Pompeii

by Mary Beard

  So far, so good. But the nagging question remains of what happened where? in one of these Pompeian houses. We have already glimpsed the atrium with its store cupboards, weavers and slaves drawing the water. But suppose we had walked in through the front door, what would we have found going on in other rooms? Or to put it the other way round, where did the people who lived here eat, cook, sleep, or shit? And who were ‘people who lived here ’ and how many?

  Some activities are easily enough located – or striking by their absence. Apart from a few private bath suites in the grandest properties, there were, for example, no designated bathrooms or washrooms in these houses. However often people might have rinsed their hands in a fountain or washed their face (or hair) in a bowl of water, bathing as such was a public activity, which took place in the city baths. Even in houses that were directly connected to the aqueduct supply, very little water overall went to sanitary or domestic use. Most of what came through the pipes was used for fountains and garden features – the triumphs of Roman engineering giving the wealthy a chance to demonstrate their control of the elements rather than encouraging them to take a more robust attitude to hygiene.

  By contrast lavatories are a common feature of Pompeian houses and easy to spot. One archaeologist, a dedicated toilet specialist, has recently examined 195 of these, a total which does not include those that have collapsed since excavation or those which are apparently still used by visitors ‘caught short’. Almost always only one per house (we must imagine that all kinds of pots, as well as the garden bushes, served the same function), these were commonly found, as in the House of the Tragic Poet, in kitchens. They were partly screened off from the surrounding area, but in this case usually without any sign of a door – an indication, like the multi-seater public latrines found in Pompeii and elsewhere, that Romans did not share our own obsession with total privacy in this sphere of life. The arrangement was simple: a wooden seat over a drain, leading usually to a cesspit. As they remained unconnected to the mains water supply, presumably a bucket or two of water was thrown down the drain every now and then to speed the detritus on its way.

  This picture of a rather makeshift (and distinctly smelly) facility is usually completed in the modern imagination with a pot carrying the sponge on a stick with which, we are always told, Romans wiped their bottoms. No doubt sometimes they did. But the evidence for this is flimsier than it is often presented (and does not stretch very far beyond the gruesome anecdote told by the emperor Nero’s tutor, the philosopher Seneca, about the German prisoner who killed himself by stuffing the lavatory sponge down his throat rather than face the beasts in the arena). Pompeians may have improvised with any number of materials for this task. One nice suggestion is that in a house converted in the last years of the city into a garum depot, the large leaves of an adjacent fig tree might well have served instead of a sponge. New evidence from a large cesspit at nearby Herculaneum suggests that they may also have used strips of cloth.

  It is also easy enough to identify kitchens and dining rooms. Or so it is in the richer houses, at least. Medium-sized and poorer houses were much more likely to have a latrine than any area specially designed for cooking, still less for eating. But with food and food preparation we begin to get the clear sense that in these Pompeian houses function did not match up to rooms as precisely as we might imagine.

  You can tell a kitchen from its cooking hearth, with occasionally a fixed water basin too, and even more rarely still a connection to the mains water supply. Normally, as in the House of the Tragic Poet, they were rather poky little affairs (Ill. 34). Certainly some cooking took place in them, and perhaps some food preparation as well (especially if we imagine that the adjacent lavatory doubled for waste disposal). But only a few were big enough to accommodate all the preparations necessary for a large dinner. We must also imagine meat roasting on portable braziers in the peristyle, with peeling, gutting and all the rest going on wherever there was space – just as Trimalchio’s porter was doubling as a pea-sheller by the front door. As for the washing up, one of the main tasks of the modern kitchen, it is a matter of guesswork how and where the dishes, glasses, knives and spoons (they had no forks, which were a medieval invention) were cleaned and dried in a Pompeian house.

  Eating and dining also spread all around the house. It is true that unlike kitchens – which are often so unimpressive that they can be entirely missed by modern visitors – dining rooms can be eye-catching and some of the most exquisitely crafted and decorated rooms in the city. The Latin word for dining room, triclinium means literally ‘three couches’, reflecting the common pattern of formal dinners in the Roman world, which involved the participants reclining, three to a couch on three separate couches. In Pompeii, triclinia came in various forms and locations within the house. Some were equipped with movable wooden couches (of which nothing or only faint traces of the fixtures may remain), others were designed with fixed masonry couches. Some were inside, others in garden areas in the semi-open air (so-called ‘summer triclinia’ – on the assumption that they were used for dining on balmy Mediterranean evenings during the summer months).

  34. The hearth of a typically poky kitchen in the House of the Vettii. The pots and pans have been placed there for effect – they were not found in this position.

