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HSC Ancient History > POMPEII & HERCULANEUM > Flashcards

POMPEII & HERCULANEUM Flashcards

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1
Q

Geographical setting of Pompeii and Herculaneum

A

located on the coast of the Bay of Naples in the fertile region of Campania, about 200 kms south of Rome.

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2
Q

Main social structure in ancient rome

A
  1. Freeborn
  2. Freedman (Libertus and liberta)
  3. Slaves
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3
Q

Freeborn (Ingenuus / p - ingenui)

A

Ranged from the elite to plebs media, to the plebs humilius

PTY refers those who were rich, but outside the elite as plebs media.

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4
Q

What did people in the freeborn class commonly engage in?

A

They all typically engaged in some form of commerce - such as selling agricultural produce of their country estates and renting parts of their townhouses to small buisnessmen

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5
Q

What did Cantarella & Jacobelli say about women within the freeborn class?

A

Women in this group were ‘psychologically and socially emancipated (liberated / free) over all’

However, women were still considered inferior and had no political power.

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6
Q

What could freeborn women do and not do in ancient rome?

A
  • play an active and visible part in social and political life (support electoral candidates), though could not vote themselves.
  • own property and slaves of their own (e.g. Eumachia, a wealthy priestess provided tge town with a new building on the forym dedicated in her own name and that of her son - possiblly for political gain)
  • were under the legal control of men - fathers or husbands (Inscriptions for women state: “…daughter of…”)
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7
Q

Legal rights of women

A
  • could inherit a share of their father’s estate when he died and could create a will to decide how their property would be handled after their death, though are limited on how they use the property.
  • They could also own property in their own right and carry out **business transactions. **
  • For example, the Herculaneum Tablets record a business deal between the freedwoman Poppaea Note, who borrowed money from Dicidia Margaris. As security for the loan Poppaea temporarily transferred ownership of two of her slaves to her creditor.
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8
Q

Female Occupations

A
  • Often individually, and in partnership with their husbands - run shops and engage in crafts and trades and earn profits. (Innkeeper, Valeria Hedone is an example of this as she took over her husband’s business.)
  • Women of a lower status - fulling industry (washing and dyeing cloth); making and mending clothes.
  • Vegetable sellers, bean dealers and butchers
  • Owned and operated taverns, inns and bars
  • medical profession (midwives and physicians)
  • prostitution.
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9
Q

Womens role in public life

A
  • public priestesses responsible for the construction and dedication of public buildings (Eumachia and Mamia)
  • supported political candidates

wall of a hot food bar:
([Make] C. Lollius Fuscus duumvir for looking after the roads [and] the sacred [and] the public buildings. Asellina’s [girls] ask you, not without Zmyrina.)

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10
Q

Women’s education

A
  • it is believed that upper-class girls were educated in the home, probably by a slave tutor.
  • The frescoes showing women with stylus and tablet or with a book in their hands suggest that literacy was a mark of status and that such an accomplishment might have made a woman more desirable as a marriage partner.
  • According to Pliny the Younger, his third wife Calpurnia was ‘highly intelligent and a careful housewife’ and would often ‘keeps copies of my books to read again and again and even learn by heart.’
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11
Q

What could freeborn men do?

A
  • had full legal rights
  • could run for office and become members of the ordo decurionum
  • were usually wealthy landowners and buisinessmen
  • controlled public finances, spaces and religion
  • had priviliged seats in amphitheatres
  • received honourary statues and tombs

ordo decurionum - council / local elites

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12
Q

Evidence of the role and status of women

A
  • Frescos/paintings
  • Epigraphic (e.g. inscriptions & graffiti)
  • Herculaneum tablets
  • Jewellery
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13
Q

Freedman / Freedwomen

A

A freedman or freedwoman was a person who had been freed from slavery by their master or who had bought their freedom.

manumitted slaves

Freedman: Libertus (plural: Liberti)
Freedwoman: Liberta (plural: Libertae)

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14
Q

What were freedmen obliged to do to their former master?

