This book examines how Pompeian peristyle gardens were used to represent the house owner’s socioeconomic status. In the Roman world, a peristyle was a colonnaded courtyard, often featuring a garden.³ This is the first examination and comparative analysis of all 252 Pompeian peristyle gardens excavated in Pompeii. The comprehensive approach permits an understanding of the different levels of wealth and social status that were transmitted by these colonnaded spaces throughout the entire city.

Pompeii has always been considered one of the main sources of information about so-called daily life in the Roman world. The city has been interpreted to reflect something ordinary compared to, for instance, the political history of Rome. Research carried out on Pompeii concentrates on the private dwellings, which are, indeed, the resource through which the city contributes most to our knowledge of antiquity. However, such scholarship has primarily focused on the largest and most decorated houses. Additionally, other buildings such as tabernae, workshops, and even brothels have been studied to illuminate the world of the poorer strata of society,⁴ but the hundreds of middle-sized and small houses have been studied only occasionally and sporadically. This study clarifies the life and social interactions of the so-called Roman middle class. This group has been overshadowed in the scholarship by the highest socio-political elite. The gap between the rich and the poor was enormous, and the economic group that belonged to this middle ground was the largest in the ancient world. Our understanding of antiquity will always be partial if this mass of people is not studied in detail.

Over the last 20 years or so, scholarship has questioned the functions of the traditional room types in the Roman house, yet the peristyle curiously remains one of the spaces which is still seen to be used mainly for display purposes.⁵ There are several Pompeian peristyles where this is the case, but the broader picture – examining all the peristyles of the city – reveals a different situation: a vast number of peristyles were not planned or used for display purposes. I will construct a novel view of why the peristyles were built and how they were utilized.

All architecture reflects something about the socioeconomic status of the owner, as has been hypothesized by several theorists from different fields. For instance, Amos Rapoport underlines the character of architecture as a means of communicating status, power, and roles. Rapoport notes that architecture provides information about human behavior, and on the other hand also influences human behavior. He maintains that the architecture of a space was planned with a view towards its proper function, and therefore the aim is to design the space to be as well suited to the intended activity as possible.⁶

Pierre Bourdieu instead sees that cultural practices and preferences are related to a person’s social origin and education. This leads to the conclusion that the limits of necessity select for the most economical alternative – which can also mean the most practical alternative – whereas a taste for liberty or luxury favors conventions and tends to ignore practicality. In this view, practical solutions in domestic architecture are favored by the lower classes, particularly by people who work with their hands, as Bourdieu’s study demonstrates.⁷

Rapoport’s and Bourdieu’s views are the basis of my theoretical framework. Even if the function of the space is altered, it must be functionally suited to its new purpose – otherwise it would not have been selected for it – and, therefore, the qualities of a space reveal something about its use in the past. Those qualities reveal the needs of the people who used the space, and on this basis we can interpret the economical level of the inhabitants, as different levels of society had different possibilities and needs.

My ultimate aim is to examine how peristyles reflect the socioeconomic status of their owners. Several other questions must be answered before reaching this goal. First, in Chapter 3, I investigate the role of the peristyle inside the house: what was its purpose and function, and what activities took place there? Then, in Chapter 4, I move on to examine: what tools could be utilized for socioeconomic display? After defining these tools, I answer a set of questions: in what types of peristyle were these different means adopted, and how did they reflect their owner’s wealth, and how did they influence each other? Chapters 5 and 6 are built around these questions. Chapter 7 explores the connection between wealth and social status in Pompeii.

Peristyles are a part of several studies of ancient Pompeii and/or the Roman house, but oftentimes the research focus limits their examination to a few selected houses and peristyles – perhaps even choosing those that are best suited to their argument, while those which do not easily fit are ignored.⁸ The Roman house, which is mainly modeled in contemporary research on the basis of the writings of Vitruvius and two excavated Campanian cities, Herculaneum and Pompeii, had several important functions in Roman social life. One of these was to display acquired wealth and social status. The house provided an opportunity to do this when other areas of life were more socially constricted. For example, the clothing of the upper class male was controlled and regulated, which left little scope to display nuanced socioeconomic status.⁹ The house, on the other hand, opened up many possibilities to do this – although it was not free from the criticism of Roman moralists. Yet, even Cicero, who often championed himself as the supporter of traditional values, was known for the Greek ornaments that decorated his villa – something that could perhaps be considered a dangerous type of Hellenistic privata luxuria by some Roman standards.¹⁰

