In JRA 15 (2002) 20-44, M. Bradley argued that Roman fullers were not involved in the finishing of cloth as part of the textile-manufacturing process, but acted solely as commercial laundrymen; further, he questioned the archaeological evidence used to identify fulleries. His paper contains a number of misconceptions, especially in the use of archaeological evidence.

Bradley attempts to argue that Roman fullers washed clothes, both new and worn, for other people, but that they did not form part of the manufacturing or finishing process of new goods before they were sold to the customer. I am not convinced that the evidence permits this conclusion, although I agree that service cleaning was an important part of their work. The nature of the genres of literary evidence surviving from antiquity is such that most writers would be unlikely to concern themselves with the place of fulling within the operations of textile-production and finishing; they are much more likely to refer to fulling in the context of operations more directly familiar to them or their readers, that is, the commercial cleaning aspect.

Bradley writes (22):

Diocletian's Prices Edict, with its individual pricings, certainly does not appeal to the logic of industrial wholesale; more likely, it was customary for an individual to purchase a rude uestimentum and then to put it through a series of ‘finishing’ services of his choice which included washing (and therefore initial shrinking of the fabric), combing, bleaching, dyeing and pressing (some or all of which were offered by the fullo).

Among the most significant material evidence for manufacturing and production activities in Roman towns are the remains of workshops dedicated to fulling. The layout of these so-called fullonicae is often relatively well preserved and provides detailed information about the daily activities in these workshops. Together with the remains of bakeries and a few other identifiable urban workshops, fullonicae allow us to discuss important aspects of the social and economic contexts of production in Roman cities. However, despite the potential of the evidence and the significance of the subject, there has been little discussion of Roman fulling, and the contribution of M. Bradley in JRA 15 (2002) 21-44 is only the second to discuss Roman fullonicae in general. Bradley focuses on the cultural and economic context of fullones (fullers) and fullonicae in Roman society. Although his narrative will prove to be a useful contribution to the debate on Roman fulling, there are good reasons to question some of his conclusions. A major objection concerns the uniformity of his approach. His highly conceptualised profile of the context of Roman fulling underestimates possible regional and chronological variations as well as the multiform nature of human society. Furthermore, he relies too heavily on literary sources and uses epigraphy and material remains merely to illustrate his suggestions. This leads to an over-simplification of the complex relations between various types of data. As I will argue below, these methodological problems seriously undermine his statements about the economic nature of the Roman fullonica, the spatial context of fullonicae, and the social status of fullones.

Over the last decade, a Herodian facility for chariot racing has been excavated at Caesarea Maritima by two different teams. A team of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) under my direction has been responsible for excavating the cavea and most of the arena (fig. I), while the Combined Caesarea Expedition under J. Patrich has excavated the carceres and a small portion of the arena. Patrich recently published (JRA 14, 269-83) the archaeological evidence for the carceres, but some of his conclusions about how the facility as a whole operated, especially those relating to the larger area excavated by the IAA, are misleading, and I would like to discuss and correct them.

Patrich calls the stone-built facility for chariot racing a “hippodrome/stadium”, although that is not a commonly accepted term among the types of ancient entertainment buildings. The sources and archaeological evidence make it clear that an entertainment building belonging to a particular building type could house a wider variety of performances than just those chiefly associated with that type. Thus, in addition to chariot races, a circus could legitimately hold athletic contests typical of the stadium in front of the longitudinal sections of the cavea, and it might even hold performances typical of theatre and amphitheatre in its semicircular end opposite the start.

The Herodian multi-purpose entertainment structure under discussion is the earliest and largest of its kind to have been entirely excavated, and it will have far-reaching implications for our knowledge of the development of stadia and hippodromes at the transition between the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. The study and interpretation of its remains therefore deserve care and attention before definitive interpretations are presented and become ‘set in stone’. Unfortunately, Y. Porath's preceding remarks suggest that he will not change his ideas on the identification of the building. However, the chronology which I presented in JRA 14, different from the one he offered in his preliminary report in The Roman and Byzantine Near East (JRA Suppl. 14,1995) 15-27, is not a focus of his objections, and that is encouraging.

To name the structure a circus, as Porath is doing, reflects a misconception. A U-shaped entertainment structure of moderate size like this one is a stadium, not a circus. But we are dealing with a special kind of stadium, wider and provided with permanent carceres for chariot races, thereby adapted to serve as a hippodrome. Stadia, Greek in origin, underwent a profound evolution in structure and function during the Hellenistic and Early Roman periods. Conceiving stadia in their Classical Greek forms leads Porath to deny the affiliation of the Herodian structure to Hellenistic/Early Roman stadia. On the other hand, the Circus Maximus, the archetype of Roman circuses, attained its definitive form only under Trajan.