Macellum

Every Roman city needed somewhere to buy fish, meat, and spices, and that place had a name: the macellum. Nowhere is the building type easier to read than at Djemila in Algeria, ancient Cuicul, a veteran colony founded between Algiers and Constantine. Just off the city’s forum, a central courtyard was ringed on four sides by a marble-columned portico, with a tholos at the center that could either house extra stalls or serve as a fountain. Along the back walls, the marble mensa, or display tables, survive largely intact, one for each shop, so the space still reads much like a butcher’s row or a fish market. Rarer still is a preserved table for measuring dry goods: three holes, each sized to a fixed volume, let a buyer watch grain or wheat pour into a bag in the legally guaranteed amount, with the measurements themselves cut into the stone. An inscription credits the benefactor Lucius Cosinius with funding the building, one of the city’s patrons.

Rome’s own macella have fared far worse. Plautus and Livy place an early market beside the Forum on the Argiletum, associated with, or perhaps interchangeable with, the Forum Piscarium, the fish market, later absorbed into the Forum Transitorium and the Temple of Peace. Varro locates a macellum at the end of the Republic next to the Forum Cupidinis, the luxury market, and traces its name to a hortus, a garden, once on the site, implying that fresh produce was sold there alongside meat and fish. A rival, likely apocryphal, tradition holds the building was named for a thief called Marcellus, whose house was demolished on the spot as punishment. Marcus Fulvius Nobilior rebuilt the structure in 179 BC. In the Augustan age, the Macellum Liviae stood on the Esquiline near the Esquiline Gate, later the Arch of Gallienus; medieval sources still located the nearby church of San Vito in Macello, and as late as AD 921 Santa Maria Maggiore was described as standing next to it. A third Roman macellum, the Macellum Magnum, was built by Nero on the Caelian Hill; it survives only on a contemporary coin and a fragment of the Severan marble map, its remains never located.

The building type spread across the empire, each city leaving its own stamp. At Pompeii, the market beside the forum dated to the 2nd century BC and was still under repair after the AD 62 earthquake, with an imperial-cult shrine tucked at its far end. Two smaller versions rose along the Via Appia: Minturnae’s beside the city’s baths and forum, and Ordona’s, in Puglia, just off the town’s forum in the 2nd century AD. Jerash, in Jordan, a Decapolis city favored by the Antonine emperors, took an unusual octagonal plan, set at a crossroads on the cardo. But the grandest stands at Pozzuoli: massive cipollino columns still rise after centuries of sinking beneath the sea and re-emerging, driven by the region’s slow-moving earthquakes. Long misidentified as a Temple of Serapis, it was in fact among the largest macella ever built, outdone only by Nero’s vanished Macellum Magnum on the Caelian Hill.

FURTHER READING

1. Hoffelinck, Adeline. “The Macellum in the Roman City: A Critical Reappraisal.” Markt, Märkte Und Marktgebäude in Der Antiken Welt, edited by Kerstin Droß-Krüpe and Kai Ruffing, Harrassowitz Verlag, 2022, pp. 527–50. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.20626746.24. Accessed 3 July 2026.
2. Richard, Julian. “Macellum / μάκελλον: ‘Roman’ Food Markets in Asia Minor and the Levant.” Journal of Roman Archaeology 27 (2014): 255–274. [Source: Cambridge Core]
3. Uscatescu, Alexandra, and Manuel Martín-Bueno. “The Macellum of Gerasa (Jerash, Jordan): From a Market Place to an Industrial Area.” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 307 (1997): 67–88. [Source: JSTOR]
4. Hoffelinck, Adeline. “A luxury food market or control mechanism in a complex Roman economy: a new interpretation of the macellum in the Roman world.” Journal of Roman Archaeology 38.2 (2025): 307-343.