Ancient Roman Houses
An exploration of the Ancient Roman domus and insula.
“The House and Everyday Life,” from The Private Life of the Romans, by Harriet Waters Preston, 1896.
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
The ordinary Roman dwelling-house had always been, even to the scholar, somewhat of a mystery, until the discovery of Herculaneum and Pompeii, in the middle of the eighteenth century, suddenly threw a good deal of light upon its construction and arrangements. The silent testimony of those partially ruined and long buried homes was all the more valuable because, in Pompeii, especially, they represented the average middle-class dwellings of a provincial town, commodious and even elegant as compared with the farm-houses and cottages of the rural poor, cramped and insignificant beside the costly city mansions, and the yet more extensive and extravagant mountain and seaside villas of the wealthy nobles.
The one essential feature of all these houses, the central point and distinctive mark of the Roman dwelling in all its developments, that which distinguishes it from the Greek and the houses of the farther East on the one hand, and, on the other, allies it with the houses of our own race, was the atrium, long the common living-room of the entire family. The earliest Roman houses may indeed be said to have been all atrium. Here, within the same four walls were assembled the family hearth and altar, the family portraits in wax and the marriage-bed, here the meals were cooked and served, the men lounged after labor, and the women spun; the very name is probably derived from the black (ater) color imparted to the room, and its contents generally, by the circling smoke of the hearth fire, which had to find its way out by open door or perforated roof, since it is certain that down to comparatively modern Roman times chimney-flues were unknown.
The houses thus occupied were small and detached even in the more considerable towns. They were built of wood, or, later, of brick, mostly square in shape, and roofed with wood or thatch, carried up to a point (culmen) in the form of a four-sided pyramid; while a yet meaner sort, circular in shape, with conical roof and built of wattled reeds, is still represented by the miserable shelter-huts of the shepherds on the Roman Campagna. It was the typical early Roman house which Virgil conceived as the palace of Evander on the Palatine hill, in the beautiful passage, where he tells how the pauper king was awakened by the light of early morning streaming through the door of his cot, and the singing of birds upon its low roof-tree.
Such, too, was the so-called Casa Romulea, long preserved as a kind of sanctuary on the northwesterly slope of the Palatine. But however primitive and promiscuous the life led in these plain dwellings may appear, it was not necessarily vulgar nor lacking in a certain dignity, as those will readily understand who have entered the common room of a podere, or farm, upon the Tuscan hills, or a hospitable farm-house kitchen in Old or New England.
Having thus gotten some idea of what constituted the kernel of a Roman dwelling, let us see what the ordinary town-house had become in the latter days of the republic.
Its entrance-door did not open directly from the street, but at the end of a passage called the ostium or aditus, paved with tiles and flanked by rooms which were usually let out as shops. The door was of wood, with pillars (pastes) upon either side. It had regularly two leaves, or fores, which swung outward into the passage on an arrangement of pivot and socket called a cardo, and were secured, when closed, by bolts (pessull) at the top and bottom. This door led sometimes into a short continuation of the passage, divided by a curtain from the atrium, and sometimes directly into the latter, now often called the cavaedium, or hollow part of the dwelling, and still constituting its main apartment....
On either side of the atrium, down about two-thirds of its length, ran a row of small square rooms, the sitting, sleeping, and guest rooms of the establishment. These opened into the hall either by doors or portieres, and from one of them ascended the steep and narrow stairs, which led to the upper story. Beyond this range of diminutive rooms, on either side, the atrium broadened out into two alae, wings or alcoves, in the comparative seclusion of which were now arranged the portrait busts of the ancestors in their several niches or shrines, and so ordered, in cases of long descent, as to present the semblance of a family tree; while bronze tablets, recording the names and deeds of the persons commemorated, were set in the wall beneath their respective shrines...
The domestic slaves were lodged in tiny cells around the posterior peristyle, rather than on the upper floor, where the regular sleeping-rooms of the family seem usually to have been. There would be extensive and beautiful grounds at the rear of such a mansion, laid out in the perpetual Italian taste, embellished with trellises, fountains, and statues, and often overshadowed by magnificent trees, like the six ancient and enormous lotus trees in the town-gardens of the orator Crassus upon the Palatine, which were valued at three million sesterces, or about $20,000 apiece, and which lived and flourished until they were consumed by Nero's fire in 64 A.D.
In Rome and the larger towns, however, as in modern cities, especially those of the continent of Europe, the detached dwellings came to be far outnumbered by the insulae, or apartment-houses, which were often several stories high, with shops upon the street level, and lodgings of various grades behind and above. The crowded tenements of the very poor were to be found in the meaner of these insulae, while there were others in the more expensive wards (regiones) where young men of fashion, like Cicero's friend Caelius, had commodious apartments, which probably corresponded very fairly with the bachelor quarters occupied by men of the same class to-day.
In trying to represent to ourselves more exactly the interior aspect of a completely appointed Roman house, we have first to remember the rich effect of its marble-wainscoted and frescoed walls; the broad panels of pure deep color, usually yellow or red, with graceful central figures, and surrounded by brilliant and delicate arabesques, which we find almost universal in Pompeii, even in houses of modest pretensions. There was color also and grace of design in the various kinds of mosaic floors, of which so many specimens are still to be seen, and though the furnishing of the rooms may seem simple and even scanty to our jumbled modern ideas, the separate pieces were for the most part so excellent in design and so beautiful in workmanship that they well deserved to be set wide apart and relieved, each one, against an artistic background.
The articles of furniture in common use may be comprised under a very few heads: lecti, beds and couches; sedilia, or seats; mensae, tables; arcae and armarii, chests and cabinets; lucernae, lamps, whether standing or depending.
Preston, Harriet Waters. The Private Life of the Romans. Leach, Shewell, and Sanborn, 1896.
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