Mary Beard Reviews Claire Holleran's "Shopping in Ancient Rome: Tuesday Hoisted from the Non-Internet from 2000 Years Ago
Mary Beard:
Mary Beard reviews ‘Shopping in Ancient Rome’ by Claire Holleran: The most memorable account of an ancient shopping expedition is found in some comic verses by the third-century BC poet Herodas, who lived in Alexandria, by far the smartest city in the Western world at the time. In his poem a woman called Metro and a couple of her friends visit a shoe shop owned by one Kerdon (‘Mr Profiteer’). As soon as they arrive, slaves bring a bench for the ladies to sit on, while Kerdon tries to interest them in his wares with a pushy sales pitch that mixes extravagant claims for the styles, workmanship and glorious colours of the shoes, with what sounds like a well practised hard-luck story lamenting his life of unremitting toil and all the mouths he has to feed. Eventually every variety of shoe in the shop is brought out – Sikyonians, slippers, boots, Argive sandals, scarlets, flats – before the ladies start haggling about prices and thinking about the footwear they are going to need for an upcoming festival.
It is often said that shopping in the modern meaning of the word... is a relatively recent invention. The English verb ‘to shop’... is not attested until the mid-18th century; and the noun ‘shopper’ not until a hundred years after that. But this poem about a ladies’ outing to the shoe emporium seems to show that a very similar kind of activity, with some of the same pleasures, took place in the ancient Mediterranean.... Herodas’ poem... is not quite as simple as it may appear. It does not take a reader long to spot that the same female character, Metro, features in the poem that comes immediately before the one about the shopping trip in Herodas’ collection; in it she admires a friend’s scarlet dildo and is told that it was made and sold by a man called Kerdon. Most critics have assumed, given the matching names, that the story of the shoe shop should be read as a sequel.... If this interpretation with its knowing parody and decidedly erotic tinge is correct, the poem offers an even clearer glimpse of an ancient culture of retail therapy that looks not so very different from our own.
But the truth is that it is a very rare glimpse indeed; or perhaps the commercial culture of third-century BC Alexandria was quite untypical of antiquity more generally (whether in its actual retail practices or in the way it chose to write about them). Claire Holleran, in her careful study Shopping in Ancient Rome, has not found anything so plausibly modern in tone and style, apart perhaps from a few epigrams of the poet Martial, which imagine what Holleran calls ‘aspirational’ window-shoppers wandering round the Saepta in Rome, ogling the expensive antiques and designer luxuries they couldn’t afford.... [H]er book is really about buying and selling in ancient Rome, rather than shopping, for which there is, in any case, no equivalent Latin word. And most of it is concerned with making sense of the puzzling archaeological traces....
Walk down the main streets in Pompeii or Herculaneum and (as modern tourist guides always insist) you can feel comfortably at home in what seems recognisably close to a modern cityscape: bars and cafés (tabernae, popinae or cauponae) with their counters facing the pavement to catch passing trade, and shops (also called tabernae) with wide openings to display products and entice customers inside....
But... the bars are a well-known conundrum. It always used to be thought that the big jars set into their counters held wine and cheap hot food, soups and stews – ladled out to a poor and hungry clientèle by an accommodating landlord or landlady. But the jars are not glazed, and could not be removed for cleaning. It doesn’t take long to see that they would be completely inappropriate for liquids, hot or cold.... The puzzles are even bigger for the other sort of tabernae: the shops. Just occasionally the finds make it clear enough what went on in them. There’s an obvious medical establishment in Pompeii, and a metalworker in Herculaneum (who probably made his money in part from repair work, to judge from the damaged lampstand awaiting attention on the day of the eruption), and the presence of butchers’ knives in other places most likely indicates the sale of meat. Occasionally too a shop sign, or an advertisement outside, will give away the nature of a business (one set of splendid paintings shows the various stages of the felt business, from the preparation of the wool to the final sale).
In most cases we have very little clue.... And we have still less clue about the personnel on either side of the counter. Did the shopowner or manager live on the premises, cramped together with his wife and kids on the mezzanine floor that many of the small units have? Or was that where he kept surplus stock? And who actually came into the shop to buy?... Part of the problem is that – apart from some fairly routine denunciation of the disreputable types who hang out in bars – Roman writers were not much interested in day-to-day retail or consumption. Rich Renaissance documentation lies behind Evelyn Welch’s brilliant "Shopping in the Renaissance" (2005), but in ancient Rome for the most part we learn about shops only when something goes wrong or in some unusual circumstance....
The most striking impression we have of this improvised world of Roman trading comes not from literature but from a painted frieze decorating a large house at Pompeii. This appears to show (exactly how realistically we cannot be certain) the portico of the local forum. A teacher with his pupils is using the colonnade as a classroom; a seemingly posh lady is giving some coins to a beggar with a dog; some men appear to be reading a notice pinned up on the columns. But more than anything else we see rough and ready trade going on: some hawkers are wandering round trying to flog fabric to women; a couple of hopefuls have laid out pots and utensils on the pavement to attract passing custom; and a dozy ironmonger has to be woken up because he has nodded off without noticing that a sale is in the offing. It’s vivid evidence, but it seems a very long way from the knowing visit to the shoe shop in Herodas’ poem – until, that is, you see that in the middle of this busy street scene a shoemaker has set up a rather elegant stall. The painting is very worn and it is hard to be absolutely certain, but it seems that four ladies, one with a young child, are sitting on benches and the shopkeeper is bringing out the stock from his display stands for them to try on and to chat about. It is presum-ably the Roman equivalent of ‘Sikyonians, slippers, boots, Argive sandals, scarlets, flats’...
