Plate LXIII - House of the Dioscuri

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The plan and elevation of the house of the Dioscuri, in Plate LXIII, will be intelligible without description. The plate is taken from one published at Naples, by authority, instead of from a plan made purposely for this work under all the difficulties of prohibition.

Little light is thrown on the subject of the difficulties which exist, with regard to the disposition of Roman houses, by even this new and more extended plan. Many would call the three courts by the names of cavaedium, atrium, and peristyle ; but if the fourth court, another peristyle, belongs to the same house, as it possibly may, another name would still be wanting.

The great door led through a vestibule or prothyrum, up an inclined plane into the peristyle. To the right, is a little chamber with the traces of stoves for cooking. There is the vestige of a wooden staircase against the wall, which led into a sort of gallery or balcony near the ceiling of the room, and where, perhaps, the cook slept, for servants are said to have slept near the ostia, where were placed the cella ostiarii. A very small cubiculum, on the left, seems also to have been a servant's room. «Servi atrienses janitores et canes».

In this kitchen the smoke might have escaped by a little window yet existing. No trace of a chimney is visible, yet it seetns impossible but that there must have been one.

Chimneys certainly existed in Greece, for not only does a scholiast speak of tubes, and canals for smoke, but Aristophanes, in Vespis, mentions a person who, being imprisoned in a house, escaped, or tried to escape, by the chimney. Appian says, on one occasion, that some tried to escape through chimneys. «In fumariis et summis tegulis se abscondisse». The testimony of Horace and of Juvenal, who talk of smoky houses, «fumosos» and «lachrymoso non sine fumo» seems to make it probable that the people suffered from the want of them, and Vitruvius gives no account of such an invention. They not only burned, in the better apartments, a more expensive sort of wood, which, from emitting no smoke, was called acapna and amurca, according to Martial, but, from a carpet found spread on a mosaic pavement, upon which stood a bracciero or foculare, with the charcoal in it, in a room at Pompeii, it is evident that the inhabitants used the same process for heating their chambers as the moderns of the same country, previous to the introduction of chimneys by our countrymen. The modern Greeks, on the contrary, have fires and chimneys in their rooms. It is, however, certain that, in a shop, and in a chamber of the Temple of Isis, chimneys may be found at Pompeii. Chimneys existed, also, at all times in the kitchens of the south of Italy.

Round the peristyle are, as usual, many cubiculi or cella, so called a celando, as well as dormitoria.

The tablinum seems to be the principal room in this and all the other houses, but there are no traces of statues in any yet found. The tablinum of this house is the only one which remains of its original height, as may be seen in the view. It is perfectly comprehensible therefore that windows, or an opening, might have given light to that room above the tiles of the peristyle. Vitruvius directs that the height of a room should be so much greater than we at first think necessary, on that account ; and as the rule «altitudo ostii octava parte latitudinem superat» cannot apply to the door, it, possibly, refers to the opening of the tablinum.

The room nearest the tablinum must have been a triclinium or coenaculum, but neither there, nor in any other room under cover at Pompeii, has a table for dinner, constructed of masonry, been found, so that they must have been made of wood. The staircase in the faux, the rails which fence off the garden from the inner portico, and the aedicula, with its statue, have all been seen in other bouses. The exedra of the court of the piscina is a fine and spacious apartment, and would answer to the description of an aula furnished with seats.

The division of the house nearest to the vicus of the lupanare seems to have been of less consequence, and divided into a greater number of small chambers or cubiculi.

On the whole, none of these houses seem to agree precisely with what we know from books either of a Roman or a Greek habitation. Julius Minutolus, whose work, De Domorum partibus, forms part of the collection of Groevius and Gronovius, fairly states his inability, after much study, to explain their construction. «Qua in re me non pudet fateri laborasse diu et haesisse».