2. Space: from Front to Back of the Roman House

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

As Rome acquired wealth and power, aristocratic Romans could afford more substantial homes.  As early as the 6th century BC, in fact, very early in Rome's conquest and expansion, we find houses much more opulent than the modest dwellings like the Hut of Romulus.  In the left frame you may wish to click on the left image, to pull up a plan of the standard components of Italian houses.  While rarely, if ever, did a Roman house conform exactly to this plan, just as now it would be impossible to draw a plan that fit all houses in the United States, this plan does include the rooms and layout that make up a recognizably Italian house in the ancient Roman world.  Above you see a plan and  reconstruction of a house from sixth century Rome.  It features design components which on the more general plan form the core of the standard Italian house

Let's walk through this sort of house to get a sense of how a Roman perceived this sort of place and how its owner as a patron designed and decorated it to capitalize on those perceptions.  We'll start with walking up to a house from the street.  First, the house could not have had a front yard or any property in front of the actual structure.  From the street you go to the sidewalk and then to the entrances and that's it.  You cannot even see the front of most of the house.  You can see the entryway, but on either side, the front of the house on the ground level would be given over to tabernae (2), small shops, which were rented out.  So except for the height of the house, you really could not tell anything about it until you entered.  The most there could have been was a vestibulum, a covered entryway at the street opening, but many houses did not have even this feature.

As a consequence, entrance to the house was rigidly controlled as was the visitor's perspective and vision of the house.  Since you could not really even see the house, or look in a window or peek inside in some way, the single entryway determined your experience of the house.  The path of the entrance thus establishes what we call the "Main Axis" of a Roman house.  Everything along this main axis is arranged and designed to have a specific effect on visitors.  The photo above gives some sense of how controlled the view of a house's interior could be from the entrance.  This shot is taken from the little corridor which typically led inside, called the fauces (1), literally the "jaws" of the house.

Once the house had swallowed you with its jaws, you found yourself in the atrium (3), the main waiting area of the house.  The central feature of this room is the impluvium (4), the low pool you see in the center of the floor.  The roof over this pool would have had a matching opening called the compluvium, which let in light and also allowed rainwater to come through which was collected in the impluvium.  So the structure has the practical purpose of collecting and storing water, but its position gave it another purpose: you cannot simply walk straight through the room.  You have to walk off the main axis around the impluvium and then back onto the axis to get to the other side.  This is a very important feature I will talk about more in a second.  So notice that there are small rooms off-axis from the side of the atrium.

These would have been small, functional rooms.  The alae (8), or "wings" could serve whatever purpose was needed.  There likely would also have been cubicula (9), bedrooms.  These were usually small, poorly lit, and little more than functional.  The atrium would, however, have been carefully designed and decorated, because visitors could well have spent a lot of their time in this room, so the message it sent was important,

but let's return to the visitor's journey into the house.  You enter on axis and see the atrium (3) like this.  This is really a reception room.  This main part of the house, the main axis, is actually business space, not where people live in private.  Prof. George in his lecture in the Citizen Unit told you a bit about how Roman families dominated business and politics.  The heads of families and businesses conducted their work in their own home as often as they did downtown.  The classic scenario for conducting business among the Romans was a crowd of clients gathering at the house of their patron.  Especially early in the morning, clients would gather at the house and wait for the patron to meet with them.  Having clients flock to you like this was a symbol of success for the Romans.  Now this would have been a patron in the more general sense of a wealthy businessman, but he also would have been an artistic, civic patron such as we are studying in this unit, so the patron would decorate his house accordingly.  Anyway, if you are a client coming to visit your patron in this house, you enter on-axis and wait in the atrium until it is your time to meet the head of the house yourself.

At the back of the atrium is the tablinum (5), the room where the actual meeting with the patron takes place.  So the client who comes for a meeting enters the atrium but then has to go out of his way, off-axis, to get around to the tablinum.  This is a basic trick to establish the power relationship.  Executives and bosses of all sorts, even faculty members, use this basic trick to establish power relationships with their visitors.  So next time you visit someone's office, notice whether there is a desk or some other piece of furniture, or a whole waiting room, or a secretary or assistant between you and the person you are coming to see.  Anything put in your path is there to establish your distance from your patron, or, conversely, an open path is reflects a meeting more on equal terms.  The main axis of a Roman house was always designed with this in mind.  Effects could be enhanced in various ways.

For example, open space behind the tablinum could allow the patron to appear to the visiting client bathed in light from the rear, enhancing his appearance.  Notice also that this arrangement of the main axis of the house means the core of the house was not devoted to private space, but to public business.  While we tend to think of a domestic house as a place for someone to go home, be with family, and get away from work, a Roman house was designed for work and business, while the private living quarters were small, functional, and off-axis.  Aside from the cubicula, the small bedrooms I mentioned earlier, the only traditional part of the Italian house that was not directly a part of the business would have been the hortus (6), or garden.  This garden could have been added to the back or side of the house and, while it could have the practical value of providing some food supply on the premises, it seems to have been the least public portion of the home.  As houses develop in time and expand spatially beyond the main axis, this last component becomes increasingly important and prominent.

