Pompeii, Its Life and Art

by August Mau

At Pompeii the alae, as the tablinum, are narrower and higher than required by these proportions. In the Tufa Period the entrances were ornamented with pilasters, and treated like the broad entrance of the tablinum.

With reference to the purpose and uses of these rooms we have no information beyond a remark of Vitruvius in regard to placing the images of ancestors in them. This throws no light upon their origin; for only a few noble families could have possessed a sufficiently large number of ancestral busts or masks to make it necessary to provide a special place for these, while the alae form an essential and characteristic part of the Pompeian house. Now and then an ala was used as a dining room; more frequently, perhaps, one was utilized for a wardrobe, as may be seen from the traces of the woodwork. A careful study of the remains only deepens the impression that at Pompeii the alae served no definite purpose, but were a survival from a previous period, in which they responded to different conditions of life.

An interesting parallel presents itself in the arrangements of a type of peasants' house found in Lower Saxony. The main entrance, as in the early Italic house, leads into a large and high central room; at the sides of this and of the main entrance are the living rooms and stalls. At the back the central room is widened by two recesses corresponding with the alae; the hearth stands against the rear wall. In the side walls, at the rear of each recess, are a window and a door. The two windows admit light to the part of the central room furthest from the entrance; the doors open into the farmyard and the garden.

The Italic house in the beginning was not a city residence shut in by party walls, but the isolated habitation of a countryman. The design of the alae, as of the recesses in the Low Saxon farmhouse, was to furnish light to the atrium, which, as we have seen, was completely covered by a roof, there being only a small hole to let out the smoke. The large windows in the rear of the alae of the house of Sallust may be looked upon as a survival; but in city houses generally light could not be taken in this way from the sides. After the compluvium had come into general use, a conservative tradition still retained the alae whenever possible, though they no longer answered their original purpose.

V. The Rooms about the Atrium. The Andron

In front there were rooms at either side of the entrance, ordinarily fitted up as shops and opening on the street, but sometimes used as dining rooms or sleeping rooms, or for other domestic purposes.

On each side of the atrium were two or three small sleeping rooms; in narrow houses these, as well as one or both of the alae, were occasionally omitted.

At the rear were one or two rooms of the same depth as the tablinum, used in most cases as dining rooms. They frequently had a single broad entrance on the side of the peristyle or the garden ([Fig. 134], 22), but were sometimes entered by a door from the atrium or from one of the alae ([Figs. 115], [121]). The door on the side of the atrium seems generally to have been made when the house was built; if the owner did not wish to use it, it was walled up and treated as a blind door, an ornament of the atrium.

The rooms about the atrium in the pre-Roman period were made high, those in front and at the sides often measuring fifteen feet to the edge of the ceiling, which had the form of a groined vault. The rear rooms were still higher, the crown of the vaults being as far above the floor as the flat ceiling of the tablinum. A corresponding height was given to the doors; those in the house of the Faun measure nearly fourteen feet. The upper part of the doorway was doubtless pierced for the admission of light in the manner indicated by wall paintings, and shown in our restoration of one side of the atrium in the house of Sallust ([Figs. 261], [262]).

The andron was a passage at the right or the left of the tablinum, connecting the atrium with the peristyle ([Figs. 115], [121]). The name was used originally to designate an apartment in the Greek house, but was applied by the Romans to a corridor. In modern times the passage has often been erroneously called fauces.