Chapter 12 — Industry, Continued

CHAPTER XII Industry, Continued

Inferences drawn solely from the larger industries must perforce lead to conclusions that are partially incorrect. It is fortunate, therefore, that the survival of the skeleton of Pompeii enables us to examine in some detail the economic structure of an ancient town and thus to round out our conceptions of industrial conditions.

Pompeii* was not in every respect a typical Roman city. A small seaport town, it doubtless served commerce rather than industry. Living in a region that was still half-Hellenic in Cicero’s day, its inhabitants had learned to look upon manual labor with a kindlier eye than did the old-fashioned nobility of Rome. But the difference should not be overemphasized. The dominant class in Pompeii’s politics and society consisted of the well-to-do landowners who had descended from Sulla’s Roman veterans, and these, of course, had brought Roman folkways with them. The difference in size caused no great dissimilarity in their economic regime: a city of twenty-five thousand souls was rather more significant in those days of evenly distributed production than it is now. If we could recover a few blocks of a typical street of Nero’s Rome, we should find difficulty in distinguishing its system of shops and booths from that of Pompeii. The picture of the city disclosed by the diligent Italian excavators may, with this word of caution, be used to illustrate Roman economics.*

* A portion of this chapter has appeared in Class. Phil. [OCR unclear: (1918,]

* The official reports of Pompeian excavations are not adequately published from the historian’s viewpoint. Very often objects of little artistic value are not reported, though they might prove of great use to the student of economic and social history.

At Pompeii, as was usual in ancient walled towns where space had to be carefully husbanded, shops lined all busy thoroughfares, while houses of residence subsided into the centers of the blocks. Since this system obtains throughout the city, we may examine a typical insula,* No. 2 of Regio VII, in order to trace some lines of connection between the industries and the social classes. The insula contains about forty shops and booths strung out mainly along the busier streets—Stabiana and Augustali—beside some ten residences crowded into the center, with hallways usually opening into one of the quieter streets.

* See map in C. I. L. IV, Suppl. II; Niccolini, Le case ed i monumenti, II, 42–5, and III; Fiorelli, Descrizione di Pompei, p. 184.

The first large house on Via Stabiana (No. 6) belonged to Paquius Proculus, a very popular baker who reached the high office of the duumvirate, apparently by an overwhelming majority,* and was proud enough of the fact to have his portrait—genial and sufficiently apologetic, if rather unintellectual—painted, apparently in a white toga, upon the wall of his tablinum.* With this house he combined the adjacent one, sacrificing the gardens of both for the mill and workrooms of his bakery. And yet, though the owner was willing to live within sound of his mills, he did not choose to display his wares directly in the five shops that lined the front of his home. These shops are all independent of the house.

* C. I. L. IV, 1122.

* Mau-Kelsey, Pompeii, p. 477.

To judge from an election notice* that appears nearby, Proculus owned a fairly large bread-and-cake shop on the opposite corner (Reg. IX, 3, 10), to which was also attached a bakery with five mills. Here there was perhaps less danger of flecking his judicial toga with the dust of his calling. Be that as it may, it is interesting to find that a duumvir jure dicundo was actively engaged in an expanding business of milling and baking. He may fairly represent the prosperous industrial class to which the petty aristocracy of Pompeii’s municipal officials largely belonged.

* C. I. L. IV, 3651.

No. 11 is a house of moderate size that was turned into a dyeing establishment in the early Empire, when the clothing industry became important in Pompeii. It is indeed characteristic of the conservative industrial tendencies of Pompeii that the proprietor did not build a place to suit his needs, but installed himself in a house built for domestic use, where, of course, the rooms were by no means adapted to his purposes. The proprietor, like Proculus the baker, apparently used part of the house as a dwelling place.

The next residence of note is No. 16. It is spacious, contains a handsome peristyle, and has supplied several noteworthy frescoes to the Naples Museum.* Its owner was M. Gavius Rufus, a man of some wealth who was once aedile and who, whether or not with success, offered himself as a candidate for the duumvirate. What his source of income was we do not know; his house is not physically connected with any shop or booth.

* Naples Mus. Cat. Nos. 1381, 1383, 1385.

Next door (No. 18) lived C. Vibius, probably he of the cognomen Severus, since the dozen election placards of Vibius Severus are all found in the immediate neighborhood. If so, he also entertained the ambition of becoming duumvir. He too turned the rear part of his house into a workshop, for the chambers beside the peristyle were used as storerooms, whence there was direct communication with the shop upon the back street.

N. Popidius Priscus dwelt in the next house (No. 20, Casa dei Marmi*), the largest and most handsomely decorated in the block and apparently long in the possession of the family, since the family name appears in Oscan on an old stone inscription in the peristyle.* Yet the source of this display is readily disclosed to anyone who will follow the three several doors that lead from the house to various shops in other parts of the block. Indeed, there was found in the house a bronze stamp such as bakers use to trademark their cakes, and this stamp bore the name of Popidius. The excavator was therefore not surprised to find a door leading from the atrium of this house into a prosperous bakery at the corner.

* Helbig, Wandgemälde, 475.

* There were magistrates of this family before Sulla took the city; Conway, Italic Dialects, 61.

Here were five mills of the usual type, made to be worked by horsepower; a cunningly contrived machine for kneading dough; a baker’s oven having a capacity of perhaps two thousand loaves per day; and a number of cake forms, but no display counters or doors inviting the purchaser. Popidius may have had his sales shop elsewhere, or he may have disposed of his wares at wholesale.

But this was not his only investment. In the rear of his house a door led to a spacious barroom (No. 47), with many wine jars and a hospitable double door upon the street. Finally, another rear door led to a complex of rooms (No. 38) that appears to have constituted a workshop terminating in two salesrooms upon the street—but we do not know what was produced and sold here. Whatever the various sources of his income, the sum total was not small, judging from the magnificence of his house.

No. 35 is a house of moderate size that is characteristic of a very large class of houses at Pompeii, in that it connects directly with two workshops upon the street, Nos. 27 and 30. The former contains a fixed workbench and a small furnace in one of its two small rooms, but there is nothing in No. 30 to indicate the character of its products.

Such were the houses that hid within and fed upon the encircling row of petty shops bordering the four streets. They give us a picture—proved true to type by the study of other blocks—of a society somewhat less provincially aristocratic, a trifle more worldly-wise, than that which Rome’s staid literature deigns to notice. These men had their courtyards decorated with marble cupids and fauns, their dining-room walls frescoed with legends from Homer and Euripides. Their fellow townsmen elected them to the highest municipal positions* of trust and to expensive honors. Yet these leading citizens of Pompeii were, to some extent, her prosperous bakers, potters, and tanners, and they did not scorn to draw their livelihood from shops and booths, if only the accumulated profits summed up large enough.

* We know the houses of several other magistrates and candidates: Vedius Siricus, duovir in A.D. 60, lived at Reg. VII, 1, 47, well known for its mosaic of Salve Lucrum (see Overbeck-Mau, p. 320); L. Popidius Secundus, an Augustianus and duovir, lived in the beautiful “house of the citharist,” Reg. I, 4; M. Lucretius Fronto in Reg. V, 4, 11; Bruttius Balbus at Reg. IX, 2, 16; Cuspius Pansa, four times duovir, in the modest house at IX, 1, 20; Albucius Celsus in the “house of the silver wedding” (Mau-Kelsey, p. 301); and Trebius Valens in the charming house recently found at Reg. III, 2, 1 (Notizie, 1915, p. 416).

But the greater number of doors in this block lead merely to independent one-, two-, or three-room shops, and other small shops connected by a stairway with a balcony room or two. Here it was that the “other half,” or rather the other nine-tenths, lived, packed into the narrowest of quarters, with the typical workrooms and salesrooms upon the street. These are, in fact, the very essence of ancient industry, with its inordinate number of petty specialists.

Their purpose is often betrayed by two distinguishing marks: some remnant of a workbench, forge, or furnace, which proves the inhabitant an artisan; and a peculiar wide lintel with grooves, which shows that in the daytime the shop stood wide open to invite customers. The well-known picture of the cupids as goldsmiths* gives precisely the right conception of this kind of industrial life. Various little workmen are busy at the furnace, the anvil, and the workbench, but at the center one of them is engaged in making a sale.

* Mau-Kelsey, p. 334.

Except for the fact that Pompeii had a greater proportion of non-slave artisans than the metropolis, these combination workshop-salesrooms were typical of all normal Roman industry. It was from shops like these that the Roman usually got his shoes and his togas, his jewelry and his lamps, his furniture, the ornaments of his house, and his kitchen utensils.

The first impression, then, upon walking around any normal block at Pompeii is that of a busy hive with countless small cells where poor artisans make and sell their few specialties, but where the space within is occupied by prosperous men who in part direct and live upon the fruits of this petty industry. A larger survey of the whole city, however, will lead to a more complex definition of the city’s industrial life; and for such a survey it is of first importance to examine the articles of commerce discovered in the shops, and in particular the articles that bear inscriptions and trademarks.

The ordinary terracotta tableware* was certainly imported. A large part of it came from the well-known potteries of Arretium, while the firms of Puteoli* and Capua and the new potteries of Gaul supplied the rest. There is no evidence that Pompeian potteries made any “Arretine” ware. Indeed, even the simple mortaria* that are so numerous in Pompeii were generally imported. At least many of them bear the mark of famous Roman tilemakers, whereas none has a brand known from native ware.

* C. I. L. X, 8055–6; Atkinson in Jour. Rom. Studies, IV, 27.

