as
normally defined by their local network of shopkeepers, whether as tolerated
tenants or trusted freedmen. The fronts of their homes, even the largest of them
—say of the Faun or Pansa in Pompeii, or of the Silver Bust in Vaison-la-Romaine
or M. Plotius Faustus in Timgad—do not disguise their shops but rather envelop
them in their street-front image (see Figs. 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, 5.13). Tabernae were
physically and (p.119) conceptually part of an elite’s nomen, not an
embarrassment to it.115 Integrated into the façade of the house, shouldering—
maybe even guarding—its privileged entrance, the taberna embodied the very
institution of the salutatio: connected, dependent, supportive.116
Even within the shops there is much to signal a strong relationship between
retail activity and the houses in which many are found. The very presence of the
household gods in their arched shrines, after all, proudly watched over the sales
counters of so many shops as a potent example of the togetherness of trade and
the spirits of the house itself (see Fig. 2.13).117 At the most pragmatic level we
have already realized these bonds in the sharing of resources and space.118 The
hearths of a small handful of Pompeian bars were located in the adjacent atrium
of the attached and accessible house (see Fig. 2.20).119 The presence of these
kinds of fixtures in the associated house, not (just) the shop, recalls that which is
known for Olynthos. There, Nicholas Cahill found that many of the production
fixtures were located not in the shops, but in the adjoining courtyards of the
houses.120 A similar relationship has been interpreted for the shops and houses
at Delos.121 And as we see cooking facilities in these courtyards, so too do we
see such spaces serving as storage areas. The bar at I.8.1 was surely responsible
for the stack of amphorae found under the staircase in the atrium of the house at
I.8.2.122 The same explanation is given for the wine containers found in the
northwest corner of the atrium of the House of Mestrius Maximus (I.9.12); they
are thought to have served the bar (of Amarantus) attached to the house.123
These last examples, as well as that at IX.11.2 where the amphorae were
stacked behind the counter, and I.7.13–14 where they were far removed to an
upper floor (their impressions survive in the ash today; Fig. 3.10), show us just
how fluid and distant the spaces associated (p.120) with a street-front bar
could be. It is worth reminding that the provision of a toilet might provide
another indicator; or, rather, the complete lack of them in the one- and two-room
bars accessed by a house. As obvious as it may seem that the larger (Types A.3
and A.4) bars should be provided with a toilet, still we can read in their complete
Page 23 of 34
absence from the smallest bars that such a provision could have been found in
the attached house. And to be sure, it is not as though a one- or two-room
Pompeian bar was simply too small to contain a toilet. We have counted them,
after all, in the smallest bars not attached to houses (Type A.1), just as we
regularly find them in almost all of the larger bars; recall that toilets are known
in 87 percent of the Type A.3 bars, and in 100 percent of all Type A.4 bars. Thus
their absence from only those small bars that retained access to a house implies
that houses might have been willing to share this facility as much as they did for,
at least, cooking and storage.
(p.121) The sum of this data