  None was more elegant than the partly open-air installation that looked out onto the garden of the House of the Golden Bracelet (Ill. 35). This had just two fixed couches, faced in white marble, on opposite sides of the room. For where, at the end of the room, a third couch might have been fitted to make the characteristic ‘U’-shaped arrangement of the Roman triclinium, there was a striking water feature, or nymphaeum. This was a flight of twelve steps, set in a niche covered in mosaics made out of glass and sea shell, down which a stream of water, brought from the mains supply, cascaded – or, more realistically perhaps, trickled. From the base of the steps, the water was channelled into a bowl that stood between the couches, and then on into another pool and fountain along the garden edge of the room. This is an arrangement found elsewhere in Pompeii, not to mention other, grander, places in the Roman world, and it must have come close to the Roman idea of ‘dining heaven’. For them, it seems, nothing could beat the pleasure of eating against a background of softly splashing water, set off by the twinkling of light catching the mosaic. In the House of the Golden Bracelet, the whole effect might have been enhanced, in the evening darkness, by an array of lamps placed in the line of tiny niches that ran all along the front of the couches (though those would also have provided a convenient place for resting nibbles between mouthfuls).

  But not all dining was formal. We have no idea how often dinners would have been eaten in this style. Modern scholars often imply that this was a regular Roman fixture: ‘the main meal of the Roman day, cena or “dinner” was taken in the triclinium in the late afternoon ...’), as you can find stated in many modern handbooks to the ancient world. In fact, as with so much of what we now read about social life in Rome, this is wild over-generalisation based on a few isolated references in Latin writers, of different periods, stitched together as if it was the norm. The truth is that the majority of the inhabitants of Pompeii only rarely, if ever, dined formally on couches; most houses did not have a triclinium. Even for the richest, with not just one but a choice of triclinia at home, it still might have been an unusual event. We certainly should not imagine other meals being taken in this way: whatever the Pompeians ate when they got out of bed in the morning, there is no reason at all to suppose that they ate it reclining on a triclinium.

  35. A triclinium to die for. The diners reclined on either side of the water, which flowed down from the niche at the end into the pool between the couches. Imagine the scene in the evening, as the diners could look out from here on to the garden, to the sound of babbling water – and lamps twinkled perhaps in those little holes beneath the couches.

  Food must have been consumed in all kinds of other locations about the house. In the smaller h
ouses there would hardly have been much choice: you ate where you could. In larger houses slaves perhaps ate what they managed to pick up on the job, or out of sight in the service quarters; the porter presumably quaffed in his cubby-hole. Other people too maybe grabbed what food was to hand, or sat on a bench in the peristyle, or pulled a chair up to a table in the atrium. That is certainly what the pattern of finds suggests. Even bearing in mind all the likely disturbance before and after the eruption, plates, drinking cups and other standard pieces of tableware are found all through Pompeian houses. The impression is one of people eating ‘on the wing’.

  There is then a piquant contradiction built into these rich Pompeian houses. They blazon a culture of leisured dining, with its own special locations, fixtures and equipment. Yet we also find, side by side, a culture that is much closer to that of the modern barbecue or fast-food. To put it another way, despite some rooms designed with a particular function in mind, there was much less differentiation of space and activity in the Pompeian house than in our own – with our clearly demarcated ‘bedrooms’, ‘living rooms’, ‘bathrooms’ and so on. As in many domestic arrangements before the modern era, most of the Pompeian house was multi-purpose.

  Upstairs, downstairs

  This becomes even more clear if we broach two other related questions. Where did people sleep? And what happened upstairs? The upper floors are one of the most intriguing mysteries when we try to figure out what these houses would have originally looked like, and how they would have been used. We know that many properties had an upper floor. Sometimes this was accessed directly from the street, and in all likelihood consisted in a flat for rental. In Roman law ownership went with the ground, so any separate living units on the upper floor could not have been ‘owner-occupied’. Elsewhere stairs led up directly from inside. That is the case, for example, in the House of the Tragic Poet, though Bulwer-Lytton ducks the issue: his characters don’t go upstairs.

  What would they have found there? That question is particularly hard to answer because relatively little of the upper structure survives anywhere in the town (where it appears to be intact, it is often in large part modern restoration). Sometimes objects found in the rooms below have been thought to have come from the quarters above, falling through the floor in the destruction. That is almost certainly the case with the famous wax record tablets of the Pompeian banker Lucius Caecilius Jucundus, which suggests that in his house part of the loft was being used as an overspill filing cabinet for out-of-date documents. How usual that arrangement was, we are not sure.

  The obvious answer, based on our own experience, that the upper floors were designed for sleeping is probably only partially right. The principal occupants of the house would have slept downstairs. We often find the traces of a fitted bed or couch still visible in those small rooms off the atrium or peristyle and others would have had similar, but movable furniture – though even these were not necessarily ‘bedrooms’ in our narrow sense of the word, but rooms where the couch could do duty as both sofa and bed, used by day and night. The upper floor was perhaps more likely to be used by the household slaves for sleeping, if they did not just lie down on the floor in the kitchen, at the master’s door or at the foot of his bed, or sometimes, of course, in it, given the sexual duties that ancient slaves might be expected to perform. Another view would see here more rooms for the ancient equivalent of lodgers, who would have accessed their quarters upstairs from inside the house itself, perhaps not using the grand front door from the main street, but one of the back doors that most houses had. In truth, we are probably dealing with a mixture of all three uses: attic storage, bedrooms, and rooms or apartments to let.

