This chapter uses the spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre to examine the way in which the Roman house operated as a ‘space of desire’ and to illuminate the processes of house and household formation and social reproduction. It draws on a variety of Roman examples, including Pliny’s villas, the luxury villas of the Roman imperial period and late antiquity, and the small houses of Roman Egypt. Spatial theory focuses attention on the processes of social reproduction in Roman societies. The chapter argues for the inclusion of agency (the desiring subject) in our understanding of houses, shifting analytical focus from taxonomies and formal architectural features. It traces the analytical shift between spaces on the ground to forms in society and argues that the slippage between the two reflects a fundamental perception that social forms have a spatial existence and that spatial forms have a social meaning.

One of the places where the disjuncture between the different qualities of written and material sources is perhaps most clear is in their temporal aspects. For example, ancient documents such as papyri were produced in a particular moment, within formal constraints of documentary practices. By contrast, the life cycles of houses tend to pivot around human – and less formal – scales of generational time: the biological life cycles of individual people and the life cycles of families. Archaeological houses hold the material memory of such cycles. This chapter examines the way the material form of the house can hold these different forms of time, and explores the way archaeological time can disrupt other ways of conceptualizing the past, for instance, in historical periodization. With specific reference to the houses of Dura-Europos in Arsacid and Roman Syria, the chapter questions the differing temporalities of the different forms of evidence and asks how these might be used together, avoiding the urge to force them to align, in order to paint a richer picture of ancient houses.

Located somewhere between ancient fiction and Christian hagiography, the story of Euphemia and the Goth recounts the tale of a young girl from Edessa, Euphemia, whose widowed mother, Sophia, is deceived and manipulated into letting an unnamed Gothic soldier marry her daughter. Later, as the story develops, events take a turn for the worse, and the pregnant Euphemia is taken away to the Goth’s homeland, only to find that he is already married. She is then given as a slave to the Goth’s wife, and suffers terrible abuse before being miraculously rescued.

The story is set in ca. 395 ce Edessa, in the context of the invasion of Mesopotamia by the Huns, although possibly composed decades later in the fifth century. As in some other cases from Syriac literature, Euphemia and the Goth reads in many ways like a tale from the genre of the Greek novel.