Welcome to the very last lecture of your first semester of Saint Anselm College's Humanities Program, and thank you for joining me today.  Throughout this semester you have read about, learned about, and debated about various facets and roles people have played in assorted ancient cultures.  As Father James explained in the first lecture of this last unit, the portrait of the Civic Patron provides an opportunity to reflect on all the portraits to date and on the journey you have made in the study of the Humanities so far.  In particular, Father James examined how a community and the leaders of that community, in their capacity as Civic Patrons, can articulate and make manifest the ideals and identity of that community by means of public monuments.  Specifically, he used the example of Pericles and Classical Athens.  Prof. Scannell followed with examples from a different sort of leader, a different sort of patron, and a different sort of community: the early Roman Emperors in the early stages of the Roman Empire.  And we learned how the patron interacted with the artisans and builders to realize the artistic, cultural and propagandistic goals of a patron.

 With this final lecture, I plan to look at this same mechanism on a much smaller scale, with a look at individual home owners as civic patrons.  These individual families drew on shared communal symbols in ancient Rome and Greece in erecting their domestic monuments.  I would like you to pay particular attention to how such patrons declare their individual identity.  And throughout the lecture --and I will emphasize the idea at several points-- I ask you to make connections to the choices you, your family and your friends have made about your own homes in order to declare your identity and publicize your participation in certain communities, religious, political, cultural, and so forth.

 The Romans of the late Republic and the early Empire provide an excellent case study for individual civic patrons and for comparisons to our own day.  In part this is because we have a relatively large amount of archaeological evidence from sites like Pompeii, but also because Roman citizens in this period took a great deal of care and committed many resources to building and decorating their homes specifically as civic patrons.

 You have already learned much about the history and principles which motivate and identify the Roman citizen.  As far as artistic and cultural identity, Romans from the Republic onward defined themselves in relation both to native Italian traditions and to eastern cultures they encountered in the course of their conquests, most notably the Greeks.

As in many facets of their lives, the Romans traced their history and the core of their identity to the early history of Rome as a small, rustic farm community.  This, of course, is the Rome of its legendary founders, Romulus and Remus, pictured above.

(click on any image to see it at its original size)

The early houses of Rome may have been huts like the model shown on the right.  We know something about the structure and appearance of such huts from archaeological discoveries, but they were more than historical curiosities and artifacts to the Romans.  Even in the early days, the image of the hut was important enough for ritual and display purposes.

(click on any image to see it at its original size)

These are urns made in the shape of huts of the early days of Rome.  The urns, made sometimes of terracotta or sometimes in more expenseive bronze were at least important ceremonial objects, and given the importance of ancestor worship in later times, probably extremely valued pieces.  Moreover, the Romans erected and maintained a hut of Romulus in Rome, which we believe looked something like these urns.  The hut symbolized for the Romans the humble yet sturdy origin of their people.  It is perhaps something like Abraham Lincoln's log cabin for Americans today.

As the Romans began building their empire through the conquest of the other peoples around the Mediterranean, they also began encountering, building, and founding large urban areas.  Two types of domicile dominated Roman and Romanized urban areas.

(click on any image to see it at its original size)

(click on any image to see it at its original size)

(click on any image to see it at its original size)

The first housed larger numbers of the population and were comparable to modern apartment complexes.  The Romans called this sort of complex an insula, which means "island."  You see remains and reconstructions of some insulae here.  Insulae were cheap, efficient, and notoriously unsafe dwellings.  They had wooden frames filled with rubble and mortar.  Despite the fact that remains of several insulae have survived to modern times, this building material was unstable, prone to collapse, and notoriously susceptible to fire.  Consequently, these structures have a checkered history.  Developers, of course, wanted to build them as high as possible so they could pack more residents in and collect more rent.  Unfortunately, the taller and cheaper the building became, the more dangerous it was.  There were attempts to protect residents.  Augustus imposed a five-story height limit, for example, but it seems his restriction had little impact.  After the great fire in Rome of 64 AD, which Prof. Scannel talked about, Nero tried again to impose restrictions, this time seven stories, with 10 foot gaps between buildings to limit the spread of fire, requiring special platforms to be installed for firefighters, and ordered more durable construction materials to be used.  The Emperor Trajan decades later restricted the height limit again, now to six stories.

Then as now, apartments offered much more limited opportunity for the civic and artistic patronage that owners of property and houses could afford.  These interior shots from the third floor corridor of the ruins of one of the surviving insula give some sense of the arrangement and conditions of the apartments.  While the walls would have been stuccoed and painted, the complexes were cramped, dark, and, as I have described, hazardous.  Keep in mind, however, that the overwhelming majority of the population in metropolitan centers like Rome lived in conditions like this.  It is important to keep this general truth in mind as we look at more expensive housing and the ideals their wealthy owners pursued.