17

THE ROMAN CITY

We think of Rome, imperial, imperious, imperative … What was their civilization? Vast, I allow: but vile. Cloacae: sewers. The Jews in the wilderness and on the mountaintop said: It is meet to be here. Let us build an altar to Jehovah. The Roman, like the Englishman who follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on which he set his foot … only his cloacal obsession. He gazed about him in his toga and he said: It is meet to be here. Let us construct a watercloset.

James Joyce, Ulysses, Episode 7, Aeolus,
‘The Grandeur that was Rome’

A Natural Disaster in the South of Italy

In 79 CE an enormous eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Campania in southern Italy both destroyed and preserved the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, along with a number of other settlements and some seaside villas owned by affluent Romans. The circumstances of their preservation, and the sheer extent of the archaeological sites, provide us with invaluable information about social, economic, religious and political life in both the public and private arenas, and across every stratum of society.

The towns had originally been settled by people who spoke Oscan, an Italian language not dissimilar to Latin. They then came under the influence of Greeks who had settled in the area in the eighth century BCE. This Greek influence was superseded by the Etruscans in the seventh century, until their sea power was destroyed by Hieron I of Syracuse in 474 BCE. This second period of Greek hegemony was terminated by the Samnites, a warlike Italic tribe who conquered Campania around the end of the fifth centuryBCE. Pompeii gets its first mention in the histories when, in 310 BCE, it became embroiled in the wars between Rome and the Samnites, at the end of which Campania became a part of the Roman confederation, and the cities became ‘allies’ of Rome.

Pompeii sided with the Italians in the Social War and was besieged by Sulla in 89 BCE. After the war, Pompeii received Roman citizenship, but a colony of Roman veterans was established there to keep an eye on it. Latin replaced Oscan as the official language, and the city soon became fully Romanized. There was a riot in the amphitheatre in 59 CE, where the inter-town rivalry with Nuceria escalated from abuse to stone-throwing and the wielding of weapons. A fresco depicting the event was found in the house of Actius Anicetius, and graffiti proudly boasts, ‘Campanians, in our victory you perished with the Nucerians’,¹ but the Pompeians were banned by the Roman authorities from holding any such events for ten years, and the local magistrates were removed from office.²

Herculaneum, which had far fewer inhabitants than its noisy neighbour, was built on a seaside promontory between two streams that flowed down the western base of Mount Vesuvius just 7 km from the volcano’s peak. Tradition connected Herculaneum with Herakles, hinting at Greek origins, and it followed a similar history to Pompeii, becoming a Roman municipium in 89 BCE, when it was defeated in the Social War.

In 62 CE a violent earthquake ‘largely demolished the populous Campanian town of Pompeii’,³ and ‘part of the town of Herculaneum [was] in ruins’.⁴ But such seismic activity was not abnormal and, amid a booming economy, repair, redecoration and restructuring was in progress. It has been estimated that Pompeii supported between 6,400 and 20,000 inhabitants at the time of its destruction.

We have an incredibly vivid eye-witness account from letters written by the Younger Pliny, whose uncle, Pliny the Elder, commanded the naval base at Misenum. Traditionally it was IX Kal. Septembris, i.e. 24 August 79 CE, although there is now some doubt about this: Pliny’s text could possibly read 30 October, 1 November or 23 November (Roman months and numerals are easy to mistranscribe if you are a medieval monk). Many victims were wearing heavy woollen garments; and quantities of autumnal fruits have been found, along with a coin of Emperor Titus, which bears the legend ‘with Tribunician power for the 9th time, acclaimed Imperator for the 15th time [this honour could not have been granted before September], Consul for the 7th time [dating the coin to 79 CE], Father of his Country’.⁵ But if the date remains unclear the sequence of events is not.

The eruption of Vesuvius caught everybody unprepared: no one realized that Vesuvius was still active. Seneca had recently written a treatise on earthquakes, but did not connect them with volcanic activity, and no one interpreted the earth tremors as a harbinger of things to come. Pliny’s uncle was actually relaxing after a bath and lunch, and when he saw the eruption column he reacted with curiosity rather than fear.

In the late morning a minor explosion of steam (the ‘phreomagmatic opening phase’) occurred. Then around noon an enormous column of hot gas and pumice erupted from the volcano, rising to a height of 15–30 km in a shape that Pliny said resembled an umbrella pine tree. Volcanologists now call this phase of explosive volcanic eruptions the ‘Plinian phase’ after the way Pliny described it.⁶ For the next seventeen hours or so fragments of ash, pumice and rock were carried on a south-easterly wind. These fell on Pompeii at about 15 cm per hour, and Pliny speaks of hot, thick ash, pumice and stones charred and cracked by the flames, and of broad sheets of fire and leaping flames blazing at several points on the mountain. The courtyard giving access to his room was filling with debris, and if he had stayed there any longer he would never have got out. People tied pillows over their heads to protect themselves from falling objects, and throughout the night buildings were ‘shaking with violent shocks, and seemed to be swaying to and fro as if they were torn from their foundations’.

By around daybreak Pompeii was covered to a depth of more than 3 m. A total of 394 victims of the ash-fall deposit have been recovered from the pumice layers, 88 per cent of them in collapsed buildings. Herculaneum received relatively little pumice (20 cm or so) at this stage, although Pliny says that the darkness was blacker and denser than any ordinary night. Tsunamis now struck the coast, sucking the sea back from the shore and marooning sea creatures on dry sand, before rushing in again.

