Four Lost Cities

by Annalee Newitz

  CHAPTER 5

  What We Do in Public

  Pompeii was already something of a disaster magnet when Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE. Seventeen years earlier, the Bay of Naples had been hit by an earthquake that leveled large parts of the city and sent a tsunami hurtling into the nearby Roman port of Ostia. Many of Pompeii’s residents left and never returned after the quake, leaving behind damaged buildings that were still empty in 79. In a sense, Pompeii’s abandonment begins with that quake, which shrank the city’s population and eroded its desirability as a vacation spot. Still, many people stayed after the dust had settled, eager to renovate and upgrade. Emperor Nero helped fund the restoration efforts, which are still visible in walls whose exposed brick shows extensive repairs. Remains found at the Sanctuary of Venus, a temple dedicated to the city’s patron goddess, reveal that engineers in 79 were reinforcing it with thick stone walls that they believed would be earthquake-proof.1 The Pompeii that we see today was a city under construction. Land owners were redesigning their properties to reflect a more modern Roman sensibility, oriented around trade rather than military conquest.

  Put another way, Pompeii’s post-quake urban landscape was geared toward shopping. Liberti and other nonelite groups transformed many of Pompeii’s great villas and homes into mixed-use spaces, with retail infringing on what were once living quarters. It’s likely that the renovation of Julia Felix’s property was part of this trend, as she added more doors to face the commercial Via dell’Abbondanza. Retail-oriented transformations were taking place all over the city, and we see laundries and bakeries springing up in what were once the fancy atria and gardens of elite estates. Most of all, we see tabernas, the bars and restaurants that were Pompeii’s ubiquitous retail outlets. Some tabernas were tiny, one-room affairs with a counter, and others boasted many rooms and garden seating. Their proprietors served hot food, cold takeaway, and wine of various types. I saw the remains of several at Julia’s place and the House of the Mosaic Columns, but that was just the beginning.

  Every major street in Pompeii is lined with tabernas, and I learned to recognize them from their characteristic L-shaped marble-topped counters. These counters always came with built-in ceramic storage containers, roughly 60 centimeters deep, their wide, round mouths level with the countertop. Many were probably covered with wooden lids that are long gone. Peering inside one, I could see the smooth inner walls of what was once a display case for dry goods like grain or nuts. Today they look stark and minimalist, almost like an ellipse punctuating the countertop. But frescoes from the time show taberna counters piled with goods, while herbs, fruit, and meat hang from the ceiling over the counter. Amphorae, elongated clay carafes for wine, olive oil, and other liquid goods, lean on their pronged feet against the walls. Tabernas would have been utterly astonishing to the Neolithic people of Çatalhöyük, who produced every ingredient in their meals, from pots and hearths, to spices and proteins. At Pompeii, a person simply had to walk outside to get meal service—or to visit specialists in cookware, oils, meats, and vegetables to make a meal at home. There were even shops that sold hot water, in case you didn’t want to boil your own.

  Taberna hopping

  To talk about Pompeii’s tabernas, I sat down for beers with longtime collaborators Eric Poehler, from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Steven Ellis, from the University of Cincinnati. Ellis is the author of The Roman Retail Revolution,2 a book chronicling the rise of small businesses in the Roman world. He has studied tabernas across the empire, from North Africa to the Middle East, and he told me that Pompeii had over 160 tabernas. “It’s an extraordinary number,” he said, adding that it’s probably a low estimate because parts of Pompeii are still buried. Poehler followed up with some back-of-the-napkin calculations: “If you’ve got 160 bars for a population of 12,000 people, then about a tenth of them had to be eating out to sustain the bars.” Who were those people? Wealthy residents would have had a whole fleet of slaves preparing meals in their well-appointed villa kitchens. The city’s humbler dwellings did not have kitchens, so it might seem at first glance that tabernas were for the poor. But that doesn’t fit the evidence, either. Even in a tiny upstairs apartment with no running water, people of little means could cook using a pan over a small brazier, like using a hot plate.

