![]()
1
INTRODUCTION
Rome made aggressive use of buildings. Few societies have so richly documented their social arrangements, their beliefs and their vanities in architectural form. The lavishly decorated Roman house with its hierarchical use of space, its command of the contemporary landscape and its complex use of classical form was rich with meaning. The first purpose of this chapter is to consider why architecture was so important to Rome. Why were houses so vocal and what kind of messages were intended?
Space in the Roman world was closely measured, mapped and regulated. The ordering of space was necessarily hierarchical and the Roman landscape was regimented by a series of potent boundaries: dividing sacred from profane, urban from rural, and domestic from public. The considered drawing of boundaries was not only practically necessary, but was accorded ritual significance deriving from archaic Roman and Etruscan practice. This fixation with spatial order can be seen in many ways. It found expression in the grid-plans of new urban foundations. It was represented in the centuriation of territories attached to colonial settlements, where landscapes were measured out in a chequer-board of regular plots. It was manifest in the use of imposing town walls and frontier works to mark boundaries. It was reflected in the close adherence to street and property boundaries that characterised formal Roman settlements, and it was a principal concern of Roman law and cadastral documentation.
The city was itself a ritual enclosure, within which sacred laws enabled the government of civic affairs. The concept of boundary and the sanctity of the urbs were powerful instruments in shaping social behaviour. Rykwert has drawn attention to the potency of the town boundary and the way in which entering through the gates of a city could be seen as a religious act (1976: 137–9). Such boundaries needed to be marked, and hence the importance attached to gates, doorways and arches in the Roman world. Concepts of procession, entry and penetration were integral to the social and spatial order established within Roman cities, and the built environment presented a variety of contrived settings in which rituals of passage and induction could take place. This can be seen in the religious and triumphal processions of Rome, where celebrants navigated a ritual landscape in a series of liminal leaps. Such concepts were readily imported into the house: in so many regards an idealised and rationalised form of urban space.
The aristocratic house stood at the heart of a controlled landscape. Land was both the reward of power and the means by which it could be sustained. Monuments declared rights of possession. Walls, gates, signs and paths established physical controls over space. Boundaries were marked to facilitate the division of land, the resolution of property disputes and the assessment of taxation liability. Although these features can be described in purely practical terms, they also reflected an essential concern with man’s place in the natural landscape. Every boundary imposed human order on an uncertain world. Every house was a carefully contrived landmark.
One of the most constant refrains in Roman architecture was that of nature shaped, subdued and dominated. This was in part a poetic exaltation of civilised man’s supremacy over wilderness and disorder, a theme close to the heart of many Latin authors and a philosophical justification for Rome’s imperial mission. But it also reflected a sensible awareness of the fragility of prosperity. Famine was a constant threat; and the ability to produce and store surplus both legitimated temporal power and bought allegiance. The landscape of design celebrated the privileged access to the wealth on which the pax Romana was built. Granaries and barns were given monumental emphasis to better boast the rewards of harvest. Images and inscriptions invoked the gods of abundance and good fortune whose favours were courted. Fountains and animated fishponds were carefully placed to catch the eye, and promised life and renewal. Mosaics and paintings vividly illustrated man’s control of nature, through images of the hunt and of beasts tamed in the amphitheatre or at the hands of the gods. Surplus was not just a gift of Roman engineering, but of Roman peace and of Roman gods. Allegory, history and myth made allusive reference to these powerful arguments.
The proof of surplus was also paraded in lordly largess, and this was made most conspicuously evident at the dinner table. Lofty dining rooms were as much a symbol of wealth as lofty granaries. This architecture of plenty was eloquent propaganda for the status quo. The exposition and articulation of worldly influence was therefore a central feature of the Roman house. Buildings incorporated numerous references, some symbolic others explicit, which testified to rank and status. The importance of architecture in social affairs is richly documented in the written sources. To take just one example the letters of Pliny, writing about Italy in the first century AD, include frequent detailed descriptions of his property, the very purpose of which was to advertise his cultural and economic status (Bodel 1997).
Houses did not simply declare wealth and importance through ostentation. One of the main purposes of the many-roomed private mansion was to provide settings for the controlled social encounters from which political and economic life was built. Houses were vehicles for the exercise of patronage. Their architecture exploited a hierarchy of cultural references that spoke differently to different audiences. Elite society subscribed to a complex range of beliefs and values. The palaces of the rich and powerful communicated an ideological message, in which the owner’s status and learning was a key motif. Roman mythology, history and religion were exploited to this end in murals and mosaics. These images enhanced status by vaunting learning, taste and sophistication. The first-century Roman author Petronius offers a waspish satire of such pretension in his description of dinner with Trimalchio, and the houses of Pompeii provide numerous vivid examples of the reality on which this was based (Wallace-Hadrill 1994, Clarke 1991).