At this stage the panic-stricken crowds who fled into the open had a greater chance of survival than those sheltering indoors. But this changed at around 5 a.m. as the eruption began its ‘Peléan phase’:⁷ the column began to collapse, and the first of six pyroclastic density currents (PDCs), ground-hugging avalanches of hot ash, pumice, rock fragments and volcanic gas, hurtled down the sides of Mount Vesuvius at speeds of 100 kph or more, killing almost everyone in their path:

A dense black cloud was coming up behind us, spreading over the earth like a flood … Darkness fell, not the dark of a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp had been put out in a closed room.⁸

Herculaneum was overwhelmed to a depth of 3 m by searing hot ash. Although less than a dozen casualties were found in the town itself, more than 300 victims were found in the arcades by the sea: a woman swept off a terrace 20mabove; a soldier knocked face down, still clutching at the sand; a small horse; a lady wearing gold jewellery; a seven-month old baby in the arms of a fourteen-year-old girl; and a boat tossed keel-up on the beach, its helmsman grasping an oar. An hour or so later a second PDC hit Herculaneum, depositing another 1.5 m of ash, demolishing walls, dislodging columns, sweeping away statues, and extending the coastline by about 400 m. The town was buried by 15–18 m of what used to be thought was boiling mud, but which was in fact ignimbrite – gas trapped in the deposit of pyroclastic flows escapes, while the ash and other fragments become welded together and form a solid, hard rock. In places the heat of the material, up to 400 °C, carbonized the wooden frameworks of houses and furniture, pieces of cloth and loaves of bread, yet elsewhere it left rope, eggs and fishing nets intact, and some wax tablets perfectly legible.

The third PDC reached the Herculaneum gate of Pompeii at about 6.30 a.m. An hour later, the fourth overwhelmed the interior of the town, killing many of the surviving residents by asphyxiation, thermal shock or physical trauma; 650 of their remains have been discovered. About half of these victims were indoors at the time, and the majority were in groups rather than on their own. The negative spaces in the volcanic material left by their decomposed bodies can be filled with plaster to reveal their final moments, andthese casts leave one of the most moving records of the inhabitants. Once seen, Pompeii and Herculaneum can never be regarded as ‘merely’ archaeological sites: there is a group with the family silver; a slave impeded by iron shackles; a pregnant late-teenage girl and her elderly, arthritic parents or grandparents; a guard-dog chained to the entrance of its owner’s house; 18 people in the lavatory of the great gymnasium; and a rich lady taking refuge in the gladiatorial barracks, who is often said to have been conducting a sordid affair with a hunky gladiator: most likely she simply ended up there (with another seventeen people and a dog) in her vain attempt to escape.

Pliny’s asthmatic uncle collapsed and died amid the dense fumes. Guide books repeat the mantra that Pompeii is a ‘city frozen in time’, which gives us a ‘snapshot of Roman everyday life’. It is not. It is a city frozen in unmitigated terror and panic.

Two more PDCs hit Pompeii in quick succession, smashing the upper floors of the houses, killing any survivors and depositing a further 60–180 cm of debris. The subsequent volcanic activity eventually left Pompeii buried some 6–7 m deep.

Precisely how many people died is hard to tell, although current estimates lean towards approximately 2,000 at Pompeii. Interestingly, there are proportionately fewer young males, who may have abandoned the women, children and elderly to their fate. However, since the destruction also encompassed the rural areas, they may have died in the countryside or at sea. The new emperor, Titus, was certainly prompted to make disaster relief a priority and created a fund for rebuilding the stricken cities, but, although the region as a whole recovered reasonably quickly, the cities were neither rebuilt nor reoccupied. The remains are riddled with tunnels dug by Roman looters: ‘House tunnelled’, says a piece of graffiti on the doors of one grand house that had been comprehensively ransacked; but bodies with a hoe and a pick found in the House of Menander suggest that this was a perilous undertaking.

Knowledge of Pompeii, Herculaneum and other sites in the region was not entirely lost, since they appear on the Peutinger Table, a twelfth-century CE medieval copy of a fourth-century CE Roman road map. In 1592 Domenico Fontana came across the ruins of Pompeii whilst digging a canal, but no one followed this through very seriously. Herculaneum was really discovered first, when a peasant accidentally sank a well-shaft into the ancient theatre in 1709, and was systematically excavated throughout the nineteenth century, attracting the Grand Tourists of the day. The first formal work at Pompeii started in 1748 under Roque Joaquin de Alcubierre, and then in 1763 the discovery of an inscription reading REI PUBLICAE POMPEIANORUM conclusively identified the site. In the nineteenth century Giuseppe Fiorelli, a proper archaeologist rather than a treasure hunter, took control. He divided Pompeii into nine regions; numbered the rectangular insulae (blocks, literally ‘islands’) of each region; and gave each door on the street a number. So every house is now identified by three numerals – the House of the Vettii (VI.15.1 = region VI, insula 15, door 1); the House of the Chaste Lovers (IX.12.6); the fullery of Stephanus (I.6.7), and so on.

Intensive excavation was resumed after the Second World War under Amedeo Maiuri, who uncovered significant areas of Pompeii, although the publication of his work was sketchy in the extreme. Since the 1960s the progress has been much more circumspect, with the focus now primarily on conservation, restoration and studying the evidence already uncovered. The archaeological areas of Pompeii, Herculaneum and Torre Annunziata now have UNESCO World Heritage status.

The Urban Environment

Inside Herculaneum’s modest city walls were at least three decumani (east–west streets), intersected by five perpendicular cardines (north–south streets), which led down to the harbour area. The grid of lava-paved streets divided the town into insulae containing residential, public and religious buildings. Pompeii is more irregularly shaped and its 3 km of walls have seven gates and enclose an area of some 66 ha. Most of the city adheres to a grid-plan concept, with the main Via Stabiana running south-east to north-west, intersected by the Via dell’Abbondanza and the Via di Nola. The wider streets can accommodate two-way traffic, while others may have operated one-way systems (as evidenced by the wear and tear around the corner kerb-stones). Traffic calming was enforced by steps, bollards, cul-de-sacs or inconvenient fountains, and the Forum seems to have been pedestrianized. Most streets have quite high-raised pavements and lava kerb-stones, with the pavement surfaced with brick chips and mortar. Holes were drilled into the edges of the pavement, possibly to secure sun-blinds or tether animals, and some pavements have inlaid designs: HAVE (‘Welcome’), it says outside the House of the Faun (VI.12.2).

