[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
One of the most challenging and controversial issues in the study of ancient houses is the relationship between the textual evidence and the material remains of houses. Literary references to houses and domestic life are often brief and oblique, and tend to reflect the perspective of elite male authors from a limited range of places and times, whereas the archaeological remains of houses represent a much wider spread of periods, regions, and social contexts. The traditional dominance of the written evidence has therefore tended to impose a normative and static perspective on our view of the archaeological evidence, which can prevent us from fully appreciating the variability, complexity, and fluidity of real houses and the households that lived in them.
This volume derives from a 2013 conference, originally entitled ‘Between Words and Walls’, which aimed to address this problem. It represents a significant step in the move away from simplistic attempts to match ‘words’ to ‘walls’, towards more critical use of the written evidence in combination with a more carefully contextualised approach to the archaeological evidence. The contributors tackle the relationship between texts and material evidence in various ways, some more explicitly theoretical or methodological than others.
Most still start from the texts, but adopt a more rigorous and nuanced approach. Janett Morgan sets the tone by tracing the role of literary sources in the study of Greek houses from the Renaissance onwards, to show how the works of ancient authors, especially Vitruvius, were used to reconstruct an imaginary ‘Greek house’, and later to label and interpret the spaces in the real houses excavated by archaeologists. She illustrates the problems with this approach through a detailed analysis of the houses that feature in Lysias 1, On the Murder of Eratosthenes, and Menander’s Samia, arguing that attaching fixed labels to spaces encourages us to see their functions as fixed too, and tends to flatten out regional and social variation.
Morgan’s warnings could equally well apply to the study of Roman houses. At first glance Simon Speksnijder’s chapter on the Roman vestibulum appears to follow the traditional method of trying to match a term used in texts to spaces found in excavated houses. However, he applies a more rigorous definition of vestibulum than previous scholars, who have used the term for a variety of entrance-rooms, most of which do not match the very specific descriptions of vestibula in the literary sources. He demonstrates that few, if any, surviving houses have a space that corresponds closely to the vestibula described in the texts, and concludes that the name should probably only be applied to elite housing in Rome.
Emily Varto takes the opposite approach of arguing that a term used in texts does not necessarily refer to a specific space. She argues that the Homeric phrase en megaroisi (‘in the halls’) stands as a metonym for abstract ideas of family and household, because the house was the location of key events in the family lifecycle and the embodiment of the family’s prosperity and wealth. Varto also traces the history of attempts to reconstruct ‘the Homeric house’ from the poems and locate it in the archaeological record, which have ultimately proved fruitless; she proposes instead that the houses represented in the poems should be understood as a product of the worldview and imagination of people living in the eighth century BCE, not as a historical reality.
Maeve McHugh’s contribution starts from an absence of words: she returns to the controversy over whether ‘farmsteads’ existed in Classical Greece, given that there is no equivalent term in the written sources. She cuts through the debate by adopting a broad (and sensible) definition of ‘farmstead’, which encompasses a wide range of agricultural sites in the countryside, both temporary and permanent, which are mostly known through survey. Moving away from the fixation on terminology enables her to focus more profitably on understanding the diversity of these sites, and the different economic strategies and regional conditions that shaped them. In the second part of the chapter, she illuminates the distribution of rural sites in the southern Argolid by modelling the most efficient routes between them and the major settlements in the region, showing how city and countryside were closely interconnected.[1]
Lisa Nevett reverses the usual approach and uses the archaeological evidence to illuminate the texts, in this case the three well-known passages in which Demosthenes criticises his contemporaries for building grand private houses, and contrasts them with the great men of the past, who lived in modest homes and instead invested in impressive buildings and infrastructure for the city (Third Olynthiac, 25–26; On Organisation, 28–30; Against Aristokrates, 206–208). Nevett outlines the archaeological evidence for the increasing size and grandeur of Classical houses, especially in northern Greece, and argues that Demosthenes might have intended to insinuate that his rivals’ lavish houses were evidence of Macedonian sympathies, as well as being out of keeping with the egalitarian ethos of democracy.
Other contributors use literary evidence to reimagine aspects of ancient housing that do not survive in the archaeological record. Amy Smith combines texts with visual evidence and ethnographic analogies to restore the lost textiles and soft furnishings that would have been a prominent feature of ancient houses. She focuses on the role of textiles in Classical Athenian weddings, and shows how they were entwined in the wedding ritual, and thus in ideas of marriage and the household. She suggests that the ritual of the anakalypteria mentioned by ancient authors was not, as is often supposed, the unveiling of the bride, but the decoration of the marriage-bed with sumptuous textiles, on the analogy of the modern Greek wedding ritual of the krevatia.
Smells, sounds, tastes and textures would also have been essential elements in the experience of an ancient house, although they are often overlooked compared to the plan and visual appearance of the house. Hannah Platts draws on literary accounts of Roman houses, primarily Pliny’s descriptions of his villas (Letters 2.17, 5.6), to reconstruct the multi-sensory experience of visiting the Villa of Diomedes at Pompeii. She argues that immersing visitors in a controlled sensory environment was a key part of the owner’s strategy of self-representation. Although the reconstruction inevitably involves some imaginative speculation, it is plausible and tantalisingly beautiful — that is, as long as you imagine yourself as the privileged visitor, rather than as one of the enslaved people working in the hot, noisy, smelly kitchens.