  Ellis believes that these tabernas were run and frequented by a group he calls “middlers,” people who aren’t rich or poor. They ate outdoors on the same blocks where they ran small shops that sold everything from onions and fish sauce to textiles and perfume. Most of the middlers, Ellis said, “have money to spend on food” and other small luxuries. They aren’t precisely what we would call middle class because that’s a term associated with modern societies. Indeed, some are quite wealthy, while others are recently freed liberti just trying to scrape by. But they are all in the vast economic middle between Roman elites and slaves. What truly sets these middlers apart, though, is that they earn money by working in business or a trade. This kind of work was taboo for elites, though of course many of Rome’s richest made their money from shops and farms staffed by their liberti and slaves. As Anderson pointed out at the House of the Mosaic Columns, the villa was literally and figuratively supported by shops built into its bottom floor.

  Newer Pompeii houses reflect a city whose wealthiest members were also working for a living. The building known as the Fullery of Stephanus appears to have been rebuilt after the quake, converting an elite house with an atrium into a “fullery,” or wool processing workshop. Stephanus’ name was discovered in an election-related sign painted near the fullery’s entrance on Via dell’Abbondanza. (Though we can’t be sure that Stephanus was the name of the baker who lived there, we’ll assume it is for simplicity’s sake.) It seems that Stephanus dramatically retrofitted the patrician house, converting the tiled atrium into several large, utilitarian rooms full of tubs and tools for treating wool. But he also left considerable room for domestic life. Leiden University archaeologist Miko Flohr, author of a book about ancient fulleries, has explored Stephanus’ property and found jewelry, cosmetics, cookware, and other signs that people were living there as well as working. Instead of segregating the “work” part of the house into a strip mall facing the street, Stephanus integrated it into his home, where his slaves and liberti no doubt lived with his family. “Essentially,” writes Flohr, “it was just a house in which people lived, slept, ate, and worked, and which they probably considered home.”3

  Further along the Via dell’Abbondanza we find a similar late reconstruction, known as the House of the Chaste Lovers, where a patrician villa was rebuilt so that its entrance led directly into a big, airy bakery. Ovens and millstones dominated the spaces that once would have shaded hushed conversations between aristocratic people of leisure. The baker cared a lot more about keeping the mules who ran his millstone happy than he did about luxurious living. He built a stable next to the former residents’ triclinium, a dining room where slaves served their patrons supper as they reclined on formal dining beds. Like Stephanus’ fullery, this bakery integrated work spaces with domestic ones. It was connected to a residential house, but Poehler said the owners prioritized rebuilding the bakery, finishing those parts of the construction first. The people who owned this bakery may have been rich, but they were not part of Rome’s patrician class. They worked for a living, and labor was literally a part of their household.

  Stephanus and the anonymous bakers who lived in the House of the Chaste Lovers were probably the main audience for Pompeii’s dizzying array of bars and restaurants. Ellis calls this period Pompeii’s “retail revolution.” Civil strife in the empire had petered out, and Romans were enjoying a rare period of peace. “This is the beginning of halcyonic Rome, and the volume of trade is spiking,” Ellis said. “We’re moving from crafts being done at the individual level, to individuals participating in a craft industry at scale.” At Pompeii, this means that people aren’t just buying and selling to each other. They’re part of a vast economic n
etwork that stretches all across the empire and into Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. On Via Stabiana, Ellis has identified tabernas that reflected this new cosmopolitan reality. Looking at evidence from storage bins, cesspits, and menus, researchers found that one taberna had a very simple menu of locally grown fruits, grains, and vegetables with some cheese and sausages. The other, two doors away, had a much wider variety of foods. “[There were] cumin, peppercorn, and caraway coming from India,” he said. “The food was flavored with spices that are foreign.” Middlers going to a Pompeii taberna could choose to dine on imported delicacies or local comfort food options. Delicacies once available only to elites were now part of everyday life for more people than ever before. Even people born into slavery might eventually have their own shops and dine like patricians. Interestingly, data from the modern world suggests that the more restaurants we see in a given area, the more prosperous it is.4 That seems to have held in the distant past as well.