* Bull. dell’ Instituto, 1875, p. 242; Pliny, N. H. III, 82, mentions the pottery of Puteoli that was made from clay found on the island of Ischia. Cumae and Sorrento also produced this ware (Martial, XIV, 102, and Statius, Silvae, IV, 9, 43). Cf. Dubois, Pouzzoles Antique, p. 121.

* C. I. L. X, 8056a.

On the other hand, all the very crude and bulky terracotta articles, such as tiles* and wine jars, were made nearby. In fact, the ware of L. Visellius, most popular at Herculaneum, is the only one that extends freely over several Campanian towns. It is noteworthy also that, while more than fifty producers supplied such ware, only two or three makers are represented by any considerable number of stamps. There was therefore no monopoly in these articles. It is very probable that, as at Rome, tilemaking was considered practically a branch of agriculture, and that any farmer who found that he had suitable clay was apt to burn tiles and jars for his own use and also, if convenient, for neighboring customers.

* C. I. L. X, 8048–53.

The splendid silver plate* that the rich Pompeian set upon his table was in large part the product of Campanian shops. The only piece of the Boscoreale trove that bears a maker’s signature is a mirror signed by a Roman citizen, presumably of freedman stock, M. Domitius Polygnos; all the marks of ownership are Latin; and two of the finest cups portray Augustus and Tiberius in scenes taken presumably from Roman triumphal arches.* If these excellent pieces could be made in Italy, the rest may well have been, though of course some of the patterns are obviously Alexandrian.

* For the Boscoreale treasure see Mon. Piot, V.

* Mrs. Strong, Roman Sculpture, p. 83; Pliny, N. H. XXXIV, 47.

Even Pompeian craftsmen may have produced work of this kind, for there were silversmiths* in the town. Perhaps we may go a step further and say that the production of such ware had passed to a large extent out of the hands of independent handicraftsmen and into the control of large producers. If in such shops the principle of division of labor had been introduced, so that each workman performed a set task instead of producing complete articles, we can explain why so few of these elaborate pieces are signed; why themes and designs from Egypt, Syria, and Rome occur side by side; why on certain pieces the engraving, the molded design, and the emblemata often fail to harmonize; and, finally, why Italian inscriptions mention specialists in silverwork who obviously were tied to some very circumscribed part of the work, as, for instance, the figurator, the flaturarius, the tritor, the inaurator, and the caelator.*

* A caelator is mentioned in Notizie, 1912, p. 69.

* Schreiber, Alexandrinische Toreutik, p. 132; Drexel, Bonn. Jahrh., 1909, p. 179.

Pliny indeed seems to refer to shops of large output when he complains that the fashion in silver plate changed, demanding nunc Furniana, nunc Clodiana, nunc Gratiana.* It is doubtful whether individual craftsmen could so have influenced the market.

* Pliny uses the phrase genus officinae in this passage (N. H. 33, 139); however, individual craftsmen would naturally accept the styles set by large producers. One such smith (VI, 9223) claimed preeminence in caelatura Clodiana.

What has been said in the preceding chapters regarding the iron and copper industries is in accord with conditions at Pompeii. The city was too near the iron and bronze factories of Puteoli and Capua to necessitate much native work in these articles. Instead of many small shops that combined production and selling, therefore, we find what seem to have been general “hardware shops” that had no forge or workbench.* In such places are found, despite centuries of looting, a few farm implements, locks and keys, kitchen utensils, pieces of harness, and even bronze trinkets and cheap objets d’art.

* Notizie degli Scavi, 1912, pp. 353, 355; 1913, p. 31.

Where and how the great abundance of very elaborate Pompeian furniture was manufactured we are, of course, not told, nor does any of it bear telltale factory signatures. Many of the simpler pieces were doubtless made in petty shops, but the excavators have not yet unearthed any shop so equipped as to be able to produce the better articles.

The beds, chairs, and table-couches certainly required skilled craftsmen of many arts for their production,* and the requisite raw materials could not have been assembled without the outlay of considerable capital. The legs of these pieces, generally of wood, required the turning lathe, usually skilled hand carving, and often the craft of the intarsia worker. The frames, if of wood, were frequently inlaid with figured bronze and silver, chiseled ivory, or at times with tortoiseshell or precious stones. The headrest and back were often veneered or inlaid, and the decorated metal braces usually took the forms of finely wrought horses’ heads, dolphins, satyrs, and the like—figurines that were sometimes molded, sometimes beaten out or carved by hand.

* See Ransom, Studies in Ancient Furniture.

Even if some of the metal ornaments could have been ordered from the foundries of Capua, this kind of furniture implies the existence of elaborate factories that employed many craftsmen skilled in all kinds of woodwork and metalwork. The combination of carved marble, fine woods, and wrought metals in tables, stands, and candelabra also points to factory production.

Perhaps the Roman inscription (CIL. VI, 9258) mentioning a guild of Neapolitan citron-wood workers may be taken as a clue to the location of the important industry near Pompeii. That intarsia furniture was imported to Rome in large quantities from some such center we may infer from the existence at Rome of a strong guild of negotiatores eborarii et citriarii, whose statutes we still have in fragmentary form (CIL. VI, 33885).

In wheat milling and breadmaking, as we have seen, wholesale proportions were reached, though in the nature of the case the trade could not well spread beyond the confines of a city, and “town economy” was a necessary result. Certain it is that very few Pompeian homes had ovens for the baking of bread, though it is possible, of course, that some of the large ovens of the city were for community use, as is frequently the case in Italian cities today. What so quickly centralized this trade in large shops, despite the abundance of house servants, we are not told, but presumably the scarcity of fuel and the failure to invent an adequate method of milling the wheat may explain it.

At Rome also, as we may infer from inscriptions* and from the elaborate frieze on the bakers’ tomb still visible at Porta Maggiore, wholesale bakers quickly captured the trade of the city. During the Empire, however, the government there took charge of the business when it decided to distribute loaves of bread to the poor instead of grain.

* C. I. L. VI, 22 and 1002. The large guild mentioned in VI, 1739, was under state control.

There must have been some wholesale trade in wine,* since the trademarks upon the amphorae bear witness to the importation of Coan, Cnidian, and Sicilian—not to speak of Falernian and Cumaean—brands. Perhaps Cornelius Hermeros was a wholesale wine merchant,* since his mark occurs upon several brands of imported as well as old domestic wines and other “bottled goods.”

* C. I. L. IV, 5510–6602.

* Wholesale dealers are mentioned on 5535 (the princeps libertinorum of C. I. L. IV, 117) and 5536. One jar (5894) bears the marks of the shipping office: in nave Cn. Senti Oniris Ti. Claudi Orp. vecta. Pompeian wine was also shipped to Rome, and the trademark mentioned by Pliny (“Trifolinum,” N. H. 14, 70) has been discovered (IV, 5518).

However, no large wine dealer’s storehouse has as yet been discovered in Pompeii, and among the thousand or more marks, repetitions of names are relatively so infrequent that it would be quite misleading to assume an organized system of middlemen wine dealers. Judging from the frequency with which estates* are named upon the jars, we should attribute the personal names and initials partly to owners of vineyards and partly to responsible vilici of wine-producing estates.* We may conclude, therefore, that wine was usually supplied to owners and private cellars directly from vineyards, just as the wine growers of the Alban Hills even now send their cartloads to Rome every morning.

* For example, in the house of the Vettii, these jars are marked, respectively, de Arriano, de Anniano, de Formiano.

* Cf. C. I. L. IV, 5778 (L. Arcellius Successus), and 6499.

At Rome the trade naturally assumed larger proportions, both because of the demand for great quantities of imported brands and because of the necessity of carrying large stocks on hand. What quantities had to be available at times may be realized when we read that on the occasion of triumphs it was not unusual to distribute several hundred thousand gallons of wine to the populace in one day.

Olive oil, like wine, was generally distributed at Pompeii in moderate quantities by the grower to the petty retailer, with little interposition of oil merchants. No storage chamber of large capacity has been found in the city, and the oil jars lying about the small shops usually bear the names of nearby plantations.

There is a hint in Cato* that oil production had once tended to fall into the hands of a special class, for he speaks of contractors who would buy the crop on the trees, harvest it, and manufacture the oil. Possibly the Italian farmers were at that time not yet thoroughly familiar with the approved processes of manufacture, or it may be that the product was not then readily marketed, since olive oil was still considered something of a luxury. However, when, by the invention of the screw press, a cheap and easily manipulated oil press could be installed on any plantation, the grower usually pressed and distributed the oil, and the situation that we find at Pompeii doubtless became normal.

* Cato, R. R. 144. He generally assumes, however, that the owner harvests the crop.

Rome, of course, presented peculiar conditions. Since wealthy epicures demanded the best products of South Italy, Spain, and Africa, there developed whole guilds of olearii negotiantes. In the Empire the demagogic princes began to interfere both with the trade and with the production of the vicinity by distributing largesses of oil to the populace, until finally they were compelled to assume complete control of the oil trade in the city. The mountain of broken jars behind the emporium, called Monte Testaccio—which the Italian army recently used as a station for anti-aircraft guns during the Great War—is largely composed of casks that brought these government requisitions from Spain and Africa.

Large-scale factory methods are well illustrated in the production, by the wealthy duumvir Umbricius Scaurus and his freedmen, of the famous fish sauces called garum* and liquamen. The constant discovery at Pompeii of jars bearing the familiar trademarks of this producer proves the magnitude of the business, and the prominence of his mark shows how nearly his firm secured a monopoly of the trade at home.

