Jared Benton, Ph.D., is an associate professor of art who teaches courses that focus on ancient Greece and Rome, archeology and cultural heritage. He came to Old Dominion University in 2015 and is the author of We caught up with him to ask how an introduction to the ancient city of Pompeii led to his research into Roman bakeries.
My introduction to Pompeii was through excavation. In 2003, as an undergraduate student, I applied to this big field school where you go to learn how to excavate. It was run by British and American researchers. I was just like a kid with a trowel, doing what I was told. And it was so fun. A big part of it was the excitement of being around other excitable young nerds. I was like, “They’re my people.”
I started to connect with archeology. Specifically, I connected with things that I could relate to in a facile way. I’d see an oven and I was like, “Oh, I know what that is. I saw that in the pizzeria last night.”
My first job was in a donut shop when I was 15. I worked in that donut shop for three years. I’ve always thought that contributed to my glomming onto the bakeries. Also, I was walking with a scholar who was my supervisor — his name’s Steven Ellis — who said, “You know, no one’s really written about the bakeries,” because I was asking him about it. I thought — opportunity.
I started to connect the dots historically and archeologically for myself via the things that I could wrap my head around. And then, as I became more confident as a scholar, I started to explore topics that were more culturally specific about the past. Pompeii and Central Italy are very heavily written about. I jumped to Morocco, and that’s where of the bulk of my research is focused.
Bread is probably the most important foodstuff for the ancient world; it is their staple, throughout the Mediterranean at least.
For the Mediterranean in the Iron Age and in the Roman period it’s unquestionably baked cereals, and that could come in a variety of forms. Understanding how it was made, how people accessed it and its various forms is going to tell us a lot about society and diversity in the Roman Empire.
One of the things we’ve seen a turn on — and I think studying bakeries has contributed to this — is there used to be this attitude that enslavement in the ancient world wasn’t so bad: that they had avenues to freedom through manumission, which is true; that it wasn’t based on race like American slavery, which is also true; and that they were part of the family. That may be true for a few, but there were tons and tons of slaves who worked in mines. And one of the horrible places that gets used as a threat against enslaved people is, “We’ll send you to the bakeries.” So, it’s clearly a place you don’t want to go if you’re laboring.
We haven’t really captured that because there’s a fantasy of the smell of bread wafting into the street from the bakery. And that is probably how some people experienced those bakeries, people who were freeborn with money. There’s this other side, though. A hot topic now is labor and a more prosaic history of Rome that’s not fixated on the experiences and perspectives of elite Romans, but thinking more about everyday people, and particularly the enslaved.
The past gives context to the present. I don’t think you can understand the history of slavery in all its forms globally if we don’t understand those nuances, because it doesn’t always go by the same names. Understanding labor or craftsmanship in the ancient economy helps us understand how our labor and economic problems have origins in the distant past. They’re not problems that are unique to our moment.
"We're not seeing a cross section of society with the skeletons we have in Pompeii, but rather a cross section of vulnerabilities." - Jared Benton, Ph.D.
Lessons from Pompeii
There are some interesting things that we learned about Pompeii in the last 30 years. One is there was very little gold or silver coinage found in Pompeii. There still isn't much. For a while people thought it was because it was a poor town, but we think now that's what you take with you. If you have expensive furniture or something, you're not going to bring that in this crisis. I'm not going to load my pockets up with silver platters. I might bury those in the backyard or hide them in the house somewhere. So, high value, easy to carry denominations are probably in people's pockets. You know, either they escaped or they're dead on the road somewhere.
The other interesting thing is there's only about 3,000 skeletons in Pompei, and best estimates is somewhere between 9,000 and 15,000 people lived there. I'm not saying everybody survived, they might be dead in caravans outside the city, but they got out. We’re catching Pompei in exodus.
One of the things I think we can learn from this, too, is it seems like most of the skeletons, and it's hard to infer social status and wealth, but it does seem like a lot of the people who died may have been enslaved or were not wealthy. We treat disasters sometimes as some sort of great equalizer — and everybody does get affected — but I think Hurricane Katrina showed that the most vulnerable in society will be impacted far greater than wealthy people, or people with means to leave and rent hotels.
That phenomenon's clear in the Roman record, too. We're not seeing a cross section of society with the skeletons we have in Pompeii, but rather a cross section of vulnerabilities. That's one of the big lessons, they weren't prepared. They had no science to measure seismic activity. Their framework for understanding the explosion of a volcano was religious rather than scientific. I think about this sometimes when we could be more well prepared and we have science and the knowledge to see the problems coming, and we see them coming but we still don't do anything.
The other thing we could learn is that things like these do happen and they are terrible, and we should try to prepare for them. Whether that's a hurricane, pandemic, climate crisis or a volcano exploding. Something's going to happen eventually. And if we can foresee it, we should try to prepare for it so that thousands upon thousands of people don't die.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.