  Poehler, who has worked with Ellis at Pompeii for almost two decades, said that there’s been a shift in how archaeologists understand the way middlers transformed the urban design of Pompeii. A century ago, he said, scholars fretted about how places like Stephanus’ fullery were signs that Roman culture was in decline. They assumed that Pompeii’s noble, cultured aristocrats were being pushed out of towns like Pompeii by dirty, low-class traders, and this shift in turn led to the demise of civility. This theory was inspired partly by Victorian prejudices against working-class people, especially at a time when most archaeologists would have been upper class. But it also came from reading what the Romans themselves had to say. Petronius’ Satyrica, a novel-like description of Rome’s underbelly written during Nero’s reign, features a long description of the tasteless parties thrown by the libertus Trimalchio, who indulges in Great Gatsby levels of vulgar conspicuous consumption. Nearly all the descriptions we have of middler life were written by elites like Petronius, and a lot of it is disparaging.

  Poehler took a swig of beer and laughed with Ellis. Today’s archaeologists are a lot more skeptical of fictionalized tales like Satyrica, which probably reflected prejudices more accurately than realities. Instead, he and Ellis view this period as one of renewal, when opportunities for middlers shifted the balance of power.

  But how do you prove that liberti and other middlers were not monsters who destroyed the empire when so few of them left any records of what they thought? There are no eloquent refutations of Petronius’ snide remarks about Trimalchio. Even monuments to middler power like Eumachia’s building are ambiguous because we know so little about how it was used. To re-create middlers’ lives, Ellis and Poehler turned to a new method of historical investigation called data archaeology. Through careful observation, they aggregate information about many structures and objects—like, say, hundreds of bars—to figure out the typical habits of individuals. It’s the perfect method for exploring a lost way of public life.

  Gutter data

  “At Pompeii, archaeology tends to look for the big, the mighty, and the unusual,” Ellis said. He was referring to the villas and monumental buildings that have been the subject of so many excavations. “But what we do is look for the usual. I’m looking for the most common events that happened on the streets. Eric [Poehler] looks for what’s happening in the street.”

  He doesn’t mean that metaphorically. Poehler is the author of a book called The Traffic Systems of Pompeii,5 and his research involved spending a lot of time literally squatting in the street, analyzing stones that were once covered in manure, sewer runoff, and carts. Lots and lots of carts. So many, in fact, that most streets in Pompeii are scored by two deep groove marks where carriage wheels wore down the stones. This immediately tells us something important: cart sizes, or at least the space between wheels in the chassis, were relatively standardized. And that in turn suggests a widely accepted set of social norms for driving in cities.

  Crawling around in the gutters, Poehler also noticed distinctive, wedge-shaped bites taken out of curbs at intersections. After counting them, noting their positions, and then consulting with an engineer, he figured out what had caused them: thousands of poorly executed right turns from the right lane, as carriage wheels banged into the curbs or rode up onto them. There were no signs of similar wear on the left-hand sides of the intersections, suggesting left turns went wide, the way they do on US streets today. Even a terrible driver making a left-hand turn wouldn’t smack into the left curb. These clues strongly suggested that people in Pompeii drove on the right side of the street.

  I stood at an intersection on Via Nocera, a block from Via dell’Abbondanza, imagining carts crowding past me, while people mobbed the tabernas. The streets in Pompeii are deep, with high curbs; to cross them, I jumped across three large, flattened boulders that served as crosswalks. Poehler said they were built like stepping stones in part because the streets often flowed with dirty water. I hopped from stone to stone, trying to imagine the scene with a sewage-laced river gushing below. A cart rode up on the curb, splashing us with filth as it slid back down, and the air filled with curses in Latin, Punic, and Oscan. This is the kind of moment that Poehler and Ellis are conjuring with data archaeology, and in that instant it made Pompeii’s past feel more tangible to me than knowing where emperors walked and consuls lived.

