The Rental Market in Early Imperial Rome

Today we visited the ancient ruins of Pompeii! It is incredible how well preserved the whole place is. It's unimaginable how much we know about a civilization that existed so long ago. I was particularly enthralled by the clay casts of the people of the time. It was amazing to see their facial expressions frozen in time. Another incredibly interesting thing I learned during our visit to the ruins of Pompeii was about the rigidly standardized nature of Roman architecture. When our guide explained how every house was built with essentially the same floor plan only varying by size, I was very surprised. It seems so contradictory to the value we place on uniqueness today. 

Our article described one particular excavation in Pompeii-that of a Vineyard. This excavation was geared toward gaining a better understanding of the planting pattern of vineyards in pompeii at the time. Before the excavation there had been disagreement between the people of the areas and the fruit scholars at the University of Naples over how the grape vines were planted. The locals claimed that the ancient people of pompeii staked their grapes just as they do today, whereas the fruit scholars claimed it is more likely that they pruned the vines low and left them without stakes. The excavation revealed that the people of Pompeii had in fact been using stakes as the locals suggested. The other thing the article stressed was how how uniformly distributed the root cavities of the plants were. Each was four Roman feet apart from the next one. This pattern, like that of the architecture seen at the ruins, again suggests a great desire for uniformity and consistency. 

I found this sense of rigid order and repetition to be interesting, and found myself comparing this with our attitude today. While I think that in a lot of ways, we still value a sense of order, when it comes to many products, we place individuality over set designs. For example, when it comes to home design, no one would want the same floor plan that everyone else has. In fact, people often have their homes custom designed for them. On the other hand, I imagine farm layout and design is done just as meticulously today as at the time.