Ideas and practices of the Roman elite undeniably altered and informed the design and decoration of their houses and villas. Whilst the perception of luxury shifted over time, which led to some changes in the style of decoration later on, ideas such as the balance between work and nature, wealth or austerity and commemoration, as well as the practices of relaxation or those in the world of business, continually influenced how these houses were constructed and decorated.
The first idea and practice that informed the design and decoration of elite Roman houses and villas is that of the house being a place for business, and the activities that were carried out there. Vitruvius writes extensively on this in his De Architectura,[1] detailing that those who do business in country produce must have stalls and shops in their entrance courts, with granaries and storerooms. He explains that the focus of country villas should be on keeping the produce fresh and in a good condition, rather than focusing on ornamental beauty and luxury, thus suggesting that houses in the country, whilst being focused upon the production, storage, and harvest of produce, were not used for business meetings, as, according to Vitruvius, they should be kept on the more modest side. However, he does state that for capitalists and farmers of the revenue of these sites, their residences should be comfortable and showier, they must be secure against robbery, and roomy and handsome enough to accommodate meetings with advocates and public speakers, suggesting that for the houses in the town and city, there is more space for luxury and beauty, as guests will inevitably be taken into the home for business matters. And indeed, this is supported by the archaeological evidence of houses. For example, the House of the Mosaics at Herculaneum contained a structure with a series of pillars on either side, and a second story with clerestory windows, which are reminiscent of a public basilica. Furthermore, both the House of Menander and the House of the Cervi had very large rooms marked out by pediments on the outside walls, much like fastigium, the apex or summit of a roof. When one considers that Caesar’s own house was joined to the Regia using a fastigium, an air of regality and importance is impressed,[2] and these houses can be linked to some of the most important public and political buildings in Rome. It is as though the owners of these houses wanted to demonstrate that the house was inextricably linked with business, and thus wished to bring this part of life into the home, not only through practice, but also architecture.
Whilst it was important for the house to be seen as a place of business, Roman writers seem to have believed that work taking over the house was a negative thing, and that nature should be incorporated into the house too. Whilst the house was a place for business to be conducted, it was seen to be poor form to isolate and sequester oneself inside of the study whilst working, and to stay inside was seen as an act of cowardice. To show a lack of engagement, as Cicero puts it, was nefarious.[3] Thus, whilst Vitruvius does state that it was important for men of rank, who held official positions and magistracies and who had a social obligation to their fellow citizens, to have libraries, picture galleries and basilicas, finished in a similar style to public buildings, it is also equally as important for them to have spacious atriums and peristyles, with plantations and walks to some extent in them.[4] Cicero agrees, saying that the paved colonnade gave his brother’s villa and air of great dignity, as did the fishpond, the fountains, the palaestra, and the shrubbery. To these writers, the incorporation of nature within the house was a crucial part of the ideology of being a good and honest businessman. The House of Octavius Quartio in Pompeii is a key example of this. As can be seen in Fig.1, the house has an enormous garden area, larger than the actual house itself. This house almost exactly fits the idealised description that Vitruvius provides – it has extensive dining areas and is lavishly decorated, whilst also having enough space for escaping from the world of work.
