Dolia

This past week involved a good bit of travel and this meant that I had some time to read in flights and in airports. I spent a good bit of that times with Caroline Cheung’s recent-ish book on Dolia: The Containers That Made Rome and Empire of Wine (2024). The book is good. It manages to thread the needle between a dry-as-dust study of dolia as containers and a more sophisticated analysis of the role of these massive vessels in shaping Roman society and economy. In a perfect world, I maybe would offer a thorough review of this book, but I just don’t have the bandwidth to do that so I’m going to focus on a few interesting points. 1. Containerization. There is something unapologetically modern about this term (and anyone who has studied the rise of the shipping container and the pallet as the manifestation of units that shape our everyday lives), but Cheung’s book demonstrates how it likewise applied to the use of dolia in the 1st century BC/AD. Particularly relevant was the clear…