As you can see, the title of today's lecture is

"Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous: Houses and Villas at

Pompeii."

We spoke last time about the public architecture of Pompeii,

about the forum, about the temples,

about the basilica, about the baths,

and also about shops, and tombs as well.

But today we're going to turn to the residential architecture

of Pompeii; residential architecture that

is extremely important, not only for what it tells us

about Pompeii, but what it also tells us about

domestic architecture in the first centuries B.C.

and the first century A.D., because there is no place where

the houses are better preserved than at Pompeii.

So it tells us again, not just about the city itself,

but also about residential architecture in Rome,

where we have very few examples, and elsewhere in the

Roman world.

I want to begin with the image that you see now on the screen,

which is a building--and we're talking about the one at the

left, front left--a building that is

on one of Pompeii's main thoroughfares,

the Via dell'Abbondanza, the Via dell'Abbondanza,

the Street of Abundance.

And the building in question is relatively well preserved,

and what is significant about it for us right now is the fact

that it is two-storied, as you can see here.

What we'll see in the course of today's presentation is that

most of the buildings, most of the houses,

in early Pompeii, are single-story dwellings,

but here we see one that is two-storied.

And this two-storied dwelling actually dates fairly late in

the history of residential architecture in Pompeii.

It dates sometime between the earthquake of 62 and the

eruption of Vesuvius of 79; so between 62 and 79 A.D.

And we see that it has two stories, in this instance.

A story down below that may have been--

that says has entranceways, might even have been opened up

as a shop, and then a second story that is

very interesting indeed.

And it has what we call cenaculae,

c-e-n-a-c-u-l-a-e, cenaculae,

which are second-story dining rooms that have open panoramic

windows, these windows,

as you can see, through columns.

So an interesting nod to Hellenization once again,

this idea of incorporating Greek elements into Roman

architecture -- elements that again are under-

that come into Roman architecture through the

influence of earlier Greek architecture,

and views out through those columns.

So two important points: one, that these have two

stories, and that adding a second story

to a Roman building, or a Pompeian building in this

instance, doesn't occur until between the

earthquake and the eruption of Vesuvius;

and secondarily, this idea of the picture

window.

And we've talked about the importance for the Romans of

vista and panorama, and they're doing it here.

They're opening up that second floor so that you can sit in one

of these dining rooms and then have a very nice view out

through the columns of the street and the street life

below.

Now this building, on the Via dell'Abbondanza,

lies at the end of the development of Pompeian domestic

architecture.

And so what I'm going to do is take us back to the beginning

and trace Pompeian domestic architecture from the Samnite

period up through the eruption of Vesuvius.

With regard to the earliest houses at Pompeii,

these were done during again the Samnite period,

the fourth and third centuries B.C.

Keep in mind that the Samnites were an Italic tribe,

that is, indigenous to Italy from way back when--

I had mentioned to you that Pompeii was founded already in

the eighth century B.C.

And these Italic tribes built houses,

obviously, in which they lived already in the fourth and third

-- substantial houses -- in which

they lived already in the fourth and third centuries B.C.

I want to begin our conversation about domestic

architecture in Pompeii, and by extension in Rome

itself, with the so-called Domus Italica.

What was the Domus Italica?

The Domus Italica was an ideal Roman house plan,

and we know quite a bit about it because of the writings of

Vitruvius.

Vitruvius -- not to be confused with Vesuvius --

Vitruvius was an architectural theoretician who was writing in

the age of Augustus, Augustus being Rome's first

emperor.

And Vitruvius left a great deal of writings about all kinds of

architecture, including domestic

architecture, and he talks in detail about

the Domus Italica or what he considered the ideal Roman

house, and he describes all of its

parts.

And through his writings we can explore together what the ideal

Roman house was, and what you're going to find

very interesting, I believe, is the fact that the

actual houses at Pompeii conform,

or the earliest houses, conform very closely to this

ideal plan.

Let's run through it together, both in plan and in restored

view.

Again I'm going to need to go over a lot of terminology here,

but I guarantee you I'm going to repeat it enough today that

it will be indelibly marked on your minds and you won't even

have to-- I don't think you'll even have

to study this, when the time comes,

because you're going to know these parts of the houses so

well after we go through them today.

Here you see the plan of the typical Domus Italica.

You can see at number 1 is the entrance into the house.

The entrance to the house was called the fauces,

f-a-u-c-e-s; the fauces or the throat

of the house.