  The crosswalks themselves are another hint that carts were standardized, since the stones are perfectly spaced for those two wheel ruts to pass between them. There are also hints from literature at the time that carts may have been permitted in the city only at night, when pedestrian traffic was thinner. Some Roman municipal regulations also stipulated that carts weren’t allowed downtown on feast days, so that those revelers from the Temple of Isis wouldn’t be run over by traffic roaring up via Stabiana.

  In a sense, data archaeology represents the democratization of history. It’s about looking at what the masses did, and trying to reconstruct their social and even psychological lives. Ellis has used data to peel back our preconceptions about Roman life and reveal a thriving group of middlers who loved to shop and eat out. When Ellis looks at a city, he said, he sees it as a “volumetric matrix” of building materials and human labor. “I always wonder: How does that volume come to be there?” he mused. He’s asking, quite literally, what it took to move giant heaps of stuff around in the ancient world. The answer leads back to the absence I mentioned earlier, the blank space that remains where liberti and slaves’ perspectives would have been, if we were standing on Via dell’Abbondanza two millennia ago.

  Poehler argues that we can learn a lot from absences, which makes sense for a person who reconstructed traffic in Pompeii by studying what had been worn away from rocks. “I’m interested in the part of the rock that is now gone,” he told me. “The shape that’s worn away—that’s what people did.” This is especially true when it comes to public spaces where many people were doing roughly the same kinds of things. “If you take the hundred thousand interactions with the stone in aggregate, all over the city, the absence is thousands of people making the same decision. Now, suddenly, you have a picture of a system of traffic at a place like Pompeii where we had zero evidence ever before.” Poehler paused, and I thought about all the absences in my home city that mark the places where crowds gather: bald trails worn through park grass; the dings in subway paint where commuters have whacked their bags into the walls repeatedly; and yes, the scars in streets where cars took turns too quickly, or bounced as they hit the bottom of one of San Francisco’s many steep hills. In these nicks and cracks, Poehler believes we catch a glimpse of the anonymous masses whose lives have been lost to history.

  We can even see how the social stratification that shaped people’s lives is written into the cityscape. For Romans, paved streets were a key technology, making it easier for carriages to deliver goods and people, as well as making it more pleasant to walk around. But the city’s rich didn’t pay to bring this fancy technology to everyone. Large, posh streets like Via dell’Abbondanza
were paved of course, as were most main thoroughfares. But in the poorer, eastern parts of the city, many streets were made from dirt.

  After the earthquake, roads in the western side of the city near the temple district were quickly put to rights, while side roads leading to humble residences were not. Poehler described a “swanky residential area” in the northwest where every street is paved with stone, except for two that were paved cheaply, with beaten earth and ash. The unpaved streets serviced the back doors of villas, and the front doors of inexpensive homes. “This tells us that some people in the city control the application of this [paving] technology, and they’re not going to share it with everybody,” Poehler said. The message to the lower-class people on that street was clear: they were only good enough to share a street with the back sides of wealthier people’s homes. Pompeii’s paving system may seem like a wonky detail of urban infrastructure, but it tells us a lot about how neighbors treated each other in Roman cities.

  Rise of the liberti

  It’s only recently that researchers have figured out what percentage of the Roman population were liberti. Henrik Mouritsen estimated their numbers after conducting a painstaking overview of sources that compiled every name mentioned on a gravestone in Rome and a few other key locations in the empire. Buried in these lists was a predictable data pattern. Roman patrons preferred to give their slaves foreign names, particularly Greek ones, as a way of emphasizing slaves’ otherness and inferiority. Even when slaves were freed, their slave names followed them for life. Roman government officials used a specific nomenclature for designating a libertus, incorporating his former master’s last name into his new freedman name. Sometimes public records even include an “L” for libertus next to the freedman’s name to make it abundantly clear that this person was once property. To find the graves of liberti, Mouritsen’s sources counted these telltale Ls, as well as Greek and foreign first names that had Roman last names attached.