* C. I. L. IV, 5657 ff.

Here too is one of the few Pompeian products that reached a foreign market. Pliny knew the garum of Pompeii as one of the three best-known brands, and indeed a jar marked gar. Pompeian. has been found at Rome.* Despite the success of Scaurus, however, there were epicures in his native town who craved the best brand, the garum of the large joint-stock company of publicans in Spain.* A jar bearing this trademark was found in the house of M. Gavius Rufus.

* Scaurus, however, seems not to have brought the whole industry under one roof. There are several brands, e.g., G(ari) F(los) ex officina Scauri; ab Umbricia; ab Umbricio Abascanto; G. F. Scauri ex off. Agathopi.

* Pliny, N. H. XXXI, 94; Martial, XIII, 102. This firm was probably the corporation of publicans that bought the fishing concession on the Spanish coast, and then proceeded to pack and distribute the product of their fisheries. There are very few instances of such producing corporations on record.

We are far from well informed about the organization of the clothing trade in the Roman world, and it may be that Pompeii will someday provide the essential facts for solving the problem. The mountains between Pompeii and Amalfi must have furnished pasture* for thousands of sheep, and that the city became an important center in the clothing trade is shown by the inordinate number of elaborate fulleries that took possession of old-fashioned houses in several parts of the city.

* Seneca (Nat. Quaest. VI, 27) mentions the herds of sheep on these mountains.

In the Middle Ages, when the manufacturing of clothing first emerged from the stage of household production, it often happened that the wool grower, the weaver, or the fuller assumed the role of entrepreneur and organized the trade of a country district by purchasing the wool and directing it from spinner to weaver, and so on from house to house, until the finished article was ready for the market.

When presently an export trade developed, the drapers, or cloth merchants, further organized the trade and brought the goods together in a community hall, like Blackwell Hall in London, where individual purchasers might choose their goods and whence the agents of the drapers’ guild might go to offer the surplus on the foreign market for the common benefit of all the guild members. Large factories seldom arose until the invention of machinery required the collection of the various craftsmen at some common point where the requisite power could be had.*

* See Ashley, The Economic Organization of England, p. 90.

At Pompeii it is evident from the ubiquitous whorls and weights that spinning and weaving remained in the household; and the list of assignments scratched on a pillar of the house of Terentius Eudoxus* shows how the eleven slave maids of one house employed their spare time. Indeed, so long as the very simple processes of spinning and weaving could conveniently utilize the unoccupied energies of such housefolk, which would otherwise go to waste, it is clear that there would be neither a demand for high-power machinery nor the possibility of large-scale production in factories. This explains why guilds of spinners and weavers did not arise in ancient Italy.

* Insula VI, 13, 6; cf. C. I. L. IV, 1507.

With the subsequent processes of clothmaking, however, it was different. Homespun direct from the household loom was now no longer used even by people of moderate means. It had to be sent to the fuller, who put it through an elaborate treatment of cleansing and bleaching,* of stamping, carding, and shearing. Then the dyer, whose work might or might not be done in the fullery, finished the cloth into a delicate product of which the figures in Pompeian wall paintings give a faded impression.

* Pliny, N. H. XXXV, 198.

At Pompeii the fullery, with its expensive system of vats, its complex trade processes, and its group of skilled workmen, may fairly be called a factory; but it is at once characteristic of the ancient conservative methods that no fullery outgrew the relatively narrow confines of the ordinary dwelling house.

And yet at Pompeii the fullers seem to have taken an unusual step toward the organization of the whole trade. In the early Empire, Eumachia, a generous priestess, built an extensive hall near the forum for the use of the fullers.* This building is certainly not a fullery, and it can hardly be anything but a hall for sales booths, like Blackwell Hall in London.

* Mau-Kelsey, p. 110.

In other words, it is very likely that, as often happened in England, the fullers, who were the last to handle the cloth in the process of manufacture, bought the stuffs outright, finished them, and became the distributors as well. So far we may safely go, but we do not yet know whether the fullers ever attempted to organize the whole trade by purchasing the raw wool and contracting for the spinning and weaving of it. Nor do we know whether, like the drapers’ guilds of England, they ever attempted to market their goods abroad through corporate agents.

In this trade again Pompeii seems to represent the normal practice in the Roman world. Roman authors generally assume that maidservants of the households occupied their spare moments with spinning and weaving;* there is no evidence of clothing factories in Italy;* we have no mention of guilds of weavers or spinners in our inscriptions, while the fullers’ guilds were among the most important ones. Indeed, several cities besides Pompeii possessed special buildings for them,* while Rome granted them certain exemptions from the public water rents.*

* Friedländer, Sittengeschichte, I, 462; Varro, Men. Sat. 190; Colum. 12, praef. 5–6. Cato’s farm was equipped for weaving, but Cato preferred to buy the clothing from the city (R. R. 10, 5; 14, 135); perhaps this particular farm had no sheep. Gummerus, Klio, Beiheft V, has generalized too boldly from this instance. Atticus, who owned large sheep ranges in Epirus (Varro, R. R. II, 10, 11), apparently had the wool woven on his estate, Cic. Ad Att. XI, 2, 4. In Sicily Verres found that good stuffs were produced in many wealthy households; he accordingly requested them to produce tapestries for him, Cic. Verr. IV, 58.

* An exception may be found in the wholesale remaking of cast-off clothing by restionarii. Perhaps several of the workmen mentioned in Roman inscriptions (C. I. L. VI, 7861, 3, 4, etc.) labored in such a factory, since they are all freedmen of a certain Octavius. A few weavers’ guilds were found in the East and in Gaul. Waltzing, Corpor. II, 153; IV, 95.

* C. I. L. X, 5682; XIII, 3200; IX, 2236.

* C. I. L. VI, 266; 10298. The fullers were, of course, also the laundrymen of ancient times.

To be sure, we may not assume that the well-to-do at Rome and other large cities continued to wear “homespun” to any considerable extent. But much good cloth could doubtless be selected by the fullers from the products of household looms and, when skillfully fulled, carded, and dyed, be marketed as wholly satisfactory cloth. For the fastidious there were always the imported* stuffs from the Egyptian state factories, the handworked fabrics of Anatolia, the choice purples of Syria, and the “Coan Silks” of the Greek islands. For the manufacture of garments there was no need of an extensive industry, since most garments were simple pieces of cloth that came from the loom in almost the form in which they were to be worn.

* See Chapot, Textrinum, in Daremberg-Saglio.

The shoe trade at Pompeii, as everywhere, was in the hands of individual shoemakers, who were generally considered men of very humble station. There was apparently a guild of them in the town, and several of their shops may be identified. The shop of Insula IV, 3, is typical, where the cobbler eked out his small profits by serving as porter for his former officer in the army.

At Rome the sutores seem to have drifted down to the “shoemakers’ alley” in the Subura in great numbers, and their row of shops may be restored in imagination by anyone who has tried to buy a pair of shoes from the street racks in the cobblers’ quarters of Athens or Constantinople. A guild* of those who specialized in women’s footwear at Rome claimed some three hundred members, sufficient proof of the minute distribution of the trade.

* The Collegium fabrum soliarium baxiarium centuriarum III (C. I. L. VI, 9404). Wholesale trade in leather is attested by the third-century inscription, VI, 1117.

By contrast, the tanner who supplied the leather to the shoemaker was a far more important personage. Tanning could not profitably be done on a small scale, since the space and the apparatus needed for the curing of a few hides could quite as well serve for curing large amounts, and some ready capital was needed to tide over the time required in the curing. It may well be that the large tannery* found in Regio I, 5, of Pompeii was able to provide all the leather needed by the shoe- and harnessmakers of the town. Here is an instance where economic considerations inherent in the nature of the industry quickly made for large-scale production.

* Mau-Kelsey, p. 395.

As for agriculture, we have long known from the famous treatises of Cato and Varro that farming had to a wide extent become a capitalistic enterprise by the middle of the second century B.C. We are now able to restore the picture of a typical plantation from the remains of a farmstead at Boscoreale,* two miles beyond Pompeii. That the owner was a practical farmer is clearly apparent from the abundance of farm implements, wine vats, and the like. That, however, he was a man of urban breeding and social connections, with wealth enough to gratify very fastidious tastes, is proved by the fact that his silver plate is now reckoned one of the special treasures of the Louvre.*

* Monumenti Antichi, VII. For other villas near Pompeii see Barnabei, La Villa di P. Fannio Sinistore, 1901, and Notizie, 1908, p. 495; 1898, pp. 15, 397, 392; 1910, p. 139.

* Mon. Piot, V.

Whatever other plantation owners may have done, this landlord, from the point of view both of production and of consumption, was part and parcel of the world’s commerce and industry. So-called domestic economy has no place in his system of householding. He produced a few specialties for the market with a view to profit, caring little whether or not he succeeded in satisfying the needs of his household from his own estate.

The main part of his farm was devoted to vine culture, as two strong presses and a storeroom of jars with a capacity of nearly twelve thousand gallons testify. That there was also provision for some olive growing is shown by a mill, a press, and jars of a few hundred gallons’ capacity. Little provision was made for stock raising, and there was apparently small need for hay.

A survey of the implement room is instructive. The abundance of hoes and picks and pruning hooks, as well as the absence of scythes and hammers and shears, indicates the narrow limits within which the work of the farm was confined. A small mill and oven show that there was grain enough for home use, but nothing has been found to bear out the orthodox assumption that a house of this sort should have a staff of slave women spinning and weaving. Since the soil near Vesuvius was too rich to be given over to pasture, the farm probably produced no wool, and the clothes were probably bought.

