Roman and Greek buildings and houses

How it is calculated

History and fun facts

The domus and the atrium house

The domus was the town house of a wealthy Roman family. We know it best from Pompeii and Herculaneum, two towns that disappeared under the ash of Vesuvius in AD 79 and were preserved because of it. Famous examples are the House of the Vettii, the House of the Faun and the House of the Surgeon, one of the oldest houses in Pompeii. From the outside you often saw only shops and a door; life happened inside, around the atrium and the garden.

• Rainwater fell through the opening in the roof into the pool below. From there it ran into a cistern under the floor, so the house had its own water supply.
• The House of the Faun is one of the largest houses in Pompeii, with two atria and two peristyles. The famous Alexander Mosaic came from this house.
• In the entrance of the House of the Tragic Poet lies a mosaic of a dog with the words Cave canem: beware of the dog.
• The shops on the street were often rented out. They usually had no door into the house itself.
• In the lararium the family worshipped its household gods, the lares.

Shop house and insula

Most Romans in the city did not live in a domus but in an insula: a block of several storeys with shops on the ground floor and rented flats above. Ostia, the harbour town of Rome, has many brick insulae from the second century, such as the Casa di Diana. In Herculaneum and Pompeii you also see small shop houses with the home above or behind the shop.

• Emperor Augustus limited the height of new houses in Rome to about 70 Roman feet, roughly 21 metres. Emperor Trajan later made it lower still.
• The best flats were low down, on the first floor. The higher you went, the smaller and cheaper the rooms, and the further you had to carry water.
• Fire was a great danger in the tall timber upper floors. That is why more and more rules for stone walls appeared.
• At the foot of the Capitoline Hill in Rome a piece of an insula still stands four storeys above the ground.
• Pompeii had dozens of snack bars with a counter holding large jars (a thermopolium).

Farmhouse and villa rustica

In the countryside a villa was first of all a farm. Writers such as Cato, Varro and Columella gave advice on how to lay out a farm: a living part for the owner, a working part with stables and barns, and storage for wine, oil and grain. Near Boscoreale, close to Pompeii, several such villas have been excavated, such as the Villa Regina with its wine jars in the ground.

• The Villa Regina still has eighteen large wine jars (dolia) buried in its courtyard.
• In another villa near Boscoreale a treasure of more than a hundred silver pieces was found in 1895. Much of it is now in the Louvre in Paris.
• Columella divides the villa into three parts: pars urbana (living), pars rustica (working) and pars fructuaria (storage).
• Many ordinary farmers lived much more simply, in a house with one hall and a hearth and a walled yard.

Villa urbana and villa suburbana

Rich Romans built villas to relax, not to farm. A villa suburbana lay just outside the town, like the Villa of the Mysteries and the Villa of Diomedes near Pompeii. A villa urbana lay further out in the country, with long colonnades, dining halls with views and formal gardens. Pliny the Younger described his villas near Laurentum and in Tuscany in detail in his letters.

• The Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum had a library with hundreds of carbonised scrolls. Researchers are now trying to read them with scans without unrolling them.
• The Getty Villa museum in Malibu, California, was built after the example of the Villa of the Papyri.
• The Villa of the Mysteries is famous for a row of wall paintings showing a mysterious ritual around the god Dionysus.
• Pliny mentions a cryptoporticus: a covered corridor half below ground where it stayed cool in summer.

Villa maritima

Along the Bay of Naples and the coast of Lazio there were villas stepping down to the sea on terraces. Emperor Tiberius owned several, such as the Villa Jovis high on a cliff on Capri and a villa with a grotto at Sperlonga. At Stabiae you can still visit the large Villa San Marco and Villa Arianna.

• Rich Romans raised fish in sea ponds (piscinae) next to their villas.
• At Baiae parts of villas sank under the sea as the ground subsided. Today you can dive between the mosaics.
• The terraces were carried by vaulted rooms underneath, so the villa stood on an artificial slope.

Peristyle villa, courtyard villa and winged-corridor villa

In the provinces villas took on their own shapes. Around the Mediterranean everything often lay around one large peristyle. In Gaul, Germania and Britain the winged-corridor villa was very common: a row of rooms with a colonnaded corridor in front between two projecting corner rooms. Large villas grew into courtyard villas with wings around a court, such as Bignor and Chedworth in England. There were Roman villas in the south of the Netherlands too, for example at Voerendaal.

• The Roman palace at Fishbourne in southern England was discovered in 1960 when workmen were digging a trench for a water main.
• Fishbourne is one of the largest Roman residences north of the Alps.
• In the cold provinces the main rooms had underfloor heating (hypocaust).
• Many villas in the north had their own small bath house with a cold, a warm and a hot room.

Palace villa

The largest villas looked like small towns. The Villa Romana del Casale near Piazza Armerina in Sicily was built in the early fourth century and is full of mosaics, about 3,500 square metres in all. It has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1997. Even bigger was Emperor Hadrian's villa near Tivoli from the second century, with palaces, baths and pools.

