Bread was a staple of Roman culture. Due to its high demand and short shelf life, citizens purchased bread daily from bakers (pistores), for few homes held the oven necessary. Some communities offered communal ovens to bake bread overnight. Roman plays, novels, historical accounts and even joke books present how common bakers and bakeries were to daily life. In Pompeii, archeologists excavated 35 bakeries throughout the city. Artopticii, the bread pictured in the mural above to the below, was sold in disks about eight inches in diameter.
While artopticii was commonly sold to civilians, special events and occupations prompted different breads. If at the Colosseum, gradilis was eaten. If eating oysters, ostiaries was eaten too. Sailors ate nauticus. Soldiers ate militaris castrensis. Dogs even consumed their own bread, furfureus. Different quality of flour yielded different
classifications
of bread. The
highest quality
was named panis
siligineus, with breads
of decreasing quality named panis cibarius,
secundarius, plebeius, and rusticus.
Despite the many variations, Roman bread, according to our standards today, was poor, in part due to low-quality yeast and coarse flour. Each bakery often contained its own mill for the creation of said flour. Marcus Virgilius Euryasaces mechanized the mixing process through a contraption consisting “of a large stone basin in which wooden paddles, powered by a horse or donkey walking in circles, kneaded the dough mixture of flour, leaven, and water” (Cerealia).
Pistorses were artisans of their craft, but were originally freedmen and lower class citizens. Pistores derives from the name of slaves who grinded grains in the mortar. In what developed to be a generational obligation, bakers formed the collegium
Marcus Virgilius Euryasaces, after earning a fortune from Rome's
bread industry, modeled his
tomb after
a bakery.
Mural preserved in Pompeii of a bakery selling artopticii