How does the section entitled “A Thriving Trade Center” (Paragraphs 5-9) contribute to the author’s depiction of Pompeii? The town was one of the more important ports on the Bay of Naples and the surrounding settlements would have sent their produce to Pompeii for transportation across the Roman Empire. Goods such as olives, olive oil, wine, wool, fish sauce, salt, walnuts, figs, almonds, cherries, apricots, onions, cabbages, and wheat were exported, and imports included exotic fruit, spices, giant clams, silk, sandal wood, wild animals for the arena, and slaves to man the thriving agricultural industry. We know that the diet of Pompeians also included beef, pork, birds, fish, oysters, crustaceans, snails, lemons, figs, lettuce, artichokes, beans, and peas. The town itself, in the Roman custom, was surrounded by a wall with many gates, often with two or three arched entrances to separate pedestrian and vehicle traffic. Within the walls there are wide paved streets in a largely regular layout, but there were no street names or numbers. The town presents an astonishing mix of several thousand buildings: shops, large villas, modest housing, temples, taverns, a pottery studio, an exercise ground, baths, an arena, public latrines, a market hall, schools, water towers, a flower nursery, fulleries to make wool cloth, a basilica, brothels, and theatres. In among all of these were hundreds of small shrines to all kinds of gods and ancestors and around forty public fountains. In short, Pompeii had all the amenities one would expect to find in a thriving and prosperous community. Pompeii had many large villas, most of which were built in the 2nd century B.C., and they display the Greek colonial origins of the town. The typical entrance of these plush residences was a small street doorway with an entrance corridor that opened out into a large columned atrium with a rectangular pool of water open to the sky and from which other rooms were accessed. A striking feature of these residences is their magnificent floor mosaics, which depict all manner of scenes, from myths to the homeowner’s business activities. Many houses had a private garden with statues, and ornate fountains surrounded by a row of columns called a peristyle. Many private residences even had areas dedicated to growing grapes for wine. Many of the larger villas also had a permanent eating area in the garden so that guests might dine outside on cushioned benches. Villas often employed wall paintings to give the illusion of landscape vistas. Indeed, the wall paintings from these residences have also given insights into many other areas of Pompeian life such as religion, diet, clothes, architecture, industry, and agriculture. In complete contrast to the richer residences, slave quarters have also survived, and they show the cramped, prison-like existence of this large section of the population. Other more modest architecture included basic two or three-storied residences, simple taverns, and small buildings that resembled curtained cubicles, where lower-class prostitutes worked their trade.