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

On the left you may wish to switch to the larger plan, which is the same plan as before, but with some additions.  This is also the same plan found on the back of the handout accompanying the lecture.  As the Romans expanded through conquest, they began borrowing architectural features from the peoples they encountered and conquered.  In particular, the regions to the East, most notably Greece, had an impact on the design of Roman homes.  These would have been the Greeks of the Hellenistic period, after the death of Alexander the Great, not the Greeks of Classical Athens.  In particular the palaces of Hellenistic monarchs and their famous garden parks very much impressed the Romans.  The most important Greek addition to Roman houses was the peristyle (14), which is basically a garden park.  Above you see a  photo from the middle of one.  The structure you see in the middle is the back of the tablinum of the house.  You can get some sense here how enormous a peristyle could become.  Rather than a small garden like the old Italian hortus, a peristyle could take up more space than the actual main axis from the fauces to the tablinum.  Generally, a peristyle was sort of like a park with a walkway around it, the walkway usually being covered and having columns on the side facing in toward the park.  There could also be a variety of rooms and monuments in and around the peristyle.  You could have a pool, fountains, or a piscina (13), a "fish pond," for example.  There was even good money to be made raising fish in your pool.

These features of peristyles have been enormously influential over the centuries, in fact.  This is a photo of the J. Paul Getty museum in Malibu, California, which is intentionally modelled on a Roman villa, and you can see the basic similarity to the peristyle, including the pool, walkway, and the back of the domus.  Other, smaller features could appear.  A Greek passageway or andron (15) could link different regions of a peristyle.  An exedra (12) could just be a little cove or a garden room in and of itself.  The peristyle could also have a posticum (11), a separate back door entrance, off-axis of course, if there was need to access the back of the house without disrupting the business quarters on the main axis.

Certainly the most important addition the Romans made in peristyle complexes was the Greek dining room, the triclinium (7), literally a "room with three couches," as you see in these pictures.  For the Romans, dinners were always power dinners, with business and negotiating at least as important as the meal.  The seating arrangement was always critical and carefully thought out.  A good seat with access to the patron could mean financial and political success while a demotion in seating could spell trouble.  A dinner invitation at all was a sign of success.  Clients constantly striving for dinner invitations was another sure sign of a patron having "made it."

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

With such dinners, of course, a house may have to add an entire culina (10), a kitchen like you see here, though you would never eat dinner in a kitchen as we sometimes do, and it was often desirable to keep the kitchen some distance from the dining room to keep the smells and hazards of a kitchen, such as fire, away from the guests, and have servants bring the food.  Someone who gives receptions and banquets could even build an oecus, which could range from an elaborate dining room to a full-scale banquet hall.

In the other direction, by the fourth century AD, we find small dining rooms like this one, which seem more modern to us, this one clearly being on a scale designed for individual or family dining.

The increasing interest in private space in the Roman house represented an inversion of the traditional Italian home.  Not only were the additions to the homes themselves foreign and Greek, but the very ideas and reasons for their existence were antithetical to traditional Roman ideals.  The idea of natural displays and fancy, elaborate gardens came from the parks of the Hellenistic Greek and Eastern monarchs, who built famous royal gardens and banquet halls.  The Romans took this interest to another extreme in building country homes outside urban areas or at least on the edges of them, called villas.  Prof. Scannell told you a little about villas, but now I want you to consider how strange a villa seemed to many Romans, whether they were simply traditional Italians or people couped up in insulae.  A villa was basically a retreat and country home, which we have today, but it took the form often of basically a peristyle with all its amenities, but instead of being set off to the side or back of the house, it WAS the main part of the house.  Some Romans even began building urban homes where the entrance on the main axis opened to the peristyle and held their meetings there rather than in the tablinum, or the tablinum became relatively diminutive at least.

 So we have a curious transformation which takes place with Roman houses.  The traditional Italian form places a premium on the business space in the main axis up front.  Under Greek influence, houses and villas are built backwards, with the private garden space taking precedence and the public, business space retreating or disappearing.  Throughout the classical period, this tension between the two types continues.  Consider Nero's Domus Aurea, his "Golden House" as Prof. Scannell described it.  It was a huge garden with a gigantic pool and a house somewhere in the middle.  Basically, it is an oversize peristyle.  To a Roman this arrangement screamed that the whole area was a private area with no business space where work would get done.  This is in part why a huge building project like markets and temples would not arouse anger and suspicion in the same way Nero's home did.