666 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1909. 
The only existing remains of a house of Republican date in Rome 
are those of the so-called house of Livia, under Domitian’s palace on 
the Palatine. It contained a small atrium with the alae formed by 
a long, narrow recess on each side of the tablinum, and not in the 
position of those in the Pompeian houses. The walls are of wrought 
masonry and the arches of stone voussoirs. From the plans of the 
three houses found on a fragment of the celebrated “ Marble Plan” 
of Rome, it would seem that alae were not essential in the atriums of 
the Imperial period. In two cases they are altogether absent, and in 
the third they have been separated from the atrium and turned into 
a sort of gallery by a wall built across it. There are, too, several 
cases in Pompeii where there are no alae or only one. 
A number of ancient writers distinguish between the insula, or 
group of small dwellings, and the domus or separate house, as we dis- 
tinguish between a house and a block of flats. But in Pompeii, at 
any rate, the domus as often as not formed part of a group which 
included habitations of various sizes. The typical example is the 
insula called the house of. Pansa, where around the domus are 
grouped, besides shops that must have been separately occupied, at 
least five small houses, three containing some five or six rooms, and 
two of one room each and a staircase leading to an upper one, now 
gone. There is, besides, a separate staircase from the street, which 
probably led to other dwellings on the upper floor. It is said that 
such an arrangement would have been impossible in Rome, where the 
insule were built four or more stories high, because the light would 
have been shut off from the main domus. But with internal courts as 
large as the atria and peristyles of Roman houses, and the little value 
evidently attached to light in the bedchambers and other small apart- 
ments, there can have been no such objection. It can only be raised 
to give the distinction between insula and domus too strict a 
meaning. No doubt many a domus in Rome and the suburbs, as else- 
where, was (in the language of the auctioneer) a “ desirable detached 
residence,’ but probably many others formed parts of insule, as 
in Pompeii. Shops on the principal street front, both communicat- 
ing with the house and separated for letting off, are characteristic 
of the Pompeian houses. Those belonging to the house were nomi- 
nally for selling the produce of country estates, and illustrate a pas- 
sage of Vitruvius in which he says: “For those, again, who have 
to deal with country produce; at their entrances shop inclosures, and 
among the buildings cellars, granaries, storehouses, and soon .. . are 
to be made.” @ 
The construction of the houses in Rome must have made it a some- 
what unpleasant place to live in. The streets must have been as nar- 
CG \Wahign WAG 2c 