Some of the most fascinating contributions to the volume use documents on papyrus or stone, or scratched into plaster, to reveal the invisible networks of relationships that shaped the structure and use of space in houses. Inge Uytterhoeven and April Pudsey both discuss houses and households in Egypt, where papyri give us insights into the lives of ‘ordinary’ families who generally do not feature in the literary sources. Uytterhoeven reviews the documentary and archaeological evidence for houses and their occupants in the communities of the Ptolemaic and Roman Fayum. Although it is often impossible to link the people and terms in the documents to specific houses or spaces, papyri enable us to reconstruct relationships within households and sometimes whole neighbourhoods. Pudsey focuses on Roman Tebtynis, where records of sales, leases, marriages, divorces and inheritance reveal the practical and symbolic role of the house in family relationships and ties with the wider community. Keeping ownership of the house within the family was a key concern in marriage strategies, but the elite could also use their houses to create advantageous connections with other families through marriage or lease agreements. Both authors show how a single house might be shared between multiple family groups with no visible alteration to the physical structure — a situation that may have been more common in the ancient world than we realise.
J.A. Baird explores similar themes at Dura-Europos, showing how houses were entangled with human relationships and lifecycles. The layout of a house might be altered as the family structure changed; repeated daily or seasonal activities created marks of wear and tear; graffiti scratched on walls preserved a moment in time. The house thus embodied the memory of relationships and activities past and present. This chapter is an important reminder that houses are dynamic structures; archaeological plans and photographs can only represent a single moment in a continuous process of change, which may follow a different rhythm to the cultural or historical periods that we are accustomed to thinking in.
Katerina Volioti looks at family relationships in late Archaic and early Classical Greece through the small terracotta oil-flasks that archaeologists label (possibly incorrectly) as lekythoi. She challenges the view that their function was exclusively funerary: by analysing the physical properties of lekythoi, their appearance in vase-paintings, and finds from settlement sites, she argues that they were used regularly in the home, perhaps to hold culinary or medicinal oils, and suggests that they might have been deposited in graves because they were intimately associated with family life.
Crysta Kaczmarek’s chapter on the cult of the Lares Compitales in late Hellenistic Delos makes visible the relationships of a group who are largely silent in the literary sources, namely slaves and freedmen. She analyses the locations, painted decoration and inscriptions of the shrines to the Lares that were attached to many of the houses on Delos, and combines them with epigraphic evidence from the communal Lares cult in the Agora of the Compitaliastai and literary evidence for the worship of the Lares elsewhere in the Roman world, to show how the version of the cult that was practised on Delos would have enabled slaves and freedmen to create their own identities and social networks.
Finally, two contributors examine the theoretical perspectives through which we view ancient houses and households. Caspar Meyer looks at the ways in which modern preconceptions and values have shaped our view of life in ancient houses. He traces the evolution of ‘domestic life’ displays in museums — represented by the eighteenth-century Museo Ercolanese, the early twentieth-century British Museum and the late twentieth-century Getty Villa — to show how the inspiration for their design has shifted, from the grand houses of the elite to the Victorian idea of the home as a private, secular space, which was primarily the domain of women and children. He argues that this shift went hand-in-hand with simplistic interpretations of ‘everyday life’ scenes on Greek pottery, which projected Victorian domestic values into the past and thus naturalised them in the present.
Richard Alston explores the relationship between space and social structures, drawing on the ideas of modern social theorists. He rejects theoretical models that prioritise either the physical house or abstract social formations as the determining factor in this relationship, as neither view allows for individual agency and resistance; instead, he argues that houses were the product of a complex and dynamic interplay between individual desires (both material and symbolic) and social norms and constraints. He illustrates this with two brief case studies tracing the desires and constraints that drove the development of luxury villa estates in Italy and generated different forms of rural housing in different parts of the Roman empire.
The volume concludes with a chapter by Penelope Allison, assessing the progress made by the contributors against the recommendations in her 2001 article ‘Using the material and written sources: turn of the millennium approaches to Roman domestic space’.[2] She notes with particular approval that they engage with the material evidence on its own terms and use it on an equal footing with the texts, not merely to illustrate them. This is indeed a welcome development, and the contributions to the volume all show in different ways how fruitful it can be to move beyond debates about terminology and use the full potential of both written and material evidence to illuminate the rich diversity of houses and households across the ancient world.
Authors and Titles
Richard Alston, J.A. Baird and April Pudsey, Introduction: between words and walls: material and textual approaches to housing in the Graeco-Roman world.
Emily Varto, Kinship ‘in the halls’: poetry and the archaeology of early Greek housing.
Caspar Meyer, Domesticating the ancient house: the archaeology of a false analogy.
Janett Morgan, Mind the gap: reuniting words and walls in the study of the Classical Greek house.
Katerina Volioti, A family affair: the household use of Attic lekythoi.
Amy C. Smith, Textiles in Alkestis’ thalamos.
Lisa Nevett, Architectural rhetoric and the rhetoric of architecture: Athens and Macedon in the mid-4th century BCE.
Maeve McHugh, The reconstruction of an agricultural landscape: seeking the farmstead.
Inge Uytterhoeven, Mudbricks and papyri from the desert sand: housing in the Ptolemaic and Roman Fayum.
April Pudsey, Housing and community: structures in houses and kinship in Roman Tebtynis.
Simon Speksnijder, The elusive vestibulum.
Crysta Kaczmarek, Living in the liminal: Lares Compitales shrines, freedmen and identity in Delos.
Hannah Platts, Experiencing sense, place and space in the Roman villa.
J.A. Baird, Houses and time: material memory at Dura-Europos.
Richard Alston, Spaces of desire: houses, households and social reproduction in the Roman world.
Penelope Allison, ‘Using the material and written sources’ revisited.
Notes
[1] These ideas are now discussed at greater length in M. McHugh, The Ancient Greek Farmstead (Oxbow Books, 2017).
[2] American Journal of Archaeology 105 (2001) 181–208.