Roman house

“ Baumeister, Fig. 146) found in various places in Italy. The ground plan is a simple rectangle, as shown in Figure 36, without partitions. This may be regarded as historically and architecturally the kernel of the Roman house; it is found in all of which we have any knowledge. Its very name (ātrium) , denoting originally the whole house, was also preserved, as is shown in the names of certain very ancient buildings in Rome used for religious purposes, the ātrium Vestae, the ātrium Lībertātis, etc., but afterwards applied to the characteristic single room. ”

“ The ground-floor of very few Roman houses is ever occupied as a dwelling-place; it is given up to shops, stables, etc., the families residing, according to their wealth, on the lowest up to the highest stories; the light purses going up and the heavy ones sinking. They had walked nearly to the end of this street, when, happening to look up at the fourth story of a house, he saw something white being reversed in the moonlight, and the next instant a long stream of water, reminding him of the horse-tail fall in Switzerland, came splashing down where a sidewalk should have been. ”

“ It was an innovation of the Roman architect to build houses of three or more stories, but it was probably only a starveling poet who would live on the fourth floor. A noble’s house would spread over the ground regardless of space, but the bedrooms and sometimes the dining-room were upstairs. Externally the Roman house was a little finer than the Greek, being fronted with a pillared forecourt and a dwelling for the concierge. At the back the atrium opened into a colonnaded garden with a fountain, flower-beds, and shrubbery. ”

“ Without this and a box of matches, you can never hope to be a good Roman. You must have seen that where the houses have any front-doors, three quarters of them are open all night long; for, as on every floor of a house, there live different families, they find it saves trouble—trouble is money in Rome—to leave the door unclosed. ”

“ Some sumptuous public edifices, beautiful private houses—that is all the splendour of the metropolis of the empire. He who goes to the Palatine may to-day refigure for himself, from the so-called House of Livia, the house of a rich Roman family of the time of Augustus, and convince himself that a well-to-do middle-class family would hardly occupy such a house to-day. ”

“ No architecture was wasted upon it; decoration and other magnificence belonged to the interior. Provided a house possessed a more or less imposing doorway its exterior walls might be left either to shops or to a dull monochrome of stucco, pierced here and there, if necessary, at 9 or 10 feet from the ground by barred slits, which cannot be called windows, for the admittance of light. The general principle of a Roman house, as of a Greek, was that of rooms surrounding spaces lighted from within. ”

“ From the excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii we have learned enough to conceive some general idea of the social life of a wealthy Roman in the time of Rome's highest prosperity. The houses had no upper story, but enclosed two or more quadrangles, or courts, with arcades into which the rooms opened, receiving air and ventilation from the centre open court. The illustration opposite p. 12 will give an idea of this arrangement.
In Mr. Hungerford Pollen's useful handbook there is a description of each room in a Roman house, with its proper Latin title and purpose ”

“ After the great conflagration which swept over a large part of Rome in this very year 64 he began to build his enormous Golden House, in which stood a colossal effigy of himself 120 feet high, and in which the circuit of the colonnade made three Roman miles. Whether he deliberately set fire to the city in order to make room for this stupendous palace is open to doubt. ”

“ In carpentry, too, the Romans must have possessed considerable skill, or they could never have connected, by a structure of timber, arches so wide as those of Trajan’s bridge over the Danube.
We will now give a short description of the general form and appearance of the Greek and Roman house. In neither nation had the external appearance of a dwelling-house much pretension to beauty. Lying chiefly, almost exclusively, on the ground floor, there did not exist that elevation of structure, or regularity of plan necessary to produce a striking effect on the eye from without. ”

“ But special contrivances like the Indian palanquins were made with or hung under poles, with curtains or shutters. Stations of such conveyances for public use were established in Rome.
The subjects of the carving and ornamentation of Roman furniture were the classic legends mainly derived from the Greek mythology. Roman house walls were, however, in later years profusely decorated with conventional representations of architecture, [pg 32] and panels richly coloured on which were painted figures of dancers, cupids, gods and heroes; sometimes commonplace landscapes and domestic scenes. ”

“ CHAPTER X THE COUNTRY HOMESTEAD AND COUNTRY SEAT Throughout the romanized parts of the empire—in other words, wherever Romans settled, in Italy, Spain, Gaul, Britain, and also wherever the richer natives imitated the Roman fashions—the house in any city or considerable town was built as nearly as possible after the type described.
In the country the poor naturally had their much simpler cottages and cabins of a room or two, commonly thatched or shingled, knowing nothing of hall and court and all these arrangements of art and luxury. ”

“ The reader will now have a tolerable notion of the Pompeian houses, which resembled in some respects the Grecian, but mostly the Roman, fashion of domestic architecture. In almost every house there is some difference in detail from the rest, but the principal outline is the same in all. In all you find the hall, the tablinum, and the peristyle communicating with each other; in all you find the walls richly painted, and in all the evidence of a people fond of the refining elegancies of life. ”

“ Whether a Roman living in England ever built himself such a house it is difficult to prove, since, so far as I can find, no remains of such a place are to be seen. But, when one considers the actual evidence of the Roman Occupation, the yields given by the neighbourhoods of Roman cities, the statues, vases, toys, the amphitheatres for cock-fighting, wrestling, and gladiatoral combat, then surely there were gardens of great wonder near to these cities where men like Pliny went to sit in their garden houses and enjoyed the cool of the evening after a day’s work. ”

“ For instance, no Roman lady of today will ever show herself at a window that looks on the street, except during Carnival, and in most houses something of the old arrangement of rooms is still preserved, whereby the men and women occupy different parts of the house. ”

