LAUSR

something indicated by the changing use of the Porta Stabia shops at Pompeii. In particular, he charts the rise of the specialized food and drink outlet at Pompeii, marked out in the archaeological record by distinctive masonry counters, which in themselves represent a marked growth in capital investment in retail. For Ellis, this is all part of a general Augustan economic upturn (p. 175). However, demographic expansion is also identified as key here (p. 177), and it is not always clear if the increased demand for food and drink outlets is down to a rise in urban living standards, or simply a consequence of increased levels of urbanization, with growing numbers of people reliant on the market to supply their needs. His ultimate conclusion here is that there were not just more shops than ever before in the early empire, but that they were much more specialized ones; it was, he claims, ‘a period that gave rise to the Roman retail city’ (p. 186). Ellis is surely correct to place retail at the centre of the Roman urban experience, but this does not in itself rely on the taberna, and beyond the development of bars at Pompeii, this specialization is not fully demonstrated, nor are the changes to production that drove a move away from the small-scale urban workshop explored in any detail. The vast majority of tabernae in the archaeological record remain generic in form, and could presumably have been used for a wide variety of functions. Ellis’ third and final ‘retail revolution’ marks the rise of retail homogenization in the early second century (chapter 7), with increasingly standardized shops with shuttered doorways and entrances on the right-hand side being constructed as part of much larger building complexes, incorporating shops, apartments and public spaces. I would argue that this standardization and ubiquity in fact reflect the flexibility of these units, rather than suggesting any standardization of retail practices; after all, it is often just the footprint of these units that survives, telling us very little about how they were used in antiquity. Ellis’ concluding chapter considers the role of retail in the Roman city (chapter 8), although the focus is primarily on the place of bars in urban life. This discussion is important and interesting in its own right, but to a certain extent reflects the tension inherent throughout this book between the study of food and drink outlets specifically and the retail trade more broadly. There is little in this final chapter about the wider role of retail, about supply chains, about who staffed these shops, about the customers, about their profitability, and so on. There is some internal contradiction here, as earlier in the book Ellis claimed that shops were not particularly lucrative and that they were often staffed by freedmen, but the implications are not discussed further here. If this were indeed the case, then retail was not part of any economic boom per se, nor were shops openly available on the rental market to independent entrepreneurs. In this final analysis, however, retail is explicitly linked to economic growth. The development of food-and-drink outlets in particular reflects increased standards of living, fulfilling more of a want than a need; it is here that we see ‘cashed-up urbanites’ (p. 245) choosing to spend their money in bars, offering an economic opportunity for retailers. Retail was for a long time neglected in studies of the ancient economy, rejected in favour of long-distance trade and a focus on production, rather than consumption. It is only recently that the retail trade has started to attract the interest that it deserves and Ellis makes an important contribution to this growing body of work. He offers a detailed study of the taberna in the archaeological record, confidently handling a vast amount of data and demonstrating the complexity not only of the world of the taberna, but also of the social, economic and political setting of the urban centres in which they operated.