You see the fauces leads into the most important room of a
Roman house, the so-called atrium, the famous atrium of the Roman house, atrium.
The atrium was the audience hall of the house.
And it's important to mention from the outset that Roman houses had
a very different role in Roman society than houses do for us today.
We tend to think of our houses today in large parts as retreats, as places we can
get away from it all, get away from work,
get away from schoolwork, and so on, and escape.
Although we do enjoy obviously having friends and family visit
us there, we tend to think of it as a place
of retreat.
This was not true in Roman times, when the house
was also a place to do some very serious business.
The man of the house, the head of the household,
the paterfamilias often greeted clients in the atrium of the house.
And when he was away on business or away at war, his wife, the
materfamilias, would stand in for him and she would conduct business in the atrium.
So, considered a very public part
of the house, a place where you wanted it to look its best,
because you were going to be greeting important visitors there to do business.
So the atrium is located here.
You can see this rectangular pool in the
center of the atrium, that is the impluvium.
And you have that monument list.
The impluvium of the house, which is a
pool in which they collected rainwater for daily use.
How did they collect
that rain water?
Because there was a, an opening in the ceiling, also rectangular in shape.
That's called a compluvium.
And that, and the compluvium had, had
surrounding it, a slanted roof to encourage the water, obviously, to slide
in through the compluvium and land in the impluvium down below.
Around the atrium, and
also around the impluvium at four here, are the bedrooms of the house,
the cubiculum in the singular, and cubicula In the plural.
The cubicula or bedrooms of the house; and you can
see that each one of them opens up off the atrium.
They are very small in size, smaller than any other rooms
in the house, and they were literally just a place to sleep.
They were very small, mostly very dark.
Some of them had slit windows, I'll show you one of those later.
Many of them didn't have any windows, they were literally just sleeping spaces.
Over here at five, we see the wings, or the alae, alae,
the wings or the alae, alae in the singular, ala of the house.
The wings of the house were a very important place from the
point of view of family tradition and religious practice and so on.
It was the place where the Romans
kept the shrines of their ancestors.
They had wooden shrines; they were usually made out of wood, with with doors.
And they kept inside those, the busts and portraits of their ancestors.
And they would take those out, they would open those shrines up and take those
out on special occasions, usually anniversaries, marking
the anniversary of the death of the deceased.
And they had an interesting
practice, in which the member of the family who
most closely resembled the deceased in size and general
appearance would put on that mask, and participate in
a kind of parade in honor of the dead.
So they kept those in those shrines in the wings or the alae of the house.
Here at six on axis and we know how much
the Romans like axiality as well as symmetry, we see
the the room over here a six is on axis with the fauces and the atrium.
This room is called the tablinum, tablinum.
The tablinum, which started as the master bedroom
of the house, the most important bedroom, much
larger than the cubicula but over time, it
became a place where the family archives were kept.
And, and beyond that, and we'll see it happening pretty early
actually today, it becomes almost a kind of passageway between the
atrium and the area that lay beyond here. At seven,
we see the also a fairly large room, the dining room or triclinium.
And you can see in this case, in the ideal Roman house,
it opens off the atrium, so easy to get to the from atrium.
And then at the back, number eight for open
of these ideal Roman houses, the hortus, hortus, or the
garden of the house, which was obviously open to the sky.
If you look at the restored view you can see how in the,
how these ver-, how these earliest houses really had a very enclosed feeling.
They were quite stark and geometrically ordered, with very few openings.
You can see in this case, this one opening as an entranceway into
the fauces as well as into two shops, as you can see here.
And then, of course, the compluvium, a hole in the
ceiling, and then the hortus is open to the sky.
But other than that, there are no windows whatsoever.
It's a very enclosed structure, and we're going to see that
although that's the case in the beginning, that changes over time.
And we'll see a very important and interesting evolution.
As I've, another point
that I want to make from the start is, is just as in temple
architecture, and we've traced it, the development
of early Roman temple architecture, where we saw