A man’s house was also an important means of building up one’s political power and to expressing their existing power. Firstly, Cicero[5] tells us about one Gnaeus Octavius, the first consul of his family. He is said to have built an attractive and imposing house upon the Palatine, which was visible to everyone. Cicero posits that this helped to gain him votes in his canvass for consulship. This seems to suggest that building impressive and ‘attractive’ houses was important for boosting one’s visibility within society and one’s political power. Indeed, the villa could be seen as a supreme symbol of an individual’s power and resources, and, at least to a modern audience, could be a symbol of brutal and unquestionable Roman power.[6]
One’s house could also provide someone with the opportunity to show off their lavish wealth. The Satyricon by Petronius provides great insight into this, describing in great detail the decorative choices that Trimalchio has made for his house in the city. He writes that a golden cage hung in the doorway with a magpie inside[7], that there were elaborate frescoes on the walls, depicting Minerva taking Trimalchio dressed as Mercury to Rome, and on another Mercury, taking Trimalchio by the chin and leading him up to a high throne.[8] He also describes the overly extravagant choices of dining equipment Trimalchio provides, such as a bronze donkey with two panniers to hold olives, and two great silver dishes, with Trimalchio’s name and their specified weights engraved into them. These decorations are clearly luxurious and lavish, but they are clearly looked upon by Petronius in a mocking light, and he sees them as garish and disreputable, rather than impressive. He writes that as everybody else kissed Trimalchio’s portrait, he himself was ashamed to even pass by it.[9] Indeed, there are conflicting views towards the showing-off of wealth. Seneca writes in his Moral Epistles[10] that people think of themselves as poor and mean if they do not show off everything they have; if their ceilings are not buried in glass, if their swimming pools are not lined with Thasian marble, or if their walls are not resplendent with mirrors. He seems to think of these expressions of wealth as blasphemous, comparing the pristine pools that were once found in temples to those now corrupted with the sweat of those who climb into them. Varro agreed, saying that in the first century BCE when he was writing, a gymnasium each is not enough, and people think that they do not have a real villa unless it tinkles with Greek names which they attach to certain places.[11] Therefore, men were also motivated by the less ‘moral’, at least to Cicero and Varro, need to show off their wealth and their extravagant lifestyles.
The idea and practice of commemoration was a crucial one when it came to the decoration and design of houses. Scipio, the first attested villa owner, posited that his house was an extension of himself, and Seneca supports this by saying that the house is the reflection of a man’s character.[12] Indeed, the destruction of somebody’s house was seen to be damning of their memory, and by the first century CE, it was seen as a deliberate and clear hostile act.[13] Many of these houses would have been handed down through generations of a family, and those who would come to own these properties would have grown up in them. It is possible that they felt a sense of obligation to maintain these homes because of the familial links and loyalties that lay within the home. The Lararium at the Villa of Volasii Saturnii was filled with an odd and large collection of ancestral portraits that were passed through the generations,[14] and so the concept of familial pietas, dedication towards one’s family and ancestors, perhaps came into play here. The sense of duty they felt towards their family may have influenced the way they designed their houses, and also influenced the way they decorated them too. The assemblages of statues in both urban houses and rural villae, whilst perhaps being an attempt to create a mythical landscape and to create objects of interest, could also have been representative of the owners of a house, seeking to idealise them.[15] Verres, who was alive in the first century BCE, took many statues made by Praxiteles, Myron and Polykleitas, three of the most skilled and famous Greek sculptors of their times, famous for their creation of the ‘ideal’ man (such as the Doryphoros statue by Polykleitas (Fig.2) or the Diskobolos by Myron (Fig.3 – a roman marble copy), and took them to his urban domus and his many villae.[16] When one links this with the idea of commemoration, perhaps these statues being representative of the past owners of the villa could be a longing to represent these people as idealised and provide them with the best memory possible. A key change that occurred across the shift from republic to empire was the restrictions on public display, and so it makes sense that people sought other, more private ways to prolong or show off somebody’s memory.[17]
The ideas and practices of tranquillity and peacefulness were also crucial to the design and decoration of elite roman homes and villae. Horti, the group name for villae in the country, served as a place of separation from the business of city life, and offered refuge and leisure to the owner.[18] Cicero writes in his Letters to his friends, that he has constructed some new sitting-rooms on his Tusculan property, and that he wishes to ornament them with frescoes, simply because he ‘take[s] pleasure in anything of that sort.’[19] He also writes to Quintus about the ‘admirable summer room’ that is being constructed (Letters to his brother Quintus, 3.1),[20] showing that in any property, space for relaxation can be created or found. The Villa of Publius Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale, constructed shortly after 50BCE, provides us with archaeological evidence for this. There was a fully heated bath complex on site, as well as there being a tranquil garden with marble fountains.[21] The reception rooms also contained life-sized figures as frescoes upon the walls – Venus, Bacchus and the three Graces, a ‘triad of divine beauty’.[22] As well as providing enjoyable and relaxing activities to the owner, these frescoes perhaps also allowed for a closer sense of connection to the divine – the depiction of these deities on a wall of a room which would receive frequent visitation perhaps brings a sense of religious tranquillity too.