Moreover, the supposition that large plantations were independent of the market in the matter of labor and implements seems to break down here. It is hardly necessary to mention that the house was built by skilled masons, as the fashionable type of reticulate masonry indicates; frescoed by an expert painter from the city; decorated with terracotta ornaments; and fitted up with standard bathtubs and an elaborate hot-water system that must have required the services of Pompeii’s highest-priced plumbers. These things are in harmony with the silverware, the artistic bronzes, and the modish furniture.

But even the implements of the storeroom are of the standard forms made by skilled artisans, the pottery bears the factory stamp, and the bricks bear trademarks known from Pompeii. In fact, the landlord had proceeded far beyond the earlier practices of agriculture, according to which the householder adapts his system of livelihood to the production of his farm. This man’s connections with his land were quite incidental. To him the land was a factory for the production of a special article from the profits of which he could make a living. And he lived upon his farm, when he did, only because he chose to be near his business or because he liked the air, not because it gave him his bread and cheese and homespun.

Such was the economic structure of the city, and this determined the social system. In the first place, agriculture must have been the most respectable occupation at Pompeii, as at Rome, and there can be little doubt that it was a portion of the land—the vineyards of the Vesuvian slopes and the rich vegetable gardens below—rather than the shops of Pompeii that Sulla distributed among the veterans in 80 B.C.

During the early years, when the city government was controlled by the colonists, these must have held all the higher offices. To that class must have belonged the Holconii, the Quinctii, and the numerous other magistrates whose liberality evoked inscriptional records. Yet, as we have seen, the profits of industry were frankly acknowledged, as witness the Salve lucrum of Vedius Siricus, the ubiquitous trademark of the fish packer, the tile stamps of Saginius and Eumachius, and the mills of Proculus, for all these men were elected to the magistracies.

If Caecilius Jucundus, the banker-auctioneer, who lived as luxuriously as any of these, failed to reach the duumvirate, lack of respectability could hardly have been the reason. He probably fell under the provisions of the lex Julia municipalis, which disqualified the praeco* for municipal office, apparently in order to keep the “contractor out of politics.”

* The business accounts of Jucundus (C. I. L. IV, Suppl. I) show that he not only took municipal contracts but also acted as agent in placing such contracts and in farming public revenues.

Of course, much of the profitable business must have been carried on by trusted freedmen, as Cicero’s letters prove that it was at Rome, but at Pompeii, where many of the natives were Greeks and still bore Greek cognomina, it is not an easy matter to recognize liberti by means of the nomenclature. At any rate, on the streets of tombs the most elaborate monuments are as likely as not to boast the honors of a sevirate, thus betraying the rank of a freedman.

Slaves, of course, shared in the industrial life of the city, and not only manual but also administrative work was entrusted to them. Very often the signacula, the seals and stamps used to brand goods and legalize documents, bear the name of a responsible slave as well as that of his master. The loaves of bread now in the Naples Museum, for instance, are marked Celeris Q. Grani Veri ser. (CIL. X, 8058, 18).

If we may judge from election notices, however, Pompeii seems to have had a comparatively large free population. The guild members who explicitly support candidates are not only the prosperous fullers, millers, and bakers; they are owners of small shops, like the aurifex and the veterarius; the petty merchants of stalls and booths, like the pomarii and the unguentarii; and also the workmen’s groups of dyers (offectores and infectores), porters (saccarii), harvest hands (vindemitores), and woodworkers (lignarii).

To be sure, such election posters do not permit the inference that every supporter is a citizen, but there would be little point to these announcements if the labor guilds consisted largely of slaves.*

* Della Corte, Case ed abitanti a Pompei, Neapolis, II, 152. The usual inference that the guilds were “in politics” is by no means justified. The “election notices” were posted as advertisements by the candidates. In every case where it was possible, the candidate tried to make the advertisements effective by announcing the support of those who occupied the house or shop on which the advertisement was painted. Such a notice, however, does not necessarily imply a greater enthusiasm for the subject of the advertisement than does a modern placard at the grocer’s lauding the merits of some breakfast food.

That there was a large free population of poor workmen may also be inferred from the inordinately great number of petty barrooms and lunch counters. The scores of these places in existence could only have been supported by poor but free folk who were in a position to spend a few sous daily for tidbits.

Some of these laborers were independent craftsmen who managed their own small business in front of their two- or three-room houses. Such places are very numerous at Pompeii. Others were clients of the well-to-do, like the soldier-cobbler at IV, 3, who, while making shoes, served as concierge to his former centurion. A very large number were ex-slaves whom, after manumission, their former masters set up in some shop, usually on a percentage basis. Such freedmen probably occupied the shops and booths connected with several of the larger houses in the block surveyed above.

We have now reviewed the methods of Roman industry and attempted to observe their application in one city. It is obviously the part of wisdom not to compete with economists who have attempted to describe this intricate situation in one all-inclusive formula. However, bearing in mind that ever-changing forces were constantly producing new conditions and that the data are nowhere adequate to justify final conclusions, we may be permitted to attempt a classification of the factors that now encouraged, now circumscribed, the growth of Roman industries.

The simple economy of the primitive household may have existed in the mountains of Italy in Cicero’s day, but few traces of it can be found. The Roman farmstead was often meant to be “self-sufficient,” to provide for all its needs and to possess slaves who could perform the technical as well as the ordinary work. When, however, this was the case, the self-sufficiency was not a mark of primitive conditions—as in our own frontier life—but rather of an elaborate capitalistic economy in which the fastidious landlord could afford to satisfy his every whim.

In the cities we find an industrial system that in many respects resembles that of early nineteenth-century New England, where the native artisans of inland towns not yet connected by steam power produced most of the articles needed by each town. However, many of the Roman cities were now growing large, and the number of wealthy men who demanded and could pay for luxuries and delicacies far exceeded that of our early Republic. To gratify these, an extensive commerce had long existed, and in some lines of production industries aiming at a wide market had already arisen.

The forces that worked in favor of large-scale and monopolistic production differed but little from those of a similar tendency today. The possession of a new device for glassblowing seems to explain the success of the Sidonian glassmakers, who apparently erected a factory on the Latin coast. The accumulation of skilled workmen and artistic designers at places providing a desirable clay enabled the Arretine potters to capture the trade of half the world. Similarly, the possession of good recipes gained a wide market for certain food specialties, like fish delicacies and prepared brands of wine.

The production of silver- and bronzeware tended to concentrate, partly because a combination of many highly trained molders, designers, and engravers was required, and partly because the expensive raw product demanded capital. The same is true of many kinds of furniture that required skill in working expensive woods, metals, and marble.

The extension of the fulleries and tanneries illustrates how mass production was encouraged when chemical preparations and apparatus not easily procured by the public were required. In wholesale breadmaking the centripetal forces were the desire to save labor and space, the increasing cost of fuel, and the difficulty of procuring flour in the home.

To some extent certain towns specialized in ironware. Here doubtless the problem of fuel reckoned in the account, and it may also be assumed that the irregularity of the demand for arms and armor, and the seasonal suspense of the trade in farm implements, discouraged the individuals who had not the capital to wait for the market; ordinary cutlery, which found a steadier sale, was doubtless produced to a considerable extent in small shops.

Finally, the behavior of the brick monopoly at Rome illustrates the chance aid that an industry might receive from such an accident as the great fire, which threw enormous contracts in the way of a few men who had the facilities for production ready when needed.

A genuine factory system did not, of course, fully develop in all of these lines, but division of labor and the employment of some labor-saving machinery and technical processes were present in the production of silver- and bronzeware, pottery, glassware, furniture, bricks, and some table delicacies; while in most of these instances there is evident a capitalistic production having a worldwide trade in view.

Certain centrifugal forces, on the other hand, were still very strong. With the slow transportation of that day, perishable goods could hardly pass from town to town. With the concomitant cost of transportation, heavy articles of low value, like cheap earthenware, could not advantageously be shipped. Lack of patent laws must also have retarded concentration, since new processes quickly became the property of any rival.

The heaviest drag upon industry, however, must have been the all-dominating slave system. The abundance of slaves enabled fastidious householders to have everything possible done in their own houses in accordance with their personal tastes. Among the slaves of Statilius Taurus, the magnificent friend of the Emperor, we find trained slaves engaged not only in performing extravagant personal services but in making articles that the industries of Rome might well have supplied: smiths, fullers, tailors, spinners, weavers, shoemakers, masons, cabinetmakers, carpenters, workers in marble, and others.* This was hardly a condition calculated to help the marketing of factory-made goods.

* C. I. L. VI, 6213–6442.

Moreover, a plentiful supply of cheap labor discouraged a demand for new labor-saving devices that might have created new products for a potential market and might also have tended to the accumulation of expensive tools and trade secrets, to the benefit of industrial concentration. For instance, the invention of a valve in the bellows used in iron furnaces to create a continuous blast—an improvement that any intelligent and interested workman might have conceived—would have revolutionized the iron industry by making smelting and casting possible on a large scale. But the slaves who performed the work were not expected to bring quick interest to their tasks.

Finally, the general disrespect for industry—due partly, of course, to a conservative devotion to land found in all aristocratic societies, but indelibly fixed by the association of industry with slavery—turned aside the capital and the intelligence of strong Romans that might otherwise have flowed into industrial development. It now seems a fair conclusion that Roman industry had reached as high a degree of advancement in Cicero’s day as it was likely to do so long as slavery persisted.

