Housing in ancient Rome brings to mind initially the villa, a large countryside residence. However, many Roman citizens lived in so-called insulae, urban apartment blocks which had up to seven floors. Only the wealthiest Romans were able to afford a domus, a city mansion, and only the super-rich owned a countryside villa. The home of an average citizen in the city of Rome could have looked like this. These blocks of houses the Romans called islands or insulae in Latin.
On the ground floor, there were stores, the so-called tabernae. On the upper floors, there were canacula, apartments. The roomiest and best furnished flats were on the first floor. They had multiple rooms, balconies, toilets and in some cases even running water, fed by aqueducts.
The residents of the higher floors lived in smaller and poorer apartments, without private toilets, but they were cheaper. On the rooftops of insulae, there were sometimes even improvised wooden sheds. Due to poor building, bad structures and very little space in between the insulae, they had lots of issues. Fires could destroy entire districts.
Water could get into the cheaply air-dried brick of the walls during a flooding. This made the insulae, which were fragile to begin with, even more unstable and could even let them collapse. The apartments themselves were often in similar bad shape.
Wind and rain came through the walls which were full of cracks. Despite these obvious disadvantages, the major part of the urban citizens lived in such insulae. The main reason for this is that the rooms in insulae were rental accommodations.
The insulae were originally introduced to handle the enormous and growing population of the city in relatively small and confined spaces. The historian Hannah Platz states that there were 40,000 insulae In contrast, she estimates that there were fewer than 2,000 domus. These differ from insulae, according to Janet Delane, in that they were privately owned properties. Hence, they were not affordable for most people. But whoever was capable of affording something better than rooms in an insulae would for sure upgrade to a domus.
Places of residence were relevant to social status and the self-representation of anyone participating in politics. Appropriate dwellings were simply must-haves when climbing the social and political ladder. Let's have a look at an example from the first century BC. Quintus Lucretius of Fela was a well-known general of equestrian rank.
In the Roman civil wars, he served under the dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla and led his men at the siege of Praeneste. He seized the city and presented to Sulla the head of Marius, Sulla's antagonist. Because of Fela played a vital role in Sulla's victory, he gained a lot of money and a massive boost in prestige. Except for his success in battle and his death, we know very little about Orfele.
But importantly, Plutarch informs us that he sought to move up in society and pursue a political career. Usually, a political career would have been only an option for Romans of higher birth, i.e. aristocrats with a senatorial ancestry. Although it was possible to advance in Rome without this, it was significantly harder.
Those who still managed to do so were called homines novi, new men. The most famous example of a homo novus is Cicero. For Othello to pursue politics, he would have needed to improve his social standing by quite a margin. Before Sulla's reforms, it would have been unlikely for Othello to even get a chance. Like many men of equestrian rank, Ophela might have lived in a first-floor apartment of an insula.
He would thus have needed a private residence, a domus of his own, to be on par with other aristocrats. But to buy or build a domus was no small enterprise. The domus, the house of the Roman elite, was constructed using costly materials, such as marble. They were furnished with elaborate decorations, inlaid panels, intricate door jams and sturdy columns. Both the walls and the floor were embellished with pompous paintings, fabulous frescoes and intricate mosaics.
In the outside wall of the Domus, facing the streets, were tabernae as well. On entering the Domus, through the osseum, the entrance, one first stepped into the vestibulum, the entrance hall, sometimes also called fauces, which means something like open mouth or throat. Through this one passed to the atrium, the center of the Domus. The atrium was a large central hall, with a statue or an altar to the household gods.
It was surrounded by high ceiling porticos. In the very center there was an open square in the roof, the so-called compluvium, through which the rain fell into the impluvium, a basin on the ground. The atrium was the most important part of the domus because it was the place where the guests and petitioners were greeted.
Leading off The atrium was a dining room, the triclinium, a study room, the tablinium, bedrooms, the cubicula and the culina, the culinary kitchen where the slaves prepared meals. The tablinium connected the atrium to the peristulium, a small, roofless courtyard around which the back part of the house was centered. From this part of the domus one could enter the bathrooms and the kitchen.
Somewhere in this part of the house there was usually a posticum. an entrance for servants and family members who wanted to leave the house unseen. As a whole, the building was constructed on one axis, so that an entering guest could see through the vestibulum, the atrium and the tablinum to the peristyleum.
The domus was closed towards the streets and the walls didn't bear any windows. This created a safe space, separating the living space from the outside, which was regarded as dangerous. Since the first century BC, The word Domus does not only refer to a building but also to a whole household, including family members, servants and slaves. Now, about the time Ophela's Domus would have been built, he heard that Sulla was looking for new candidates to fill the depleted senatorial benches.
Because Ophela hadn't been contacted personally, he decided to run his own campaign for consulship. He even canvassed on the Forum Romanum, despite Sulla had told him not to. Eventually, he figured that he had to improve his architectural self-representation even further and to make his wealth a little more obvious to the public. So he looked for a nice spot on a hill outside the city, say, near Tusculum, where he could have built a villa suburbana, a countryside residence. Besides the villa suburbana, there were several other types of villae.
There was, for example, the Villa Rustica. which was basically an estate with functioning agricultural facilities and workshops. This agricultural flair was much less important in other types of villas, but it was a common feature even for primarily representative villas.
Ophelia would have wanted a place to spend his leisure time, Baltium, in which he would have perhaps engaged in literary or philosophical pursuits. What sets the villa apart from the Domus and the Insulae is not only their sheer size but their placement in nature. Around the Gulf of Naples in southern Italy, for example, the villi were placed in the mountains, around lakes or close to the sea.
A villa was deemed perfect if it dominated the scenery and provided a vast panorama view. In addition, extensive lavish gardens surrounded the houses and redirected streams gently flowed through the gardens. Ironically, While the poor tenants of urban insulae with cracked walls unwillingly suffered chilly winds, the houses of rich people were placed in windy locations on purpose to ensure fresh air circulation and to reduce bad smells.
Indispensable to a villa were cryptai, multiple other porticos and a bath. Of course, the furniture and ornamentation depended on the budget of the owner. The range went from modest interiors focused on an elitist educational landscape to all the splendor one could think of.
Vast mosaics, art collections, mural paintings, extensive libraries or expensive dishes. The villi are also famous for another very important feature, only affordable for the rich. Heating. The Romans used so-called hypocausts. The word is derived from the Greek terms hypo meaning under and cost meaning burnt.
As shown here, the system of central heating provided warmth by heating the space beneath the ground through the smoke and heat of the furnace. Many rich Romans possessed more than one villa, spent a major part of the year there and went to their domus in the city only to pursue their political activities. It was a villa in this style Ophelia might have wanted to build. It would have certainly impressed his fellow Romans.
But why did it not work out for him? Well, we know from Plutarch, that Ophela, while gathering supporters for his election, went to the forum with a large crowd of followers. Sulla's patience with Ophela and his self-made political advances was wearing thin, very thin.
He sent one of his centurions over to Ophela. In front of all the Romans on the forum, he simply had him slayed.