Public and Private in the Roman House

Heini Ynnilä, D.Phil candidate (University of Oxford) and a researcher of the EPUH-project (Expeditio Pompeiana Universitatis Helsingiensis), is giving a presentation about the trade and living arrangements of a Pompeian insula. The presentation will be held in the seminar room of Classical Philology in Metsätalo (Unioninkatu 38/Fabianinkatu 39, A-wing, 2^nd floor. Entrance through the 3^rd floor) on Thursday April the 19th at 6 pm. Welcome!

D.Phil candidate (University of Oxford) ja EPUH-projektin (Expeditio Pompeiana Universitatis Helsingiensis) tutkija Heini Ynnilä pitää torstaina 19.4. klo 18-20 esitelmän ‘Asumista ja kaupankäyntiä saman katon alla pompejilaisessa korttelissa’. Esitelmä pidetään klassillisen filologian seminaarihuoneessa Metsätalossa (Unioninkatu 38/Fabianinkatu 39, A-siipi, 2. krs. Käynti 3. kerroksen kautta). Tervetuloa!

Abstract deadline: April 15, 2012

E-mail: romanhouse2012@gmail.com

 Roman houses were designed to suit both the private life of its occupants and the demands of public life. As a result, the division between public and private spaces inside the domus was a complicated topic even for the Romans themselves. Previous scholarship has tended to treat the domus in terms of a rigid division between public and private, with the same division acting as a gender marker for (male) political activities and (female) domestic activities respectively. This strict division within the household now seems outdated. The aim of this workshop, then, is to take a fresh look at notions of public and private within the domus by exploring the public and private spheres of the Roman house from the first century BCE to the third century CE.

We therefore invite papers that explore the complex relationship between public and private in Roman society from a variety of perspectives – historical, archaeological, philological, architectural and anthropological – in order to further the understanding of the domus as a place for social, cultural, political and administrative action.

Potential themes include but are not limited to:

-       private spaces as political and cultural arenas

-       the person and the house of the citizen and magistrate

-       trials and administration within the private Roman house

-       the public and private nature of the emperor and the early imperial administration

The workshop is organized by the project Public and Private in the Roman House (http://blogs.helsinki.fi/romanhouse/), which seeks to contribute to the ongoing debate on privacy in the ancient world as well as the issues of how the limits between public and private spaces were drawn. In an attempt to gain new perspectives on these questions, the project seeks to utilize comparative anthropological theories concerning the conceptualization of the public/private interface.

Please submit your abstract (300 words) as a [word/pdf] file to Kaius Tuori to romanhouse2012@gmail.com Please include your name, academic affiliation and address in your email.

The deadline for submission of abstracts is April 15, 2012.

The purpose of this project is to explore the public and private spheres, the areas of the house primarily intended for private or for public use and access, of the Roman house from the first century BCE to the second century AD through a re-evaluation of the material remains of the houses themselves and literary evidence that tells of life in them.

As an interdisciplinary enterprise, the project seeks to combine historical, archaeological, philological and architectural analysis to further the understanding of the function of Roman house, the domus, as a place for social, cultural, political and administrative action. Questioning the modern presuppositions such as that of a home as a purely private area reserved for the family and their friends and relatives, or that of regarding the functions of spaces within a home as single purpose, such as a bedroom or a living room, to each space, the aim is to show the contradictions of material finds, the things that archaeologists have found in each room, with the assumptions regarding the use of that space.

The older scholarship supported a very rigid view of the Roman house as divided between a public and private sections, with the same division acting as a gender marker for the male political activities within the political sphere and the female activities of nurturing and housekeeping within the domestic sphere. Thus the house would have followed the pattern of the family with the head of family with his sons taking care of the outside relations and the women taking care of the home. This division now outdated within the household, the aim of this project is to take a fresh look on conceptions of public and private within the house. Drawing from new theories in social studies, the project sees that the functions of spaces within the house were created by the actions of its inhabitants instead of being predetermined.

The investigation is carried out on three fronts, literature, the archaeological finds and the architectural outline. Through the study of literary sources will be mapped the historical uses of the Roman house as the center for the public and private lives of its occupants. The survey of archaeological finds from houses in Pompei and Herculaneum as well as Rome and its environs will help to identify the functions of rooms and who occupied them. Architectural reconstructions made with computer imagining (3D CAD) will be used to configure hypotheses on three case studies on how the Roman house functioned.

While the earlier projects have been focused on archaeological fieldwork, the current project offers a pioneering analytical study to bridge the gap between historical and archaeological knowledge. The multidisciplinary approach of combining historical and archaeological data using 3-dimensional reconstructions, still in an experimental phase, has promise. The ultimate aim of this project is to find out whether these prospects may be realized. As a research project involving graduate students preparing their doctoral theses, the project has distinct aims of researcher education in the field.