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.
The clothing of the whole Roman population was originally woollen; both the outer garment, the _toga_, the inner (_tunica_) were of this material, and the sheep which supplied it were pastured well and conveniently in all the higher hilly regions of Italy.

Other materials, linen, cotton, and silk, came in later with the growth of commerce, but the manufacture of these into clothing was chiefly carried on by slaves in the great households, and we need not take any account of them here.

The preparation of wool too was in well regulated households undertaken even under the Empire by the women of the family, including the materfamilias herself, and in many an inscription we find the _lanificium_ recorded as the honourable practice of matrons.[87] But as in the case of food, so with the simple material of clothing, it was soon found impossible in a city for the poorer citizens to do all that was necessary within their own houses; this is proved conclusively by the mention of gilds of fullers[88] (_fullones_) among those traditionally ascribed to Numa.
Fulling is the preparation of cloth by cleansing in water after it has come from the loom; but the fuller's trade of the later republic probably often comprised the actual manufacture of the wool for those who could not do it themselves.