The road surface is convex, facilitating the run-off of water, and large stepping stones are placed to allow vehicles drawn by pairs of animals to pass over them with the beasts and wheels on either side, resulting in a road surface scarred with ruts carved by the traffic. The stepping stones allow pedestrians to cross without getting wet or filthy, since the street might well have been awash with a disgusting mixture of rotting food waste, human and animal excrement, and, if we believe Suetonius, human body parts.⁹However, the high kerb-stones channelled rainwater through the streets and, because Pompeii is on a sloping site, heavy downpours would effectively sluice out the garbage, which may account for the surprisingly sporadic provision of drainage.

Pompeii’s Via dell’Abbondanza seems to evoke a very ‘in your face’ street environment: penthouses above the shops; balconies and galleries projecting from the facades; loggias gracing the upper stories; doors adorned with bronze studs; and inscriptions that constantly talk to you – there are election ‘posters’ painted on the walls and graffiti that ranges from scurrilous smut to quotations from Virgil, the results of gladiatorial combats, accusations, children’s ABCs, erotic encounters, shopkeepers’ accounts,situationsvacant, workmen’s advertisements, lists of market days and the birth of mules. Pompeii’s archaeology is very noisy. Yet the many vineyards, fruit trees and gardens now suggest that the land use was less intensive, and the population smaller, than had once been thought.

Outside the gates, access to the city of the living is via the city of the dead. Funerary practices change from inhumations during the fourth to second centuries BCE, to cremations after the Romans founded the colony at Pompeii, and the largest funerary monument is that of Pompeii’s most celebrated woman, Eumachia, a priestess who was honoured by the city’s guild of fullers and was buried just by the Nuceria Gate. Elsewhere a warrior’s tomb reflected Rome’s mighty imperial conquests, but was defaced by a woman – ‘Atimetus got me pregnant’¹⁰; the tomb of a highly respected freedman called C. Munatius Faustus was nevertheless overshadowed by that of his wife Naevoleia Tyche, who inherited his business and erected a much grander monument, complete with a résumé of his achievements.

Inside the walls, Pompeii’s main public buildings are grouped mainly in three areas: the Forum; the Amphitheatre and Palaestra; and the Triangular Forum. The latter is the site of a sixth-century BCE Doric temple, originally of Hercules, which is the oldest in the city. To the east of this the Great Theatre, the Little Palaestra and the Small Covered Theatre were built during the Hellenistic era, with the temple of Zeus Meilichius and the Temple of Isis situated close by. A large square quadriporticus (piazza) lies behind the stage building of the Great Theatre and was ultimately converted into a gladiatorial school.

There were three complexes of public baths in Pompeii: the Stabian Baths, whose female section was the only part in fully working order in 79 CE; the state-of-the-art but as yet incomplete Central Baths; and the fully functioning Forum Baths. There were also a number of private bath-suites, such as those on the estate of Julia Felix, which advertised themselves as ‘an elegant bath-suite for prestige clients’, or the Suburban Baths, of which the terrace provided delightful views over the sea, and the changing room featured a series of explicit erotic paintings.

These baths provided an essential area of social intercourse, but the heart of any Roman town’s commercial, political, administrative, social and religious life was the Forum. At Rome itself the Forum was the focus for civic pride, and the orator Cicero often used it to push the patriotic buttons of his listeners. Pompeii’s Forum was a large rectangular piazza surrounded by a two-storey colonnaded portico, which also integrated a temple, a basilica and various ancillary buildings. The dominating building, framed by two triumphal arches and with Vesuvius glowering behind it, was the temple dedicated to the Capitoline triad of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva. This typically axial, elevated, frontal temple stood on a high podium, approached up a flight of steps, and had a deep porch with six columns. Moving clockwise we come to the Macellum (meat and fish market), a large rectangular courtyard with a central tholos (circular building), beneath which large quantities of fish bones were found. Next along was a large unroofed square courtyard with an apse at one end and recesses on two other sides containing niches for statues, which is conventionally called the Sanctuary of the Public Lares (guardian deities), but may in fact be an imperial cult building.

Immediately to the south come two structures with associations to prominent Pompeian women: the ‘Temple of Vespasian’, perhaps erected by the priestess Mamia, which may really be dedicated to the Genius of Augustus, the colony or Pompeii; and the Eumachia Building, the biggest edifice in the Forum, which an inscription tells us the affluent Eumachia dedicated to Concord and to Pietas. It may have functioned as the headquarters of the fuller’s guild, a huge fullery, a place to store and sell cloth or a meeting place for the Augustales. At the south-east corner of the Forum is the Comitium, where the municipal elections were probably held, and along the south side are three large halls that are usually said to be the offices of magistrates and town councillors.

The basilica opens on to the south-west corner of the Forum. As a building type, this represents one of the most influential innovations in Roman architecture, in that it ultimately provided the blueprint for the ground plan of the typical Christian church. However, Pompeii’s basilica was not a religious structure, but one used for social and commercial interaction, and for hearing lawsuits. The local who scrawled, ‘C. Pumpidius Dipilus was here … 3 October 78 [BCE]’¹¹ gives us an inkling as to its date, as do the brick stamps, which suggest construction in c.100 BCE.