underscores the essential bond
between house and shop,
patrons and clients. It might
also explain the exclusion of
tabernae from the regionary
lists at Rome, which in their
accounting of insulae and
domus otherwise include all
bakeries, brothels, and
toilets.124 These listings reflect
property and ownership more
than types or units of space.
Through them we have only to
assume that tabernae were part
and parcel of the house,
regardless of their functions or
occupants. They will have
shared fixtures and spaces, just
as they did roofing structures,
standing walls, and their
attendant water catchment and
drainage systems. More than an
Fig. 3.10. Remains of two amphorae (and
infrastructural connection, the
the impressions of several others)
access to shared resources also
embedded in the volcanic ash against a
speaks to a necessary fluidity
wall on the second floor of the bar at I.
between these spaces. The use
7.13–14, Pompeii.
of these resources can only
have been achieved through Photo: S. Ellis.
movement back and forth.
Whether a shop maintained a
doorway into the house from which it was built—or not, as we know for the
majority of examples at Italica and Volubilis—should not distract us from the
greater likelihood that the shop was ostensibly within both the structural and
Page 24 of 34
social framework of the house itself.125 These relationships were neither limited
to, nor defined by, physical and spatial proximity.
Conclusion
In pointing out the need to consider a broader range of motivations to retail
investment, I want to be careful not to draft too great a fiction; I have already
focused too much on the retail outlets found in the best and surely politically
active households. Not all tabernae, of course, were given to freedmen by their
patrons, and the many found physically separate from elite houses, as seemingly
independent structures, present not just a chorus of challenges to the ideas
presented here but also a reminder that plural explanations should remain our
goal in understanding urban investment. The rental posters alone demonstrate
that the search for tenants extended beyond one’s own social network. Can we
lay the same ideas (p.122) about urban investment on the many shops and bars
not directly connected to an elite house? Do these premises reflect investment at
a simply more modest scale, or might they also have been part of the same
model in which we find some combination, however imbalanced, of socio-
political and economic interests?
The question hinges once more on equity, investment, and ownership. While we
can reasonably expect the owner of the House of Sertius at Timgad, or that of
the Cryptoporticus at Vulci to have made the necessary investments in the shops
that front their own enormous premises, much harder still is it to identify the
owners, or even to know something of their status, of the countless shops that
form the more modest segments of urban retail landscapes. The shops that front
the Porta Stabia neighborhood present once more a useful study: none of them
have any immediate, physical connection to an elite house (see Fig. 1.5). But just
as there is no secure way of knowing the identity of their owner/s, we cannot be
sure that they were not themselves counted as part of an investment portfolio of
a patron in much the same way as those directly connected to an elite house;
they could just as likely have come under the control of the nearest elite house
(at I.2.28, the House of the Tetrastyle Atrium; Fig. 3.11) as the farthest (say, the
House of the Vestals at VI.1.7 near the Herculaneum gate). Uncertainty abounds,
which is part of the point, but if a Nigidius can have had property investments
across Pompeii, and an Afer or a Cicero from one city to the next, then the
immediate physical connection of a shop to a house as an index of ownership,
even just of economic participation, becomes less imperative. The modest
insulae inside the Porta Stabia could have been owned by several investors or
just one, purchased as multiple units or as a whole. We can be no more certain if
the owner or owners lived within these spaces, nor even within Pompeii. In this
we have not just uncertainty about urban investment, but a range of possibilities
for it that are too readily cast aside in our attempts to delineate strict modes of
evidence; we identify house–shop relationships by the presence of a doorway,
open or closed, and deny them because of a lack of proximity between house and
shop.126 If the socio-political motivations we have explored were indeed a
Page 25 of 34
paradigm, then they may (p.123) not only have explained—even if only in part
—the shops that front an elite house, but equally so those further afield.
As uncertain as we may be as to
who constructed the buildings
just inside the Porta Stabia at
Pompeii, if they were not part of
an investment portfolio of a
neighboring or distant elite,
then we are left with just as
much uncertainty as to the
necessary economic foundations
of the sub-elites who
established and/or lived and
worked in them. These were Fig. 3.11. View of the properties in the
sizeable structures in what Porta Stabia neighborhood (facing
must have been an appealing directly onto the rear of those in insula I.
