The Uses of Pre-Industrial Streets

Ancient Romans spent much of their lives in the streets

On Friday, I crossposted this article from Potentially Interesting Roman History about filth in ancient Roman streets and attempted remedies. This is an important issue since urbanists insist that street life is better. Certainly lingering amidst the filth is unhealthy, so the prescriptive theory of multi-functional street use must account for sanitation. Whatever the rich social lives that Romans enjoyed, they also wallowed in the muck.

This essay examines ancient Roman cities in terms of their pre-industrial streets. In the coming weeks, I will be publishing a few essays about the writings of Martial and his rebellion against the salutatio, a practice in ancient Rome that supported its patronage system. This played out every morning in the streets, and it was, as far as I know, a practice that was unique to the Roman world.

Image 1. Image Source: Eduardo Barrón, “Nero and Seneca, by Eduardo Barrón (1904). Museo del Prado,” Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0.

I distinguish pre-industrial streets and modern streets. Modern streets are primarily or exclusively transportation corridors and they are optimized for movement. By contrast, pre-industrial streets serve multi-purposes: in addition to transportation, they support business transactions and social interactions. Many ancient people found sustenance in streets. Sometimes these street types are not perfectly distinguished. There are examples of modern multi-purpose streets and there are examples of ancient highways, or rural roads whose sole purpose was conveying traffic. Despite the rough edges, this distinction is useful for understanding the differences between pre-industrial and modern cities, and for understanding modern transportation in general. Broadly speaking, pre-industrial streets supported a greater range of public uses, implying that people used them in many ways in which people now use modern parks. In this sense, the Forum Romanum—in modern terms, the main square of ancient Rome—was in its pre-industrial function simply a wide street.¹

This and other questions about the cleanliness of ancient streets are relevant, since many classical scholars believe that people spent much of their lives there. Romans retrieved their water from the streets, procured their food in the streets, and often ate it there. Romans socialized in the streets. They conducted business in the streets. Last, there was the unique practice of the salutatio, which will be discussed in What Are Streets For in the coming weeks.²

Part of the question of street use is a definitional problem. While the carriageways were depressed, they can be understood as a street part and not exhaustive of the definition of the street itself. Pompeii is famous among ancient cities for its raised sidewalks and stepping-stone crosswalks. Mary Beard imagines these sidewalks and stepping stones as refuges for Pompeiians from the filth in the carriageways. When I write “street,” I refer to the entire width of the easement, which often includes a curb, planting strip, and sidewalk in modern configurations. The problem with my definition is that it depends on knowledge or assumed knowledge of the legal status of property; that is, what property is publicly owned and what property is privately owned. Sometimes this is not intuitive. A practical alternative to defining streets for the purpose of understanding their geometries is delineating streets by the building planes formed by the facades. Varro considers this idea through the analogy of buildings as rows of crops and streets as the corridors between the rows.³

Similar to James Coverley’s essay on filth in Roman streets, Mary Beard concludes that a critical purpose of the ditched carriageways in Pompeii was receiving sewage, which were cleansed by periodic torrents streaming into the city from Mount Vesuvius, thus also functioning as a storm run-off system. Beard imagines that filth was a problem of Pompeian streets and the trenched carriageways served to receive effluence, which was periodically flushed with high-volumes of water running down the hills during storms. The annual volume of human waste produced in Pompeii was 6,500,000 kilos, according to one rough estimate. That does not account for the waste produced by non-human animals.⁴

Filth in public easements is a challenge to urban theorists who hold up pre-industrial streets as exemplars. They were clearly unsanitary. Yet Romans spent much of their lives in the streets for a variety of purposes. One of these purposes was what we might call urban foraging. As Beard characterizes the practice in Pompeii, there was a social inversion of dining out, in which dining at home was only accessible to elite households:⁵

Most ancient Pompeians, like most modern visitors, would have spent a lot of time on their city’s streets. This was not simply a consequence of the warm weather or some laid-back ‘Mediterranean lifestyle’. Many of the inhabitants of ancient Pompeii had little choice but to live outdoors; They had nowhere else to go. True, the super-rich families had plenty of space in their large houses and palaces: quiet retiring rooms, shady gardens, showy dining rooms, even private bath suites. Others who were not in that league lived comfortably enough in houses of half a dozen rooms. Further down the scale of wealth, many of the town’s inhabitants lived in a single small room above their shop, bar or workshop, with no ‘mains’ water supply, and often no means of heating or cooking — except perhaps for a small brazier (which must have doubled as a serious fire hazard).

