Plan of the Roman Patrician Domus
How Public and Private Space Was Defined in Elite Roman Townhouses.
A dual purpose dwelling, the elite Roman townhouse was designed to accommodate guests and clients in very different ways.
Designed to be inward looking and closed to the outside world,the townhouses of the Roman elite carefully manipulated social space to accommodate private family life whilst making statements that reinforced the relative social positions of the owner and his visitors.
Typical Rooms in an Elite Domus
Externally, Roman townhouses were often unprepossessing, and featureless. External walls would have contained few windows, restricting entry and maintaining privacy. It was common for even patrician residences to be fronted by shops. The only discernable external feature would have been the entrance of the house leading to the fauces
A narrow, dark passageway, the fauces was the public entrance to the domus. They were manned constantly by a porter who would monitor and restrict entry. Fauces generally led into only one room, the atrium.
The origin of the atrium was as a communal central room that provide the households basic of water, heat and light and where the family would have worked and eaten. Water was collected via a hole in the roof, the conpluvium into a central pool, or impluvium. The conpluvium acted as a source of air and natural daylight.
Although the atrium always maintained these discernable features, as well as housing the household shrine of the lares and penates, its function gradually changed. It developed into a central reception area, a nexus point from where callers to the house could directed according to status. For this reason, it was generally a feature only of elite households, for lower status dwellings would not need to make a distinction between guests and clients. Plans of such dwellings confirm this. Atria, if they exist at all, are open plan, allowing free visual and physical access to other areas of the house.
Small cubicula or bedrooms were traditionally situated around the atrium, although in later periods they could be situated elsewhere in the private zones of the house. Also found in this area were dining rooms and general reception rooms, oeci and sitting rooms or alae. However, their access was restricted by closing them off either physically or employing recognisable visual language in the form of decor. Private areas for guests or family were marked by ornately frescoed and paved passage ways which would immediately be recognised as no go areas by visiting clients. However, the tablinium or study was entirely open to the atrium. Directly opposite the fauces, it was visually and physically accessible to even the most casual visitor. Ancillary rooms would have been peripheral and accessible via plain, unadorned corridors.
In very early style houses, a garden or hortus marked the limits of the house, such as in the House of the Surgeon, Pompeii. However, in later style houses, it was normal for this to develop into a peristyle garden. The peristyle was an internal feature, surrounded and overlooked by other rooms of the house. It too played its role in transmitting messages of status to the occupants of the house.
The Public Function of the House
Patrician houses were not simply living spaces. Rather, they provided an interface between public and private life. The house was the primary place of business. Every morning, during a custom known as the salutatio, the Roman pater familias would receive dependant clients and petitioners in the tablinium rather than at an outside office.
The house was designed to channel these clients straight into the areas designated for public business whilst ensuring the private areas of the house remained private. In atrium centred houses, this involved employing the Fauces-atrium-tablinium axis. The linear design of the architecture ensured that the first sight clients would see was their patron in his study. This was a convenient arrangement to ensure that the business area of the house was clearly demarcated. However, it also served to emphasis the subservient status of client. Peristyle gardens often acted as a full stop at the end of the axis, a visual final statement of a patron’s status.
The Private Function of the House
As a rule, the higher the status of the house, the more reception rooms it possessed. These rooms were used in a private capacity for the entertainment of guests. However, even they were used to make statements of social status, employing visual language the visitors were familiar with. It was common to draw attention to particular features visible in the peristyle from the nearby triclinium, by using features of public architecture to frame the view, as in the case of the House of Menander in Pompeii. In the same way, those climbing the social scale, such as the owner of the House of Octavius Quartio, who had wealth rather than established standing, could misemploy this language of status, creating a confused and vulgar impression.
Sources
Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture (Dover Publications)
Wallace-Hadrill, A (1988) 'The Social Structure of the Roman House' Papers of the British School at Rome.
Wallace Hadrill, A (1994) Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum. (Princeton University Press.)
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