When Trajan improved the harbor at Ostia, the mouth of the Tiber, the town quickly became a thriving port city. With the decline of the empire, the port silted up and sand covered much of the city, preserving it modern archeology. The city had huge warehouses for grain, but its most unique and unusual feature is a large market square, visible in the picture above just behind the stage of the theater. Around three sides of this square ran a walkway with mosaics showing the name, origin, and specialty of the traders in the adjacent stalls. The picture on the left shows one side with the stall of the "shippers of Carthage" dealing in "its products" in the foreground. The same mosaic is shown below from a different angle.
There are over fifty of these trading establishments identified in this way in the pavement. Sometimes the mosaic shows the good traded, as in the picture of wheat to the right. Often, they show the ships in which the goods arrived. Our emblem for the course, shown below, comes from one these, a ship of the "shipowners and merchants of Karales," that is, of modern Cagliari in Sardinia. Walking around the square with an active imagination (and a good guide to the Latin inscriptions) gives a vivid impression of the trade of the empire.