A

they had a social obligation to honour him and to serve his interests.

Society was based on a patronage system. A member of the elite would act as the patron to a poorer citizen and expect their support and loyalty in return, for example in local elections.

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15
Q

Occupation of freedmen and women

A
  1. associated with crafts, trade and commerce. The small shops, workshops, bars and taverns, built into the facades of many dignified residences - run by freedmen / women.
  2. Wives of freedmen helped their husbands in businesses - bakeries
  3. others ran their own enterprises (brothels and inns)
  4. many became wealthy and influential

  1. An example of this is the freedmen who ran the garum business for Scaurus.
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16
Q

what could freedmen do?

A
  • Some became shop keepers & business owners
  • vote
  • become an Augustalis
  • Some freedmen/women had their own slaves

Augustalis: A priest of the cult of the emperor

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17
Q

what could freedmen not do?

A

Freedmen &
women could not
hold public office

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18
Q

What could slaves do?

A
  • Domestic work e.g. cooks
  • Educated slaves could be tutors & secretaries
  • Agricultural work
  • If the ’master’ was the town council, slaves could work in public spaces and buildings
  • Could be a gladiator
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19
Q

What could slaves not do?

A
  • Could not vote
  • Female slaves could not marry
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20
Q

Public vs. private slaves

A
  • Public slaves owned by the town government (responsible for things like cleaning the streets, record offices)
  • Private slaves were owned by masters (help with home, businesses, industries, or farms)
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21
Q

manumission of slaves

A

Slaves could be manumitted by their masters, or could save up enough money themselves to buy their liberty

they had to pay a freedom tax equal to 5% of their assessed valuation. They were then permitted to assume their master’s name.

22
Q

Beggars in Pompeii

A
  • Beggars seem to have been prevalent in Pompeii
  • A graffito tells us this: ‘I detest beggars’
  • paintings that depict the wealthy offering a beggar a piece of bread.
  • This suggests that the boundaries between the upper and lower levels of society were not quite distinct.
23
Q

Economy

A
  1. Agriculture
  2. Industries → Wine, ceramics, fulleries (bleached and clean clothes), olive oil
  3. Commercial life: Markets, shops, bars, taverns, inns, thermopolia
  4. Banking
24
Q

Commercial centres

A
  • Generally localised economies largely based on agricultural production & fishing
  • Pompeii → Trade centre and commercial centre
  • Seems that making a profit and accumulating wealth was favoured
  • Herculaneum → Fishing Village (Smaller but still had some farms)
25
Q

Evidence of Commercial activity in Pompeii

A
  • about 600 excavated privately owned shops, workshops, bars and inns
  • The city-controlled markets around the forum
  • epigraphic evidence - number of guilds of tradesmen and retailers
  • 20 maritime warehouses containing objects
  • characteristic of a port area
  • buildings lined with wine jars
  • Paintings of cargo boats on the Sarno and porters carrying products to be loaded onto the vessels
  • Trade signs depicting various manufacturing processes

Shows that they exported and imported wine

26
Q

Limitation in evidence for commercial activity

A
  • Inscriptions on walls and floors of houses and workshops:
  • ‘Profit is Joy’ found in the mosaic entrance way of two wealthy men, Siricus and Numerianus
  • Images of Mercury, the god of commerce, displayed - to gain blessings: on a sign outside a shop, on a sales counters
  • This idea of creation for profit is questionable, and not necessarily indicative of Pompeii as a whole because the production of food, bread, wine, clothing etc. was not made in such large amounts for export.
  • There is a debate about the extent to which Pompeii had a ‘textiles’ or ‘wool’ industry.

The number of fulleries and farming of sheep is used as evidence of export by the historian Moeller, while Jongman argues that it was more small-scale and localised.

