Roman Dwellings: Villas, Houses and Apartments

Paper Summary:

This paper provides a description of the early and later architectural designs of the Roman houses, villas, and apartments. The author offers a historic view of the designs found in excavations and on mosaics and discusses the social relevance of certain architectural designs.

From the Paper:

"Architecture was outstanding among the Roman arts. Many of the outward forms of Roman architecture were taken over from the Greeks. It was through Rome that these forms became the common language of a great part of the tradition of western architecture. Connections between Greek houses and Roman ones provide important context both for Roman villas planned around peristyles as well as for the luxuriousness of the decoration and contents of late republican and early imperial houses and villas. This Greek luxury was a matter of some ambivalence for the Romans. Certain members of the Roman elite were eager to emulate the model of Hellenistic taste as found in Greek palaces of the fourth century B.C. and later (Robertson, 1986). But there has been a change of attitude about Hellenistic influence on architecture, painting, and mosaics: scholars are now stressing the ready naturalization of Greek art and ideas in the Roman context rather than using Roman art to reconstruct a hypothetical Hellenistic original (Jones, 2001)."

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