Pompeii

by Mary Beard

  Altogether the remains of almost 150 properties have been discovered in the hinterland of the city, but our knowledge of what kind of establishments they were or who owned them is very hazy, for only rarely have they been systematically excavated. Some were certainly pleasure villas for the rich, even those from as far away as Rome: it was not only Cicero who had his ‘Pompeian place’. Some were working farms. Others were a combination of the two. Almost certainly there is a bias, in what we have discovered, towards more substantial remains, rather than the huts and sheds of the poorer peasant farmers. If, as some archaeologists have half suspected, there were the ancient equivalent of shanty towns or squatter settlements of poor labourers in the countryside outside the walls, we have found no trace of them.

  There is one case where we can pin down a country property of a leading Pompeian family. In the 1990s, excavation at Scafati, a few kilometres east of Pompeii, turned up a family burial ground, with eight memorials to various Lucretii Valentes in the first century CE, most of the men carrying exactly the same name, Decimus Lucretius Valens. They ranged from tiny children, like the toddler who died when he was just two years old, to a distinguished young man, who had been buried elsewhere at public expense, but was given a memorial plaque here alongside the rest of his relations, where he was celebrated for sponsoring, together with his father, a gladiatorial show consisting of thirty-five pairs of fighters. That was about as generous as a Pompeian benefactor could be.

  In Pompeii itself this family has been associated with a group of houses at the far end of the Via dell’Abbondanza, near the Amphitheatre, including the House of Marine Venus, with its sprawling goddess on the garden wall. In fact, some graffiti in one of these properties refer not only to a Decimus Lucretius Valens, but also to a couple of the more distinctively named women known from the burial ground, Iusta and Valentina – clinching the association between the family and the house. But why the group of family memorials in this particular out-of-town location? Presumably because the the Lucretii Valentes had a country house here, in all likelihood the very one that has been partly uncovered, just adjacent to the burial ground.

  The Lucretii Valentes, like most of the local Pompeian aristocracy, owed their wealth to the products of their land, even if they did not work it themselves. Some of their holdings would have been farmed by tenants. Some they would have controlled more directly. Often, as in the Villa of the Mysteries and in the house at Scafati no doubt, prestige entertaining rooms for the owner and his family were combined with a working agricultural establishment, operated by a farm manager, using hired labourers and slaves. Vivid evidence for the use of a slave workforce on these farms comes from a distinctive type of metal contraption, almost certainly stocks, or leg irons (one big enough to shackle fourteen people) found at a number of out-of-town properties. In the Villa of the Mosaic Columns just outside the walls, human leg-bones were unearthed still held in iron chains. The idea of slaves and prisoners meeting a horrible end because they were unable to break free of their bonds is a powerful myth of disaster stories, from the destruction of Pompeii to the film Titanic, and many early guidebooks to the buried city point to several (quite fictitious) instances of this horror. In this case, the story seems to be confirmed by photographs of the bones as they were discovered, still fused to the metal – though whether the slave concerned was a farm worker or a domestic we have no idea.

  Part of this country territory around Pompeii was certainly used for the grazing of sheep, which would have provided both milk and wool. Indeed Seneca hints that some of this husbandry might have been on a relatively large scale, when he claims that a flock of no fewer than 600 perished in the earthquake of 62 CE. For the rest, we should imagine an agricultural landscape of very fertile volcanic soil supporting cereals, grapes and olives. These were the staples of ancient Mediterranean life, essential for basic subsistence and light (from olive oil), and most of them were consumed locally. Exactly how much of the available land was given over to which crop is a tricky question. Roman writers tend to stress the vines and wines of the region, and excavated farms often preserve clear traces of wine production, in the shape of vats and presses. But this may overestimate the importance of vines. The literary emphasis may partly be a reflection of the fact that elite Romans were generally more interested in the varieties of grape than in the varieties of grain, and the archaeological prominence may partly be due to the fact that the paraphernalia of wine-making are so instantly recognisable.