CHAPTER XII Industry, Continued

Conclusions based solely on the larger industries must inevitably be partly incorrect. Fortunately, the surviving skeleton of Pompeii allows us to examine the economic structure of an ancient town in some detail and thus complete our understanding of industrial conditions.

Pompeii* was not in every respect a typical Roman city. As a small seaport town, it undoubtedly served commerce more than industry. Because its people lived in a region that was still half-Hellenic in Cicero’s day, they had learned to regard manual labor more favorably than the old-fashioned Roman nobility did. But this difference should not be exaggerated. The dominant class in Pompeii’s politics and society consisted of the well-to-do landowners descended from Sulla’s Roman veterans, and they had, of course, brought Roman customs with them. The difference in size did not create any great difference in economic organization: a city of twenty-five thousand people was more significant in an age of evenly distributed production than it is now. If we could recover a few blocks of a typical street in Nero’s Rome, we would have difficulty distinguishing its system of shops and booths from Pompeii’s. With this warning, the picture of the city revealed by diligent Italian excavators may be used to illustrate Roman economics.*

* A portion of this chapter appeared in Class. Phil. (1918, [OCR unclear: citation incomplete in source].

* From the historian’s point of view, the official reports of the Pompeian excavations have not been adequately published. Objects of little artistic value are very often omitted from the reports, though they might be extremely useful to students of economic and social history.

At Pompeii, as was usual in ancient walled towns where space had to be carefully conserved, shops lined every busy thoroughfare, while residences withdrew into the centers of the blocks. Because this arrangement occurs throughout the city, we may examine a typical insula,¹ No. 2 of Regio VII, to trace some connections between industry and social class. The insula contains about forty shops and booths, mainly strung along the busier streets—Stabiana and Augustali—together with about ten residences crowded into the center, their hallways usually opening onto one of the quieter streets.

The first large house on Via Stabiana, No. 6, belonged to Paquius Proculus, a very popular baker who attained the high office of duumvir, apparently by an overwhelming majority,² and was proud enough to have his portrait painted on the wall of his tablinum.³ In it, he appears genial and suitably apologetic, though rather unintellectual, and apparently wears a white toga. He joined the neighboring house to his own, sacrificing the gardens of both to create the mill and workrooms of his bakery. Yet although the owner was willing to live within hearing of his mills, he did not choose to display his goods directly in the five shops lining the front of his home. All these shops were independent of the house.

Judging from an election notice⁴ found nearby, Proculus owned a fairly large bread-and-cake shop on the opposite corner, Regio IX, 3, 10, to which a bakery containing five mills was also attached. Perhaps there was less danger there of covering his judicial toga with the dust of his trade. In any case, it is interesting to find a duumvir jure dicundo actively engaged in an expanding milling and baking business. He may fairly represent the prosperous industrial class to which much of Pompeii’s minor aristocracy of municipal officials belonged.

¹ See the map in C. I. L. IV, Suppl. II; Niccolini, Le case ed i monumenti, II, 42–5, and III; Fiorelli, Descrizione di Pompei, p. 164.

² C. I. L. IV, 1122.

³ Mau-Kelsey, Pompeii, p. 477.

⁴ C. I. L. IV, 3651.

No. 11 is a moderately sized house that was converted into a dyeing establishment during the early Empire, when the clothing industry became important in Pompeii. It is characteristic of Pompeii’s conservative industrial habits that the proprietor did not construct a building suited to his needs. Instead, he installed himself in a house built for domestic use, whose rooms were naturally poorly adapted to his purposes. Like Proculus the baker, the proprietor apparently used part of the building as his home.

The next notable residence is No. 16. It is spacious, contains an attractive peristyle, and supplied several noteworthy frescoes to the Naples Museum.⁵ Its owner was M. Gavius Rufus, a man of some wealth who had once been an aedile and who stood as a candidate for the duumvirate, though we do not know whether he succeeded. We also do not know the source of his income; his house is not physically connected with any shop or booth.

⁵ Naples Mus. Cat. Nos. 1381, 1383, 1385.

Next door, at No. 18, lived C. Vibius, probably the man whose cognomen was Severus, since all twelve election placards for Vibius Severus were found in the immediate neighborhood. If so, he too hoped to become duumvir. He also converted the back part of his house into a workshop. The rooms beside the peristyle were used as storerooms, with direct access to the shop on the back street.

N. Popidius Priscus lived in the next house, No. 20, the Casa dei Marmi,⁶ which was the largest and most handsomely decorated house in the block. It had apparently remained in the family’s possession for a long time, since the family name appears in Oscan on an old stone inscription in the peristyle.⁷ Yet the source of this display becomes readily apparent to anyone who follows the three separate doors leading from the house into various shops elsewhere in the block.

A bronze stamp of the kind bakers used to brand their cakes was found in the house, and it bore the name of Popidius. The excavator was therefore not surprised to find a door leading from the house’s atrium into a prosperous bakery on the corner. It contained five mills of the usual type, designed to be driven by horses; an ingeniously constructed machine for kneading dough; a baker’s oven capable of producing perhaps two thousand loaves a day; and several cake molds. But it had no display counters or doors inviting customers inside. Popidius may have had a retail shop elsewhere, or he may have sold his goods wholesale.

This was not his only investment. At the back of his house, one door led into a spacious barroom, No. 47, containing many wine jars and opening onto the street through a welcoming double door. Finally, another rear door led to a complex of rooms, No. 38, that appears to have formed a workshop ending in two street-facing salesrooms—though we do not know what was produced and sold there. Whatever the various sources of his income were, their total cannot have been small, judging from the magnificence of his house.

⁶ Helbig, Wandgemälde, 475.

⁷ Members of this family held magistracies before Sulla captured the city; Conway, Italic Dialects, 61.

No. 35 is a moderately sized house characteristic of a very large class of Pompeian houses because it connects directly with two street-front workshops, Nos. 27 and 30. No. 27 contains a fixed workbench and a small furnace in one of its two small rooms, but nothing in No. 30 reveals what it produced.

These were the houses concealed within—and supported by—the surrounding row of small shops bordering the four streets. A study of other blocks confirms that they give us a typical picture of a society somewhat less provincially aristocratic, and slightly more worldly, than Rome’s sober literature cares to acknowledge. These men decorated their courtyards with marble cupids and fauns and covered their dining-room walls with frescoes illustrating legends from Homer and Euripides. Their fellow townspeople elected them to the highest municipal positions of trust and to costly honors. Yet these leading citizens of Pompeii were, to some extent, its prosperous bakers, potters, and tanners, and they did not despise earning their living from shops and booths, provided that the accumulated profits were large enough.⁸

⁸ We know the houses of several other magistrates and candidates. Vedius Siricus, duumvir in A.D. 60, lived at Regio VII, 1, 47, a house well known for its Salve Lucru mosaic; see Overbeck-Mau, p. 320. L. Popidius Secundus, an Augustanus and duumvir, lived in the beautiful “House of the Citharist,” Regio I, 4; M. Lucretius Fronto lived at Regio V, 4, 11; Bruttius Balbus at Regio IX, 2, 16; Crispinus Pansa, four times duumvir, in the modest house at Regio IX, 1, 20; Albucius Celsus in the “House of the Silver Wedding,” Mau-Kelsey, p. 301; and Trebius Valens in the charming house recently found at Regio III, 2, 1, Notizie, 1915, p. 416.

Most of the doors in this block, however, lead only to independent shops of one, two, or three rooms, or to other small shops connected by stairways with one or two rooms on an upper balcony. Here the “other half”—or rather, the other nine-tenths—lived in the narrowest of quarters, with the typical combined workrooms and salesrooms facing the street. These shops were, in fact, the essence of ancient industry, with its extraordinarily large number of small-scale specialists.

Their purpose is often revealed by two distinctive features. Some remnant of a workbench, forge, or furnace shows that the occupant was an artisan, while a distinctive broad lintel with grooves shows that during the daytime the shop stood wide open to attract customers. The well-known picture of cupids working as goldsmiths⁹ gives exactly the right impression of this kind of industrial life. Several small workmen are busy at the furnace, anvil, and workbench, but at the center one of them is making a sale.

Except that Pompeii had a larger proportion of artisans who were not slaves than the metropolis did, these combined workshops and salesrooms were typical of ordinary Roman industry. From shops like these, Romans usually obtained their shoes and togas, jewelry and lamps, furniture, household ornaments, and kitchen utensils.

⁹ Mau-Kelsey, p. 334.

A first walk around any ordinary block in Pompeii therefore creates the impression of a busy hive containing countless small cells in which poor artisans made and sold their few specialties, while the space inside the block was occupied by prosperous men who partly directed this small-scale industry and lived on its profits.

A broader survey of the entire city, however, leads to a more complex definition of its industrial life. For such a survey, it is essential to examine the commercial goods discovered in the shops, particularly those bearing inscriptions and trademarks.

Ordinary terra-cotta tableware¹⁰ was certainly imported. Much of it came from the well-known potteries of Arretium, while firms in Puteoli¹¹ and Capua, along with the newer potteries of Gaul, supplied the rest. There is no evidence that Pompeian potteries made any “Arretine” ware. Even the simple mortaria,¹² which are extremely numerous in Pompeii, were generally imported. At least, many bear the marks of famous Roman tilemakers, while none carries a brand known from local ware.

¹⁰ C. I. L. X, 8055–6; Atkinson in Jour. Rom. Studies, IV, 27.

