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Housing in the Roman Empire
The inhabitants of the countryside lived in houses made of stone or mud brick, often with
several generations of the family sharing rooms along with farm animals. Rich people in the
city lived in houses, the word for which was domus, from which comes our word domestic.
The wealthy also often owned sumptuous country villas. The majority of people living in Rome,
however, rented apartments. A surviving document known as the Regionary Catalogue is a list
of all the different buildings in ancient Rome and includes the number of houses and
apartment buildings in the city of Rome. At the time the list was made in the fourth century
CE, there were 1,797 buildings that were identified as a domus, but there were 46,602
apartment buildings. This discrepancy is even more shocking if one considers that each
domus only contained one family, but an apartment building could shelter hundreds.
Roman houses in the city had few or no windows, and from the outside, a house would simply seem like a blank
wall. By modern standards, Roman houses had relatively little furniture. Today, people tend to decorate a house by
putting objects in the room, but the Romans had the opposite mentality. Rather than placing decorative objects in a
room, they put more effort into decorating the walls and floor of the room itself. Most floors would have a mosaic,
formed by pressing small bits of colored stone into wet concrete to create pictures. The walls tended to be
completely covered in paintings, often of mythological scenes or landscapes.
The center of the house, and its focal point, was the atrium. This was usually an open courtyard with a large hole in
the ceiling to admit light. The entryway to the house itself always opened onto the atrium and was called the
vestibulum. In the center of the atrium, there was often a pool of water termed the impluvium. Opening onto the
atrium was a raised platform called the tablinum, which was where the paterfamilias would sit when receiving visitors
of lower status. For example, when a man's clients came every morning to pay their respects at the salutatio, the
patron would greet them seated in the tablinum. The dining room, or triclinium, also usually opened onto the atrium.
In the back of the house were a series of tiny rooms that served as the bedrooms. Each of these was called a
cubiculum. The quarters for slaves and women were also at the back of the house. Roman houses were more or less
the same range of sizes as modern houses, with the average house being about 2,000 square feet.
In Rome and other large cities, only a tiny percentage of urban Romans could afford their own homes. The rest lived
in high-rise apartment buildings. The Romans called them "islands," or insulae, because of the way they often
occupied entire city blocks. Insulae were located all over the city of Rome; some of the larger ones may have had 10
or more stories. Because of the destruction caused by poorly built insulae collapsing, emperors several times set
limits on the height of insulae. Usually, these limits were about 60 or 70 feet. That the emperors felt the need to
repeatedly pass such legislation suggests that these limits were repeatedly ignored. Ancient sources record
numerous instances when insulae collapsed and Roman law did not offer tenants much protection.
Insulae housed a wide variety of tenants of differing socioeconomic classes. The ground-floor apartments would have
been rented to the wealthiest tenants, who did not want to have to trudge up many flights of stairs to reach their
dwellings. Often the row of rooms opening onto the street were rented out as shops and small businesses. As one
climbed up the levels of the insulae, the wealth of the tenants declined and the number of people per room increased.
The least-desirable rooms were located under the eaves of the roof and frequently leaked and were inhabited by
vermin. A chamber pot served as a toilet, and despite more legislation prohibiting such actions, full pots were
routinely dumped out the window. The owners of insulae included many famous Romans. The well-known orator
Marcus Tullius Cicero was such a slumlord who owned several insulae, including one that collapsed because it was
so poorly made. Cicero expressed no concern for the lives lost in the disaster but cheerfully noted that he would
rebuild it and be able to charge higher rents for the new building.
Further Reading
Clarke, J. The Houses of Roman Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991; Stambaugh, J. E. The Ancient
Roman City. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988; Wallace-Hadrill, A. Houses and Society in
Pompeii and Herculaneum. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Select Citation Style:
MLA
MLA
Aldrete, Gregory S. "Housing in the Roman Empire." Daily Life through History. ABC-CLIO, 2013. Web. 31 Oct.
2013.
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Entry ID: 1450172