  58. A reconstruction of the Villa Regina small-holding near Pompeii. It was an unpretentious property surrounded by vineyards. In the central courtyard, the dolia, or storage jars, set in the ground are visible.

  One smallholding that has recently been thoroughly excavated, the Villa Regina (known from the modern place name) near Boscoreale, to the north of Pompeii, shows how diverse the cultivation may have been even when a vineyard dominated (Ill. 58). First discovered in the 1970s, this is a relatively humble house with just ten rooms on its ground floor, set around a courtyard. It is a long way from the grand style of the country properties of the wealthy. Most of those rooms were connected with farm work, only two had painted decoration. Presumably the property was owned by a farmer of modest means, though one who, like many in the city, was busy with renovations at the time of the eruption. The lintel of one doorway had had to be propped up, foundations were being underpinned, pavements had been removed, and the kitchen and painted dining room were not in use.

  Much of the surviving agricultural equipment was connected with wine-making, including a press and eighteen huge storage jars, or dolia, set in the ground, enough to hold 10,000 litres of wine. Unless Roman domestic life was lived through a drunken haze, such a large quantity must have been for more than home consumption. Even so it would have needed less than 2 hectares of vineyard to produce (a small villa nearby had seventy-two wine dolia to hold the produce of its, obviously much larger, estate). Part of this vineyard has been excavated, the root cavities filled with plaster and the remains of seeds and pollen analysed. What has emerged are not only the traces of vines trained on poles, but other plants being grown in between and alongside them – olives, apricots, peaches, almonds, walnuts and figs, to name just a few of the more than eighty species that have been identified.

  The physical remains of the house also point to a range of cultivation extending beyond vines. There is what appears to be a threshing floor, suggesting that cereal crops were also being grown, and a hay store, for animal bedding and feed. The animals on the farm certainly included whatever mules, donkeys or horses drew the large cart whose iron wheels and fittings have been found. Pigs were kept too, for meat, as the plaster cast of a splendid young porker found in one of the rooms under repair shows. It must have fled here during the eruption from its pen or sty elsewhere. In the vineyard itself, excavators unearthed the skull of a guard dog.

  Wine production on this scale was for the local market rather than for the export trade, perhaps delivered to customers in the town in the kind of transporter pictured on the walls of one inn in Pompeii: a vast leather wine skin on a cart, from which the contents were decanted directly into wine jars (Ill. 59). From what we know of the prices of wine on sale in the town (written up, as they sometimes were, for customers in bars) and from the usual mark-up that Roman writers suggest between the point of final sale and the farmgate price, this 10,000 litres of wine might have brought in between 5000 and 7500 sesterces for the proprietor of this farm. But when all the production and equipment costs have been taken into account (in Pompeii, a single mule could set you back more than 500 sesterces), the actual profit would have been much less, even if more cash came in from selling some of the other fruit, crops or animals found there. This was not breadline living. It is usually reckoned that 500 sesterces would have kept a family of four at absolute minimum subsistence, alive but hungry, for a year; while the basic annual pay of a legionary soldier was 900 sesterces. But it was not lavish either. It was enough, pre
sumably, to support, feed, clothe and shelter a household – slaves included – of somewhere between five and ten, with some cash to spare for the occasional little luxury, such as smartening up a few rooms with a coat of decorative paint.

  Could the hinterland of Pompeii, thanks to farms like this and other larger estates, have supported the population of the area, in basic staples, without the need for mass imports? This has been the subject of intense modern debate and little agreement. Part of the problem is that we can only guess at some of the figures that would be vital for any accurate calculation: not only the total size of population, but also the kind of yield the Romans would have extracted from this land, and the levels of consumption we should expect (is a quarter-litre of wine per day for every man, woman and child in the right order of magnitude or not?).