¹¹ Bull. dell’ Instituto, 1875, p. 242; Pliny, N. H. III, 82, mentions the pottery of Puteoli made from clay found on the island of Ischia. Cumae and Sorrento also produced this ware: Martial, XIV, 102, and Statius, Silvae, IV, 9, 43. Cf. Dubois, Pouzzoles Antique, p. 121.

¹² C. I. L. X, 8054.

On the other hand, all the very crude and bulky terra-cotta articles, such as tiles¹³ and wine jars, were made nearby. In fact, the ware of L. Visellius, most popular at Herculaneum, is the only kind widely distributed across several Campanian towns. It is also noteworthy that although more than fifty producers supplied such ware, only two or three makers are represented by any substantial number of stamps. There was therefore no monopoly in these goods.

It is very likely that, as at Rome, tilemaking was regarded almost as a branch of agriculture. Any farmer who discovered suitable clay on his property was likely to fire tiles and jars for his own use and, when convenient, for neighboring customers as well.

¹³ C. I. L. X, 8048–53.

The splendid silver plate¹⁴ that wealthy Pompeians placed on their tables was largely produced in Campanian workshops. The only piece in the Boscoreale treasure that bears a maker’s signature is a mirror signed by a Roman citizen, presumably descended from freedmen, named M. Domitius Polygnos. All the owners’ marks are Latin, and two of the finest cups depict Augustus and Tiberius in scenes presumably taken from Roman triumphal arches.¹⁵ If these excellent pieces could be made in Italy, the remainder may well have been made there too, though some of the designs are obviously Alexandrian.

Even Pompeian craftsmen may have produced work of this quality, since there were silversmiths in the town.¹⁶ Perhaps we may go one step further and say that the production of such ware had largely passed out of the hands of independent craftsmen and under the control of large producers. If division of labor had been introduced into such workshops, so that each worker performed a fixed task instead of producing complete objects, that would explain why so few elaborate pieces are signed; why themes and designs from Egypt, Syria, and Rome appear side by side; why the engraving, molded design, and emblemata on particular pieces often fail to harmonize; and, finally, why Italian inscriptions mention specialists in silverwork who were clearly confined to very narrow parts of the process, such as the figurator, flaturarius, tritor, inaurator, and caelator.¹⁷

Pliny indeed seems to refer to workshops producing on a large scale when he complains that fashions in silver plate changed, demanding nunc Furniana, nunc Clodiana, nunc Gratiana.¹⁸ It is doubtful whether individual craftsmen could have influenced the market so strongly.

¹⁴ For the Boscoreale treasure, see Mons. Piot, V.

¹⁵ Mrs. Strong, Roman Sculpture, p. 83; Pliny, N. H. XXXIV, 47.

¹⁶ A caelator is mentioned in Notizie, 1912, p. 69.

¹⁷ Schreiber, Alexandrinische Toreutik, p. 132; Drexel, Bonn. Jahrh., 1909, p. 179.

¹⁸ Pliny uses the phrase genus officinae in this passage, N. H. XXXIII, 139. Individual craftsmen, however, would naturally adopt the styles established by large producers. One such smith, C. I. L. VI, 9223, claimed superiority in caelatura Clodiana.

What has been said in the preceding chapters about the iron and copper industries agrees with conditions at Pompeii. The city was too close to the iron and bronze factories of Puteoli and Capua to require much local production of these articles. Instead of many small workshops combining production with retail sales, we therefore find what appear to have been general “hardware shops” without forges or workbenches.¹⁹ Despite centuries of looting, a few farm implements, locks and keys, kitchen utensils, harness pieces, bronze trinkets, and cheap objets d’art have been found in such places.

¹⁹ Notizie degli Scavi, 1912, pp. 353, 355; 1913, p. 31.

We are naturally not told where or how Pompeii’s great abundance of highly elaborate furniture was manufactured, nor does any of it bear revealing factory signatures. Many simpler pieces were undoubtedly made in small workshops, but excavators have not yet uncovered any shop equipped to produce the finer articles.

The beds, chairs, and dining couches certainly required the skills of craftsmen in many different trades,²⁰ and the necessary raw materials could not have been assembled without considerable capital. The legs of these pieces, generally wooden, required a turning lathe, usually skilled hand-carving, and often the craft of the intarsia worker. Wooden frames were frequently inlaid with figured bronze and silver, carved ivory, and sometimes tortoiseshell or precious stones. The headrests and backs were often veneered or inlaid, while decorated metal braces usually took the form of finely worked horses’ heads, dolphins, satyrs, and similar figures. These were sometimes molded, sometimes hammered out, and sometimes carved by hand.

Even if some of the metal ornaments could have been ordered from Capua’s foundries, furniture of this kind implies the existence of elaborate factories employing many craftsmen skilled in every kind of woodwork and metalwork. The combination of carved marble, fine woods, and worked metals in tables, stands, and candelabra also points to factory production.

Perhaps the Roman inscription C. I. L. VI, 9258, which mentions a guild of Neapolitan citron-wood workers, provides a clue to the location of this important industry near Pompeii. We may infer that intarsia furniture was imported into Rome in large quantities from some such center because Rome had a strong guild of negotiatores eborarii et citriarii, whose statutes survive in fragmentary form, C. I. L. VI, 33885.

²⁰ See Ransom, Studies in Ancient Furniture.

As we have seen, wheat milling and breadmaking reached wholesale proportions, though by its nature the trade could not easily spread beyond a city’s boundaries, making “town economy” the necessary result. Very few Pompeian homes had ovens for baking bread, though some of the city’s large ovens may, of course, have been intended for communal use, as is still often the case in Italian cities.

We are not told why this trade became concentrated so quickly in large shops despite the abundance of household servants. Presumably, however, the scarcity of fuel and failure to invent an adequate method of milling wheat help explain it.

At Rome, too, as we may infer from inscriptions²¹ and from the elaborate frieze on the bakers’ tomb still visible at Porta Maggiore, wholesale bakers quickly captured the city’s trade. During the Empire, however, the government took control of the business when it decided to distribute loaves of bread to the poor instead of grain.

²¹ C. I. L. VI, 22 and 1002. The large guild mentioned in C. I. L. VI, 1739, was under state control.

There must have been some wholesale trade in wine,²² because trademarks on amphorae show that Coan, Cnidian, and Sicilian brands were imported, not to mention Falernian and Cumaean wines. Perhaps Cornelius Hermeros was a wholesale wine merchant,²³ since his mark appears on several varieties of imported wine, as well as on aged domestic wines and other “bottled goods.”

However, no large wine merchant’s warehouse has yet been discovered in Pompeii. Among more than a thousand marks, names are repeated so infrequently that it would be seriously misleading to assume the existence of an organized system of middlemen dealing in wine. Judging from how frequently estates²⁴ are named on the jars, we should attribute the personal names and initials partly to vineyard owners and partly to the responsible vilici of wine-producing estates.²⁵

We may therefore conclude that wine was usually supplied directly from vineyards to owners and private cellars, just as winegrowers of the Alban Hills still sent their cartloads to Rome every morning. At Rome, the trade naturally operated on a larger scale, both because there was demand for large quantities of imported brands and because large reserves had to be kept in stock. We can appreciate the quantities that sometimes had to be available when we read that, during triumphs, it was not unusual to distribute several hundred thousand gallons of wine to the populace in a single day.

²² C. I. L. IV, 5510–6602.

²³ Wholesale dealers are mentioned in 5535—the princeps libertinorum of C. I. L. IV, 117—and 5566. One jar, 5894, bears the marks of the shipping office: in nave Cn. Senti Oniriti Claudi Orpi vecte. Pompeian wine was also shipped to Rome, and the trademark mentioned by Pliny, “Trifolinum,” N. H. XIV, 70, has been discovered: C. I. L. IV, 5518.

²⁴ For example, in the House of the Vettii, these jars are marked respectively de Arriano, de Anniano, and de Formiano.

²⁵ Cf. C. I. L. IV, 5778, L. Arcellius Successus, and 6499.

Like wine, olive oil at Pompeii was generally distributed in moderate quantities by growers to small retailers, with little intervention by oil merchants. No large-capacity storeroom has been found in the city, and the oil jars scattered through small shops usually bear the names of nearby plantations.

There is a suggestion in Cato²⁶ that oil production once tended to fall into the hands of a specialized class, for he speaks of contractors who bought crops while they were still on the trees, harvested them, and manufactured the oil. Italian farmers may at that time not yet have been thoroughly familiar with approved manufacturing methods. Alternatively, the product may not yet have been easy to market, since olive oil was still considered something of a luxury.

However, once the invention of the screw press made it possible to install a cheap and easily operated oil press on any plantation, growers generally pressed and distributed their own oil. The situation found at Pompeii then presumably became normal.

Rome, of course, presented unusual conditions. Because wealthy epicures demanded the finest products from southern Italy, Spain, and Africa, whole guilds of olearii negotiantes developed. During the Empire, demagogic emperors began to interfere both with the trade and with local production by distributing gifts of oil to the populace. Eventually, they were forced to assume complete control of the city’s oil trade.

The mountain of broken jars behind the emporium, called Monte Testaccio—which the Italian army recently used as a station for antiaircraft guns during the Great War—is composed largely of containers that brought these government requisitions from Spain and Africa.

²⁶ Cato, R. R. 144. Generally, however, he assumes that the owner harvests the crop.

Large-scale factory methods are well illustrated by the wealthy duumvir Umbricius Scaurus and his freedmen, who produced the famous fish sauces called garum²⁷ and liquamen. The continual discovery at Pompeii of jars bearing this producer’s familiar trademarks demonstrates the scale of the business, while the prominence of his mark shows how nearly his firm achieved a monopoly of the local trade.

