Ancient Roman Country Houses 
From Pompeiian IVall Paintings 
times of plaster painted; the floors of mosaic 
or tile, or of marble flaggings. The furni¬ 
ture was scanty compared with modern 
equipments, but it was costly and heavy, of 
wood, ivory, bronze or marble. Rugs, cush¬ 
ions, folding stools and couches provided what 
comfort was to be had. To this day the 
Italian has little use for the lounging chairs, 
rockers, hammocks and other devices for 
comfort which the American deems essential. 
The Roman type of villa belonged to the 
social organization of its time. No other 
age, people or system could have produced 
it. We have in modern times the vast 
wealth necessary for the building of splendid 
residences, but serfdom and slavery, essen¬ 
tial elements in developing the Roman villa, 
have been forever abolished, and the privacy 
of family life which we cherish to-day for¬ 
bids the creation of the vast caravanserais 
which the Roman villas really were. Four 
or five hundred slaves were not infrequently 
accommodated in a single one of the larger 
villas; and we read that when Caesar visited 
Cicero at Puteoli, 2 two thousand of his 
soldiers were quartered in and about the 
house of Philippus near by. Hadrian’s 
imperial villa at Tivoli covered a square mile. 
Such enormous and extravagant establish¬ 
ments are out of the question in an age like 
ours, even as the folly of an emperor. 
The smaller country houses of the Romans 
were, by contrast with the villas, quite mod¬ 
est affairs. One of these—a suburban rather 
than a rural house —recently excavated in 
Boscoreale is shown in plan in Fig. X. 
There is no planning to it, in the modern 
sense of careful arrangement and systematic 
adaptation. Rooms of all sorts, sizes and 
shapes are strung around three sides of a 
court, and the domestic accommodations 
occupy but a small part of the whole area. 
This was, indeed, a farmhouse rather than a 
rural residence, and the wine-press, oil-press 
and fermentation court take up the greater 
part of the ground floor. There was a 
second story, which probably contained most 
of the sleeping and living rooms. It is 
noticeable that there was a complete bathing 
establishment, with furnace, tepid room and 
hot room, indicating a well-to-do owner. 
The more genuinely rural houses of the 
small landed proprietors of antiquity have 
wholly perished. We may infer from the 
pictures preserved to this day that they were 
small and modest; that a tower or a turret was 
an essential feature; that barns and granaries 
were detached structures, often with thatched 
roofs ; that the tools were left in lean-to sheds, 
and that barn-yard and dooryard were much 
the same thing. It would also seem to have 
been the custom to place the house and farm 
under the protection of deities whose statues 
were set up beside the entrance door. The 
group of sketches shown in Fig. XT possibly 
suggest the types of architecture which pre¬ 
vailed in these smaller houses. They are 
from carelessly painted details in Pompeiian 
pictures, and are not to be taken too literally. 
These rural houses may have been pictur¬ 
esque, but the poorest farm laborer on a New 
England hillside probably has more real 
comforts in his wooden house than the most 
prosperous plebeian farmer in ancient Italy. 
2 G. E. Jeans, Selected Letters of Cicero : Letter 104, to Atticus. 
(London, 1880.) 
3 For these sketches I am indebted to the courtesy of Mr. Lucian 
E. Smith, of New York. 
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