UC prof reveals revolutionary world of Roman retail

When it comes to retail therapy in the ancient world, no one perfected it quite like the Romans, says University of Cincinnati archaeologist Steven Ellis.  

A stroll through the main streets of Pompeii or Herculaneum reveals the ruins of what was once a buzzing cityscape of bars and shops (or tabernae) with wide openings facing the street and walk-up counters to display products and hawk wares. And ancient Romans, says Ellis, embraced shopping with a gusto that would rival even the most determined of today’s Black Friday crowds.

As Ellis notes in a new book released earlier this summer, “The Roman Retail Revolution: The Socio-Economic World of the Taberna,” such shops were a teeming mainstay among ancient Roman cities, lining the busiest urban thoroughfares and outnumbering even the number of homes.   

Of all the types of urban structures in the Roman city, none outnumber the shop. They line all the major streets. They gather around the intersections. They hover around all the major city monuments. And the motivation behind their construction is both social and economic — they respond to a whole range of urban needs. So any study of tabernae is a study of the social and economic underpinnings of a city. There’s just so much we can learn about urban life from a study of a city’s shops.

Yes, that’s right. There were shops earlier — you find retail spaces in the Greek world, for example — but what you get [in Rome] is a more dedicated, specialized form of architecture associated with retail. And you get shops in numbers never before known in the ancient world. Effectively, we see three waves, or three ‘revolutions’ in retailing. The first is not really until the second century B.C.E. when we see a sudden and striking spike in a particular type of space given over to retail. Instead of making things in one’s house and selling it from your house, you now have a part of the house that is dedicated to retail activity on the streetfront.  That is a Roman theme.

Compared to the study of temples, large houses and villas, big important civil monuments and amphitheaters, the study of shops have been passed off as a daily life kind of topic. Even though the general public finds it interesting, the scholarly world hasn’t found it as interesting as they probably could have or should have. In terms of classical archaeology, the tradition has been to look at powerful people, powerful spaces.  

I try to look at this fabric of society not just as something that’s different or opposite to the world of the elite, but to understand how all of it was integrated: it’s about the social stratigraphy, the social hierarchy. What I’ve found is that there is a much tighter connection with the elites of the Roman city and the sub-elites of the shops.  When we look at the motivations behind the investments in shops, we see that all of the social classes associated with retailing are really rather interconnected. What fuels it all is mutual benefit, whether social, economic, or even political.

It’s not just about studying the elites or subelites; it’s about recognizing how these seemingly subelite spaces are actually more integrated into the whole city structure.
 

I’m hoping that the book demonstrates the intellectual value of studying nonelite spaces. For too long these types of topics — the study of shops, bars, taverns — have been given this kiss-of-death of daily life studies. What that does is passes it off as simple and simplistic when, in reality, there are some wonderfully complex issues and ideas that we have to try and grapple with in studying these spaces.  

My hope with this book is to open up the study of these types of spaces and shine a light on how interesting the study of retail landscapes can be and the many important contributions they contain.
 

Featured image at top: The neighborhood of the Porta Stabia under the excavations of the University of Cincinnati.  Photos provided by Steven Ellis