Puteoli in the Second Century of the Roman Empire: a Social and Economic Study

τὰ γὰρ τὸ πάλαι (sc. ἄστεα) μεγάλα ἦν, τὰ πολλὰ σμικρὰ αὐτῶν γέγονε. The period of high prosperity in Roman Puteoli extended from the late Republic until the early years of the second century A.D., after which economic primacy in Italy passed from the great port city on the Bay of Naples to Ostia at the Tiber's mouth. Or so, at any rate, it is now commonly believed: Charles Dubois was the first scholar to develop the thesis that Puteoli declined in the second century, and his arguments have been accepted, with modifications, both by economic and social historians and in most recent investigations of the two Roman cities. But inevitably, given the nature of our sources, there are elements of subjectivity in the criteria used to measure historical change; ‘decline’, ‘prosperity’ and ‘growth’ are relative, and therefore often ambiguous, terms, particularly when applied to pre-industrial cities and towns. In this article I hope to modify the prevailing opinion by a closer scrutiny of the evidence for social and economic conditions in second-century Puteoli. In part one the various arguments for a decline are critically reviewed; parts two and three are attempts to exploit a substantial body of local evidence, which is largely inscriptional, to shed light on the nature of Puteolan society and on the economic conditions prevalent in the city; the results of the study are set forth in a brief conclusion.