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Some Ancient Italian Country-Houses
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2015
Extract
It is a matter for surprise that none but the vaguest idea can be gleaned from ancient writers of the appearance or plan of an ordinary farm-house in the ancient world. Cato, Varro, Columella, the Elder Pliny, and Palladius describe with varying degrees of detail the kind of site on which such a house might most suitably be built and the type of rooms required for those who inhabit it. They indicate the uses to which the various portions of the house were put (villa urbana, villa rustica, willa fructuaria) but none of them thought it necessary to describe methodically the lay-out of the house as a whole. Varro mentions incidentally a ‘cohors’ (cortile or farm-yard) and states that on a large farm it is more convenient to have two such areas, one for the kitchen and tool-sheds, the other for live-stock. Varro's remark is vague enough, but the notices of other writers are even vaguer. The younger Pliny sets out to give a detailed description of his Laurentine villa, but the attempts of modern scholars to reconstruct the plan of the villa from Pliny's description have produced the most varied results and shown the futility of the quest.
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References
1 Tanzer, Helen H., The Villas of Pliny the Younger (Columbia Univ. Press, 1924).Google Scholar
2 A list of them, with bibliographical details, is given by Rostovtzeff, , The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, pp.496–7.Google Scholar Rostovtzeff’s list has been slightly enlarged by Day ‘Agriculture in the Life of Pompeii,’Yale Classical Studies, 1932, 3, 165ff. For convenience of reference, the numbers assigned in Rostovtzeff's list to the villas discussed in this paper are here appended:—No. 1=R.25; no. 2=R.29; no. 3= R.30; no. 4=R.27; no. 5=R.I; no. 6=R.IO; no. 7=R.13; no. 8=R.16; no. 9=R.34; no. Io=R.31; no. II=R.24; no. 12=R–5 ; no. 13=R.33.Google Scholar
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5 ANTIQUITY, June 1933, pp. 137–8 and fig. Ib.
6 It would be beyond the scope of this paper to discuss in detail the evidence by which these villas have been dated. Reference may be made to an article by the writer, ‘Notes on the Building Materials of Pompeii,’ in Journ. Rom. Stud., 1933, pp. 125 ff, where justification will be found for the dates assigned in this paper to the various types of construction.Google Scholar
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13 Ibid., p. 143 and fig. 2a.
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15 Not shown in fig. III.
16 It is significant for the view taken in this paper about the origin of the atrium that, in this instance, when the atrium–plan was used, not in the town but in the suburbs, the alae became doorways leading out of the central area.
17 ANTIQUITY, loc. cit.
18 XXIII, passim, esp. eh. 15.
19 ANTIQUITY, March 1932, p. 7, fig. I, period III.
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22 II, 13, 6.