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Pompeii would seem to be the ideal Roman city to do bottom-up economic history. It is famously a city of houses, and although its elite fabric has garnered more interest, recent work has drawn attention not only to nonelite housing, but also to other aspects of nonelite economic life – retail and artisanal infrastructure, foodways, and broader consumer behavior.1 Most of these studies have, by necessity, been qualitative in nature, limited by a strange lacuna in the Pompeiian data themselves: prices. For a town blanketed in graffiti and plastered with political sloganeering, we are poorly informed about how much things cost. Some 64 pieces of price data are preserved from the Vesuvian cities, a seemingly robust dataset that conceals systemic problems.2 Most prices are preserved as graffiti, a genre of “everyday writing,” which until recently received little attention and has yet to be fully integrated into Roman economic studies.3 For some items – such as the cost of a prostitute – we have multiple references, but for most everyday necessities, we are left either with no data or with data that confuse rather than illuminate.4 Prices formed part of the Roman rhetorical apparatus of insult and exaggeration, and therefore much of our seeming price dataset may be intended as satire. Prices also formed part of different systems of value from our own, not necessarily circumscribed by quantity (price per unit) or time (service per period).5 The information on “price” in Pompeii is therefore more accurately information about “cost” – the former implying a set value per unit, whereas the latter describes simply the value of an exchange independent of qualifiers. These problems have not gone unnoticed, but they have pushed the few studies that touch on prices onto the more fertile ground of monetary circulation or Roman numeracy.6 The absence of a detailed study of Pompeiian prices is consequently not surprising, but it is nonetheless limiting for any quantitative understanding of economic well-being – particularly for nonelites – in a city that would otherwise be rich territory for it.
This paper seeks to partially address this gap with an analysis of five expense lists, scratched on the walls of five different buildings. These lists enumerate a series of consumables...