  59. Wine was brought to local traders and innkeepers in large wineskins drawn on carts. In this nineteenth-century drawing of a now very faded painting from a Pompeian bar, the men are about to decant it into jars, or amphorae.

  To try out one line of speculation: suppose we assume that the city in 79 CE was home to roughly 12,000 people, and some 24,000 more lived in the surrounding country (a shot in the dark, based partly on the later population figures). It would then be a reasonable guess, given the fertility of this soil and the climate, that if 120–130 square kilometres out of the 200 were sown with grain, that would have provided the necessary quantities to feed this total of 36,000. And it is almost certain that you could produce enough wine for everyone to have a quarter of a litre per day in less than 2 square kilometres of vineyard. As for olive oil, if we reckon that each person would have consumed (or burnt) 10 litres a year, that could have been produced in less than 4 square kilometres of olive groves all told. Not that we should imagine continuous fields of a single crop, as these calculations might imply. The planting at the Villa Regina, with olives and fruit trees amidst the vines, shows just how mixed this ancient farming could be.

  Of course, change any one of these rough estimates – increase the population by 50 per cent, for example, or decrease the amount of available land – and the overall picture can change dramatically. Even on these optimistic calculations, there will also have been years of shortage, drought or crop failure which would have left the Pompeians looking elsewhere for their staples. All the same, it looks very much as if they would usually have had enough to be exporting their surplus, and that is borne out by other evidence. Ancient writers certainly associated the area round Vesuvius with well-known varieties of grape, one even known as Pompeiana. This celebrity suggests that the wines reached well beyond the local area. In fact, Pliny’s sniffy remarks about the inferiority of some of the Pompeian plonk may suggest not that it was merely a rustic brew made for local consumption only, but, as one historian has recently proposed, that they were over-stretching production to meet a larger market (‘the old story of the sacrifice of quality to quantity’). Nor was it just the wine from Pompeii that had gained a reputation outside the area. Columella, a first-century writer on agriculture, particularly recommended the Pompeian onion, and Pliny described in some detail the Pompeian cabbage, warning those who might try to grow it that it cannot survive cold weather.

  Archaeology, both on land and under water, can occasionally help us trace the produce of Pompeii around the Mediterranean and beyond – the pottery wine jars at least, which are virtually indestructible after 2000 years, even if not the cabbages. As early as the beginning of the first century BCE, probably before the foundation of the colony at Pompeii, wine was going from the Bay of Naples to southern France. So much is clear from one cargo boat that did not make it, but was wrecked off Anthéor, not far from Cannes. This was carrying wine jars with stoppers stamped, in Oscan script (hence the dating of the wreck), with a very rare name: Lassius. The only other Lassii we know in the Roman world are from Pompeii and nearby Surrentum (Sorrento), including a Pompeian priestess of the goddess Ceres, Lassia, whose tombstone has been discovered outside the city walls. The chances are that this wine was from Pompeii or thereabouts.

  Other cargoes made it safely to their destination. These included Pompeian wine jars that ended up in Carthage in North Africa. Some of these were stamped with the name L. Eumachius. Whether he was the producer of the wine or merely the maker of the jars (the stamp could indicate either), he was very likely the father of another Pompeian priestess, Eumachia, who is best known for sponsoring one of the large public buildings in the Forum which now takes her name, the Building of Eumachia. Other Pompeian wine jars, some stamped by the same Eumachius, have turned up in France and Spain, as well as in other parts of Italy. One has even been found in Stanmore in Middlesex. But before we leap to the appealing conclusion that there was a brisk market for Pompeian wine in Roman Britain, we should remember that one solitary amphora does not necessarily indicate a major trade route. In any case, these jars were too good and sturdy for single use, and they were often reused over years, if not decades. The jar found at Stanmore might have originally been made in Pompeii, but not necessarily its final contents.