location for business interests: 1) from the House of the Tetrastyle
they were the first shops Atrium at I.2.28.
encountered upon entering the Photo: S. Ellis.
city through one of its busiest
gates, lining the city’s principal
cardinal route and nestled within the hustle and bustle of the so-called
“entertainment district” (see Fig. 1.5). Whether attached to a mosaic-filled
house, or as part of a property of the “lowest” quartile, the actual costs to build
tabernae, let alone maintain a place in the retail market, can hardly have been
inconsiderable. Ultimately much of this is about autonomy and “commoner
agency.”127 On the autonomy of workshop workers we (p.124) have much to
gain from the recent work of Miko Flohr, who similarly found for fullones that
neither complete submission of social inferior to superior, nor complete
autonomy, was the foundation for urban industry.128 Balance here is important,
because we can risk expecting too much from sub-elite agency, while also
denying too much of it altogether. Thus it is also about the extent to which we
accept a more complex set of motivations to urban investment in Roman retail
landscapes. Many shops were surely established for almost entirely economic
benefit, many others more so for political purpose. Still a good many others were
a product of both socio-political and socio-economic motivations. Pinning any one
shop—worse still, an industry of them—to a point along this scale is difficult to
do, regardless of its location across a city, along the street-front of an insula, or
even within, and regardless of connecting or closed doorways, a house large or
small. The more important point is that such a scale existed.
The intention of this chapter was to call for a new reading of urban retail
landscapes, one that restores complexity to the otherwise overly-simplified
spatial patterns. The motivations of profit and place are readily identified in the
Page 26 of 34
gathering of shops and bars around intersections and along main roads; even
the extent to which those rooms closest to the intersection were chosen to open
a bar over those further away underscores the power of space in urban
topography. Yet lost to these patterns are the foundational factors that should
prompt much richer discussions about agency and social stratigraphy, the
political economy and urbanism and much more besides. As effective as
distribution plans are for understanding the place of one type of property or
another, still their patterns can mislead us, or discourage deeper inquiry. The
patterns are perhaps too readily observable, and so our immediate impressions
of them too easily satisfied. This is not to invalidate the ways in which a
distribution map intentionally abstracts the many localized, complex causes
behind the establishment of a taberna or bar. Simplification of a system is often
essential, just as the idiosyncratic decisions reflect not just local and immediate
opportunity but broader urban trends. But in fixing dots to one place or another,
we miss the fuller set of agencies in their investment, and not least the social
movements that integrated them into their urban world in ways that extend far
(p.125) beyond their fixed place. We also miss the fundamental dimension of
time. That is, our plotting of properties shows them as a mass of synchronous
entities, and thus not able to express when they were once planted in those
locations. To continue the metaphor, a more effective distribution plan might be
one that displays the depth of time since planting, which we might even conceive
of as the roots of each establishment: some would be deep, some shallow, and
others altogether entangled. However we visualize the processes, ongoing
efforts to understand the shape of Roman retail landscapes, particularly those
that grapple with the motivations behind their investment, should result in
newer connections with the more commonly tackled parts of the city: houses, of
course, but also infrastructure, institutions, and people. (p.126)
Notes:
(1) Packer 1978; Gassner 1986; De Simone 1988; La Torre 1988; Laurence 1994;
1995; Wallace-Hadrill 1994; 1995; DeFelice 2001; Ellis 2004a; 2011a; DeLaine
2005; Monteix 2010. See also Cahill 2002, 274 for Olynthos.
(2) Kostof 1992, 92.
(3) For example, VI.5.12; see also I.2.29; I.8.1; I.13.13; II.3.5; III.6.1; III.8.9; VI.
15.15; VII.2.15; VII.3.23.
(4) I.3.21–22; I.10.2–3; IX.11.2.
(5) Ellis 2004a and 2011a.
(6) See Maiuri 1941, 371–404 for his excavations of the 7 shops along the
eastern side of the forum. See also Baratto 2003, 75.
Page 27 of 34
(7) Kleberg 1957, 52; followed by La Torre 1988, 76–7. See also Russell 2016a,
69, 80.
(8) Varr. ap. Non. Fr. 853 Lindsay.
(9) Nilson et al. 2008, 53–8; Poulson 1992, 56–7.
(10) Baratto 2003, 81.
(11) DeLaine 2005, 34–5.
(12) The examples at Herculaneum, with an indication of their types, are: II.6–7
(A.3); IV.10 (A.2.H); IV.15–16 (A.4); IV.17 (A.2.H); V.6 (A.1.H); V.10 (B.2.H); V.21
(C); VI.12 (B.2.H); VI.19 (B.1); Ins. Orient. II.6 (A.3); Ins. Orient. II.9 (B.2); Ins.
Orient. II.13 (A.4).
(13) On the “spatial turn” as it has impacted Roman studies, see the brief
summary in Laurence 2015, 175–6.
(14) Lefebvre is considered something of a founding father of urban spatial

