Open Collections

Naylor, Matthew

University of British Columbia

The study of Roman economic behaviour has been dominated by quantitative analyses of large datasets for quite a while. Further, there has been a general reluctance to interact with material qualitatively in order to understand more fully the social aspects of what drove small-scale economic behaviours in ancient Rome. While there has been much previous scholarship concerned with the scenes of customer interaction and sale contained in this study, focusing instead on the potential semiotic responses of this material as a marketing tool can not only provide us with a greater understanding of how Roman shopkeepers responded to increased competition, but also allows us to more fully access customer preference and value assignment in the Roman world. This analysis sheds light on the value-laden cultural concepts that this particular subset of shop signs were commissioned to communicate in order to elicit positive value responses by observers. Seemingly, the most important of these concepts were communicative ability, trust, performance, entertainment, and success. The value-centred semiotic approach utilized here will demonstrate how ancient Romans used these value-laden concepts within an evolving and adaptive environment where retailing was the most visible form of commerce. This not only shows that we can speak of advertising and marketing in the ancient Roman world—something which has been objected to in the past—but that ancient advertisements were commissioned to be just as persuasive as post-industrial marketing strategies.

Text

2024-01-23

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87335

Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/