This article analyses the relation between commerce and urban development in Ostia. It explores the question of how commercial interests played a role in decisions about building projects, and how this, in turn, impacted on the way in which the urban landscape functioned as a social space: to which extent did commercial interests shape the urban experience? This agenda necessitates a close reading of building practice on the micro scale, analysing changes and shifts over time, and assessing the impact of individual building projects. For this reason, the argument will develop from a close analysis of one specific subsection of the city, and it will focus on an area that has long remained relatively marginal in scholarly thinking about Ostia's urban landscape: the so-called “Cardo”, which has traditionally played a secondary role in conceptualisations of Ostia's urban landscape, as these very much focused on the eastern decumanus and its continuation west of the forum towards the sea. Still, the excavated section of the cardo, which connected the forum of Ostia with the so-called Laurentine Gate and the necropolis beyond it, must be seen as a key road within Ostia's urban street network, and it certainly was one of the oldest: it has been argued that it went back to before the foundation of the Roman colony in the fourth century BC (Mar 1990; Stöger 2011). Understanding the way in which the role of commerce alongside this road developed over time, and comparing this to the other main arteries of Ostia, which tend to be better known, can add to discourse on the commercial history of Ostia at large.

COMMERCIAL INVESTMENT IN OSTIA

Commerce in Ostia has not escaped scholarly notice. Indeed, there is, compared to elsewhere in the Roman world, a relative wealth of literature on commerce in Ostia. Already in the late 1950s, Girri published a small booklet on the shops of Ostia (Girri 1956). Meiggs subsequently discussed commerce extensively in his trend-setting work on Roman Ostia, as did Hermansen in his book on daily life in the city (Meiggs 1960; Hermansen 1981). More recently, DeLaine has offered an architecture-based approach to the “commercial landscape” of Ostia in the second century AD, while several scholars have been studying bakeries, fulleries, and horrea in the city (DeLaine 2005).