Bricks, tiles, and stone were all objects of trade, but for the most part only marble seems to have travelled truly long distances. The market for marble was clearly willing to pay high prices, and it was commonplace for marble to be brought many kilometres over land (for instance from the important quarries at Docimium in Phrygia), and most of the length of the Mediterranean by sea.“9 This was not just a question of satisfying the tastes | of the emperor; so much of certain marbles was reaching Pompeii and Herculaneum by 79 from Numidia and from Teos that an expert scholar concluded that there must have been ‘regular channels of supply’ for the private market. 120 Under the principate the marble trade seems highly organized, i2i and since all or most of the quarries were imperial property, it was probably the emperor’s familia which imposed this degree of organization and profited from it.
The market for other building materials is likely to have been no more than regional at most. This emerges, for instance, from a study of stamped bricks in the northern Adriatic region.122 Yet stamped bricks made in the vicinity of
116 Harris (1980b) [[Chapter 5]].
117 Sections 6-10, 17, 39, 49, 56.
118 Pliny, NH xxxvi.194; cf. Harden (1970: esp. 48-51, bibliography: 67-71); add e. g. Gabler (1983: 109-11) on Italian glass sent to Pannonia. [[For the wreck of a second-century ship carrying mainly glass at Les Embiez in Provence, see the Addendum.]]
119 J. B. Ward-Perkins (1980: esp. fig. 1, p. 27) shows the distribution of sarcophagi made from Docimium marble, and see Fant (1989). For transport of marble by sea, see Pliny, NH xxxvi.2-4, and the report on the Saint-Tropez wreck by Benoit (1950).
120 Ward-Perkins (1980: 39).
121 Cf. ibid., esp. 25.
122 Buora (1985). See also Matijasic (1983: 990-91). The gradual disappearance of these Pansiana stamps after ad 68 suggests that they were replaced by local products.
Rome were used as far away as Tripolitania in the second century, and apparently arrived there as objects of trade.123
World History
