Roman maritime commerce and especially the food supply of Rome havelong been studied from a merely juridical point of view, ignoring the actualpersons involved in the commercial organisation, e.g. navicularii and negotiatores.As very few of these merchants are known from Roman epigraphy,one has to depend on research results from underwater archaeology andamphorae studies. Of particular interest are the tituli picti on Dressel 20, oilamphorae from southern Spain. They introduce to us various families of oilmerchants, whose commercial networks stretched from Baetica over GalliaNarbonensis to Ostia and Rome.