  There was plenty of trade in the other direction too. If Pompeii could in theory have supplied its needs entirely from the surrounding territory, it certainly did not choose to do so – or, at least, not by its later years. The pottery jars for wine and other foodstuffs tell a clear story of imports on a relatively large scale. Many of these came from not so distant parts of Italy. Richer Pompeians, for example, enjoyed Falernian wine, one of the classiest premier crus of the Roman world, produced some 80 kilometres to the north of the city. But there were imports from further afield too. In the House of the Menander some seventy amphorae and other jars were discovered, many still bearing indications of their contents and place of origin. True, there were some very local products: a couple bore Eumachius’ stamp, another couple had contained wine from Surrentum and one, much smaller, local honey. But some had brought olive oil or fish sauce from Spain, others were from Crete, and at least one came from Rhodes and was billed as containing passum, a special variety of sweet wine made out of raisins, rather than fresh grapes. Roughly the same picture emerges from the store of amphorae, some full, some empty, in the run-down House of Amarantus. Probably a mixture of first-, second-, or third-hand containers, they included a substantial number that had originated in Crete (thirty, apparently full, which must have been a recent shipment), a couple from Greece, and one – a rare specimen – from the city of Gaza which, in a poignant contrast to its present state, was to become one of the most celebrated and profitable centres of wine production in the early Middle Ages.

  The import business dealt in more than the contents of amphorae and other jars, whether wine, olive oil or garum. We have seen how microscopic analysis has brought to light the remains of exotic herbs and spices (see p. 37). But other sorts of relatively indestructible materials, such as fancy Egyptian glassware and coloured marble, are even easier to trace. Ordinary ceramic tableware could also come from well outside the local area. In fact, one packing case containing some ninety new Gallic bowls and almost forty pottery lamps was found intact, presumably having arrived in the town too close to the eruption ever to have been unpacked. In this case, if archaeologists are right to say that the lamps were made not in Gaul, but in northern Italy, we must imagine that some kind of ‘middleman’ had been involved, packaging up a mixed consignment.

  All in all, there can hardly be any doubt that, wherever exactly it was, and however small by comparison with the great trading centres of Puteoli or Rome, Pompeii’s port must have been a thriving, international and multilingual little place.

  City trades

  Agriculture was not only an activity for the countryside outside the city. Current estimates are that within the city walls as much as 10 per cent of the land, even in the years leading up to the eruption, was in agricultural use; in earlier periods it would have been even more. Some of this was the home to animals, an underestimated part of the Pompeian population, largely be
cause earlier generations of archaeologists tended to overlook animal bones. But even they did not miss the skeletons of two cows which were in the House of the Faun when the eruption came, and we shall be looking at another yet more dramatic discovery later in this chapter. There was plenty of cultivation too. We have already glimpsed a small ‘kitchen garden’ in the House of Julius Polybius, with a fig tree, and olive, lemon and other fruit trees. There were other cases of city cultivation on a much larger, more commercial scale.

  On one piece of open ground near the Amphitheatre, once thought to be the burial ground for dead gladiators, or alternatively a cattle market, careful excavations in the 1960s revealed a closely planted vineyard (Fig. 13), with olive and other trees growing among the vines, and possibly vegetables too (or so it has been deduced from the discovery of a single carbonised bean). The vineyard covered about half a hectare, and the wine – several thousand litres of it – was not only produced on the spot (as the wine press and large dolia show), but was also retailed from a bar facing onto the Via dell’Abbondanza or served to customers dining at one of the two outdoor triclinia built at the edge of the property. And there were many other, smaller vineyards, orchards and vegetable gardens (stocked with those famous cabbages and onions, perhaps), all identified from the traces of root cavities, carbonised seeds, pollen and carefully laid-out beds and irrigation systems. In one garden, with a particularly elaborate watering arrangement, it seems as if flowers were being grown commercially – maybe, it has been argued from the quantity of glass jars and phials in the adjacent house, for the production of perfume. Some very recent work has found evidence of ‘nurseries’ which probably supplied the local gardeners with their herbaceous plants.