It measures 54 × 24 m. The external sides and the rear are built of stucco-coated rubble masonry enhanced with tufa piers and door posts. The main facade is built from tufa blocks and is accessed via entrances that could be closed by wooden shutters. Four steps lead up through four Ionic columns into a central space articulated into a long nave with a surrounding corridor with a further twenty-eight substantial stucco-clad brick columns with tufa capitals. The side walls, the lower levels of which are covered in plaster worked in relief to simulate stone blocks, then painted to complete the effect, feature engaged Ionic columns carrying a Corinthian order above them. At the far end of the building is the tribunal, a raised platform with six Corinthian columns across its front, perhaps used for trials and auctions. The rooms on either side and underneath may have been used as premises – where Pompeii’s magistrates conducted their business.

At the back of the Basilica was the temple of Venus Pompeiana, who had been the patroness of the city since the founding of the Roman colony in 80 BCE. Across from the basilica to the north was the Corinthian Temple of Apollo, enclosed by a portico of forty-eight columns. In a recess in the outer wall of the temple precinct was the Table of Official Weights and Measures, while just down from there was the Horreum, a storehouse for agricultural produce. The Forum area was very much the hub of Pompeii’s life, and a series of wall paintings from the estate of Julia Felix gives a fine impression of the vibrancy of what went on there: a down-and-out with his dog gets a handout from a well-dressed lady; kids play among the columns; women shop for shoes and haggle for fabrics; and a schoolboy gets a thrashing. The basilica walls contain a wonderful selection of graffiti that proves that the goings-on there were not always particularly legalistic: ‘Suavis wishes to drink jars full of wine, please, he really does’; ‘My life, my delight, let us play this game for a while: this bed be a field and I your steed’; ‘O Chios, I hope your piles reopen and burn even more than they did before’; and ‘I admire you, o wall, for not having collapsed under the weight of the tedious scribblings of so many writers’.¹²

Outside Pompeii’s Forum one significant industry – noisy, messy and hideously smelly – was the fulleries (fullonicae), where newly woven woollen material was finished or old material washed. In the fullonica of Stephanus (I.6.7) the cloth was examined for blemishes before being stiffened by soaking in (male) human or animal urine collected in portable urinals situated outside the shop and on street corners, which came to be known as vespasiani after the Emperor Vespasian introduced a tax on them. A wall painting showing children trampling cloth in vats, like the five small ones in Stephanus’ establishment, suggests that child labour was used for unpleasant jobs such as this. The cloth was then washed in a mixture of water and a degreasing agent called ‘fuller’s earth’. Next, after being stretched and beaten, the material was washed in three large vats at the back of the fullonica. The finished cloth could be hung to dry, and there were dedicated rooms for combing, brushing and clipping it. Whites were laid over hemispherical wooden cages on the roof and bleached by burning sulphur underneath them. Finally the fabrics were flattened using a large press. There was also a large vat that functioned as part of the laundry service. Money in a bag found with a body inside the fullonica of Stephanus totalled 1,089.5 sestertii, a considerable sum, though it is impossible to tell if this was from the shop or belonged to a fugitive who happened to end up there.

Equally smelly and lucrative was the production of garum, a fish sauce for which Pompeii was famous. Roman cuisine was based around it, and there was even a kosher variety. It is made by mixing the innards of different types of fish with salt water and allowing them to ferment in the sun for anything up to three months. What results is a clear liquid, liquamen, which was distributed in vessels known as urcei, plus a sediment known as allec and a brine called muria. A character called Scaurus got rich on the proceeds of this, selling liquaminis flos (‘flower of liquamen’), liquaminis flos optimus (‘best flower of liquamen’), liquaminis floris flos (‘flower of flower of liquamen’) and a special mackerel version of it to clients as far away as Gaul.

There were more than thirty bakeries in Pompeii, one of which was the Bakery of the Chaste Lovers (at IX.12.6-8) on the Via dell’Abbondanza. Entering through a vestibule with access to upstairs rooms, a visitor would see four flour mills at the back of the main room. These consisted of a lower, conical part (meta) set into a round masonry base, with a wooden stake inserted vertically into the top of it as a pivot. A biconical hollowed upper stone (catillus) sat on top of the meta, and grain was poured into the top of thecatillus, which was then rotated using wooden handles. The flour dropped into a lead-faced trough at the bottom. The muscle power was provided by slaves or, in this establishment, horses, mules, donkeys or hinnies, which were stabled on the premises. The dough was prepared in stone bowls or on a wooden table. When they were ready for baking, they were passed through a hatch to the oven area. Roman ovens were big – one in Herculaneum fitted eighty-one loaves – and not unlike the pizza ovens used in Italy today: the fire is lit inside the oven, and the bread is baked next to it. A long-handled spade is used to put the bread in and take it out, and the smoke is drawn up a flue along the front of the oven and out through a chimney.

Pompeii’s streets were also teeming with bars, taverns and what guide books call thermopolia (‘hot food shops’), but which Romans usually called popinae. These have a masonry counter right on the pavement with large jars (dolia) embedded in it and display racks behind, and are often attractively decorated with paintings or coloured fragments of marble. Though the popinae may have sold wine and hot food to a population on the hoof, the dolia are porous and awkward to clean, so they must also have served dry foods such as nuts, dried fruits, beans and chick peas. Restaurants and inns vary from upmarket places with gardens, to sleazy dens, and our sources portray the popina, caupona (bar that doesn’t serve hot food), hospitium (guest house) and stabulum (tavern for travellers with animals) as sordid centres of drunkenness, gambling, violence and sex: a graffito outside one bar triumphantly announces ‘I shagged the landlady’.