studies; especially Lefebvre 1991. On which see Laurence 1997, and Soja 1996.
(15) For example De Simone 1988.
(16) The subsequent studies at Pompeii were fertilized by the influential works of
Laurence (esp. 1994) and Wallace-Hadrill (esp. 1994).
(17) The seminal study is Hillier and Hanson 1984. For some more recent studies
and overviews, and from among many, see Vaughan 2007; Paliou et al. 2014.
(18) Eschebach 1979.
(19) On location theory as it might apply to retailing spaces, the most important
contributions have come from studies of much later cities, particularly those in
eighteenth- to twentieth-century Britain. For example, Scola 1982, 164–8. See
also Wild and Shaw 1974; 1979. Useful overviews can be found in Kostof 1991;
1992.
(20) On urban clustering see, especially, Marshall 1890, 267–77; 1919, 283–8,
599–608; Cumbers and MacKinnon 2006. For clustering in Roman cities see,
chiefly, Goodman 2016 (with healthy bibliography); also Morel 1987; Holleran
2012, 51–61; Monteix 2012. For a longer range analysis of broader concepts as
class and ethnicity in clustering, see York et al. 2011.
(21) Hotelling 1929.
Page 28 of 34
(22) Carpenters: Liv. 35.41.10; scythe-makers: Cic. Sull. 18.7; potters: Varr. Ling.
5.50; fruiterers: Varr. Rust. 1.2.10; 3.16.23. Oliver 1907, 136–42. For retailing
toponyms, Kostof 1992, 97–8.
(23) Maiuri 1959, 79–81; Castrén 1975, 79–82; Ellis 2011c, 71.
(24) Pirson 2007, 463.
(25) Most notably Laurence 1994, 70–87, 118–19 (slightly revised in 2007, 82–
101) and Wallace-Hadrill 1995, 51, 54–5. See the challenges to “moral
geography” in Ellis 2004a; and, most effectively, McGinn 2002, 30–2; 2004, 241–
51; also 2013, 622. For a more global view of zoning in cities of different periods,
see Kostof 1992, 102–21.
(26) See note 34, Chapter 7, on sumptuary laws.
(27) Again, McGinn 2002, 30–2; 2004, 241–51; also 2013, 622.
(28) See Giese 1979; see also Vance 1971 and Aubert 2001, 90.
(29) Frank 1918, 229.
(30) Maiuri (especially) 1960; Rostovtzeff 1957; Finley 1973.
(31) Wallace-Hadrill 1995, 49–50; 2008, 134–5. Cf. Ellis 2004a, 377–8.
(32) Richardson 1988, 200.
(33) For financial profit as a dominating motivation see, especially, Wallace-

