This book comes from the Oxford Roman Economy Project and stems from a conference the project held in 2012. Its aim is to cover a range of topics where it is thought the Pompeiian evidence can help contribute more generally to our understanding of the Roman economy. In both the introduction by the editors and the afterword by Willem Jongman it is noted that the city and its scholarship have become something of a backwater when the wider Roman economy is considered. This is unfortunate because the past quarter century has seen considerable work there, focused both on the standing fabric of the a.d. 79 city and sub-surface excavations to uncover its earlier history.
The book is divided into four sections. The first explores the agricultural hinterland (De Simone) and the city's likely population size in a.d. 79 and its composition (Flohr). The next section explores the quality of life via its consumer behaviour (Ray), diet (Rowan) and health (Lazer). The third section looks at the economic life via attempts to map how population flows through the city would have worked (Poehler), the evidence for the different types of production (Monteix), how wealthy entrepreneurs might have influenced the economy (Robinson) and how big a business interior decoration was (Esposito). The final section directly addresses money and trade. The first two papers use coins from two large sub-surface excavations. Hobbs explores one set with the main focus being on when and how Pompeii became monetised. Ellis explores the other from the viewpoint of its depositional history. The other two papers use the unrivalled written evidence in the form of graffiti and accounts such as those of the Sulpicii to explore the different types of currency modes in use (Verboven) and how businessmen managed their relationships (Broekaert). This fascinating final pair of papers takes us back outside the city walls into the business world of Campania and its wider contacts. Some of these papers are based on work that has been more fully considered and published elsewhere, e.g. Lazer's Resurrecting Pompeii (2009) and Hobbs's Currency and Exchange in Ancient Pompeii (2013).
Whilst many readers will be aware that Pompeii is far from being the city caught in time at a single moment as promulgated by many popular treatments, not everyone will realise how problematic the quality of the data is. This is a site which has been under excavation for more than a quarter of a millennium. The motives driving the work have been diverse and the recording methodologies and documentation equally varied. People unfamiliar with this would do well to read ch. 7 by Monteix first. This succinctly and elegantly lays out the problems of studying the Pompeiian data which are flawed in so many ways. Jongman remarks about this chapter (424) that ‘data are never good’ and urges us to ask whether they are good enough for our purposes.
There are issues in some of the essays that suggest this question has not been asked rigorously enough. Ray, for example, uses data from P. Allison's Pompeian Households (2004) in an attempt to model discretionary spending. Inspection of the data (available at http://www.stoa.org/pompeianhouseholds) and comparison with the standard corpora which record the vessels from the houses considered (e.g. S. Tassinari, Il vasellame bronzeo di Pompei (1993) and L. A. Scatozza Höricht, L'Instrumentum vitreum di Pompei (2012)) make it clear that the data are not good enough here, and that sadly there is now no way of rectifying this. Not everything was initially recorded and where it was, it was not always done in a usable manner. Secondly it is not possible to correct this because what is in the stores now is only a subset of what was initially recorded. It is a little unfair to single out one paper in this way but it demonstrates very well that the reader should keep data issues to the forefront of their mind when reading these essays — caveat emptor. This paper is exemplary because the data can be looked at and the reader can make their own judgements.
Even when there are problems with the data used, there is much of interest in several of these essays from a more general methodological viewpoint and the ideas deserve development outside of the world of Pompeiian scholarship. Certainly Ray's modelling approach attempting to look at discretionary spending to explore consumer behaviour is one that could be more widely copied. Robinson has interesting insights into why we hear little about how the curial classes exploited their urban properties for gain in the ancient literature in comparison to the manuals that promoted the exploitation of rural properties. Ellis correctly points out that coin data are too often used uncritically and the taphonomy of the deposits they come from should be considered. The data for both these papers come from unpublished excavations so the validity of their conclusions cannot yet be tested. Data quality continues to be an issue even for recent investigations.
Of considerable interest is a theme that can be seen emerging in several papers, namely the need to think of the interdependencies of people working in many different industries. At a simple level we can think of the cobbler's need of the blacksmith to make his tools and the farmer to raise the animals whose hides will go to the tanner for curing. Monteix (233–5) explores this within the Système Technique framework. Rowan does it to place the fishing industry within its wider setting (123), and Esposito in his exploration of the logistics of interior decoration (273–4). Read against the background of the Verboven and Broekaert papers looking at the integrated business background, these papers provide considerable food for thought. This integrated approach could usefully be explored elsewhere.
In a short review of thirteen papers it is not possible to do justice to the many areas explored. Suffice to say a reader would go away with a good idea of current views of Pompeii's economy. They would also have a better understanding of the need to see different aspects of the economy, normally considered in isolation, as a network of practice in the same conceptual landscape. Certainly there are ideas here that could usefully be applied to other sites and the book should help bring Pompeii back into the mainstream of thought on the Roman economy.
It may be noted though that, for such an expensive book, the publishers have been parsimonious in the resources devoted to it. It would have benefited from some colour. Distinguishing between ten shades of grey in Poehler's street plans, for example, verges on impossible. Some figures lack keys and labelling. Figs 1.2–3 purport to show archaeological sites but seem to have lost all their text leaving just dots and lines. Fig. 10.3 lacks a key to the coin densities it is supposedly illustrating. A map showing the main Campanian sites mentioned, and a plan of the city showing the location of the principle properties repeatedly referred to, would also have been helpful for those readers who are not Pompeii specialists, presumably a large part of the intended audience.
