The focus of this chapter is movement through the Porta Esquilina in the Republican Wall and the Porta Tiburtina in the Aurelianic Wall, alongside an evaluation of the mutual influence of traffic and urban development from the time of Augustus to the late fifth century. Two decisive moments are identified. The first is the Augustan period, characterized by a great expansion and modernization of the infrastructure in the periphery. The second is the fifth century, by which time the construction of the Aurelianic Wall has led to the development of new urban nodes and a process of monumentalization of the Porta Tiburtina area.

This volume presents fourteen papers by Roman archaeologists and historians discussing approaches to the economic history of Pompeii, and the role of the Pompeian evidence in debates about the Roman economy. Four themes are discussed. The first of these is the position of Pompeii and its agricultural environment, discussing the productivity and specialization of agriculture in the Vesuvian region, and the degree to which we can explain Pompeii’s size and wealth on the basis of the city’s economic hinterland. A second issue discussed is what Pompeians got out of their economy: how well-off were people in Pompeii? This involves discussing the consumption of everyday consumer goods, analyzing archaeobotanical remains to highlight the quality of Pompeian diets, and discussing what bone remains reveal about the health of the inhabitants of Pompeii. A third theme is economic life in the city: how are we to understand the evidence for crafts and manufacturing? How are we to assess Pompeii’s commercial topography? Who were the people who actually invested in constructing shops and workshops? In which economic contexts were Pompeian paintings produced? Finally, the volume discusses money and business: how integrated was Pompeii into the wider world of commerce and exchange, and what can the many coins found at Pompeii tell us about this? What do the wax tablets found near Pompeii tell us about trade in the Bay of Naples in the first century AD? Together, the chapters of this volume highlight how Pompeii became a very rich community, and how it profited from its position in the centre of the Roman world.

This introductory chapter to "The Economy of Pompeii" sets the agenda of the volume, and introduces the reader to the historiography of the Pompeian economy and to recent developments in Pompeian studies, before introducing the chapters of this volume and discussing some of the trends emerging from the volume, and how they relate to current developments in scholarship on the Roman economy.

The World of the Fullo takes a detailed look at the fullers, craftsmen who dealt with high-quality garments, of Roman Italy. Analyzing the social and economic worlds in which the fullers lived and worked, it tells the story of their economic circumstances, the way they organized their workshops, the places where they worked in the city, and their everyday lives on the shop floor and beyond. Through focusing on the lower segments of society, Flohr uses everyday work as the major organizing principle of the narrative: the volume discusses the decisions taken by those responsible for the organization of work, and how these decisions subsequently had an impact on the social lives of people carrying out the work. It emphasizes how socio-economic differences between cities resulted in fundamentally different working lives for many of their people, and that not only were economic activities shaped by Roman society, they in turn played a key role in shaping it. Using an in-depth and qualitative analysis of material remains related to economic activities, with a combined study of epigraphic and literary records, this volume portrays an insightful view of the socio-economic history of urban communities in the Roman world.

This chapter investigates the economic performance of the Pompeian countryside. In particular, it evaluates to what extent the countryside provided the basic staples the city needed — such as grain, oil, and fuel —and to what extent it produced marketable surpluses. To find an answer to these questions, this chapter first reconstructs the ancient landscape of the environs of Vesuvius, and calculates the scale of local demand by reconstructing the region’s urban and rural population. Analysing the evidence for agriculture from both literary sources and archaeological data, it then attempts to create a model that makes it possible to quantify the scale of production and assess its relation to regional demand.