Hadrill 1994, 118–42; Ellis 2004a; Robinson 2005.
(34) Carucci 2010, 257 describing the distribution of shops among houses at
Italica.
(35) Robinson 2005, 99.
(36) On “economic rationality” in the placement of Roman bars, Ellis 2004a, 383.
(37) Finley 1973, 40–61.
(38) Gassner 1986; Wallace-Hadrill 1991; 1994, 117–42 (but notably voiced in
another way (137), with less than a third of Pompeian houses showing no
obvious sign of economic activity).
(39) Wallace-Hadrill 1994, 140–1.
(40) Pirson 1999, 139; 2007, 469.
(41) Carandini and Papi 1999, plate 43.
Page 29 of 34
(42) See Carandini and Carafa 2000, plate 57. See also Wiseman 2008, 271–80.
(43) Boeswillwald et al. 1905, 325–6.
(44) Trümper 2005, 129.
(45) Trümper 2005, 122.
(46) Trümper 2005, 129.
(47) On the combination of houses and workshops as being the normal

arrangement of space in Classical Greece, see Tsakirgis 2005. Also Cahill 2002,
273–6. On shops connected to houses at Empuries, see Mar and Ruiz de Arbulo
1993, 349–53. For those at Dura-Europos see Baird 2007, 417–20.
(48) Translation from Purcell 1994, 664.
(49) Garnsey 1976, 123–7 (in response to Frank 1940, 394–6 and Rostovtzeff
1957, 31, 17).
(50) Again Garnsey 1976; Frier 1977; 1980; Reger 1992; Parkins 1997; Jongman
2006.
(51) On the scale of rental incomes, see Frier 1977; 1980, 39–47. Also Duncan-
Jones 1965, 224–6; Hermansen 1978. On rental payments being “exorbitantly
high,” Frier 1977, 27.
(52) For the renting of property at Ostia, from among many see Heinzelman
2005.
(53) For example, Ulp. Dig. 50.16.183.
(54) For the petals, see Cic. Fam. 16.18; for the bluster, see Cic. Off. 1.150. For
the inconsistencies in his writings, sometimes described as “hypocracies,” see
the countless examples listed throughout Carcopino 1947; also Horsfall 2003,
83–95. For Cicero’s urban property portfolio more specifically, see Frier 1978.
(55) Jul. 38.2.
(56) Cic. Att. 13.46.2; 14.9.1; 10.3; 11.2. See Garnsey 1976, 126.
(57) Mart. 4.37.
(58) Hollander 2007, 112 provides a useful summary.
(59) On the man, van Buren 1947.
(60) See note 32, Chapter 2.
Page 30 of 34
(61) Pirson 2007, 469.
(62) And how: Mart. 3.38.5; 12.32.3.
(63) Neudecker 2005; Morel 1987.
(64) The shop at III.2.3, attached to the House of Loreius Tiburtinus, retailed in
modest ceramics; see Spinazzola 1953, I.369, 419–20. See also the shops
attached to the house at VIII.5.9; on which, Eschebach and Müller-Trollius 1993,
380–1. For the shop at Dura-Europos, Baird 2007, 419. On the prices of lamps in
this period, see Harris 1980, 134–5. See also CIL IV 5380.
A fuller survey of prices is beyond the present scope; otherwise see the Edictum
Diocletiani et collegarum de pretiis rerum venalium (the so-called Price Edict of
301 CE); on which see Giacchero 1974; and for a brief overview, Peña 2007, 27–
8.
The edict includes lamps, but they are notably so inexpensive as to be priced by
lots of ten (at four denarii communes per lot).
(65) Robinson 2005, 94. More fully explored in Flohr 2013.
(66) Robinson 2005, 97. See also Mayer 2012, 66.
(67) Blake 1930, 95; Curtis 1984, 565; De Vos 1984, 165.
(68) Purcell 2014.
(69) Pirson 2007, 469.
(70) Frier 1980, 22–3.
(71) We have already met with Maiuri’s vision (1960), see also that of Jashemski
1964, 343: “The resident of a modern city who has seen fine old homes gradually
transformed into rooming houses and places of business immediately recognizes
a similar deterioration in residence neighborhoods taking place in Pompeii.”
Otherwise, Finley 1973, 40–61.
(72) Kostof 1991, 52.
(73) Mouritsen 1988, 52–7. See also Parkins 1997, 97–102 on how shops could be
part of dowry and used for social and familial political ties.
(74) Especially Mouritsen 2001; 2005; 2011; but also Verboven 2002; Broekaert
2012; Flohr 2013. The topic is otherwise well subscribed: see note 82 in this
chapter.
(75) Mouritsen 2001, 4.
Page 31 of 34
(76) Verboven 2012, 88.
(77) Jongman 2003, 116–17.
(78) D’Arms 1974, 112, n. 71.
(79) Mouritsen 2001, 5; see also Camodeca 1993, 242; Bove 1984.
(80) Mouritsen 2001, 1–4.
(81) D’Arms 1974, 112.
(82) On freedmen in Roman society, Veyne 1961 and Treggiari 1969 are the
classics. Otherwise, and apart from those already mentioned in note 74 in this
chapter: Garnsey 1981; Bradley 1987; Kirschenbaum 1987; Hackworth-Petersen
2006; Bell and Ramsby 2012; Verboeven and Laes 2016. For a recent overview of
the scholarship on freedmen, see Laird 2013, while fuller bibliographies can be
found in Mouritsen 2011, 1–9 and Bell and Ramsby 2012, 1–15.
(83) See, for example, the seminal but fraught study by Duff 1928. For the
changing tone of their study, see the introduction in Bell and Ramsby 2012.
(84) On the reforms of Rutilius Rufus, see Purcell 1994, 669–70; Verboven 2012,
95.
(85) The best attempt remains Pöhlmann 1884, 86–8. See also Duncan-Jones
1965, 224–6.
(86) On which see Frederiksen 1984, 321, with 327–8 providing a good
introduction to the tablets themselves. Also Andreau 1974; Sbordone 1976; Bove
1984; Jongman 1988. Haley 1990 has investigated the inscriptional evidence for
these ties.
(87) Bang 2008, 239–89; Verboven 2002; Broekaert 2011; 2012.
(88) On seasonality and markets, Frayn 1993, 1–11; De Ligt 1993, 11–13, 48–9;
Ellis 2011c, 67–75. We will return to the concept of retail confidence in Chapter
5.
(89) On the peculium, Kirschenbaum 1987, 31–88. On sub-elite wages, Scheidel