The boundaries between inn-keeping and prostitution were somewhat blurred and, although the identification of brothels has become an issue of scholarly contention, the lupanar (‘brothel’, derived from lupa = ‘she-wolf’, and hence ‘prostitute’) at VII.12.18 was undoubtedly used for sex. The ground floor has five rooms and a latrine opening off a short corridor decorated with a menu board showing various couples performing explicit and rather vigorous sexual activities, one couple studying a tablet (looking at porn?) and an image of a bizarre double-phallused Priapus. Whether or not there were male prostitutes is uncertain, although the graffiti refers to anal sex, and, though we find out the girls’ names, there is no way of telling whether these are real or ‘professional’ monikers. Each room has a stone bed, hopefully covered with cushions when in use, and there is much earthily illuminating graffiti: ‘Phoebus the perfumer fucks the best’; ‘Arphocras had a good screw with Drauca [for a] denarius’ (quite expensive – you could get the same in a bar for one-eighth of the price); and so on.¹³

Roman prices and earnings fluctuated according to local conditions, and it is difficult to create exact equivalents, but the estimated average daily spend for a family in Pompeii was 6–7 sestertii. The lowest denomination coin was the copper as-4 asses = 1 bronzesesterius; 4 sestertii = 1 silver denarius; and 25 denarii = 1 gold aureus.

We have invaluable information about domestic living arrangements from the hundreds of single family homes (domi, sing. domus) buried by the eruption, along with a detailed description written by the architect Vitruvius, which together illuminate thearrangement and functions of the various rooms. Interestingly, the divisions Vitruvius indicates within the house are made on the criteria of ‘common’ (entrance acceptable without an invitation, and visible from the street if the door is open) and ‘exclusive’ (by invitation only, and often not visible).

The general arrangement is firmly axial, allowing a view from the front door right through to the garden, and also comprising a front (Italian) part assembled round an atrium, and a rear (Hellenistic) part around a peristylium, a garden surrounded by colonnades with rooms of various sizes opening off it in the manner of the men’s rooms of a Greek house. It is significant that the names of the front rooms of a Roman house are Italian (vestibulum, fauces, atrium, ala, tablinum, cubiculum), while those of the back are Greek (peristylium, triclinium, oecus, exedra) (see Table 17.1, below).

Table 17.1 Rooms in a Roman house

Vestibulum	A hallway between the entrance of the house and the street
Fauces	‘throat/jaws’: a narrow entrance passageway
Atrium	Central courtyard, for reception of visitors and domestic work
Impluvium	Central basin for collection of rainwater (pluvia), with a cistern underneath
Cubiculum	‘Chamber’
Ala	Small room or alcove on either side of the vestibulum
Tablinum	Open room between the atrium and the peristyle used as a reception room and office
Triclinium	Dining room that had space for three dining couches
Peristylium/Peristyle	Colonnades surrounding a building or a courtyard
Exedra	Hall for entertaining guests
Oecus	Hall or ‘salon’ for entertainment
Hortus	Garden

Roman houses face inwards and tend to be mainly built on one floor, or with a few rooms on the upper floor constructed on an ad hoc basis. They are easily accessible to the street, but well insulated from it. The facades are fairly plain, windows are small and infrequent, and only the large double doors adorned with bronze studs, knockers, handles and decorative frames distinguish the entrances of the great houses from the surrounding self-contained commercial establishments, which do not connect with the house and may have been rented out. There might be a small enclosed space called the vestibulum leading from the street to the door, and security was clearly a major concern, as is indicated by the existence of elaborate locks and the famous CAVE CANEM (‘Beware of the dog’) mosaic from the House of the Tragic Poet (VI.8.3), which shows a large chained beast baring its teeth to unwelcome visitors.¹⁴

Through the door, the fauces (= ‘jaws’/‘throat’) led directly into a large open-plan courtyard living area centred on the atrium, which was also the abode of the household deities and the ancestral images. This lofty, cool and often elaborately decorated space was lit through a large central opening (compluvium). Some ‘tetrastyle’ atria had four columns supporting the beams at the corners of the compluvium, but the non-columned ‘Tuscan’ type was the most fashionable at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Beneath the opening was a pool (impluvium) to catch rainwater from the roof, to be drained off into an underground cistern. This was particularly important prior to the provision of ‘mains’ water supply via the aqueduct system. Around the atrium were the cubicula (sing. cubiculum, conventionally translated ‘bedroom’, but more multi-functional than that), which were part of the private ‘exclusive’ areas of the house.

The core of the house’s functionality was the tablinum, located on the central axis and open to the atrium, although a fixture in the aptly named ‘House of the Wooden Partition’ in Herculaneum shows clearly that it could be screened off if necessary. This was crucial to the hierarchical nature of Roman society, since here the patronus would receive his clientes and conduct business. To either side of it, also open to the atrium, were the alae (‘wings’, sing. ala), open-fronted rooms, where funeral masks were sometimesdisplayed, and beyond it, still in ‘open plan’, a courtyard surrounded by a colonnade called the peristylium. Elite Roman dwellings tended to use the peristylium as a garden, particularly once they could secure permanent running water. Roman gardens might be formal, informal or kitchen, and were exploited for a combination of pleasure and profit. Often adorned with wall paintings, they boasted pools, fountains and irrigation channels, and could contain peach, apple, pear or apricot trees, shrubs, flowers, vegetables and vines.

Social mores meant that the dining room (triclinium), which could come in a summer or winter variety, was especially elaborate, since that was where you could display your affluence and generosity, as you might also do in an exedra or an oecus.

The interiors of domus houses were often decorated with wall paintings and mosaics, which served a further purpose as expressions of wealth, status or aspiration. Vitruvius viewed changing fashions in wall-painting as a barometer of Rome’s moral decline, and nowadays his scheme has been distilled into four basic styles linked to specific historical periods, though, as Mary Beard, rightly observes, ‘the fixation of some modern archaeologists with the Four Styles is much too rigid¹⁵’: trying to identify any given style in a Roman house is often very tricky, and several styles of decoration might well appear in the same house. This decoration was normally designed in three horizontal zones. The painters prepared the wall by applying several coats of increasingly refined lime plaster. Then, starting at the top, the paint was applied.

