Roman Businesswomen I: The case of the producers and distributors of garum in Pompeii
By Piotr Berdowski
Analecta Archaeologica Ressoviensia, Vol. 3 (2008)
Introduction: This paper is intended to be a beginning of a series of texts about the economic activity of women in Rome. We still do not have a comprehensive monograph referring to the issue; however, one can find a number of contributory papers. During the last three decades, gender studies have been marked by a true explosion of works referring to different aspects of females’ life in antiquity and providing invaluable facts. The studies on the economic aspects of females’ activity in Greece and Rome have emerged as a relatively new field for researchers against the background of this knowledge. This state is in a way understandable and filling the gaps in our knowledge is a postulate which is urgent and at the same time difficult to complete. The substantial difficulty arises due to the state and character of the sources accessible for scholars. Much has been written about the sparseness of the evidence referring to Greek and Roman women; also it has been underlined that the few sources there are represent the male point of view. As rightly remarked by Neville Morley what we have is not ‘the real lives of real ancient women’ but rather ‘just representation and images of them’ . Happily our analytical tools are progressively more and more advanced: the heuristic nature of the present methods does not at all resemble the older works, whose authors had a quite naive attitude to the source material.
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