Most ancient Pompeians, like most modern visitors, would have spent a lot of time on their city’s streets . . . . Many of the inhabitants of ancient Pompeii had little choice but to live outdoors. They had nowhere else to go . . . . Further down the scale of wealth, many of the town’s inhabitants lived in a single small room above their shop, bar or workshop, with no ‘mains’ water supply, and often no means of heating or cooking—except perhaps for a small brazier (which must have doubled as a serious fire hazard). Compact quarters for a single occupant, this kind of apartment would have been little more than a cramped dormitory for a family of three or four. For almost all of their basic needs they would have gone outside: for water to the street fountains, for a meal—beyond bread, fruit and cheese, and whatever simple concoction could be brewed up in the brazier—to one of the many bars and cafés which opened directly onto the pavement (Plate 4). Pompeii offers a striking reversal of our own social norms. For us, it is the rich who visit restaurants, the poor who cook economically at home. At Pompeii, it was the poor who ate out.

Broadly speaking, Beard is merely expressing a consensus among classical scholars about ancient Roman streets. Regarding Pompeii, further evidence for streets as the sources for potable water are the remains of fountains, which are seemingly located without regard to their impacts on street traffic. Water fountains appear anywhere within the rights-of-way. This implies the importance of the street as a source of sustenance, even when it impeded vehicular and pedestrian movement. These water fountains imposed both a primary and secondary effect on movement. People gathered at the fountains to retrieve water and they also socialized there, creating even more obstacles to movement. Where the fountains where placed does not appear optimized to facilitate movement. Many fountains constituted what Jeremy Hartnett characterized as nuisances.⁶

Streets as Places

A good place to start regarding the questions of the design, conditions, and uses of streets come from the great literary corpus. Regarding the uses of streets, I sometimes cite Varro, who took a theoretical approach, while imagining that a locus simultaneously facilitated movement and cessation of movement. Without too much extrapolation, it is easy to re-imagine Varro’s commentary, as David J. Newsome does, to apply Varro’s analysis to the concept of place.⁷

Jeremy Hartnett invokes the premise of Juvenal’s First Satire to illustrate the varied scenes of a Roman street, including varied street users, uses, and performances:⁸

As his examples come to a head in this programmatic overture, Juvenal gets specific about location: “Wouldn't it be possible to fill a whole notebook while you're standing on the street corner?” Two final street scenes follow: six men bear an open litter carrying a fellow who got rich by forging documents, and a distinguished lady who has poisoned her husband walks unabashed behind his bier. [FN 3...Juv. 1.63-72.] Like their predecessors, these examples hinge on a shared pair of characteristics of the street: first, it is a place to observe all of society. Juvenal fills the space with everyone from the humiliated populus to the cold-hearted matron. Second, he sees them all as they wish to be seen. The outrages to which Juvenal bears witness are products of streetgoers' efforts to posture here --through what they wear, ride, or drive; through their domination of the thoroughfare; or through their ability to keep up appearances despite common knowledge of their transgressions. For them, the street offered an arena for display before the eyes of the many. For Juvenal, as for many Romans, the street's broad spectrum and manifold performances triggered reflection about society at large as well as individuals' places, just or unjust, within it.

Urban access requires the facilitation of stopping just as much as the facilitation of moving. So place facilitates both moving and lingering. Many people conducted business on the streets of Rome. Martial complained about “Rome being nothing but a shop” and about the danger of barber’s plying their trade on the sidewalk, providing literary evidence that streets were places where Romans conducted business. Artistic representations of such practices come in the form of tapestries and murals.⁹

Streets facilitated recreation and socialization as well. Water fountains located in the streets of Pompeii brought people together based on their need for potable water, but often people lingered around these fountains, so they doubled as meeting places. This pattern repeated itself at the shrines (lares), which were often street features. People sought the shrines to pay homage, but they also lingered around them. There were also corner boys (circuli) in ancient Rome; that is, groups of young men who lingered at street corners socializing and gossiping.¹⁰

Conclusion

This brief essay presents the streets of ancient Rome as examples of pre-industrial streets. A modern street is one that prioritizes movement, both at the surface and underneath it. Modern streets include public utility easements, some above ground and some underground. In the US, electrical and telephone wires are suspended in the air by high poles, corridors of invisible transportation of electricity and electrical signals. Underground are pipes conveying natural gas, water, and sewage. Since they are underground, they are not competing with other human uses, so prioritizing movement of gas, water, and sewage has no direct impact on quality of life. Yet the legal and social constructions of street surfaces make them functionally similar to the underground infrastructure: vehicular mobility is prioritized and anything or anyone that is not moving at speed or is impeding speed is characterized as an illicit street use. In sharp contrast to the modern street, facilitation of mobility was just one of many legitimate street uses, and these different uses and different users required negotiation and compromise. This essay presents just one interpretation of the streets from one ancient society. We should consider many other examples of pre-industrial streets from various civilizations and from different eras.