2007b, 335–6.
(90) Hopkins 1978b, 115–31; Fabre 1981; Purcell 1994, 663; Mouritsen 2001,
(esp.) 9–13.
(91) Maiuri 1960, 58.
(92) Jashemski 1964, 343.
Page 32 of 34
(93) Dossey 2010, 91.
(94) On the importance of reciprocity in social structures, particularly networks,

see Cook and Whitmeyer 1992.
(95) On institorum, see Treggiari 1980; Aubert 1993; Mouritsen 2001.
(96) On which, see Waldstein 1986, 51–69; also Treggiari 1969, 68–81.
(97) Ripat 2012. See also Barabási 2003, 93–107; Sandwell 2009.
(98) Ripat 2012, 52.
(99) Juv. Sat. 9.102–10.
(100) Levin-Richardson 2011; Milnor 2014.
(101) On the Herculaneum Album (the so-called Album Augustalium), see

Camodeca 2000; 2008. Also Emmerson 2011, 162–3; Wallace-Hadrill 2011, 138–
45; De Ligt and Garnsey 2012.
(102) For political slogans and their networks, now see Viitanen and Ynnilä 2012.
(103) On the intermediary role of freedmen, see Treggiari 1969, 177–92;

Vanderboek 1987, 52–5.
(104) On politics and communication, and the relationship between elites and
their freed slaves, see Ripat 2012.
(105) For example, Q. Cic. Pet. 18, 24, 29, 30.
(106) Cic. Amic. 20.74 reminds us that true friendship could not happen between
social unequals. Cf. Q. Cic. Pet. 16 for how that definition could be stretched in
times of candidacy; on which, Ripat 2012, 57–8.
(107) See note 56, Chapter 2.
(108) An early account is Fiorelli’s description captured in Helbig 1864, 119–20.
(109) Fröhlich 1991, 236–41; Clarke 2003, 259–61. See also Monteix 2010, 64.
(110) Hartnett 2008; see also Goldbeck 2010, 134.
(111) On social orders in the bath-house, see Fagan 2011. Also Meiggs 1973, 404.
(112) Cael. 56–69.
(113) Ep. 3.14.6–8. I borrow these examples from Fagan 2011, 362–3, and thank
him for exploring these examples and others with me.
Page 33 of 34
(114) I thank Allison Emmerson for walking me through the burial evidence
throughout Campania, and for making so clear the value of looking beyond the
well-trodden Pompeian tombs. On the commemoration of freedmen in family
tombs in the Roman world, see Emmerson 2013, 99; see also Kleiner 1977, 22–
46, 184–91; Hackworth-Petersen 2006, 215–26.
(115) On pride in the nomen, Saller 1994, 169, 178–80, 231.
(116) On the rich topics of salutatio and patronage, the contributions are many:
Saller 1982; 1989; Wallace-Hadrill 1989a; 1989b; 1994, 118–42; Damon 1997;
Hartnett 2008; Goldbeck 2010.
(117) See note 62, Chapter 2, on shrines.
(118) See Chapter 2; also briefly explored in Ellis 2012, 106–8.
(119) Some of the clearest examples are known for the bars at I.4.3, I.8.1, VI.
16.32–33, VII.3.23, and IX.7.24–25. The relationship between the house and bar
at I.4.3, as determined by the presence of the hearth in the courtyard of the
house, was already recognized by Niccolini 1854–96, Vol. II, 79; followed by Foss
1994, 186.
(120) Cahill 2002, 274.
(121) Trümper 2005, 122.
(122) Foss 1994, 280.
(123) Timby 2004, 387; Hay 2016, 109–10.
(124) Wallace-Hadrill 2008, 297.
(125) For the examples at Italica, Carucci 2010, 257. For the examples at
Volubilis, Carucci 2007, 202–12.
(126) On questions of ownership, control, and economic interest based on the