27
Q

Agriculture

A

Agriculture was the backbone of the economies of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
* respectable way of earning a living and those with large landholdings enjoyed great status.
* medium-sized farmsteads and villas associated with a farm or vineyard (villa rustica) that dotted the Sarno Plain, as well as the market gardens (horti) within the walls of Pompeii → provided the raw materials (wine, olive oil, cereals, fruit, vegetables, meat and wool) for much of the retail and industrial workforce.

28
Q

Fishing in Herculaneum

A
  • Fishing fleets (Herculaneum) on the coastline of the Bay of Naples → valued crustaceans, molluscs and fish, the latter also used for making the garum.
  • A large volume of fishing nets, bronze hooks, sinkers and fish bones and skeletons have also been discovered at Herculaneum.
29
Q

The Forum

A
  • The forum buildings, once roofed in red terracotta tiles, were brightly coloured, as were the statues that surrounded them.
  • The Pompeian people covered the forum walls, particularly those of the basilica, with painted notices ‘in vivid colours and large letters, the better to draw attention’, according to M. Brion.
30
Q

Commercial Buildings in the Forum

A
  • Building of Eumachia
  • Macellum (fish / meat market)
  • Olitorium (dried cereals and legumes)

Eumachia - Use of the building remains unclear; meeting place for the Fuller’s collegium or an area where business was conducted, such as the sale of wool or other commodities.
Macellum - and possibly fruit and vegetables

31
Q

Mensa Ponderaria

A

a weighing table: a marble slab with nine circular cavities of different capacities for measuring the foodstuffs sold by shopkeepers.

32
Q

Trade

A
  • money - for trading (denarii and sesterces)
33
Q

Evidence of money

A
  • A cache of 127 waxed writing tablets was found at Villa Murecine in 1959.
  • These tablets were the business transactions of the Sulpicii family, a family of bankers and money lenders.
  • Evidence of banking
34
Q

Pompeii’s port and evidence

A
  • remains of twenty warehouses containing weights for anchoring boats and fishing gear, but amphorae and a statue of Neptune, god of the sea, to whom departing sailors made sacrifices. The port was a trans-shipment point for local and foreign goods.
  • evidence shows that Pompeii was an important trading town for the Campanian region, while Herculaneum’s economy generally served more localised needs.
35
Q

Exports evidence

A
  • The occasional Pompeian amphora, tile or pottery container has turned up beyond Italy, but some scholars believe their export trade was relatively minimal.
  • Pompeian wine amphorae have been found in Ostia, Spain, Alesia, Germany and Britain.
  • Pliny the Elder tells us that garum was a major export throughout the Mediterranean. He also praised the quality of Pompeiian garum. Two bottles of garum produced by Scaurus in Pompeii were found in the south of France, indicating the extent to which Pompeiian garum was exported.
36
Q

Imports

A
  • Tableware from Puteoli
  • Pottery from Spain and Gaul
  • Furniture from Naples
  • Lamps from Alexandria
  • Wine and oil was imported from Spain, Sicily and Crete

Dr Jaye Pont (Mackenzie-Clarke), specialises in Red slipware Pottery → proved that pottery from Pompeii were locally made.

37
Q

Commerce

A
  1. Tabernae (shops)
  2. Thermopolia (public eating & drinking)
  3. Cauponae (Bars and Taverns)
38
Q

evidence for tabernae

A

Numerous shops were located along the Via dell’Abbondanza (Road of Abundance), as it was the main commercial thoroughfare.