  In one relatively small house (the House of the Prince of Naples, named after the local aristocrat who witnessed its excavation in the 1890s), there are no fewer than three staircases leading to rooms on the upper floor. One leads up from the street outside, to – presumably – a separate rented apartment. Another leads up from the atrium to what were at best a few dingy rooms. The most recent archaeologist to study this house thought these were most likely sleeping quarters for a handful of slaves. They could equally well have been attic storerooms. Another stairway went up from the kitchen, to rather brighter accommodation which overlooked the garden. Perhaps this was another rented apartment (but accessed from the kitchen?), or more quarters for domestic slaves, or maybe for the children of the house with their slave carers. This last option would be one solution to another little Pompeian problem: where did the children sleep? Apart from a single wooden cot found at Herculaneum (Ill. 33), we have no evidence at all of any special provision for sleeping infants. They must simply have bedded down with adults, either their parents or much more likely slaves.

  The even bigger question that the upper storeys raise is how many people would have lived in one of these houses, and – leaving aside the apartments with their own independent street access – what kind of relationship would they have had to one another. Pompeian houses were not usually occupied by just one married couple, their children and a couple of faithful retainers. Anyone who once studied Latin using the Cambridge Latin Course and its (partly) imaginary Pompeian family should put the idea of Caecilius and Metella, their son Quintus, with slaves Clemens and Grumio, the cook, right out of their minds.

  Well-off Romans lived in an extended family. This was not the loose mixture of cohabiting grandparents, aunts, uncles and a variety of cousins which we usually mean by that term (a mixture that is anyway more nostalgic fiction than historical reality). It was rather an extended household – or houseful as one scholar has more aptly put it – consisting of a more or less ‘nuclear family’ and a wide array of dependants and hangers-on. These included not just slaves (and there may have been very many of these in the richest households), but ex-slaves too.

  In Rome, unlike the Greek world, domestic slaves were often granted their freedom after long years of service: an act of apparent generosity on the part of the master, which sprang from a mixture of humanitarian fellow-feeling and economic self-interest – for it got rid of the expense of feeding and supporting those no longer fit for much work, while also acting as an incentive to the others to remain obedient and hardworking. The fictional Trimalchio was very much an exception among this class. Most ex-slaves remained in various ways attached and obligated to their old master and his family, running their shops and other commercial enterprises, even still living on the premises – perhaps now with their own wives and children. In fact, the Latin word familia does not mean ‘family’ in our sense, but the wider household including the slaves and ex-slaves.

  So adding together the nuclear family of the house owner, the slaves and ex-slaves, and the lodgers, how many people would have been resident in a house like the House of the Tragic Poet? The truth is we can only guess. One idea has been that the number of beds might help the calculation. But even when we find a clear trace of one, we cannot be certain that it was actually used for sleeping, or, if it was, how many people it would have contained. (Recognisably ‘double beds’ are not found at Pompeii or Herculaneum, though many do seem large enough to hold more than one occupant, adult or child.) And the number of people we pack in upstairs or imagine sleeping curled up on the floor is quite imponderable. One recent estimate for the House of the Tragic Poet gives a figure around forty. In my view, this is much too large. It involves housing no fewer than twenty-eight sleepers upstairs, and, if multiplied across the whole city, would give an implausible total of 34,000 inhabitants. Nonetheless, even if you halve it, it offers an image of a relatively crowded lifestyle, a very long way from Bulwer-Lytton’s idea of the sophisticated bachelor pad – and with considerable pressure on that single lavatory.

  But reconstructing the houses of Pompeii demands more than filling in the gaps of what has been lost, satisfying as it is to restock those bare atria with their cupboards, looms, screens and curtains, not to mention the odd sleeping slave. There are also bigger issues of what these Pompeian hous
es were for. To reflect on these, we must look at how the one surviving Roman discussion of domestic architecture presents the purpose of the house and how that can help us understand what remains at Pompeii.

  Show houses

  An important guide to the social function of the Roman house is Vitruvius’ treatise On Architecture, probably written in the reign of the emperor Augustus. Vitruvius is largely concerned with methods of construction, public monuments and city planning, but in his sixth book he discusses the domus or ‘private house’. It is at once clear that, for him, it was not ‘private’ in the sense that we usually mean. For us, ‘home’ is firmly separated from the world of business or politics; it is where you go in order to escape the constraints and obligations of public life. In Vitruvius’ discussion, by contrast, the domus is treated as part of the public image of its owner, and it provides the backdrop against which he conducts at least some of his public life. Roman history provides telling examples of just that kind of identification between a public figure and his residence: when Cicero is forced into exile, his adversary pointedly demolishes his house (which Cicero rebuilds on his return); shortly before the assassination of Julius Caesar, his wife had a dream in which the gable of their house collapses.