Lastly, the changes in decoration and design of these places of residence over time must also be discussed. The perception of luxury and its reception changed over time. Indeed, there is no one fixed way to define luxury, there can be no absolute standard. It is all relative to one’s personal taste, as well as the commodities available at the time. Nevertheless, as aforementioned, luxury has been met with both positive and negative reactions, with people such as the character of Trimalchio seeing it as a positive, and others, such as Cato, living in the second century BCE, who outwardly boasts about the lack of stucco on his walls,[23] or Seneca, alive in the first century CE, who bemoans the materialistic nature of society,[24] seeing over-extravagance as a negative. Indeed, political factors could have come into play here, with laws restricting excess under Augustus, him destroying part of the opulent Vedius Pollio’s house[25] because he had become too infamous for his luxury-loving lifestyle. It seems, indeed, that later on, in the first century CE, there was a shift from luxury and extravagance to simplicity, Pliny the Elder writing about how overindulgence led to moral corruption and protesting the use of a gold ring to mark the equestrian status.[26] There appears to be a shift back into the ‘Greek style’, moving from the extravagant nature of roman houses to the more restrained, simplistic, and austere nature of those of Greece.[27]
To conclude, whether influenced by business activity, the balance between work and nature, relaxation, the act of commemoration and the representations of idealism that came with that, wealth and luxury or austerity, the design and decoration of the housing of the Roman elite provides a clear view into the motivations, practices, and ideas that society held, and how these ideas and the reception of opulence changed over time.
Hannah Newman has just completed her first year of a BA in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Oxford.
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Notes: [1] Vitruvius, De Architectura, 6.5. [2] Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, ‘The Villa as Cultural Symbol in The Roman Villa’ in A. Frazer (ed.), The Roman Villa (Philadelphia, 1998), p. 19. [3] Susan Treggari, ‘The Upper-class House as Symbol and Focus on Emotion in Cicero’, Journal of Roman Archaeology 12 (1999), pp. 41-44. [4] Vitruvius, De Architectura, 6.5. [5] Cicero, On duties, 1.138 [6] Wallce-Hadrill, ‘Villa’, p. 43. [7] Petronius, Trimalchio’s Dinner Party: Satyricon, 28. [8] Ibid., 29. [9] Ibid., 60. [10] Seneca, Moral Epistles, 86. [11] Varro, Res Rusticae, 2.1 [12] John Bodel, ‘Monumental Villas and Villa Monuments’, Journal of Roman Archaeology, Vol. 10 (1997) p. 5. [13] Ibid., pp. 7-10. [14] Ibid., p. 27. [15] Kim J. Hartswick, The Gardens of Sallust: A Changing Landscape (Austin, 2004), pp. 17-18. [16] Alessandra Lazzeretti, ‘Verres, Cicero and other Collectors in Late Republican Rome’, in Maia W. Gahtan and Donatella Pegazzano (eds.), Museum Archetypes and Collecting in the Ancient World (Brill, 2015), p. 91. [17] Bodel, ‘Monumental Villas’, p. 31. [18] Hartswick, The Gardens of Sallust, p. 16. [19] Cicero, Letters to his Friends, 7.23. [20] Cicero, Letters to his brother Quintus, 3.1. [21] Bettina Bergmann, ‘New perspectives on the Villa of Publius Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale’, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 67.4 (2010), p. 14. [22] Ibid., p. 22. [23] Cato, On Agriculture, fr. 175. [24] Seneca, Moral Epistles, 86. [25] Tacitus, Annals, 3.55. [26] Pliny, Natural Histories, 33. [27] Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Villa’, p. 21.
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