“ The later Roman period, it is true, has provided most of the remains unearthed. I saw and measured myself, amongst many other houses, two of undoubted Roman construction, one apparently a temple, to judge by the now empty niches which are constructed round three sides of the inner wall, and the doorway of well-dressed stone in the fourth side. Another house near it, of which the chief apartment was twenty-two feet in diameter, possessed a dressed stone piscina or font in the wall, and what appeared to be a bath of five feet in diameter and nearly six feet deep of rubble and tiles. ”

“ Our English kin hate a walled town or a stone house, and they would not live within the strong walls, whose wide span was, save for the king’s palace, which was built partly of the house of the Roman governor, and these other halls, which went for naught in so wide a meadow, empty and green, and crossed by two paved roads, with grass growing between the stones. ”

“ I shall now endeavour to bring before my readers, in a short chapter, the daily inner life of Rome. First of all, let us take a peep into a Roman dwelling. The mansions of the nobility and the houses of the wealthier classes are built on the plan of the ancient Romans. There is a portal in front, a paved court in the middle, a quadrangle enclosing it, with suites of apartments running all round, tier on tier, to perhaps four or five stories. The palaces want nothing but cleanliness to make them sumptuous. They are of marble, lofty in style, and chaste though ornate in design. ”

“ The red brick carcases of five small cottages and those huge masses of grey stone all overgrown with ivy, do these constitute all that remains of the once great Roman town? Did Caius, and Lucius, and Publius, and Marcus, and Quintus, inhabit these miserable hovels? The floors are overgrown with weeds, the walls are dilapidated and roofless, yet still it is somewhat strange to remember that the Romans, whom we know only in history, were actually living men and women when these walls were built, just the same as we who now look at them, after nearly two thousand years, are living men and women. ”

“ The architecture which we inherit from the Middle Ages, associated by an accident of history with the name of the Goths, had its origin under the Empire, and may be traced down to modern times, step by step, from the basilica of Trajan and the palace of Diocletian. These are but a few instances of the inheritance we have received from Rome. But behind the ordered structure of her law and government, and the majestic fabric of her civilisation, lay a vital force of even deeper import; the strong grave Roman character, which has permanently heightened the ideal of human life. ”

“ From this point, the “Peristyle” is also visible, with its columns coloured red some way up, a Xystus or flower-garden, and a back wall, upon which are curious specimens of perspective decoration, in which the Romans seem to have delighted. This court was always open to the sky in the middle. Passing through the “tablinum,” and turning to the right, we come to a small doorway which admits us into the “triclinium,” or winter dining-room. The Roman dining-room generally contained three couches, each large enough to hold three persons. ”

“ Nothing similar ever flourished in Rome.
Unlike the Greeks, the Romans were never sensitive or imaginative. Properly speaking, they had nothing which they could express through art; they were utilitarian from the outset, and their architecture finally took shape in the most perfect system of materialistic building which, probably, has ever existed. Obviously such a system could only be matured in a capitalistic society, and, accordingly, Roman architecture only reached perfection somewhat late, perhaps, toward the close of the first century. ”

“ The amphitheatres and the triumphal{92} arches of the empire well illustrate this mixture of arched construction, as shewn in the round-headed wall openings, combined with trabeated decoration, in the form of horizontal entablatures supported on engaged columns or pilasters. This mixed style long prevailed, and examples of it are to be found in every part of the Roman world. But in later times, when purity of taste had begun to decay, the Romans gradually gave fuller scope to their noble constructive powers, and allowed them to find a worthier expression in their designs. ”

“ Nothing in Rome is more interesting, and no locality has such a confusion of picturesque charms. It is a vast, rambling garden, where you stumble at every step on the disinterred bones of the past; where damp, frescoed corridors, relics, possibly, of Nero's Golden House, serve as gigantic bowers, and where, in the springtime, you may sit on a Latin inscription, in the shade of a flowering almond-tree, and admire the composition of the Campagna. ”

“ Le lieu est fait pour une aquarelle, et quand un beau soleil éclaire les débris antiques, les vieux murs sombres de la rue étroite où la poisson se vend sur des tables de marbre blanc, et à travers laquelle des nattes sont tendues, on a, à côté du monument romain, le spectacle d'un marché du moyen âge, et un peu le souvenir d'un bazar d'Orient."—Ampère, Emp. i. 179.
"Who that has ever been to Rome does not remember Roman streets of an evening, when the day's work is done? They are all alive in a serene and homelike fashion. ”

“ Nevertheless this deserted country once teemed with life—some seventy cities, it is surmised, once covered the plain, and countless villas and farms, the property of Roman patricians, consuls, and senators, made it a veritable garden. Driving within the walls of Rome being forbidden save to the Emperor and the Vestals, the tenants of these villas met the rheda outside the gates, drawn by its pair of fast-stepping horses. ”

“ And, in fact, such mere vague traces and memorials as baths, bits of pavement, and dusty holes, with smouldering brick-basements, which people call "Roman villas,"—are not at all fitted, whatever would-be classicists may pretend, to stir up the strong tide of enthusiastic association. These are but miserable odds and ends of fragments, from which you can no more leap to the dignity and the grandeur of the Romans, than you could argue, never having seen a man, from finding a cast-away tooth-pick, up to the appearance and nature of the invisible owner. ”

“ The centuries have bestowed a certain pathetic beauty, they have also taken away much, and the sympathy which these ruined pleasure palaces evoke whets our curiosity to know what they were like in their heyday of joyous revelling.
If we run down the list of the nobler villas of Rome we will find that, with few exceptions, they were built by princes of the purple, and that the names they bear are not Roman but those of the ruling families of other Italian cities. ”