This was also one of the few Pompeian products to reach a foreign market. Pliny knew Pompeian garum as one of the three best-known brands, and a jar marked gar. Pompeian. has actually been found at Rome.²⁸ Despite Scaurus’s success, however, some epicures in his native town desired the finest brand: the garum produced by a large joint-stock company of publicans in Spain.²⁹ A jar bearing this trademark was found in the house of M. Gavius Rufus.

²⁷ C. I. L. IV, 5657 ff.

²⁸ Scaurus, however, does not seem to have brought the entire industry under one roof. There are several brands, for example: G(ari) F(los) ex officina Scauri; ab Umbricia; ab Umbricio Abascanto; G. F. Scauri ex off. Agathopi.

²⁹ Pliny, N. H. XXXI, 94; Martial, XIII, 102. This firm was probably the corporation of publicans that bought the fishing concession on the Spanish coast and then packed and distributed the catch from its fisheries. Very few such producing corporations are recorded.

We are far from well informed about the organization of the clothing trade in the Roman world, and Pompeii may someday provide the essential facts needed to solve the problem. The mountains between Pompeii and Amalfi must have provided pasture³⁰ for thousands of sheep. The extraordinary number of elaborate fulleries that took over old-fashioned houses in several parts of the city shows that Pompeii became an important center of the clothing trade.

When clothing manufacture first moved beyond household production during the Middle Ages, the wool grower, weaver, or fuller often assumed the role of entrepreneur. Such a person organized the trade of a rural district by buying the wool and directing it from spinner to weaver, and then from house to house through the remaining stages, until the finished article was ready for market.

When an export trade later developed, drapers or cloth merchants organized the industry further. They brought goods together in a communal hall, such as Blackwell Hall in London, where individual buyers could select their merchandise. From there, agents of the drapers’ guild could offer the surplus on foreign markets for the common benefit of all guild members. Large factories rarely appeared until machinery made it necessary to gather the various craftspeople at a common location where the required power was available.³¹

³⁰ Seneca, Nat. Quaest. VI, 27, mentions the flocks of sheep on these mountains.

³¹ See Ashley, The Economic Organization of England, p. 90.

At Pompeii, the whorls and loom weights found everywhere make it clear that spinning and weaving remained household activities. A list of assignments scratched on a pillar in the house of Terentius Eudoxus³² shows how the eleven female slaves of one household used their spare time.

As long as the very simple processes of spinning and weaving could conveniently use the otherwise unoccupied labor of household members, there would clearly be neither a demand for powerful machinery nor an opportunity for large-scale factory production. This explains why guilds of spinners and weavers did not arise in ancient Italy.

³² Insula VI, 13, 6; cf. C. I. L. IV, 1507.

The later stages of clothmaking, however, were different. Even people of moderate means no longer wore homespun cloth directly from the household loom. It had to be sent to the fuller, who put it through an elaborate process of cleansing and bleaching,³³ stamping, carding, and shearing. Then the dyer—whose work might or might not be performed in the fullery—finished the cloth into a delicate product of which the figures in Pompeian wall paintings give only a faded impression.

At Pompeii, a fullery, with its expensive system of vats, complex technical processes, and group of skilled workers, may fairly be called a factory. Yet it is characteristic of conservative ancient methods that no fullery expanded beyond the relatively narrow limits of an ordinary dwelling house.

³³ Pliny, N. H. XXXV, 198.

Nevertheless, Pompeii’s fullers seem to have taken an unusual step toward organizing the entire trade. During the early Empire, Eumachia, a generous priestess, built a large hall near the forum for their use.³⁴ This building was certainly not itself a fullery, and it can scarcely have been anything other than a hall for sales booths, like Blackwell Hall in London.

In other words, it is very likely that, as often happened in England, the fullers, who were the last to handle the cloth during manufacture, bought the fabrics outright, finished them, and also became their distributors. We may safely go this far, but we do not yet know whether the fullers ever attempted to organize the entire trade by purchasing raw wool and contracting for its spinning and weaving. Nor do we know whether, like the drapers’ guilds of England, they ever tried to market their goods abroad through corporate agents.

³⁴ Mau-Kelsey, p. 110.

In this trade again, Pompeii seems to represent normal practice throughout the Roman world. Roman authors generally assume that female household servants spent their spare moments spinning and weaving.³⁵ There is no evidence of clothing factories in Italy.³⁶ Inscriptions do not mention guilds of weavers or spinners, while fullers’ guilds were among the most important. Several cities besides Pompeii had special buildings for them,³⁷ and Rome granted them certain exemptions from public water charges.³⁸

Admittedly, we should not assume that prosperous people in Rome and other large cities continued to wear “homespun” to any significant extent. But fullers could undoubtedly select much good cloth from the products of household looms and, after skillfully fulling, carding, and dyeing it, market it as entirely satisfactory material.

For the fastidious, there were always imported³⁹ fabrics from Egyptian state factories, hand-worked textiles from Anatolia, choice purple cloth from Syria, and the “Coan silks” of the Greek islands. Garment making did not require an extensive industry, since most garments were simple pieces of cloth that came from the loom in nearly the form in which they would be worn.

³⁵ Friedländer, Sittengeschichte, I, 462; Varro, Men. Sat. 190; Columella, XII, praef. 5–6. Cato’s farm was equipped for weaving, but Cato preferred to buy clothing from the city, R. R. X, 5; XIV, 135. Perhaps this particular farm had no sheep. Gummerus, Klio, Beiheft V, generalized too boldly from this example. Atticus, who owned large sheep ranges in Epirus, Varro, R. R. II, 10, 11, apparently had the wool woven on his estate, Cicero, Ad Att. XI, 2, 4. In Sicily, Verres discovered that good fabrics were produced in many wealthy households, so he required them to make tapestries for him, Cicero, Verr. IV, 58.

³⁶ An exception may be found in the wholesale remaking of discarded clothing by centonarii. Several of the workers mentioned in Roman inscriptions, C. I. L. VI, 7861, 3, 4, etc., may have worked in such a factory, since they were all freedmen of a certain Octavius. A few weavers’ guilds have been found in the East and in Gaul. Waltzing, Corpor. II, 153; IV, 95.

³⁷ C. I. L. X, 5682; XIII, 3200; IX, 2236.

³⁸ C. I. L. VI, 266; 10298. The fullers were, of course, also the laundry workers of ancient times.

³⁹ See Chapot, Textrinum, in Daremberg-Saglio.

At Pompeii, as elsewhere, the shoe trade was controlled by individual shoemakers, who were generally considered men of very low social standing. There was apparently a guild of shoemakers in the town, and several of their workshops can be identified.

The shop at Insula IV, 3, is typical. There, a cobbler supplemented his small profits by serving as doorkeeper for a man who had once been his officer in the army. At Rome, the sutores appear to have gathered in large numbers in the “shoemakers’ quarter” of the Subura. Anyone who has tried to buy shoes from the street racks in the cobblers’ quarters of Athens or Constantinople can imagine their row of workshops.

A Roman guild⁴⁰ of those specializing in women’s footwear claimed about three hundred members, sufficient proof of how minutely the trade was divided.

⁴⁰ The Collegium fabrum soliarium baxiarium centuriarum III, C. I. L. VI, 9404. Wholesale trade in leather is attested by the third-century inscription C. I. L. VI, 1117.

By contrast, the tanner who supplied leather to shoemakers was a much more important figure. Tanning could not profitably be performed on a small scale, since the space and equipment needed to cure a few hides could just as easily serve for large quantities. Some readily available capital was also needed to support the business during the time required for curing.

The large tannery⁴¹ found in Regio I, 5, of Pompeii may well have been capable of providing all the leather needed by the town’s shoemakers and harness makers. Here is an example of economic considerations inherent in an industry’s nature quickly producing large-scale operations.

⁴¹ Mau-Kelsey, p. 395.

As for agriculture, the famous treatises of Cato and Varro have long shown us that farming had, to a great extent, become a capitalist enterprise by the middle of the second century B.C. We can now reconstruct a typical plantation from the remains of a farmstead at Boscoreale,⁴² two miles beyond Pompeii.

The abundance of farm implements, wine vats, and similar equipment clearly shows that the owner was a practical farmer. But his silver plate—now regarded as one of the Louvre’s special treasures—proves that he was also a man of urban education and social connections, with enough wealth to satisfy highly refined tastes.⁴³

⁴² Monumenti Antichi, VII. For other villas near Pompeii, see Barnabei, La Villa di P. Fannio Sinistore, 1901, and Notizie, 1908, p. 495; 1898, pp. 15, 397, 392; 1910, p. 139.

⁴³ Mons. Piot, V.

Whatever other plantation owners may have done, this landlord was fully integrated into international commerce and industry, both as a producer and as a consumer. So-called domestic economy had no place in his household system. He produced a few specialized goods for the market in pursuit of profit and cared little whether his estate itself satisfied the needs of his household.

The main part of his farm was devoted to vineyards, as shown by two powerful presses and a storeroom of jars with a capacity of nearly twelve thousand gallons. A mill, a press, and jars capable of holding a few hundred gallons show that some provision was also made for growing olives. Little provision was made for raising livestock, and there was apparently little need for hay.

A survey of the implement room is instructive. The abundance of hoes, picks, and pruning hooks, together with the absence of scythes, hammers, and shears, shows the narrow limits within which the farm’s work was confined. A small mill and oven show that enough grain was produced for household use, but nothing has been found to support the traditional assumption that a house of this kind must have had a staff of female slaves spinning and weaving.