The pigment does not ‘sink in’ to the plaster, as is sometimes said; rather, lime is drawn to the surface, reacts with carbon dioxide in the air and forms a crystalline layer that ‘seals’ the pigments and makes the finish both durable and lustrous. Guide lines would be drawn or incised on the plaster, and the artist would work while the plaster was still damp (‘true fresco’ technique), adding any ornaments or figures by either: pressing on the plaster to bring more moisture to the surface; applying the colours in a specially prepared solution of lime-water once the plaster had set (the ‘fresco secco’ technique); or binding the colours with an organic medium to ‘glue’ them to the surface (‘tempera’ technique).

The Pompeian palette is very distinctive: white was derived from calcium carbonate, calcareous clay and remains of fossils known as Attiorum, after the Atii, who had a shop in Pompeii; black was made by burning ivory, pine resin, needles or bark; Pompeian blue (or Alexandrian frit) was manufactured in Egypt and was very expensive; various reds came from rubrica (red ochre based on ferrous oxides and haematite), cinnabar (minimum, mercury sulphide), which gave bright vivid hues, and the calcification of yellow ochre; Vitruvius said that for yellows sil atticum was superior to the other yellow ochres used; green came from celadonite, glauconite or malachite; and violet or purpurissum was extracted from murex shells, and was also used for cosmetics.

The First ‘Incrustation’ Style¹⁶ (c.150–80 BCE) uses moulded plaster and painting to imitate rectangular stone blocks or marble facings.

The Second ‘Architectural’ Style¹⁷ (c.80–14 CE) deploys trompe l’oeil architecture to ‘open up’ the wall surface and create an illusion of depth based on three planes: the actual wall surface; the colonnade ‘in front’; and the open-air world ‘beyond’ the wall. Colonnades rise from podiums and support architraves that appear ‘in front’ of the wall, while ‘openings’ provide views of architecture receding into the distance. Shadows are projected from the light source of the room itself, and the artists show a decent knowledge of linear perspective, using several vanishing points along the vertical axis. Sometimes there are three symmetrically placed doorways as in theatrical scene-painting.

In the Third ‘Ornate’ Style¹⁸ (c.14–62 CE) the perspective disappears as the architectural framework becomes less realistic and more ornamental. Delicate candelabra, very slender columns and twining foliage become fashionable, and the podium becomes just a flat, decorative dado, while the upper zone’s architecture becomes independent of the middle zone. The wall is articulated into symmetrical zones and panels, and colour is very important in defining the layout, with, say, a black dado, red central zone and yellow upper zone, or the central zone featuring alternating black and red panels. Framed landscapes, still lifes, theatrical, mythological and genre scenes regularly decorate the central zone, and free-floating figures appear in the subsidiary panels.

The Fourth ‘Intricate’ Style¹⁹ appears after the earthquake of 62 CE and accounts for about 80 per cent of what survives at Pompeii and Herculaneum. It is a kind of mash-up of both the Second and Third Styles, making it quite tricky to pin down. Solid-lookingbut fantastic ornamental architecture ‘opens up’ the wall again in the upper zone, but there is often no connection between that and the central zone, which sports subsidiary panels of fantasy architecture, as well as flat, ornamental panels depictingmythologicalscenes, still lifes, landscapes, ‘floating’ figures and ‘theatre sets’ with mythological ‘actors’.

Mosaic floors were popular with those who could afford them: signinum, cement with a pattern of white tesserae, complemented the First Style, with ceilings possibly continuing the imitation-masonry theme; lithostraton, rectangular tesserae scattered with irregular pieces of bright stone, went with the Second, the ceilings of which often imitated coffering and panelling in stucco; all-over geometric black and white floors came on trend thereafter, although the commonest form of flooring in 79 CE was opus sectile, made from cut marble segments of a variety of colours; Third Style ceilings often placed figures and ornaments in stuccoed or painted panels; and the Fourth Style ceilings tend to be richer and integrate the painting and stucco-work more tightly.

The most luxurious Campanian houses were built under Hellenistic influence between c.200 and 80 BCE. One, the palatial House of the Faun (VI.12.2) in Pompeii, named after the statue of a dancing faun that adorned its impluvium, occupies an entire city block (3,000 square metres). Insulated from the street by shops, its internal walls were decorated with out of date, but exceptionally high quality, First Style painting. It sported two atria (one Tuscan, one Tetrastyle), four triclinia, two peristyle gardens and anexedrawhere the stunning ‘Alexander mosaic’ was found. This enormous virtuoso work used well over a million tesserae to produce (probably) a copy of a lost Hellenistic painting. Achieving incredible three-dimensional effects, the unknown artist shows Alexander the Great hurtling into the thick of the fray to defeat the Persian forces of Darius III, who is about to flee amidst the chaos. As Darius’ charioteer manoeuvres his horses out of Alexander’s way, the king’s chariot tramples one of its own side. A wonderfully foreshortened horse occupies the centre of the scene; a fallen Persian soldier looks at his own reflection in a shield; faces are full of intense emotions; gestures are eloquently expressive; this is a real tour de force of dramatic narrative art.

The unknown owners of the house were clearly connoisseurs of fine mosaics, and owned other first-rate pieces: Bacchus as a child riding on a lion and drinking from an oversized cup; a cat seizing a quail; ducks sitting among a still-life of fish, seafood and birds; and so on. Somewhat unusually, the house had dedicated service quarters featuring a kitchen, a domestic shrine, a bath with a latrine, a stable and various rooms decorated in the Third Style. Skeletons discovered here included a woman wearing heavy gold jewellery, although the normal occupants would have been more like the slave Martha – who scrawled, ‘This is Martha’s banqueting room, as she craps in this banqueting room’ on the latrine wall of the House of the Centenary (IX.8.6), misspelling triclinium (= ‘banqueting room’) as trichilinium in the process.