proximity of one property type to the next, see Robinson 2005.
(127) On commoner agencies in complex societies, see Joyce et al. 2001.
(128) Flohr 2013, 289.
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Roman Retail Landscapes

The Roman Retail Revolution: The Socio-

Print publication date: 2018

Roman Retail Landscapes

Abstract and Keywords

The Distribution of Retail Outlets at Roman Cities: Typical Patterns,

like Grumentum or Thibilis, or even altogether smaller settlements like Velleia

All of Pompeii’s principal

Given these strategies for

While retail outlets were mostly

(p.93) How to Complicate

Nevertheless, as much as we should aim to identify other factors in the

The underlining point is that these distribution outcomes, clustered or

distributions we risk imagining some kind of “master plan” behind the

Nevertheless, the underlining principles of moral zoning, founded as they are in

Shops and/in Houses from Humble to Haughty

Some cities boast significant

How much of a return, precisely, is a matter of conjecture; there is much about

(p.104) Though we might

Apart from asking how much

Swinging the Pendulum of Retail Investment: From an Avoidance of Trade,

“epigraphic habit” skews the inscriptional evidence toward an inflation of

We could readily catalogue, ad infinitum, the literary, epigraphic, even

Pompeii, megalopoloi nearing the size of Rome, or minor settlements like

The sharp social and economic

(p.121) The sum of this data

(2) Kostof 1992, 92.

(4) I.3.21–22; I.10.2–3; IX.11.2.

(5) Ellis 2004a and 2011a.

(8) Varr. ap. Non. Fr. 853 Lindsay.

(9) Nilson et al. 2008, 53–8; Poulson 1992, 56–7.

(10) Baratto 2003, 81.

(11) DeLaine 2005, 34–5.

(14) Lefebvre is considered something of a founding father of urban spatial

(15) For example De Simone 1988.

(18) Eschebach 1979.

(21) Hotelling 1929.

(24) Pirson 2007, 463.

(26) See note 34, Chapter 7, on sumptuary laws.

(29) Frank 1918, 229.

(30) Maiuri (especially) 1960; Rostovtzeff 1957; Finley 1973.

(32) Richardson 1988, 200.

(33) For financial profit as a dominating motivation see, especially, Wallace-

(35) Robinson 2005, 99.

(37) Finley 1973, 40–61.

(39) Wallace-Hadrill 1994, 140–1.

(40) Pirson 1999, 139; 2007, 469.

(41) Carandini and Papi 1999, plate 43.

(43) Boeswillwald et al. 1905, 325–6.

(44) Trümper 2005, 129.

(45) Trümper 2005, 122.

(46) Trümper 2005, 129.

(47) On the combination of houses and workshops as being the normal

(48) Translation from Purcell 1994, 664.

(53) For example, Ulp. Dig. 50.16.183.

(55) Jul. 38.2.

(57) Mart. 4.37.

(58) Hollander 2007, 112 provides a useful summary.

(59) On the man, van Buren 1947.

(60) See note 32, Chapter 2.

(61) Pirson 2007, 469.

(62) And how: Mart. 3.38.5; 12.32.3.

(63) Neudecker 2005; Morel 1987.