Grandiose as it was, the harbor was ill-protected from prevailing winds: a storm in A.D. 62 wrecked 200 ships anchored or berthed in it. Trajan therefore built a smaller but more efficient basin (Fig. 10.6), hexagonal in shape and with numbered berths where ships might tie up to discharge their cargoes directly into warehouses on all six sides. A complicated entrance with a right-angled turn protected it completely from the hazards which had plagued Claudius’ harbor; it also was connected with the Claudian canal. Nowadays it forms a pool on the Torlonia estate, and access to it is almost invariably refused. [Illustration: FIG. 10.4 Ostia, harbors. (Calza, _op. cit._)] [Illustration: FIG. 10.5 Ostia, harbors of Claudius (traces of the mole show in a different color in the air photograph), and of Trajan (the hexagon). (Italian Ministry of Aeronautics) ] [Illustration: FIG. 10.6 Ostia, harbor of Trajan, model. (Mostra Augustea della Romanità, _Catalogo_, Fig. 104)] The ships that unloaded at the quays of Claudius’ or Trajan’s harbor came from all over the Mediterranean. Their agents had their in-town offices in the portico behind the Augustan theater, called by the Italians the _Piazzale delle Corporazioni_. Each office had an emblem in mosaic before its door, indicating the commodity it imported or the service it rendered. These mosaics, plus inscriptions, document the greatest variety of goods and services, giving a clear idea how busy the port of Rome was in the high Empire. The commodities included furs, wood, grain, beans, melons, oil, fish, wine, drugs, mirrors, flowers, ivory, gold, and silk. Among the service personnel were the caulkers, cordwainers, grain-measurers, maintenance-men for the docks, warehouses, and embankments, shipwrights, bargemen, carpenters, masons, muleteers, carters, stevedores, and divers for sunken cargoes. The home offices, often recorded in the mosaics, include ports famous or forgotten in North Africa, Sardinia, Gaul, and Spain. Ostia proper, as well as the ports, was full of warehouses where these multifarious goods were stored. Their plan, multistoried around a courtyard, was to influence the luxurious _palazzi_ of the Renaissance. (When McKim, Mead, and White built the Boston Public Library, for example, their ultimate model was an Ostia warehouse.) The headquarters of the various guilds grew, in the second and third centuries, very luxurious, with airy courtyards and temples in imported marble, testifying to the power and prosperity of these ancient labor unions. Perhaps, then as now, the labor leaders were more prosperous than the rank and file, for in Ostia as in Pompeii, the multitude of small shops, of fishmongers, fullers, and millers, and the omnipresent _thermopolia_ or bars, are humble enough, often with dark, cramped living quarters behind or on a mezzanine.