• The Villa del Casale has a corridor about 60 metres long with the mosaic of the Great Hunt: animals are caught and shipped to Rome.
• Another mosaic shows ten women in sports clothes that look a bit like bikinis.
• Hadrian's villa has the Canopus: a long pool with statues along its edge.
• The palace of Emperor Diocletian in Split is so solid that the old town now stands inside it.

Baths

Bath houses were for everyone: you went there to bathe, exercise and catch up. The bather walked from the changing room through the cold and warm rooms to the hot room. The Stabian Baths in Pompeii are among the oldest that survive. In Rome the Baths of Caracalla and of Diocletian were enormous. In Heerlen in the Netherlands, the Roman Coriovallum, you can see the remains of a bath house in the Thermenmuseum.

• The floors rested on small pillars. Hot air from the fire flowed underneath and rose through pipes in the walls.
• You did not use soap: you rubbed yourself with oil and scraped it off again with a scraper (strigil).
• In part of the Baths of Diocletian Michelangelo later built a church: Santa Maria degli Angeli.
• In Bath in England a Roman bath house stands at a hot spring that still gives water.

Forum, basilica and temple

The forum was the heart of a Roman town: market, politics and religion together. On the forum of Pompeii the Temple of Jupiter stands at the short end, with the basilica on the south side. In the basilica courts were held and business was done. A temple stood on a high podium with steps at the front, like the Maison Carrée in Nîmes, which is still almost complete.

• The word basilica comes from Greek and means something like royal hall.
• The basilica shape with a tall nave and lower aisles was later used for the first large churches.
• The clerestory is the row of windows in the high part of the nave, above the roofs of the aisles.
• In Rome more imperial forums were later built next to the old Forum Romanum, such as the Forum of Trajan.

Triumphal arch

A triumphal arch remembered a victory or an emperor. The Arch of Titus in Rome honours the capture of Jerusalem in AD 70. The Arch of Constantine from 315 has three passages and reuses reliefs from older monuments. The Arch of Janus in Rome has four equal sides and stood at a crossing.

• On the Arch of Titus you see soldiers carrying the great candlestick (menorah) from the temple in Jerusalem.
• The attic often carried an inscription and sometimes a statue group with a chariot.
• The Arc de Triomphe in Paris was inspired by the Roman arches.

Greek houses: pastas, prostas and courtyard house

Greek houses looked inwards, onto a courtyard with an altar. At Olynthus in northern Greece, destroyed in 348 BC by Philip II of Macedon, whole streets of equal houses have been found. They have a pastas: a broad hall along the courtyard. At Priene in present-day Turkey the houses have a prostas, a porch with two columns in front of the living room. On the island of Delos stand rich Hellenistic houses with columns around the court and beautiful mosaic floors.

• The andrōn was the dining room for male guests. The door was off-centre, so the couches fitted neatly along the walls.
• The houses usually faced south, so the low winter sun shone into the rooms and the high summer sun stayed outside.
• Olynthus had a grid of straight streets. The blocks were divided into two rows with a narrow alley between them.
• On Delos there was often a rainwater cistern under the courtyard, with a well head in the middle of the mosaic floor.

Megaron

The megaron is the great hall of the Mycenaean palaces of the Bronze Age, around the thirteenth century BC, as at Mycenae, Tiryns and Pylos. You entered through a porch with two columns, then a vestibule, and then the throne hall with a round hearth between four columns. The throne stood against the side wall.

• In the palace of Pylos clay tablets in Linear B were found. They survived because the fire that destroyed the palace baked them hard.
• The round hearth at Pylos was painted, and above the hearth there was an opening in the roof for the smoke.
• The shape of the megaron, a long hall with a columned porch, resembles that of the later Greek temple.

Tower house

In the Greek countryside and on islands such as Siphnos stand the remains of stone towers from the Classical and Hellenistic periods. Often a yard with low buildings belonged to them. What exactly they were for is not clear everywhere: safe storage, a refuge, a lookout, or part of a farm or a mine.

• On Siphnos the remains of dozens of such towers have been found.
• The walls were thick and the windows small, so the tower was easy to defend.
• Some towers stood where you could see the next tower, perhaps to pass on signals.

Stoa and agora

The agora was the square of a Greek town, for the market, politics and meeting people. Along its edges stood stoas: long halls with an open row of columns at the front, where you could walk, talk and trade in the shade. The Stoa of Attalos in Athens was given around 150 BC by King Attalos II of Pergamon and rebuilt in the 1950s. Today it is the museum of the Athenian Agora.

• In the Stoa Poikile, the painted stoa, the philosopher Zeno taught. His followers were therefore called Stoics.
• The Stoa of Attalos has two storeys and a row of shops behind the columns.
• The agora of Athens also had the Altar of the Twelve Gods, the point from which distances were measured.

Warehouse (horreum)

Rome needed huge warehouses for grain, oil and wine from the whole empire. In Ostia you can still see the Horrea Epagathiana, named after two freedmen who owned it: storage cells around a courtyard behind one monumental gate. In the army forts along the frontier stood long granaries with a raised floor and buttresses.

• The raised floor kept the grain dry and cool and kept mice and rats out.
• The buttresses took the push of the grain pressing against the walls.
• The hill of Monte Testaccio in Rome is made entirely of fragments of discarded olive oil jars.