The towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum have proved invaluable for insights into the lives of Ancient Roman’s, regarding all aspects of their daily business and habits. One of the most useful insights has been the preservation of the houses themselves, allowing us to understand and reconstruct their homes and therefore better understand how they lived.
A typical Roman house is often referred to as an atrium house. This house looked a little something like this:
An atrium house
There are various elements to a house and so I’d like to discuss them in their latin terms and take you through a typical house.
As you walk into the front door of the domus, you will be walking through the ianua. There you will find yourself in the fauces or the entrance hall. In front of you will typically be the atrium, with an impluvium in the centre (a pool for rain water) and a compluvium above this (a same-sized gap in the roof to allow the rain in). This gives the atrium house it’s typical look. The roof would be slanted inwards to encourage the rain downwards.
An example of a typical atrium with an impluvium and compluvium in Pompeii.
Atrium houses were designed to show off the wealth of the owner so typically the atrium would be lavishly decorated. Some house owners would have a table in the atrium furnished with prized possessions, such as their finest silverware.
A painting from a Pompeiian wall showing a table holding the owner’s finest silverware. The Romans loved to show off!
Due to its design, it is likely your eye would be drawn straight ahead, through the tablinum (the study) and on into the peristyle and hortus. The peristyle was a collonaded courtyard which ran all the way around a garden (hortus) in the centre. The tablinum would typically be between this and the atrium and open-plan. Excavators in Pompeii have found evidence of shutters and curtains having divided such rooms, although it may have been preferred to keep it open to show off the size of the house.
A view of a peristyle and hortus in Pompeii.
Moving into the peristyle, your ears may have been graced by the sound of running water from fountains or the tweets of birds in the bushes, shrubs and trees in the garden. There may have been benches about the garden, both wooden and stone or marble, where the house owners may have rested on a good day.
Off of the peristyle would have been other rooms, such as the cucina (the kitchen), the cubicula (the bedrooms) and the tricliunium (dining rooms).
The cucina often held, much to modern distaste and in disregard for good hygiene, the latrina. Yes, that is the toilet. Why? Perhaps for easy disposal of waste, maybe even because the smell of food masked the smell of the latter? We may never know. However, we are sure that it was covered over by a room divider so at least there was an element of privacy.
A cucina in the House of the Vettii in Pompeii.
The cubiculum often held stone or wooden beds. Mary Beard suggests that no one person had a fixed bedroom, as we would today, which is an interesting thought. One just lay wherever they fancied!
Similarly, Mary suggests that the triclinium was not used as often as one’s breakfast table today. Triclinium means three couches which would have been set out in a U-shape, as below. Each person, or persons, would lay with their feet at the head of the next person (not pleasant when you’re eating, I would say). A table, fixed or otherwise, would be within arms reach in the middle of the couches and the rooms were typically richly decorated, fit for receiving, and impressing, guests.
A typical triclinium.
In addition, a Roman house wouldn’t be so without a lararium – a household shrine. Each house had a household god or gods which were honoured with statues in the shrine with small statues and sacrificed to here. Sometimes these were dedicated free-standing structures, other times just niches in the walls. Often it is difficult to tell the difference between a possible lararium or what might simply have been a shelf. Some archaeologist have in some cases jumped to the conclusion of the latter without much evidence to go by to suggest such a use.
Here is a lararium, or household shrine, from Pompeii.
Some of the best houses also had private baths. Many houses also had taberna on either side of their ianua, i.e. shops. Sometimes they were owned by the owners of the house, sometimes they were seperate altogether. Some houses had upstairs quarters (seperate often to the house below) and some of the people up in those quarters owned the shops themselves (think of your typical corner shop with flats above). The taberna were sometimes accessible from the houses themselves in which case this was more like having local shops on the front of a wealthy person’s house today. This may seem odd but it was very commonplace then.
In the future, I will focus more on the roles of each room and what may have been found and used in here. For now, I hope this serves as a good introduction to a typical Roman house.
For the Love of Rome 