Fewer houses were erected after 80 BCE, and these tended to be less imposing, although more elaborately decorated. The House of the Vettii (VI.15.1) offers interesting insights into the attitudes and tastes of its prosperous merchant owners, which might be indicative of ‘new money’. The entrance features a painting of Priapus, symbolizing good luck and prosperity, studiously weighing his enormous phallus against a bag of money on a set of scales. The atrium, where two iron-clad bronze chests were displayed, had no tablinum, but opened directly on to a nice peristyle, where a fountain/statue of Priapus ‘ejaculated’ water from his erect penis. Many of the rooms were decorated in the newest Fourth Style, with mythological scenes such as Pentheus being torn limb from limb by frenzied bacchants, Dirce dragged to her death by a raging bull, and Hercules strangling the snakes that Hera sent to destroy him; and a large triclinium has some quite charming friezes of cupids engaged in various activities, including making garlands and perfumes, racing chariots, working metal, and buying and selling wine.

Only a pretty wealthy Roman could afford a domus, but an extremely wealthy individual might also be able to afford the luxury of at least one other property in the country. Wealthy landowners, who generally lived in the city, possessed large agricultural estates, which would have a large complex called a villa that provided accommodation for the landowner, his family, the overseer, the workers and often even livestock, as well as the necessary storage and work rooms. Such establishments were not necessarily purely commercial, since the rich felt the need for relaxation in the country or at seaside resorts, and owning such a residence pandered to the ideal of the citizen-farmer, even though no noble Roman had got his hands dirty on the land since the third century BCE.

As if to symbolize architecturally that country life was the antithesis of urban life, the villa was a domus turned inside out, open to the surrounding landscape, with the atrium set back as a private living room and the peristyle at the front. This was the layout of the Villa of the Mysteries, situated a short walk from Pompeii’s Herculaneum Gate. Built early in the second century BCE, and remodelled after the earthquake of 62 CE, it has sixty rooms and covers 0.56 ha. It included an industrial section featuring a wine press, although we do not know how much land its owner farmed. Entering from the east, you would find yourself in a peristyle of sixteen Doric columns, surrounded by several cubicula, an apsidal room (a lararium/reception room/bath suite), a Tuscan atrium, a tetrastyle atrium that gave access to a small bathing complex and a kitchen yard with a couple of ovens. The rooms around the Tuscan atrium, which at some stage was walled off from the tablinum, had Second Style wall paintings. There was acryptoporticus(semi-subterranean vaulted corridor) running under the main floor to the north, west and south, which provided a shady place to walk, and along the edge of the platform on which the house rested were two terraces planted with hanging gardens, arranged symmetrically around an exedra, all providing glorious vistas over the Bay of Naples. The rest of the western wing was occupied by suites of cubicula offering all manner of views and lighting, but the pièce de résistance is the wonderful painting located in a room at the south-western corner that shows scenes relating to Dionysos, and which gives the villa its name.

It is one of the finest, and most enigmatic, examples of ancient painting that survives. The work of a Campanian artist of the first century BCE, it comprises a frieze of life-size figures against a red architectural background that covers all four walls. The focal image shows Dionysos reclining in the lap of Ariadne, amid various overlapping scenes: a naked boy reads a scroll; a woman with a tray turns to look at us; a woman with two attendants sits with her back to us; an old satyr plays the lyre; a ‘female Pan’ suckles a goat; a woman recoils from the activity on the end wall; a Silenus and two satyrs drink and display a theatrical mask; a kneeling woman prepares to unveil a phallus; a semi-naked winged female demon in high boots flagellates a young woman who buries her head in a companion’s lap; a naked woman dances on tiptoe with castanets; a winged cupid holds up a mirror to a woman who is having her hair braided; and a mantled woman sits looking on. The artistic quality of the work is sensational, full of swirling draperies, fine expressive portraits and convincing anatomy. But quite what it actually portrays is open to discussion: are the scenes sequential or simultaneous? Where do they start? Does it show the transition of girlhood to womanhood? Is it a woman’s initiation into a Dionysiac mystery cult (the default position, which has given the villa its name)? Nobody knows; the Villa of the Mysteries remains just that.

Ordinary Romans did not live in domi or villae. Farming families frequently owned or rented small plots of land and lived in small huts, while urban dwellers often inhabited one-or two-roomed tabernae. Open to the street, except for folding shutters, these functioned as shops and workrooms as well as residences. There was sometimes a back room or a mezzanine that offered a modicum of privacy, and some dwellings were of the ‘flats over the shop’ type, with stairs or ladders leading to an upper living space. These structures could rise to three storeys, constructed from opus craticium (a wooden frame filled with rubble and plaster), even though, as Vitruvius said, ‘they are like torches ready for kindling’.²⁰

The introduction of concrete (opus caementicum) allowed builders to produce more solid apartment blocks called insulae (‘islands’), the walls of which were commonly built as a concrete core held in place by a facing of which the surface pattern was achieved with bricks or stones set into the concrete: the fishnet pattern of opus reticulatum was more pleasing to the eye, but liable to crack, whereas the old-fashioned, more irregular opus incertum was less aesthetic, but stronger. If fired bricks replaced the stones of opus reticulatum, it was called opus latericium, and a concrete core faced with alternating rows of rectangular blocks and courses of brick or tile, was known as opus vittatum mixtum.

