Pompeii, Its Life and Art

by August Mau

In accordance with an ancient custom the children, even those of the imperial family, sat on low stools at a table of their own on the open side of the large table. In an open-air triclinium in the ninth Region (IX. v. 11) the children's seat is preserved, a low bench of masonry about forty inches long connected with the projecting arm of the lower couch ([Plate VII].).

The inner part of the dining room, designed for the table and couches, was often distinguished from the free space in the same way that the place for the bed was indicated in bedrooms, sometimes by a difference in the design of the mosaic floor, more frequently by the division of the wall decoration and the arrangement of the ceiling. In the third and fourth decorative styles the division is less plainly marked than in the second; but often the side walls back of the couches and the inner end of the room have each a single large panel with a small panel at the right and left, while on each side wall in front are only two panels, of the same size.

In one respect the ordinary dining room was far from convenient; those who had the inner places could not leave the table or return to it in the course of a meal without disturbing one or more of those reclining nearer the outside. Large rooms, in which an open space was left between the couches and the wall, or in which several tables with their sets of couches could be placed, were unknown in pre-Roman Pompeii. In the time of the Empire a few of these large dining rooms were built in older houses. There is one measuring about 25 by 33 feet in the house of Pansa; another, of which the dimensions are 23 by 30 feet, in the house of Castor and Pollux; and a third, 36 feet long, in the house of the Citharist.

In a number of houses we find a large, fine apartment—designated by the Greek word oecus—which seems often to have been used for a dining room, especially on notable occasions. A particularly elegant form was the Corinthian oecus, which had a row of columns about the sides a short distance from the walls, the room being thus divided into a main part with a vaulted ceiling and a corridor with a flat ceiling. The couches would be placed in the main part; the guests could pass to their places along the corridor, behind the columns. The remains of such an oecus may be seen in the houses of Meleager and of the Labyrinth.

A specially interesting example—unfortunately not yet wholly excavated—is in the house of the Silver Wedding. In this case only the inner part, designed for the couches, is set off by columns. We may assume that there was a vaulted ceiling over the middle, resting on the entablature of the columns; that the ceiling of the corridor between the columns and the wall was flat, and of the same height as the entablature; and that the front part of the room had a flat or slightly arched ceiling of the same height as the crown of the vault over the middle.

In the more pretentious Roman houses there was sometimes a dining room for each season of the year; when Trimalchio in Petronius's novel boasts that he has four dining rooms, we are to understand that he had one each for winter, summer, autumn, and spring. In the case of the Pompeian houses we are warranted in assuming that dining rooms opening toward the south were for winter use, those toward the north for use in summer. Other airy apartments, with a large window in addition to the wide door, may well have been intended for summer triclinia. Further than this it is hardly possible to classify Pompeian dining rooms according to the seasons.

IX. The Kitchen, the Bath, and the Storerooms

In the Pompeian house the kitchen had no fixed location. It was generally a small room, and was placed wherever it would least interfere with the arrangement of the rest of the house.

The most important part of the kitchen was the hearth. This was built of masonry, against one of the walls. It was oblong, and the fire was made on the top. The cooking utensils sometimes rested on rectangular projections of masonry, as in the kitchen of the house of Pansa, sometimes on small iron tripods, as in the house of the Vettii ([Fig. 125]). The hearth of the latter house was found undisturbed, with a vessel in place ready to be heated. In one house the place of an iron tripod was taken by three pointed ends of amphorae set upright on the hearth. Underneath there was often a hollow place, like that shown in our illustration, in which fuel was kept, as in similar openings under the hearths of Campanian kitchens to-day.

Sometimes we find near the hearth a bake oven, not large enough to have been used for bread, and evidently intended for pastry; bread must ordinarily have been obtained from the bakers. In one of the cellars of the house of the Centenary there is a larger oven, which may have been used to bake coarse bread for the slaves; the heat was utilized in warming a bath above.