Short Measures and Broken Pots in the Roman Market

Marcus Valerius

The gates of the macellum swing open just after dawn, and the smell reaches you before the noise does. Fish, wet stone, cheese, crushed herbs, and under it all the sharp sweetness of new bread from somewhere behind the colonnade. Come in, come in. Stay close to me. The crowd here will carry you off if you let it.

Marcus Valerius

My wife Cornelia has sent me with a handful of bronze and a short list. Lentils. A little salt pork. Oil, if the price is kind. We're not people with a granary on a country estate, you understand. A rich man fills a storeroom once a year. We eat what we can buy this morning, in the portion we can pay for. So the measure matters to us more than the price does. The scoop is where the day is won or lost.

Marcus Valerius

Around the walls, the shops are locked up at night, which is why the traders are so cheerful at this hour. Their money slept safe. In the middle, the water basin is already loud with fishmongers gutting the catch, and the water runs red toward the drain. A good Roman keeps his sandals out of it.

Marcus Valerius

I go to a man I'll call Sabinus, because that's his name. He sells legumes, and he smiles as if we were cousins. Now, there's an old opinion, and Cicero put it in writing, that men who sell food are vulgar, because they can't turn a profit without a little lying. My mother said it more simply. She said, count your change twice and your lentils once, and never look at his face.

Marcus Valerius

I ask for one sextarius of lentils. You know the sextarius. Every Roman child knows it, or should, the way he knows his own cup. Sabinus dips his wooden scoop, and he's quick, very quick, and the lentils come up in a neat little hill. A hill looks generous. But I've carried my wife's shopping for twenty years, and my wrist knows what a full sextarius feels like. This one feels like a sextarius with its shoulders hunched.

Marcus Valerius

I turn the scoop over in my hand. The walls are thick. Too thick. And the bottom sits higher inside than it ought to. A man with a sharp knife and a little patience can make a measure that looks honest from every side except the inside.

Marcus Valerius

Sabinus laughs, and then he's wounded. Old wood, he says. Wear. Everything wears, Marcus Valerius, even the standards, even the weights that hang in the temples. And here's the trouble, my friend, he isn't entirely lying. Weights and measures do wear down. Our Roman pound, the libra, is a little over three hundred twenty grams, and the pounds in different hands differ by a few grams either way, even before anyone cheats. The line between a rascal and a tired old scoop is thinner than a bronze coin. And every argument in this market lives on that line.

Marcus Valerius

People have started to gather. Naturally. Nothing draws a Roman like another man's quarrel. I do not want a shouting match. I want my lentils. So I pick up the jar and my coins, and I say, loudly enough for the whole row, that we'll settle this at the stone.

Marcus Valerius

The stone is the mensa ponderaria, the public measuring table, set under the portico where everyone can see it. It's a great slab, waist high, carved with round hollows of the official sizes, from the big modius down to the sextarius and the little hemina. Each hollow is lined with bronze, and at the bottom each has a small spout. Nobody owns it. That's the point of it. It belongs to the city, and the city doesn't take bribes. Or so we say.

Marcus Valerius

Sabinus follows me, muttering, with half the market behind him. I pour my lentils into the hollow for the sextarius, slowly, level with my hand, while strangers lean in as if I were pouring wine for the gods. They don't fill it. A finger's width short, perhaps a little more. You could hear a coin drop.

Marcus Valerius

There's a noise from the crowd, the low pleased growl of people who have been cheated themselves and enjoy seeing it happen to someone else. Sabinus goes grey. Then he goes loud. The stone is crooked, he says. The stone is old. The stone, apparently, has a grudge.

Marcus Valerius

And then the crowd parts, because the aedile has arrived.

Marcus Valerius

I've no idea whether he was walking the market anyway, or whether somebody ran to fetch him when the shouting began. Honestly, nobody knows. Some mornings he strolls through and nobody so much as clears a throat. Other mornings he comes down on a stall like a summer storm. Today, he's here, and that's all anyone cares about. He wears a bordered toga, and he has his attendants behind him, a clerk with a tablet and two public slaves carrying rods.

Marcus Valerius

He looks at the hollow. He looks at Sabinus's scoop. He doesn't say much. He takes the scoop and tests it on the stone himself, and the clerk writes. Then he hands it back to an attendant, and the attendant lifts the jar of false measures from the stall and brings it down on the paving.

Marcus Valerius

It breaks with a crack that echoes off the colonnade. Clay everywhere. Then the scoop, thrown down and stamped on. The law gives him that right, and a fine too, and the city does love a magistrate who makes a show of it. Of course the poets laugh at the little town aediles who think smashing a short pot is the grandest thing they'll ever do. Juvenal sneers at a threadbare one in some forgotten country town, whose whole glory is judging weights and breaking jars. Well. Let Juvenal go hungry on short measure for a month and see how he feels about broken pots.

Marcus Valerius

Still, I'm not a fool. In the baths, men grumble that some aediles and some bakers scratch each other's backs, and that loaves shrink when nobody's looking. I've bought bread that I could cover with my thumb. So I don't thank the magistrate too loudly. I thank him enough.

Marcus Valerius

Sabinus, shamed, fills my jar again, this time from a scoop borrowed from his neighbor, and he pours it into the stone hollow first, so everyone can watch. It fills. A heap of lentils sits proud at the brim, and a public slave strikes it level with a wooden stick, the rutellum, the way the grain measurers do. Nothing hollow. Nothing heaped. Just what I paid for.

Marcus Valerius

I buy the salt pork from a man who hangs his steelyard from a hook, with the sliding weight shaped like a little bronze acorn. The beam bears a stamp that says it was checked on the Capitoline, under Jupiter's own roof. I find that comforting, and I don't know why, since the man who owns it is just as capable of lying. But a god watching a scale is a better thing than no god watching it. I tell him to weigh it slowly.

Marcus Valerius

Walking home, I carry the lentils against my chest. Nothing grand. A pint of small brown seeds, and a pound or so of pork. But Cornelia will tip them into the pot tonight and know, the way you know a coin is good, that this one time the city kept faith with her. And tomorrow I'll count again.