Insula dwelling became the norm, and the fourth-century CE Curiosum Urbis Romae Regionum XIV indicates that Rome contained 46,602 insulae and just 1,797 private houses. At Rome’s port of Ostia, the insulae feature plain facades of brick-faced concrete, sometimes relieved by balconies above ground-floor level and large windows. They seldom exceeded five storeys, probably to comply with building regulations. The House of Diana was quite representative, with tabernae along the street frontage, two of which had back rooms. An interior courtyard, accessed via two entrance corridors, was surrounded at ground level by a corridor and several suites of rooms. The courtyard served to provide light and air, and contained a water cistern. One of the rooms in the block was converted into a stable, while a latrine and a porter’s lodge served the whole complex. On the second storey were various apartments, facing either the street or the courtyard.

No town could survive without an effective water supply, and the Romans saw themselves as world leaders in this. The engineer Frontinus, who wrote On the Aqueducts of Rome, put it beautifully: ‘Compare the idle pyramids of the Egyptians … when we have all these important structures, carrying so much water!’²¹ Drinking water at Pompeii and Herculaneum came from wells and the impluvia installed in the houses, but, once an aqueduct system was constructed throughout Campania around 27 BCE, some wealthier households acquired piped ‘mains’ water, generating a whole new style of garden design involving elaborate water features. Given that the average Roman (in Rome) used about 285 litres of water per day, getting water into and out of any city demanded immense structures and considerable planning and surveying expertise. Vitruvius tells us that water conduits should have a fall of not less than 1 in 200, and that the channels should be arched over to protect the water from the sun. A reservoir should be located where the channels come to the city walls, with pipes to distribute the water. If there are hills between the city and the fountain head, he recommends that underground tunnels be dug and air shafts installed; and advocates avoiding pressurized systems if possible. Earthenware pipes represented a cost-effective option (so long as a build-up of air did not burst them), especially as anyone could repair a fault, and interestingly Vitruvius knew that water from lead pipes is said to be harmful, which gives the lie to the facile ‘lead pipes caused the downfall of the Roman Empire’ cliché: Vitruvius was writing more than four centuries before the fall of Rome in the West.²² This aqueduct engineering could be spectacular. Brilliantly combining practicality and aesthetics, the Augustan aqueduct that brought water 56 km to the provincial town of Nemausus (Nîmes) and included the magnificent Pont du Gard, 48.75 m high and 270 m long.

Using systems like this the Aqua Marcia at Rome could deliver around 1.1 million litres an hour, and there were severe penalties for tampering with this fundamental aspect of Roman life:

Whoever shall … intentionally pierce, break, or countenance or attempt to pierce or break, the channels, conduits, arches, pipes, tubes, reservoirs, or basins of the public waters which are brought into the City … shall be condemned to pay a fine of 100,000 sestertii to the Roman people; [and repair] what he has damaged.²³

At Pompeii the water flowed into the Castellum Aquae (‘Water Castle’) at the highest point of the city, from where a system of water towers and fountains distributed it throughout the town. The water towers had a lead tank at the top, which regulated the hydraulic pressure, and lead pipes ran under the pavements to the public fountains, which dispensed continually flowing water into large stone troughs and to nearby houses. The earthquake of 62 CE badly damaged Pompeii’s water supply, and a major overhaul of the entire system was still under way when Vesuvius erupted. The priority had clearly been to restore the public fountains, since many grand houses had lost their connections, and quite a few private bath suites had fallen into disuse. Water kept the Roman city alive, and the expert provision of this vital commodity to even the most unassuming provincial town represents what Vitruvius dubbed ‘the most remarkable achievement anywhere in the world.’²⁴

Notes – Chapter 17

1. CIL IV 1293.

2. Tacitus, Annals 14.17 for the riot; CIL IV 3340.143 and 3340.144 for the removal of the magistrates.

3. Tacitus, Annals 15.22.

4. Seneca, Natural Questions 6.1.2. Seneca was writing shortly after the event, and says it took place on 5 February 63 CE. There is still some dispute about who is correct.

5. TR P VIIII IMP XV COS VII PP. The August date is, however, supported by finds of leaves of deciduous trees, herbs that would have finished flowering by autumn and broad beans, which ripen in late summer. Autumnal fruits like pomegranates were also often picked early and preserved.

6. Pliny, Letters 6.16; 6.20. The letters are written to the historian Tacitus.

7. So called after a famous and devastating eruption of Mount Pelée on Martinique in 1902.

8. Pliny, Letters 6.12, trans. B. Radice, in The Letters of the Younger Pliny, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.

9. Suetonius, Vespasian 5.

10. CIL IV.10231.

11. CIL IV.1842.

12. CIL IV.1819; CIL IV.1781; CIL IV. 1820; CIL IV.1904.

13. CIL IV 2184; 2193.

14. CIL X.877. Mosaic dogs guard other entrances, e.g. those of Paquis Proculus (I.7.1) and the House of Caecilius Iucundus (V.1.26), and one was painted on the wall of Trimalchio’s house in Petronius’ Satyricon, also with CAVE CANEM.

15. M. Beard, Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town, London: Profile, 2008, p. 117.

16. Described by Vitruvius, de Architectura, 7.5.1. See R. Ling, Roman Painting, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 12 ff.

17. Vitruvius, de Architectura, 7.5.2. See Ling, Roman Painting, 23 ff. (Good illustration at http://www.skenographia.cch.kcl.ac.uk/oplontis/analysis.html.)

18. Vitruvius, de Architectura, 7.5.3. See Ling, Roman Painting, 52 ff.

19. Vitruvius had died by 62 CE. See Ling, Roman Painting, 71 ff.

20. Vitruvius, de Architectura, 2.8.20.

21. Frontinus, On the Aqueducts of Rome 1.16, trans. C.E. Bennett, The Stratagems and the Aqueducts of Rome, London: William Heinemann, 1925.

22. Vitruvius, de Architectura, 8, 6, 1–10.

23. Frontinus, On the Aqueducts of Rome 1.16. The law was passed in 9 BCE. The penalty is astronomical.

24. Pliny the Elder, N.H. 36.121 f. Cf. Strabo 5.3.8.