1. For a comprehensive study of the pre-industrial city, see Gideon Sjoberg, The Pre-Industrial City, Past and Present (Glencoe, Il: Free Press, 1960). For more about Roman street life, see Mary Beard, Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008), 52-80; Claire Holleran, Shopping in Ancient Rome: The Retail Trade in the Late Republic and the Principate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), esp. 197-231; Claire Holleran, “Representations of Food Hawkers in Ancient Rome,” in Food Hawkers: Selling in the Streets from Antiquity to the Present, Melissa Calaresu and Danielle van den Heuvel, eds. (London: Routledge, 2016); Claire Holleran, Shopping in Ancient Rome: The Retail Trade in the Late Republic and the Principate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Claire Holleran, “The Street Life of Ancient Rome,” in Rome, Ostia, Pompeii: Movement and Space, Ray Laurence and David J. Newsome, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 251-60; Jeremy Hartnett, The Roman Street: Urban Life and Society in Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Jeremy Harnett, “The Power of Nuisances in the Roman Street,” in Laurence and Newsome, 135-59; Akkelies van Nes, “Measuring Spatial Visibility, Adjacency, Permeability and Degrees of Street Life in Pompeii,” in Laurence and Newsome, 100-17; Steven J. R. Ellis, “Pes Dexter: Superstition and the State in Shaping of Storefronts and Street Activity in the Roman World,” in Laurence and Newsome,” 160-73.

2. Simon A. Speksnijder, “Beyond ‘Public’ and ‘Private’: Accessibility and Visibility during Salutationes,” in Public and Private in the Roman House and Society, Kaius Touri and Laura Nissen, eds. (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2015), 87-99; Timothy M. O’Sullivan, Walking in Roman Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 55, 66.

3. Beard, Fires of Vesuvius, 55; Varro, De Lingua Latina 5.145.1.

4. Beard, The Fires of Vesuvius, 55-7.

5. Beard, Fires of Vesuvius, 57[quoted]-8, 60-1, 70, 107; Beryl Rawson, “Marriages, families, households,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rome, Paul Erdkamp, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 102; Hartnett, The Roman Street, 39-42, 63; Holleran, Shopping in Ancient Rome, 2, 96-7, 205, 207-8, 210-11, 224; Alan Kaiser, Roman Urban Street Networks: Streets and the Organization of Space in Four Cities (London: Routledge, 2011), 73.

6. For a study of the placement of water fountains in Pompeii, see Hartnett, “The Power of Nuisances,” 135-59.

7. David J. Newsome, “Introduction: Making Movement Meaningful,” in Laurence and Newsome, 20-1; BNJD, “The Varro Paradox,” 19 April 2022, What Are Streets For.

8. Hartnett, The Roman Street, 76-7. Citing Juvenal, Satires 1.63-72.

9. Martial, Epigrams, 7.61; Hartnett, The Roman Street, 60-1, 63-4 Holleran, Shopping in Ancient Rome, 194-231; Holleran, “Street Life of Ancient Rome,” 254-8.

10. Placement of fountains in the street: Hartnett, The Roman Street, 46-8; Hartnett, “The Power of Nuisances,” 149-151, 155; Alan Kaiser, “Cart Flow in Pompeii and Rome,” in Laurence and Newsome, 180. Placement of lares in the street: Alan Kaiser, Roman Urban Street Networks: Streets and the Organization of Space in Four Cities (London: Routledge, 2011), 73; J. Bert Lott, “Regions and neighborhoods,” in Erdkamp, 177; Diane Favro, The Urban Image of Augustan Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 124. Circuli: Peter O’Neill, “Going Round in Circles: Popular Speech in Ancient Rome,” Classical Antiquity 22, no. 1 (2003): 135-76; Hartnett, The Roman Street, 49, 51-3.