Tag Archives: Pompeii

Prosperity and Inequality: Imperial Hegemony and Neighbourhood Formation in the Cities of Roman Italy (2023)

What did emerging imperial hegemony do to urban communities in Roman Italy, and how does it shape the Roman cities we know so well? Urban landscapes in Late Republican Roman Italy came to accommodate increasing levels of socioeconomic inequality, and this profoundly changed the ways in which urban communities functioned. This chapter explores what that meant for processes of neighbourhood formation. Starting from the idea that inequality can be physically expressed through urban housing stocks, the paper analyses the impact of the increasing wealth inequality brought about by Roman hegemonic prosperity at the micro-level. It starts by identifying the mechanisms of urban development through which inequality could accumulate in urban space, and then proceeds to analyse the actual developments in Roman Italy, contrasting the nature of neighbourhood formation in mid-Republican Italy with that in Late Republican Italy.

The chapter argues that, in the decades that followed the Roman conquest of large parts of the Mediterranean, cities at the heart of Rome’s imperial network increasingly developed urban landscapes defined by inequality, and that this had immediate consequences for the ways in which these quarters could function in everyday practice, entrenching socioeconomic distinction and hierarchy permanently in the urban landscape. However, it is also clear that this did not work out in the same way in every city: in some places, such as Pompeii, inequality became much more strongly pronounced in an earlier period than in other cities (e.g. Norba, Ostia, Paestum, Herculaneum).

Bibliographical details

Type

Chapter in edited volume, 2023. Publication of a November 2021 conference on Neighbourhoods in Kiel, where I gave an invited talk.

Reference

Flohr, M. (2023). ‘Prosperity and inequality: imperial hegemony and neighbourhood formation in the cities of Roman Italy’, in A. Haug, A. Hielscher and A.-L. Krüger (eds), Neighbourhoods and City Quarters in Antiquity. Design and Experience. Berlin: De Gruyter, 157–173.

Open Access

The chapter was published in open access through De Gruyter (doi: 10.1515/9783111248097-010).

Miko Flohr, 18/12/2023

Between Aesthetics and Investment. Close-Reading the Tuff Façades of Pompeii (2022)

Why did Pompeians suddenly – in the mid second century BCE – start building houses with façades of finely polished tufa ashlar? This chapter was published in a volume on architecture and the ancient economy edited by Monika Trümper and Dominik Maschek. It offers a qualitative assessment of the economic rationale underlying the transformation of building practice in mid-second century BCE Pompeii. In this period, local traditional building practice based on carefully stacked blocks of travertine was replaced by a much more varied building practice that combined mortar with a number of regional building materials, including tuff ashlar.

The chapter observes that the new practice partially started from aesthetic considerations, but emerged with a clear economic rationale that both minimized costs and anticipated upon return on investment. Putting these developments in a broader Italic context suggests that the emerging building practice was facilitated by the unique local material circumstances at Pompeii: the developments in building technology were to a large extent local in nature, and should be seen as independent of architectural change. This, in turn, suggests that understanding the building practices and construction economies of the Roman world depends to a significant level on qualitative, but contextualized analyses of developments at the local level.

Bibliographical details

Type

Chapter in edited volume, 2022. Publication of a 2019 conference organized at the Freie Universität Berlin, where I gave an invited talk.

Reference

Flohr, M. (2022). ‘Between aesthetics and investment. Close-reading the tuff façades of Pompeii’, in M. Trümper and D. Maschek (eds), Architecture and the Ancient Economy. Analysis archaeologica, monograph series 5. Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 155–172. ISBN: 9788854912922.

Open Access

This publication is not currently (2023) available in open access. You can buy the volume here. For availability in libraries see worldcat.

Miko Flohr, 24/08/2022

Artisans and Markets: the Economics of Roman Domestic Decoration (2019)

This article investigates how consumer demand shaped markets for high-quality domestic decoration in the Roman world and highlights how this affected the economic strategies of people involved in the production and trade of high-quality wall decoration, mosaics, and sculpture. The argument analyzes the consumption of high-quality domestic decoration at Pompeii and models the structure of demand for decorative skills in the Roman world at large. The Pompeian case study focuses on three categories of high-quality decoration: Late Hellenistic opus vermiculatum mosaics, first-century C.E. fourth-style panel pictures, and domestic sculpture.

Analyzing the spread of these mosaics, paintings, and statues over a database of Pompeian houses makes it possible to reconstruct a demand profile for each category of decoration and to discuss the nature of its supply economy. It is argued that the market for high-quality decoration at Pompeii provided few incentives for professionals to acquire specialist skills and that this has broader implications: as market conditions in Pompeii and the Bay of Naples region were significantly above average, the strategic possibilities for painters, mosaicists, and sculptors in many parts of the Roman world were even more restricted and, consequently, their motivation to invest in skills and repertoire remained limited.

Bibliographical details

Flohr, M. (2019), ‘Artisans and Markets: The Economics of Roman Domestic Decoration’, American Journal of Archaeology 123.1, 101-125. DOI: 10.3764/aja.123.1.0101.

This publication is available in open access through Leiden University (https://hdl.handle.net/1887/69905).

Miko Flohr, 18/12/2018