Roman order involved maintaining a balance, a harmony, between forces. Such harmony was both expressed and promoted by order, and the Roman house was designed not just for mortal use, but with a view to the place of man in the order of things. Divine forces were present in the affairs of men and were catered for in the design of domestic space. Domestic space was sacred and potent. Roman world order found reflection in architectural order. Leone, in a groundbreaking study of Georgian architectural refinement in eighteenth century Virginia (1984), argued that the rules of classical design generated an environment that was meant to appear fixed and inevitable. The premise is that ideology takes social relations and makes them appear resident in nature or history, giving them a veneer of permanence that protects them from challenge. Aristocratic society is perhaps most concerned with the virtues of order at times of greater stress and insecurity.
Architecture and meaning
Houses dominated the Roman social landscape even more than they dominated the physical one. They were seats of power and stages for the performance of domestic ritual. Contemporary sources help us understand how some such houses might have been used, but the evidence is highly partial and not always reliable. In Britain we only have the evidence of the buildings themselves. This evidence is not always easy to read, and scholars have reached conflicting conclusions about its significance. The argument developed in this book is that Romano-British houses served broadly similar functions to houses in other provinces of the empire, and that they witness both the cultural hegemony of Rome and the heterogeneous and changing nature of Roman identities. However the evidence is read, it is clear that message was intended. It should therefore be possible to reconstruct social arrangements from the evidence of the house plans.
In the design of houses, as with any other artefact, meaning can involve a complex series of references, ranging from the self-explanatory to the impenetrably obscure. Space has curious properties. Not only can it be measured and drawn, with plans and elevations to represent architectural conceits and the bounded realms of geometric entity, but it is also experienced. Voyages through space are described temporally as well as spatially, and they create different layers of understanding. The house is an event and a journey, as much as it is an artefact and a monument. Postmodern thinking has brought these issues to the fore, and encouraged diverse approaches to our reading of landscape and site. Writers such as Henri Lefebvre (1991) and Edward Soja (1996) have given impetus to a research community intent on reconceptualising space. Most current studies recognise that space is temporal and that buildings present ideological arguments.
Each society must develop a common and coherent language of building design, since houses need to be used and understood by a variety of players through a range of daily performances. The social use of space depends on shared knowledge and common practice, although such systems of understanding are often stratified and segmented. Ritual and routine articulate domestic and political life. Roman hegemony drew on beliefs and understandings built from a Hellenistic cultural language shared by much of the empire. These affiliations facilitated the construction of the complex relationships of obligation and dependency through which power was channelled and government effected. The root source of power was property, and the architecture of property was a critical component of the shared knowledge that bound Roman elite society.
Representations of space derived from this shared knowledge witness conformity with the Roman order. Lefebvre has argued (1991) that the spatial practices of society, the routines and rituals of daily life, result in conceptualisations of space made manifest in architectural practice. These architectural ideas in turn generate the space experienced, where social relationships are articulated through systems of symbols and signs. Lefebvre believes that each mode of production (ancient, feudal and capitalist) had its own spatial order, and that shifts from one system to another necessarily involved the creation of new types of space. Changing ideologies reflect and reinforce changes in the structure of social and economic power, and these place different demands on architecture.
Nothing more clearly marked the passage of Roman rule in Britain than the introduction, manipulation and subsequent rejection of the architectural fashions described in this book. The architecture that we describe as Roman was the product of a particular understanding of space. Such architecture carried ideological meaning and contributed to both the creation and replication of a power that was qualitatively and quantitatively different to that which came before and after. The archaeological evidence of consumption and display leaves little doubt that elite society was better able to extract surplus and accumulate wealth under Rome than previously. This is not, however, to say that shifts in architectural design simply mirror transformations in the economic modes of production or the basis of social power. It is possible to argue that the choices that made architecture Roman as opposed to British reflected changes in the manifestation of power rather than its economic basis. In other words, power might always have been based on the ownership of land and the command of rents and taxes but that the way in which power was represented in the landscape was reconfigured with the changes in allegiance provoked by Rome. Choices made about political affiliation and elite cultural identity are made in the context of the nature of social control over modes of production, but the correlation is not direct. The architecture described in this book witnesses the disruption of traditional systems of expressing power and the construction of new expressions of identity. These transformations may indeed have been the consequence of a changing approach to the command of economic surplus and may also have served as a catalyst to such change, but this was not necessarily so.
Houses are exciting things to study because they sit at this boundary between cultural and economic, between personal and collective, between real and imagined. These machines of wood and brick were fashioned for the smooth ordering of domestic affairs within a prevailing social orthodoxy. Genius was not unbound. Various factors influenced the design of these houses, and contributed to the articulation of their morphological and decorative language. Some of these factors are fundamental: such as the constraints imposed by site and setting, by the climate and by the laws of physics. Resource availability also had an important impact, both in terms of access to building materials and labour, although such limitations can generally be overcome through the accumulation of wealth. In most circumstances cultural factors were more important in the design choices that were made. Household and family structure has been a fav...
