Multisensory Living in Ancient Rome

Power and Space in Roman Houses

Hannah Platts

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350114326
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

Classicists have long wondered what everyday life was like in ancient Greece and Rome. How, for example, did the slaves, visitors, inhabitants or owners experience the same home differently? And how did owners manipulate the spaces of their homes to demonstrate control or social hierarchy? To answer these questions, Hannah Platts draws on a diverse range of evidence and an innovative amalgamation of methodological approaches to explore multisensory experience – auditory, olfactory, tactile, gustatory and visual – in domestic environments in Rome, Pompeii and Herculaneum for the first time, from the first century BCE to the second century CE. Moving between social registers and locations, from non-elite urban dwellings to lavish country villas, each chapter takes the reader through a different type of room and offers insights into the reasons, emotions and cultural factors behind perception, recording and control of bodily senses in the home, as well as their sociological implications. Multisensory Living in Ancient Rome will appeal to all students and researchers interested in Roman daily life and domestic architecture.

1

Smelling, Touching, Hearing, Tasting and Seeing the Roman Home

Introduction

Once on a time – such is the tale – a country mouse welcomed a city mouse in his poor hole, host and guest old friends both. Roughly he fared, frugal of his store, yet could open his thrifty soul in acts of hospitality … At last the city mouse cries to him: ‘What pleasure can you have, my friend, in living so hard a life on the ridge of a steep wood? Wouldn’t you put people and the city above these wild woods? Take my advice: set out with me … while you may, live happy amid joys; live mindful ever of how brief your time is!’ These words struck home with the rustic, who lightly leaped forth from his house … And now night was holding the mid space of heaven, when the two set foot in a wealthy palace, where covers dyed in scarlet glittered on ivory couches, and many courses remained over from a great dinner of the evening before, in baskets piled up hard by. So when the town mouse has the rustic stretched out on purple covers, he himself bustles about in waiter-style, serving course after course, and doing all the duties of the home-bred slave, first tasting everything he serves. The other, lying at ease, enjoys his changed lot, and amid the good cheer is playing the happy guest, when of a sudden a terrible banging of the doors tumbled them both from their couches. In panic they run the length of the hall, and still more terror-stricken were they, as the lofty palace rang with the barking of Molossian hounds. Then says the rustic: ‘No use have I for such a life, and so farewell: my wood and hole, secure from alarms, will solace me with homely vetch.’¹

The story of the town and country mouse, as rewritten by Horace, presents a colourful account of the pleasures and trials of urban and rural living. Focusing on the differences between life in the two spheres, Horace emphasizes the frugal way of rustic life and the opulence of the urban realm. Thus whilst the country mouse survives on and entertains with meagre rations in his humble home, in contrast we read of the sumptuous and plentiful fare, in decadent surroundings, of ivory couches and scarlet coverlets that the town mouse provides for his guest.

For the purposes of this book, the story above is more than a delightful tale that has been retold through the centuries.² Rather it opens the door onto the world of the Roman home, the sensory experiences to be had within it as well as the chances of disapproval or praise to which house owners exposed themselves when they welcomed guests into their residences. Just as the country mouse risked criticisms of plain and simple food in the bacon and oats he himself serves (aridum et ore ferens acinum semesaque lardi frusta) in his unattractive home, which is described as a ‘poor’ hole (paupere cavo) situated in a seemingly uncomfortable location perched on the ridge of a steep wood (praerupti nemoris), so too the urban mouse opens himself up to similar critique when he invites his friend to dine with him. For although the setting and foods are opulent and plentiful, the interruption of the dinner by Molossian hounds and the fear that ensues likewise leaves the country mouse with an unpleasant experience.

Key to both stories are the attempts by the house owners to control the multisensory experiences of their guests and it is this notion which is to be examined throughout the following chapters. By reconnecting the literary accounts with the archaeological remains of life in the home, this book explores the embodied Roman home, reconnecting it with the vivid sounds and smells, the vibrant tastes, textures and sights experienced by those within. Such an approach in turn seeks to develop further our understanding of the complexities behind the organization and manipulation of space and surroundings as a means for displaying power and status to others.

The embodied experience of the home

The experience of home is structured by distinct activities – cooking, eating, socializing, reading, storing, sleeping, intimate acts – not by visual elements. A building is encountered; it is approached, confronted, related to one’s body, moved through, utilized as a condition for other things. Architecture initiates, directs and organizes behaviour and movement. A building is not an end in itself; it frames, articulates, structures, gives significance, relates, separates and unites, facilitates and prohibits. Consequently, basic architectural experiences have a verb form rather than being nouns. Authentic architectural experiences consist then, for instance, of approaching or confronting a building, rather than the formal apprehension of a façade; of the act of entering, and not simply the visual design of the door; of looking in or out through a window, rather than the window itself as a material object; or of occupying the sphere of warmth, rather than the fireplace as an object of visual design. Architectural space is lived space rather than physical space, and lived space always transcends geometry and measurability.³

In his book on architectural theory, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa explores in depth the role of multiple bodily senses in the experience of the built environment. As the passage above highlights, for Pallasmaa full corporeal immersion within a building is critical. Engagement with the home is not just about ‘visual elements’ but, as importantly, is embedded in bodily experience of the lived space and the physical responses that this realm, and the activities within it, engenders. For him, the fireplace is not merely something to be seen, but is to be physically felt as its heat warms the skin; the door is not only to be looked at, but is something to be moved through, changing a person’s surroundings and physical sensations as he or she enters a different environment.

