I want to show you briefly a couple of other houses just to make some
a few small points. well, important points.
Important point or two about each of them.
The first one is the House of Menander, in Pompeii.
Which dates to the second century BC and later.
You see it in plan here.
The House of the Menander, like everything else we've seen
in the latter part of this lecture, is a Hellenized Domus.
You can tell that because of the Peristyle here.
In other respects, it's very similar to
everything we've seen, the usual fauces, atrium, cubiculum,
tablinum system, the large peristyle up here
and some dinning spaces opening off that peristyle.
What makes this particular house interesting and
the reason that I show it to
you, is it's a good illustration of what happens when over time you remodel.
And also over time when other property becomes
available nearby and we can tell from this plan that what happened here Is
that the core of the house was added to as property on either side.
Additional property became available, and this
owner purchased that property and added it.
And the plan becomes much more irregular obviously because of that.
An addition over here, an addition over here you know, some
of that sense of axiality and symmetry is lost when you start
to add to either side horizontally.
But there are lots of houses like this and it's one of the things one needs to keep
in mind as one as one visits the city
and as one looks at each of these incredible structures.
Just very quickly with regard to the house just so
you have a sense of what it looks like today.
It's named the House of Menander because of this painting
of the Poet who sits on a chain over there on
one of the walls of the house.
The, part of the peristyle is actually quite well preserved, as is the atrium.
We're standing in the atrium, as you can obviously
see, with the impluvium looking back toward the garden.
This is interesting because you can see
again the, the cubicola opening off either side.
But also because of the incorporation just as in the House
of the Fawn, of columns elsewhere, than just in the peristyle.
These in that transition place between the atrium and
the the garden the so called tablinum space.
These very large columns stuccoed over, fluted, and
you can see in this case, not painted
red at the bottom, but a kind of bright yellow to match the colors of the wall.
So again, this incorporation of Greek elements into houses, like this one.
This is also a good view.
It's a very well preserved house, and we're back in the atrium again.
You can see the way in which the cubicola, the small cubicola, open off that.
You can see some of the paintings.
And here's the entrance way through the fauces.
And you can see in this particular case a small shrine that's located in
the corner, the purpose of that for the household to display the household gods.
This is another interesting house that I just wanted to treat fleetingly.
It's the so-called House
of Pansa in Pompeii and it dates to the second century BC.
And it's a very large house as you can see, like all the
other, Hellenized Domus, because we see when
it has a peristyle with columns, here.
it, like all the others it has everything that we've seen, the vestibulum, the
fauces, the atrium, the cubicula, the wings,
or alae, the tablinum, the dining room.
And a,
a bevy of shops down here.
In fact, more shops then we have seen a be the
case and most of the houses we've looked at a, at least
5 if not 6 shops down here, which gives us something of
a clue to something that might be going on in this house.
If we go back to the peristyle and we take a look
at that we see that there is a pool, in between the columns.
And you might speculate, oh how nice, you know a nice pleasant pool,
you could sit around, you could you know dip your hands
or your feet into that pool, nice, pleasurable spot, to enjoy.
Well, actually, it wasn't that at all.
We think now that it was probably a pool that held fish.
And fish, not fish just attractive fish that one could admire but actually
fish that one that were sold in one of the shops in front.
One of the reasons we believe that is a scholar
by the name of Wilhelmina Jashemski, who's specialty is Gardens
of Pompeii.
Has spent her whole scholarly career, and it was well worth it because she's come
up with some extraordinary things, on studying
the root marks of the gardens in Pompeii.
And she's been able to demonstrate through studying those and working with
experts on that sort of thing just what was grown in these gardens.
And you find that some of them were pleasure gardens
with beautiful flowers and some of them were produce gardens.
And this one was a produce garden so that there would have been vegetables and
fruits and so on, that were, that were gardened here.
And then you, and then they were sold, in the shops, that were located at the front.
So here, we see a wonderful example of the way in which, these houses could
even be used by some owners as a means of income for them and for their families.
And that was surely the case with the House of Pansa.
It also has a very well preserved peristyle.
We can see the columns here around that pool that was used
to hold the fish that were sold in one of the shops.
The columns are extremely well preserved, including some of
the capitals, ionic capitals as you can see here.
And the fluting and then the plain, you know,
this stuccoed over at the bottom, with the paint.
You can see in this case, remains of the red
paint that would have decorated the bottom part of those columns.
Another very interesting house well, you know, interesting
house and one that's important for us because it
marks a a later development in Roman house architecture
in Pompeii, is the house of Marcus Loreius Tiburtinus.
Remember Tiber was the ancient word for Tivoli.
And so it's likely that Tiburtinas, in
fact came from Tivoli, moved to Pompeii and
built this large house sometime between the earthquake and
the eruption of vesuvius so 62 to 79 AD.
