Flexible social sites

The spatial representation of foreignness and locality in Roman puteoli and ostia

Samenvatting

In Roman communities, individuals and groups competed for prestige by materialising themselves with the help of public inscriptions, statues, and buildings. Traders provide a particularly interesting example in this regard as they used their urban environment to make claims on their locality, but also reference to their distinct origin. This paper explores how groups of foreign traders used material and textual dimensions of space to influence the construction of their social identity in Puteoli and Ostia during the Roman empire. For this, I systematically examine Ostian and Puteolian epigraphic sources in their archaeological context. My findings contribute to previous insights by arguing that the vast spatial distribution and function of social sites associated with traders enabled context-dependent representations. As a result, individuals were much more flexible in their expression of social identity, as previously assumed.