It might appear odd to begin a book about Roman housing with references to contemporary architecture. But this insight into the multisensory aspects that make up the meanings and values of the built environment of the home was as pertinent then as it is today. From the architectural treatise of Vitruvius, which ascribes an idealized blueprint to the layout of Roman residences according to social standing, to the remains of dwellings destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, the wealth of extant evidence on the Roman domestic sphere is substantial. Examination of Roman literature and the archaeological remnants of houses emphasizes the extent to which the home played a crucial role in displaying a person’s standing to contemporaries. Beyond the views, vistas and ways of movement within the home, however, there has been little consideration of its full, embodied experience and the way in which this could be manipulated as a further means for displaying personal power and wherewithal. It is, then, this concept of the ‘lived experience of the home’, that sits at the heart of this monograph on Roman domestic space. This book examines the sensorially charged environment of the Roman home by focusing on textual and material evidence of housing from the Bay of Naples and Rome. It explores the diverse corporeal responses (including smell, touch, sound, taste and sight) to be had within the Roman house, and investigates how owners, inhabitants and visitors of various social levels physically experienced the Roman domus. To what extent and in what ways did the sounds, smells and textures of Roman domesticity affect perception of a home and how far and for what reasons were multisensory experiences open to manipulation by house owners?

Approaches to the past: The problems of the pre-eminence of sight in the western sensorium

Evidence from ancient Rome is diverse and requires varied approaches in its interpretation.⁴ Engagement with literary materials differs significantly from examining tangible artefacts and scholars need to balance carefully discrepancies between types of evidence.

When trying to understand the remains of antiquity from a sensory perspective, one of the biggest issues is the dominant role that vision has played when approaching evidence. Sight has been accepted as the most important sense of the traditionally recognized five senses in the Western sensorium since the fourth century BC, when Aristotle ordered the bodily senses in terms of importance.⁵ Sight, hearing and smell he labelled as the ‘human’ senses, whilst taste and touch were ‘animal’ senses.⁶ Although some medieval scholars, such as Aquinas, equated the importance of sight to that of touch, thereby confusing the traditionally accepted hierarchy of the Western sensory realm, the primacy of vision above other sensory experiences has remained.⁷ As Day points out, the development of visual instruments such as cameras, telescopes and microscopes, which enabled knowledge of, and access to, sights and locales that were otherwise too small or far away to see, ensured that ‘sight became the gateway to new worlds’, thus increasing the ‘intellectualization of vision’.⁸ The voyages of discovery that brought Europeans into contact with other civilizations emphasized further the dominance of the sense of sight in the West, since those with whom they made contact were seen as ‘primitive’ peoples whose connections with the world were perceived to revolve around the ‘lesser’ senses of taste, touch and smell.⁹ The culmination of this was the combination of sensory and racial hierarchies determined by the natural historian Lorenz Oken who categorized races according to the senses they were understood to prefer. At the top of the cultural ladder Europeans favoured the sense of vision whilst at the lowest level were Africans for whom touch was perceived to be most vital.¹⁰

The continued dominance of vision becomes more obvious when we consider attempts to re-engage with the full array of human senses through which the world is perceived since these have struggled to dislodge the perceived pre-eminence of sight. Key to this was the work of the mid-twentieth-century French philosopher Merleau-Ponty.¹¹ At the heart of his attempts to interpret the physical, visual, literary and dramatic experiences of human life was an emphasis placed upon the ability to ‘read’ all types of evidence. For him the study of music, dance, religious ritual or the visual and dramatic arts required a relatively standardized approach similar to that used to study the written word.¹² The problem with this methodology was that ‘reading’ evidence inherently emphasized vision, whilst other sensory responses – touch, sound, smell and taste – faded into insignificance. This logocentric bias resulted in scholars questioning whether such examination of human action based on linguistic study of human experience should be considered reductive. Can we really ‘read’ all examples of human endeavour like a text? As Serres, one of Merleau-Ponty’s severest critics explains,

I laughed a lot at Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. He opens with the words: ‘At the outset of the study of perception, we find in language the notion of sensation.’ Isn’t this an exemplary introduction? A collection of examples in the same vein, so austere and meagre, inspire the descriptio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Text
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Smelling, Touching, Hearing, Tasting and Seeing the Roman Home
• 2 Sensing Status? Multisensory Awareness and Power Display in the Roman Domestic Realm
• 3 The Impact of Streetscapes on the Domestic Realm
• 4 Initial Perceptions: Controlling Access and Multisensory Experience in the Atrium-Tablinum
• 5 ‘Public’ and ‘Private’: Multisensory Perception and the Roman Cubiculum
• 6 Beyond Taste: The Multisensory Experience of Roman Dining in the Domestic Sphere
• 7 Housing the Foul: Kitchens and Toilets in the Roman Home
• 8 Conclusion: Sensing Status – Approaching a Lived Experience of the Roman House
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright