Inward looking and closed to the outside world, the townhouses of the Roman elite carefully manipulated social space to accommodate private family life while making statements reinforcing the relative social positions of the owner and his visitors.

The Reception Areas: The Fauces and Atrium

Externally, Roman townhouses were often unprepossessing and featureless. External walls 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. It was staffed constantly by a porter who would monitor and restrict who could enter. Fauces generally led into only one room: the atrium.

Originally, the atrium was the central communal room of the house. In early roman dwellings, it was here that the family would have cooked, worked and eaten. Water passed through a hole in the roof — the compluvium — to be collected in a central pool, the impluvium. The compluvium also acted as a source of air and natural daylight. Daily worship around the household shrine of the lares and penates also occurred in the atrium.

Although the atrium remained integral to the patrician domus and maintained these traditional features, its function gradually changed. It developed into a central reception area, a nexus point where callers to the house collected to be redirected about the house according to their status. 

Dining areas surrounded the atrium, as well as general reception rooms known as oeci and open sitting rooms called alae. Traditionally, small cubicula or bedrooms were also situated around the atrium. However, over time, these bedrooms moved away from the atrium to the private zones of the house.     

The Role of Mosaics and Frescos

Access to the public and private zones of the Roman domus was restricted by either closing off private areas physically or employing recognisable visual language in the form of decor. Private areas for guests or family were marked by ornately frescoed and paved passageways, which would immediately be recognised as no-go areas by visiting clients. Ancillary rooms were peripheral and accessible via plain, unadorned corridors.

The tablinum or study was entirely open to the atrium. Directly opposite the fauces, it was visually and physically accessible to even the most casual visitor as it was a place of business. 

The Garden of the Roman Domus

In early-style houses, a garden or hortus marked the house’s limits, as in the House of the Surgeon, Pompeii. However, in later homes, the hortus developed into a peristyle garden.

The peristyle was an internal feature, surrounded and overlooked by other rooms of the house. It played its role in transmitting messages of status to visitors. Often visible from the atrium, the peristyle garden acted as a full stop at the end of a sequence of rooms that made an important statement about the owner’s status to his clients: the fauces-atrium-tablinum axis.

The Fauces-Atrium-Tablinium Axis

Patrician houses were not simply living spaces. They were an interface between public and private life and the house was the primary place of a patron’s business. 

Every morning, during a custom known as the salutatio, the Roman pater familias would receive dependant clients and petitioners not at an office but in the tablinum of his house.

The house’s architecture and decor channelled these clients straight into the areas designated for public business while ensuring the private areas of the house remained private. In atrium-centred houses, this involved employing the fauces-atrium-tablinum axis. The architecture’s linear design ensured that clients’ first sight was their patron in his study. This was a convenient arrangement to ensure that the business area of the house was clearly demarcated. It also served to emphasise the subservient status of the client.

Entertaining in the Triclinium

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. They also made statements of social status, employing visual language the visitors were familiar with.

The dining room often faced the peristyle garden and it was common practice to frame the view using emblems from public architecture. By marrying impressive garden features with grand architectural images commonly associated with power in the public sphere, the owner could emphasise his own importance — a device used to good effect in the House of Menander in Pompeii.

Often those new to the Roman elite had the money but not the subtlety to apply such visual devices tastefully. Misemployment could have the opposite effect to that intended. Such is the case at the House of Octavius Quartio in Pompeii, where overuse of this visual language creates a confused and vulgar impression.

Resources

Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture. Dover Publications

Wallace-Hadrill, A, (1988). “The Social Structure of the Roman House” in “Papers of the British School at Rome”.

Wallace Hadrill, A, (1994) Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Princeton University Press.