The Roman street brought together people of all backgrounds, genders and statuses, connecting places as well as buildings and playing the key role in urban infrastructure. This book integrates the aspects that characterize and represent Roman street life. It begins with an introductory chapter that presents the reader with a selection of aspects concerning streets that might seem obvious, but can still so easily be overlooked—and have been in previous research. That is to say, streets are more than just a physical space for simple movement and infrastructure; they provide a location for religious, commercial, as well as civic activities and, further, they form a stage for all kinds of social interactions. This makes the street an important and central part of urbanism. The introduction also clarifies the nature and extent of the primary sources the author draws upon: ancient Roman authors on the one hand and the material remains of the Vesuvian cities Pompeii and Herculaneum on the other.
What follows are three sections, each consisting of several chapters and subchapters. The first, ‘Repopulating the street’, focuses on the physical appearance of the Roman street. Aside from appearance and technical properties, this also includes the city dweller's perception of the street in terms of bustle, cleanliness and discomfort, amongst other factors. Different kinds of activities regularly taking place on the street are presented, among them institutional activities like rituals and commerce, as well as behaviour and interaction between individuals. Part II, ‘The street and its architectural border’, comprises the strongest part of the book, describing the street in its role as ‘architectural border’, as Hartnett calls it. By this he means features that belong to adjacent buildings—mostly of domestic houses—but which also have a clear impact on the street environment. These features can be physical as well as symbolical. Thereby, he successfully demonstrates a link between house owners and passers-by, or, in other words, between architecture and society. The third and final part, ‘The street in microcosm’, most fully realizes Hartnett's explicit aim for the book as a whole: bringing the Roman street back to life. For that purpose, he selects a distinct location in both Herculaneum and Pompeii to (re-)create, using architectural and inscriptional evidence, several narratives around these discrete loci. The actors in those stories are individuals: for example, magistrates using a water tower as a bulletin board for their self-promotion; Augustales accentuating their civic presence through architectural structures; and a barmaid endorsing a candidate for duumvir, and having her name erased in return.
Does Hartnett succeed in bringing the Roman street back to life? He certainly manages to shift the research focus from an outside perspective to an insider's experience. The number of literary sources about Roman street life he has collated are very helpful in that respect, since they are the only witnesses to the atmosphere and ambience of street life. However, literary sources must be read with care, because the authors are potentially biased due to their origin, social status and their targeted readership. Furthermore, the scenes described mostly take place in the city of Rome itself, and thus cannot and should not be extrapolated to Roman streets in general. A similar problem occurs with Pompeii and Herculaneum. In the same way that Rome is nearly the only source when it comes to the literary evidence, these two cities form the whole foundation of the archaeological evidence. So, the picture of the Roman street that Hartnett is trying to recreate is primarily based on literature from the city of Rome and material remains from two cities located in the same area and destroyed at the same time. These circumstances could be considered to render any reconstruction as potentially rather one-dimensional. However, this rather unavoidable circumstance should neither be seen as an imbalance in the author's research, nor is the author unaware of the restricting nature of the data (pp. 15–17). There is almost no Roman literary corpus richer than the one coming from the city itself, and no other Roman city well enough preserved to give us so many details about the street system, facade architecture, decoration and murals as the Vesuvian cities. It would be a shame to neglect their value simply because of a lack of comparanda. It should accordingly be kept in mind that examples of Roman streets are under examination here, and not necessarily the Roman street, per se. In that regard, the author wisely chose a subtitle that expresses the intrinsic and unavoidable focus of the study.
This restriction, however, does not make the book any less valuable or enjoyable to read. The author makes precise observations and arguments about how house owners deliberately and carefully chose to design their house's facades and how, in doing so, they actively shaped their street's environment. It is no surprise that there was a tendency on the part of owners to make their house the most outstanding and visible. Instruments to that end could be special paving or ramping of sidewalks (chapter 4), setting up benches (chapter 6), or very distinct features of house facades (chapter 5). It must be pointed out, though, that the processes behind these kinds of decisions were more complex than the simple ambition to stand out. The goal was to achieve a balance between conspicuousness and becoming an obstacle to movement (pp. 210–19), as well as between magnificence and social appropriateness (pp. 158–61). Furthermore, house owners did not solely play an active role by shaping the physical appearance of the street, being simultaneously exposed to public judgement and critique (pp. 93–8). Instead of a one-way relationship from transmitter to receiver, a complex and interactive system of social dynamics operated on the Roman street on a daily basis.
In explicating these processes, this book is a useful contribution to the study of social and hierarchical aspects of domestic architecture. The focus of previous studies lay, for example, on the size, shape, and location of representative rooms within the house (Dickmann Reference Dickmann1999), access patterns of guests and clientes (Wallace-Hadrill Reference Wallace-Hadrill1994) and the social meaning of wall paintings (Leach Reference Leach2004). In adding to this corpus of work, Hartnett is able to show that the phenomenon of the image of society being expressed in domestic architecture does not just occur beyond the threshold. Instead, symbols and messages reach far out into the street and become part of the scenery, while representing the house owner's social status and identity.
This book is for everyone interested in the symbolical meaning of the street in its urban context. The focus lies on the street's function as a stage for various social encounters and activities. In addition to the performance itself, the stage setting—in the form of built structures like benches and sidewalks, as well as architectural features like house facades—is of equal importance. Within this field of interest, Hartnett assembles an impressive collection of literary and archaeological data. What the reader will not find is chapters on construction processes, traffic and analytical methods, either spatial analysis, or similar quantitative approaches. One exception is a few tables and calculations about the location and frequency of streetside benches (pp. 212–17); those data are based on a former publication of Hartnett himself (Hartnett Reference Hartnett2008). These kinds of research questions can rather be found in, for example, Laurence and Newsome (Reference Laurence and Newsome2011).
Over 90 illustrations and 9 coloured plates help the reader to visualize all the various details and minutiae. Furthermore, by summing up his results at the end of every (sub-) chapter and at the same time giving an outlook on what will follow, Hartnett closely and articulately integrates his arguments, providing an easy and comprehensible read.
