Arretium
About
Fine red-gloss Arretine ware first made this Etruscan hill town famous across the Roman world, its potters' stamped molds still filling the local Maecenas museum. Emigrant potters had already carried the technique to Lyon and Pisa under Augustus, and by the Flavian dynasty the industry that made Arretium's name had largely moved on. In 117 CE the city's great pottery boom was history, not headline news.
What happened here
The workshop runs as a production line. Clay is dug locally, weathered over winter, kneaded and thrown, or pressed into moulds for the decorated wares. Vessels are dried under cover, stamped with the potter's name, stacked in the kiln around a central flue and fired for days with the temperature judged by eye and by test pieces pulled from a port in the side. A big firing holds tens of thousands of pots and a bad one loses the lot. Wasters are dumped in heaps beside the works. Some workshops export across half the empire and their stamps turn up thousands of miles away. Fuel is the limit on everything, so kilns sit near woodland and move when it runs out.
In ancient writing
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History 35.160
Names Arretium among the towns whose tableware is famous, in a passage arguing that earthenware still outranks silver at most Roman tables.
Sources
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →