Shopping in Ancient Rome

Abstract

Abstract Given the remarkable concentration of consumers in ancient Rome, the vast majority of whom were entirely reliant on the market for survival, a functioning retail trade was vital to the survival of the city in the late Republic and the Principate. Through an analysis of the literary, legal, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence, together with wide-ranging comparative studies of the distributive trades, this book provides a systematic account of the retail network of Rome — an area of commerce that has been largely neglected in previous studies. The diverse means by which goods were sold to consumers in the city are investigated, from shops and workshops to permanent and periodic markets, fairs, auctions, street traders, and ambulant vendors. The critical relationship between retail and broader environmental factors, including the structure and organisation of production, the wholesale trade, transport systems, social structure, cultural conventions, income levels, and patterns of consumption are all considered, placing the retail trade within the wider context of the urban economy. In exploring the retail trade of Rome in its totality, the book sheds new light on the experience of living in the ancient city.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 210 citations exist upstream.