Sometimes the fauces had before it a vestibule,

called a vestibulum--and all of these words are on the

Monument List for you-- a vestibulum,

which was a place right before the beginning of the

fauces, underneath the eaves of the

house, where you could actually stand,

get in from the rain in case it was raining outside,

while you waited for the door to be opened.

But in these very early Domus Italica houses,

we don't tend to see the vestibulum.

So think it away for the moment, just the fauces

or throat of the house.

Then on either side of the fauces there are two

rooms, which are called cells or

cellae: cella in the singular and cellae,

c-e-l-l-a-e in the plural.

These can be treated in a number of different ways.

They can either be closed off from the street and used as

interior rooms for the house, extra bedrooms or living

spaces, or they can be, as you see them in this ideal

plan, opened up to the street.

When they are opened up to the street they take on the role of

shops or tabernae, t-a-b-e-r-n-a-e,

shops or tabernae.

And those shops could be either used by those who owned the

house, to make additional money, or they could be leased out to

others for their shops.

You see the fauces leads into the most important room of

a Roman house, the so-called atrium,

the famous atrium of the Roman house,

a-t-r-i-u-m.

The atrium was the audience hall of the house.

And it's important to mention from the outset that Roman

houses had a very different role in Roman society than houses do

for us today.

We tend to think of our houses today in large parts as

retreats, as places we can get away from

it all -- get away from work,

get away from schoolwork and so on,

and escape.

Although we do enjoy obviously having friends and family visit

us there, we tend to think of it as a place of retreat.

This was not true in Roman times, when the house was also a

place to do some very serious business.

The man of the house, the head of the household,

the paterfamilias, often greeted clients in the

atrium of the house, and when he was away on

business, or away at war, his wife, the

materfamilias, would stand in for him and she

would conduct business in the atrium.

So considered a very public part of the house,

a place where you wanted it to look its best because you were

going to be greeting important visitors there,

to do business.

So the atrium is located here.

You can see this rectangular pool in the center of the

atrium.

That is the impluvium--and you have

that on the Monument List-- the impluvium of the

house, which is a pool in which they collected rain water for

daily use.

How did they collect that rain water?

Because there was an opening in the ceiling, also rectangular in

shape.

That's called a compluvium,

and the compluvium had surrounding it a slanted roof to

encourage the water obviously to slide in through the

compluvium and land in the impluvium down below.

Around the atrium and also around the impluvium,

at 4 here, are the bedrooms of the house,

the cubiculum, in the singular,

and cubicula, in the plural:

the cubicula or bedrooms of the house.

And you can see that each one of them opens up off the atrium.

They are very small in size, smaller than any other rooms in

the house, and they were literally just a place to sleep.

They were very small, mostly very dark.

Some of them had slit windows.

I'll show you one of those later.

Many of them didn't have any windows, they were literally

just sleeping spaces.

Over here, at 5, we see the wings or the

alae, a-l-a-e--the wings or the alae,

ala in the singular--alae of the

house.

The wings of the house were a very important place from the

point of view of family tradition and religious practice

and so on.

It was the place where the Romans kept the shrines of their

ancestors.

They had wooden shrines--they were usually made out of wood--

with doors, and they kept inside those the busts and

portraits of their ancestors, and they would take those out,

they would open those shrines up and take those out on special

occasions, usually anniversaries marking

the anniversary of the death of the deceased.

And they had an interesting practice in which the member of

the family who most closely resembled the deceased in size

and general appearance would put on that mask and participate in

a kind of parade in honor of the dead.

So they kept those in those shrines, in the wings or the

alae of the house.

Here at 6 on axis--and we know how much the Romans liked

axiality as well as symmetry-- we see the room over here,

at 6, is on axis with the fauces and the atrium.

This room is called the tablinum,

t-a-b-l-i-n-u-m, the tablinum,

which started as the master bedroom of the house,

the most important bedroom, much larger than the

cubicula, but over time it became a place

where the family archives were kept.

And beyond that--and we'll see it happening pretty early

actually today-- it becomes almost a kind of

passageway between the atrium and the area that lay beyond

here.

At 7 we see also a fairly large room,

the dining room or triclinium,

and you can see in this case, in the ideal Roman house,

it opens off the atrium; so easy to get to from the

atrium.

And then at the back, number 8, for one of these

ideal Roman houses, the hortus,