39
Q

evidence for thermopolia

A
  • About 200 public eating and drinking places have been identified in Pompeii.
  • Some were simply fast-food snack bars known as thermopolia and are recognised by the marble-covered counter in which large dolia, holding hot drinks and dishes may have been encased.
40
Q

evidence for cauponae

A
  • scattered throughout both towns, but in Pompeii, they were more densely clustered near the entrance gates and around the amphitheatre.
  • Two pieces of graffiti declared ‘Cheers! We drink like wineskins’ and ‘Suavis demands full wine jars, please, and his thirst is enormous’.
41
Q

Industries in Pompeii

A
  • Wine and Oil
  • Garum Industry
  • Fishing
  • Pistrina (Bakeries)
  • Wool
  • Fullery
  • Perfume
  • Prostitution
42
Q

Evidence of a wine industry

A
  • Wilhelmina Jashemski at Pompeii - evidence of a large commercial vineyard near the Pompeian amphitheatre.
  • Approximately 2014 vine-root holes and the cavities of their supporting stakes were plaster cast in this large area
  • On the site was a room set up for wine pressing and a shed with embedded dolia, each of which could fill forty amphorae.
43
Q

What did villas have?

A
  • These villas had rooms for pressing the grapes (torcularia – grape presses), for fermentation (cellae vinariae) and storage.
  • According to Pliny, ‘districts with a mild climate store their wine in jars and bury them completely or partially in the ground thus protecting them from the weather …’.
  • The villas at Boscoreale – Villa of Pisanella and Villa Regina – possessed a huge storage capacity, supporting Pliny’s statements.
  • The wine was transported to town in large leather wineskins (cullei), then decanted into amphorae or dolia.
44
Q

Evidence of Varieties of Wine

A
  • A wide variety of wines were produced in the Vesuvian area.
  • A sign on a Herculaneum wine bar, inviting patrons to ‘Come to the Sign of the Bowls’, advertised half a dozen types of wine and their vintages.
  • Another tavern advertisement confirms that there was a wide range of wines sold in Pompeii: ‘…drink here for just one as; for two asses you can drink better, and for four have some really good Falernian wine.’
45
Q

Production and Storage of Oil

A
  • The same estates that produced wine, also produced oil. The Villa of Pisanella kept enough storage jars for 5910 litres of oil.
  • Most of the pressing was done on the estates, even though oil presses were also found in Pompeian houses and in the Forum granary.
46
Q

evidence of Garum

A
  • Aulus Umbricius Scaurus - four large mosaics of fish sauce bottles were found in the atrium of his house with the following inscriptions: “Scaurus’ finest mackerel sauce from Scaurus’ workshop”; “Finest fish purée”; “Scaurus’ finest mackerel sauce”; “Best fish purée from Scaurus’ workshop”
  • Over fifty fish sauce bottles have been found in or around Pompeii.
  • Two were even found in southern France. His label “ex oficina scauri” (“from the shop of Scaurus” was distinctive.
47
Q

evidence of Bakeries

A
  • In the bakery of N. Popidius Priscus, a member of a prominent Pompeian family, eighty one loaves of bread were recovered, still in the oven where they had been placed on the morning of 24 August AD 79.
  • In Herculaneum, a baker known as Sextus Patulcus Felix appears to have specialised in cakes, as twenty-five bronze baking pans of various sizes were discovered in his premises, together with mixing bowls. By the mills, the skeletons of the donkeys who once turned them were found.
48
Q

Evidence of Fulling

A
  • Lucius Veranius Hypsaeus dried his fabric on brick pillars between the Corinthian columns of a large atrium, while Stephanus is believed to have hung the wet clothes over canes on the upper floor and in the courtyard.
  • Once dried, the cloth was bleached with sulphur and then dyed. A clothes press, a little under two metres high and more than half a metre wide, was discovered in a shop attached to the House of the Wooden Partition in Herculaneum.
49
Q

Evidence of Perfume

A
  • According to Jashemski (1979), the Garden of the Fugitives and Garden of Hercules were for flower production for the perfume industry.
  • Root cavities probably of rose bushes; fragments of terracotta and glass perfume containers highlight this.
50
Q

Types of wall writings

A
  • Electral Programmata
  • Advertisement (financial)
  • Electoral Programmata
  • Advertisement (entertainment)
  • Personal messages

HSC Ancient History (2 decks)

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