The baking trade must have given employment to a large number of persons.  So beyond doubt did the supply of vegetables, which were brought into the city from gardens outside, and formed, after the corn, the staple food of the lower classes.  We have already seen in the Moretum the countryman adding to his store of bread by a hotch-potch made of vegetables, and the reader of the poem will have been astonished at the number mentioned, including garden herbs for flavouring purposes.  The ancients were fully alive to the value of vegetable food and of fruit as a healthy diet in warm climates, and the wonderfully full information we have on this subject comes from medical writers like Galen, as well as from Pliny’s Natural History, and from the writers on agriculture.  The very names of some Roman families, e.g. the Fabii and Caepiones, carry us back to a time when beans and onions, which later on were not so much in favour, were a regular part of the diet of the Roman people.  The list of vegetables and herbs which we know of as consumed fills a whole page in Marquardt’s interesting account of this subject, and includes most of those which we use at the present day.[84] It was only when the consumption of meat and game came in with the growth of capital and its attendant luxury, that a vegetarian diet came to be at all despised.  This is another result of the economic changes caused by the Hannibalic war, and is curiously illustrated by the speech of the cook of a great household in the Pseudolus of Plautus, who prides himself on not being as other cooks are, who make the guests into beasts of the field, stuffing them with all kinds of food which cattle eat, and even with things which cattle would refuse![85] we may take it that at all times the Roman of the lower class consumed fruit and vegetables largely, and thus gave employment to a number of market-gardeners and small purveyors.  Fish he did not eat; like meat, it was too expensive; in fact fish-eating only came in towards the end of the republican period, and then only as a luxury for those who could afford to keep fish-ponds on their estates.  How far the supply of other luxuries, such as butchers’ meat, gave employment to freemen, is not very clear; and perhaps we need here only take account of such few other products, e.g. oil and wine, as were in universal demand, though not always procurable by the needy.  There were plenty of small shops in Rome where these things were sold; we have a picture of such a shop (caupona) in another of the minor Virgilian poems, the Copa, i.e. hostess, or perhaps in this case the woman who danced and sang for the entertainment of the guests.  She plied her trade in a smoky tavern (fumosa taberna), all the contents of which are charmingly described in the poem.[86]

Let us now see how the other chief necessity of human life, the supply of clothing, gave employment to the free Roman shopkeeper.