Step inside a Roman home, and you might be surprised by what you find

The people of ancient Rome lived in a wide range of housing, from grand urban mansions to crowded flats and makeshift dwellings attached to shops. Where and how someone lived depended on geography, social status and wealth – but Roman housing across the social spectrum looked very different from anything built to modern regulations.

On an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, Hannah Platts, a senior lecturer in ancient history and material culture at Royal Holloway, University of London, explained what ancient Roman homes would have been like for different members of society.

However, as with many things in history, there’s one big bias: historians know the most about the wealthy when it comes to Roman houses.

Large and better-build homes survive far better in the archaeological record than modest dwellings, but that’s not the only reason. “Archaeologists were very keen to dig out the big and the lavish – or indeed to dig out the urban – because that’s where they would find the mosaics, the big structures and the statues,” Platts explains.

But that doesn’t mean that historians haven’t learned plenty about Roman homes. Here are three essential facts you need to know about Roman housing, with expert insight from Platts.

The houses of wealthier Romans had lots of different rooms

A wealthy Roman’s house could have 50 rooms or more. They tended to be multifunctional, but there were certain rooms that were found in most of the bigger houses.

On first walking into a Roman house, you’d be greeted by an atrium.

“An atrium is like a front hall today – it's where you would walk in and receive guests,” Platts says. “It had a very important architectural feature within it: a hole in the ceiling.”

This hole allowed natural light in as well as rain, which would collect in a basin on the floor of the atrium, called an impluvium. This was designed to help to cool the building and provide water that could be used for washing, cleaning or watering plants.

Just off the atrium were smaller rooms called cubicula, often used as bedrooms, as well as a room called the tablinum, which started off as a master bedroom but over time began to be used for a different purpose.

“It was used almost as the library or the study, where you would store ancestors’ records, keep any business documents, or where the master of the house might do elements of the meet-and-greet salutatio process,” Platts says.

Then there were the dining rooms, which were used to entertain and were an important way for elite families to signal their wealth.

“They could be very opulently decorated with amazing wall paintings, furniture, and couches that would be festooned in fabrics and cushions. Guests would be arranged according to perceived status and would be served food that would be brought to them by the enslaved members of the household,” Platts says.

Wealthier families often had two dining rooms – one for winter and one for summer – which faced different directions for the optimum temperature and light.

Meanwhile, the kitchens that supplied the diners weren’t nearly as nice.

“The kitchens were often located at a distance from the main reception areas,” Platt says. “These were noisy, dirty, dark areas where the enslaved members of the household would be working to produce the food for the household. They were often windowless or had a very small window.”

Many ordinary Romans lived in apartment buildings

There were plenty of other types of home that existed in ancient Rome, too.

“The house sizes that I found the most of, in Pompeii and Herculaneum, have between 10 and 19 rooms. They're called domus, and they are for single family occupancy,” Platts says. “They might be two storeys high and that was it.”

Although not as big as the largest Roman villas, domus houses were still occupied by members of the upper classes. Most ordinary Romans in cities would have lived in tall, densely packed blocks of flats.

There are useful remains of these flats in Ostia, the ancient port of Rome, dating from the second century AD.

These buildings were called insulae and were common in cities. Historians have estimated that between 800,000 and one million people lived in insulae in Rome in the early imperial period.

The lower storeys of these buildings were typically constructed from brick or concrete, while the upper floors were often made of wood, which was lighter but more vulnerable to fire and collapse. Some insulae rose to five or even six storeys, though the wooden upper levels have not survived well.

Living conditions varied widely. Some apartments were relatively comfortable, with access to running water and private toilets.

Others consisted of a single cramped room, particularly on the upper floors, where rents were cheaper, plumbing was less likely, and the danger of structural failure was greater.

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For the lowest status members of society, it was a different story again.

“A lot of people might have lived, for example, in their shop,” says Platts. “They would have a shop and then have a room, or maybe two, behind their shop that they would then live in. It could be a family of six more living there, in some really small spaces.”

There’s also no direct evidence left of where homeless people lived, although we know that there certainly was homelessness. “There was no support. You could go and sleep in the archways under bridges or in the archways of the amphitheatre, or you could try to get into large tombs and sleep there,” Platts suggests.

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No matter where they lived, Romans didn’t expect privacy at home

“The Roman house really blurred the boundaries of what we think of as public and private,” Platts says, because they defined the two ideas very differently.

“The Latin word privatus translates as of or belonging to an individual, apart from or away from the state or the community. The Latin term publicus, where we get public from, means belonging to the people, the state, or the community. So, it's not where an act takes place, but the nature of the act itself and whether it's relevant to the state or the community that defines whether something is public or private,” Platts says.

Community or state-related activities often took place in people’s houses, because there weren’t necessarily spaces that were reserved just for public or private activities.

They did have doors and curtains that would separate spaces off within a house, and the front doors of big houses would be shut at night or when there had been a tragedy in the family – but mostly they were open for people to look in from the street.

Many aspects of Roman housing across the classes mirrors how many people live today. But the way Romans used their domestic spaces, and the limited expectation of privacy within them, can feel strikingly unfamiliar to modern eyes.

Hannah Platts was speaking to Emily Briffett on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.