Scholars have examined many of the largest Pompeian houses, trying to connect them to the texts of ancient authors such as Cicero, Pliny the Younger, and – of course – most importantly Vitruvius’s De Architecura. Conclusions about the functions of the rooms were made on the basis of the architect’s descriptions, and archaeological material played a secondary role in the process. These interpreted functions provided a simplified model of the Roman house created by 19th and early 20th century archaeologists and scholars,¹¹ and overlooked most of the domestic material in Pompeii. During the past 20 or 30 years, researchers have questioned these functions, and the ensuing deconstruction of room functions has shaped debate for decades.¹² It has been noted frequently that the municipal city of Pompeii was very different from Rome, the huge capital city of the known world, making it somewhat problematic to use Roman literary sources in the Pompeian context.¹³ The Roman house is now often viewed as a multifunctional space; it seems that the rooms, courtyards, and gardens seldom had one clear function, although models easily give this impression. This means that socioeconomic representation was not separated from other possible functions, as is demonstrated several times in this book. Of course, having the capacity to allocate a space mainly for display purposes was a sign of wealth, but the multifunctional nature of the rooms meant that the display would be seen by several types of audiences.

Penelope Allison’s many contributions to this field of study – for example Pompeian Households: An Analysis of the Material Culture (2004) – played a significant role in the reinterpretation of the room functions of the Pompeian house. Emphasizing the analysis of the archaeological finds, she questioned the literature-based analysis. This deconstruction of the interpretation of the Pompeian house has considerably changed our view of the Roman house and their daily life, and it has left space for new reconstructions and interpretations. The more than fifteen years that has passed between the publication of the work have resulted in several excellent contributions to the study of Roman urbanism, and in many cases Pompeii has been a key source. Nonetheless, studies covering the entire city and combing through all of the material related to a single type of space have been a rarity, and for instance several important space types, such as the peristyle, have thus far remained unstudied.

Andrew Wallace-Hadrill’s Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum (1994) has been deeply influential in the study of socioeconomic representation in urban and domestic space in the Roman world. In his work, the peristyle was defined as one of the most important display spaces in the Roman house.¹⁴ Although the heyday of this explanation of the socioeconomic function of the Roman house is often considered to be the 1990s or early 2000s, it was not a new idea; similar interpretations were made already in the 19th century.¹⁵ However, the conclusion relies heavily on the writings of Vitruvius, and leaves space for an analysis of the archaeological material.

Although the archaeological material of Pompeii mostly corresponds to the year 79 CE and the time immediately associated with the eruption of Vesuvius, it can also be interpreted as reflecting the overall situation of the early Principate – or partly even the ideas and fashions of the late Republican period. The birth of the Imperial government has often been seen as representing a change in the ruling class of Rome: the Emperors nominated the equites, liberti, or even slaves to important positions in the Empire.¹⁶ These groups, historically situated below the highest senatorial elite, thus gained more status and power, which they then needed to display to society.¹⁷

The Pompeian peristyles primarily reflect something that could be called a Roman middle class, even though in this case it is better to talk about the middle classes – in plural. Although this term can be seen as anachronistic, there was a distinct group of people situated between the richest and poorest inhabitants,¹⁸ and the vast majority of the Pompeian peristyle owners belonged to this group. The Roman middle class is often neglected by scholars due to the fact that the written sources concentrate on the elite, having been mainly written by the elites themselves. Of course, the middle stratum is not entirely neglected by scholars and there are, for example, studies that focus on individual parts of it, such as freedmen.¹⁹ However, the picture is still very incomplete and more work needs to be done, and Pompeii offers a location and body of material well suited to this purpose that should not be disregarded.

The traditional understanding of the movement of ideas in the Roman world has been built according to the top-down model, where the upper levels of society produced new trends and the lower social groups passively adopted these ideas.²⁰ This book will question that approach. Organizing the houses and their peristyles according to their architectural remains – which on a general level reflects the house owner’s wealth – demonstrates that not all types of decorations and designs can be found in the houses of the wealthiest Pompeians; rather, some means of display seem to have been developed by the middle or lower echelons of society.

Having now introduced the larger historical context and the interpretations I follow in my study, the controversial concepts of the top-down model and the middle class still require further examination and consideration before moving on.