Because the soil near Vesuvius was too rich to devote to pasture, the farm probably produced no wool, and clothing was probably purchased. Moreover, the belief that large plantations were independent of the market for labor and implements seems to fail here.

It is hardly necessary to mention that skilled masons built the house, as its fashionable reticulate masonry shows. An expert painter from the city frescoed it; terra-cotta ornaments decorated it; and it was equipped with standard bathtubs and an elaborate hot-water system that must have required the services of Pompeii’s most expensive plumbers. These things were consistent with the silverware, artistic bronzes, and fashionable furniture.

Even the implements in the storeroom, however, followed standard forms made by skilled artisans. The pottery carried factory stamps, and the bricks bore trademarks known from Pompeii. In fact, the landlord had gone far beyond the earlier agricultural practices in which householders adapted their way of life to what their farms produced.

This man’s connection with his land was quite incidental. To him, the land was a factory producing a specialized commodity whose profits supported him. When he lived on his farm, he did so only because he chose to remain near his business or because he liked the air—not because it supplied his bread, cheese, and homespun clothing.

This was the city’s economic structure, and it determined its social system. Agriculture must have been the most respectable occupation in Pompeii, as it was in Rome. There can be little doubt that what Sulla distributed among his veterans in 80 B.C. was a share of the land—the vineyards on the slopes of Vesuvius and the rich vegetable gardens below—rather than the shops of Pompeii.

During the early years, when the colonists controlled the city government, they must have held all the higher offices. The Holconii, the Quinctii, and the many other magistrates whose generosity inspired commemorative inscriptions must have belonged to this class.

Yet, as we have seen, industrial profits were openly acknowledged. Evidence includes the Salve lucrum of Vedius Siricus, the fish packer’s ubiquitous trademark, the tile stamps of Saginius and Eumachius, and the mills of Proculus, for all these men were elected to magistracies.

If Caecilius Jucundus, the banker and auctioneer, lived as luxuriously as any of these men but failed to attain the duumvirate, lack of respectability can hardly have been the reason. He probably fell under the provisions of the lex Julia municipalis, which disqualified a praeco⁴⁴ from municipal office, apparently to keep the “contractor out of politics.”

⁴⁴ Jucundus’s business accounts, C. I. L. IV, Suppl. I, show that he not only accepted municipal contracts but also acted as an agent in assigning such contracts and farming public revenues.

Much profitable business must, of course, have been conducted by trusted freedmen, as Cicero’s letters prove happened at Rome. But because many Pompeian natives were Greeks and still bore Greek cognomina, it is difficult to identify liberti from their names. In any event, the most elaborate monuments lining the streets of tombs are as likely as not to boast of the honor of a sevirate, thereby revealing the dead person’s rank as a freedman.

Slaves naturally participated in the city’s industrial life, and both manual and administrative work was entrusted to them. Very often, the signacula—the seals and stamps used to brand goods and authenticate documents—bear the name of a responsible slave as well as that of the slave’s master. The loaves of bread now in the Naples Museum, for example, are marked Celeris Q. Grani Veri Ser., C. I. L. X, 8058, 18.

If election notices are reliable evidence, however, Pompeii seems to have had a comparatively large free population. The guild members who explicitly supported candidates included not only prosperous fullers, millers, and bakers. They also included owners of small workshops, such as the aurifex and veterarius; small-scale merchants operating stalls and booths, such as the pomarii and unguentarii; and workers’ groups such as dyers, infectores and offectores; porters, saccarii; harvest workers, vindemitores; and woodworkers, lignarii.

Admittedly, election posters do not allow us to infer that every supporter was a citizen. But such announcements would have had little purpose if the labor guilds consisted mostly of slaves.⁴⁵

⁴⁵ Della Corte, Case ed abitanti a Pompei, Neapolis, II, 152. The usual inference that guilds were “in politics” is by no means justified. The “election notices” were advertisements posted by the candidates. Whenever possible, a candidate tried to make an advertisement effective by announcing the support of the people occupying the house or shop on which it was painted. Such a notice does not necessarily imply any greater enthusiasm for the subject of the advertisement than a modern placard at a grocery store praising the merits of a breakfast food.

The presence of a large free population of poor workers may also be inferred from the extraordinarily large number of small bars and lunch counters. The dozens of such establishments could only have been supported by poor but free people who were able to spend a few sous each day on small delicacies.

Some of these workers were independent craftspeople who managed their own small businesses in front of their two- or three-room homes. Such places are very numerous at Pompeii. Others were clients of the prosperous, like the soldier-cobbler at IV, 3, who made shoes while serving as concierge for his former centurion.

A very large number were former slaves whom their previous masters established in shops after manumission, usually under an arrangement for sharing the profits. Such freedmen probably occupied the shops and booths connected with several of the larger houses in the block surveyed above.

We have now reviewed the methods of Roman industry and attempted to observe their application in one city. It is clearly wiser not to compete with economists who have tried to describe this complicated situation with a single all-inclusive formula. Yet, remembering that continually changing forces were always producing new conditions, and that the evidence is nowhere adequate to justify final conclusions, we may attempt to classify the factors that alternately encouraged and restricted the growth of Roman industry.

The simple economy of the primitive household may have existed in the Italian mountains during Cicero’s day, but few traces of it can be found. The Roman farmstead was often intended to be “self-sufficient,” providing for all its own needs and possessing slaves capable of performing technical as well as ordinary work.

When this was the case, however, its self-sufficiency was not a sign of primitive conditions, as it was in our own frontier life. Instead, it was the product of an elaborate capitalist economy in which a fastidious landlord could afford to satisfy his every whim.

In the cities, we find an industrial system that in many respects resembles that of early nineteenth-century New England, where native artisans in inland towns not yet connected by steam transportation produced most of the goods each town required.

Many Roman cities, however, were already growing large, and the number of wealthy people who demanded luxuries and delicacies—and could afford them—far exceeded the comparable number in our early Republic. An extensive commerce had long existed to satisfy these people, and in some fields, industries aimed at broad markets had already arisen.

The forces favoring large-scale and monopolistic production differed little from similar forces today. Possession of a new glassblowing technique seems to explain the success of Sidonian glassmakers, who apparently established a factory on the Latin coast. The concentration of skilled workers and artistic designers in places possessing desirable clay enabled the Arretine potters to capture half the world’s trade. Similarly, possession of good recipes won broad markets for certain food specialties, such as fish delicacies and prepared varieties of wine.

The production of silverware and bronzeware tended to become concentrated partly because it required a combination of many highly trained molders, designers, and engravers, and partly because the expensive raw material demanded capital. The same was true of many kinds of furniture requiring skill in working costly woods, metals, and marble.

The growth of fulleries and tanneries illustrates how mass production was encouraged when production required chemical preparations and equipment not easily obtained by the public. In wholesale breadmaking, the forces promoting concentration were the desire to save labor and space, the rising cost of fuel, and the difficulty of obtaining flour in the home.

Certain towns specialized to some extent in ironware. The fuel problem undoubtedly mattered here. We may also assume that the irregular demand for weapons and armor, together with seasonal interruptions in the trade in farm implements, discouraged individuals who lacked enough capital to wait for the market. Ordinary cutlery, which enjoyed steadier sales, was probably produced to a considerable extent in small workshops.

Finally, the development of Rome’s brick monopoly illustrates the assistance an industry might accidentally receive from an event such as the great fire, which placed enormous contracts in the hands of a few men whose production facilities were ready when needed.

A true factory system did not, of course, develop fully in all these industries. But the division of labor, along with some labor-saving machinery and technical processes, was present in the production of silverware, bronzeware, pottery, glassware, furniture, bricks, and certain table delicacies. In most of these cases, capitalist production aimed at a worldwide market is evident.

On the other hand, certain forces promoting decentralization remained very strong. Given the slow transportation of the period, perishable goods could scarcely be shipped from one town to another. Because transportation was expensive, heavy goods of low value, such as cheap earthenware, could not profitably be shipped.

The absence of patent laws must also have hindered concentration, because new processes quickly became available to any competitor. The greatest obstacle to industry, however, must have been the all-dominating slave system.

The abundance of slaves allowed fastidious householders to have everything possible done in their own homes according to their personal preferences. Among the slaves of Statilius Taurus, the Emperor’s magnificent friend, we find trained workers who not only provided extravagant personal services but also made goods that Rome’s industries could easily have supplied: smiths, fullers, tailors, spinners, weavers, shoemakers, masons, cabinetmakers, carpenters, marble workers, and others. This situation was hardly calculated to help factory-made goods find a market.

Moreover, the plentiful supply of cheap labor discouraged demand for new labor-saving devices. Such devices might have created new products for a potential market and might also have encouraged the concentration of expensive tools and trade secrets, thereby promoting industrial consolidation.

For example, the invention of a valve in the bellows used in iron furnaces, creating a continuous blast—an improvement that any intelligent and interested worker might have conceived—would have revolutionized the iron industry by making large-scale smelting and casting possible. But the slaves who performed the work were not expected to take an active intellectual interest in their tasks.

Finally, the general contempt for industry redirected the capital and intelligence of capable Romans that might otherwise have flowed into industrial development. This contempt arose partly from the conservative attachment to land found in every aristocratic society, but it was permanently reinforced by industry’s association with slavery.

It now seems fair to conclude that Roman industry in Cicero’s day had advanced as far as it was likely to advance while slavery continued to exist.