II.

Architecture

A clear picture of Roman architecture can be drawn from the impressive remains of ancient Roman public and private buildings and from contemporaneous writings, such as De Architectura (trans. 1914), the ten-volume architectural treatise compiled by Vitruvius toward the close of the 1st century bc.

A.

Roman City Planning

The typical Roman city of the later Republic and empire had a rectangular plan and resembled a Roman military camp with two main streets—the cardo (north-south) and the decumanus (east-west)—a grid of smaller streets dividing the town into blocks, and a wall circuit with gates. Older cities, such as Rome itself, founded before the adoption of regularized city planning, could, however, consist of a maze of crooked streets.

The focal point of the city was its forum, usually situated at the center of the city at the intersection of the cardo and the decumanus. The forum, an open area bordered by colonnades with shops, functioned as the chief meeting place of the town. It was also the site of the city’s primary religious and civic buildings, among them the Senate house, records office, and basilica.

The basilica was a roofed hall with a wide central area—the nave—flanked by side aisles, and it often had two or more stories. In Roman times basilicas were the site of business transactions and legal proceedings, but the building type was adapted in Christian times as the standard form of Western church with an apse and altar at the end of the long nave. The first basilicas were put up in the early 2nd century bc in Rome’s own Forum, but the earliest well-preserved example of the basilicas (circa 120 bc) is found at Pompeii.

B.

Roman Temples

The chief temple of a Roman city, the capitolium, was generally located at one end of the forum. The standard Roman temple was a blend of Etruscan and Greek elements; rectangular in plan, it had a gabled roof, a deep porch with freestanding columns, and a frontal staircase giving access to its high plinth, or platform. The traditional Greek orders, or canons (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian), were usually retained, but the Romans also developed a new type of column capital called the composite capital, a mixture of Ionic and Corinthian elements. An excellent example of the canonical temple type is the Maison-Carrée (circa ad 4) in Nîmes, France.

Roman temples were erected not only in the forum, but throughout the city and in the countryside as well; many other types are known. One of the most influential in later times was the type used for the Pantheon (ad 118-28) in Rome, consisting of a standard gable-roofed columnar porch with a domed cylindrical drum behind it replacing the traditional rectangular main room, or cella. Simpler temples based on Greek prototypes, with round cellas and an encircling colonnade, such as that built about 75 bc at Tivoli, near Rome, were also popular.

C.

Markets and Shops

Recreational buildings and shops were dispersed throughout the Roman city. The shops were usually one-room units (tabernae) opening onto the sidewalks; many, including combination mill-bakeries, can still be seen at Pompeii and elsewhere. Sometimes an entire unified complex of shops was constructed, such as the markets built in the reign (ad 98-117) of Trajan on the Quirinal Hill (Monte Quirinal) in Rome and still standing, which incorporated scores of tabernae on several levels and a large vaulted two-story hall.

D.

Theaters and Amphitheaters

Roman theaters first appeared in the late Republic. They were semicircular in plan and consisted of a tall stage building abutting a semicircular orchestra and tiered seating area (cavea). Unlike Greek theaters, which were situated on natural slopes, Roman theaters were supported by their own framework of piers and vaults and thus could be constructed in the hearts of cities. Theaters were popular in all parts of the empire; impressive examples may be found at Orange (early 1st century ad), in France, and Sabratha (late 2nd century ad), in Libya.

Amphitheaters (literally, double theaters) were elliptical in plan with a central arena, where gladiatorial and animal combats took place (Gladiator), and a surrounding seating area built on the pattern of Roman theaters. The earliest known amphitheater (75 bc) is at Pompeii, and the grandest, Rome’s Colosseum (ad70-80), held approximately 50,000 spectators, roughly the capacity of today’s large sports stadiums.

Racecourses or circuses were also built in many cities for holding chariot races and horse races. Rome’s circus-shaped Piazza Navona occupies the site of one that was built during the reign (ad 81-96) of the emperor Domitian. The largest circus in Rome, the Circus Maximus, held about 200,000 spectators.

E.

Public Baths

Large cities and small towns alike also had public baths (thermae); under the Republic they were generally made up of a suite of dressing rooms and bathing chambers with hot- , warm- , and cold-water baths (caldaria, tepidaria, frigidaria) alongside an exercise area, the palaestra. The baths (75 bc) near Pompeii’s forum are an excellent example of the early type. Under the empire these comparatively modest structures became progressively grander; such late examples as the Baths of Caracalla (about ad 217) in Rome also incorporated libraries, lecture halls, and vast vaulted public spaces elaborately decorated with statues, mosaics, paintings, and stuccos.

F.

Public Works

Among the other great public building projects of the Romans, the most noteworthy are the network of bridges and roads that facilitated travel throughout the empire, and the aqueducts that brought water to the towns from mountain sources (Pont du Gard, late 1st century bc or early 1st century ad, near Nîmes).

G.

Residences

Although the public buildings were generally the grandest and costliest structures in the city, most of the area of a Roman town was occupied by private residences.

G.1.

The Domus

Family dwellings then as today were built in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, but the Roman domus usually displayed the preference for symmetry around an axis that characterizes most of Roman public architecture as well. Early houses dating from the 4th and 3rd centuries bc seem to have been built on patterns going back to Etruscan times.

The standard domus italica, or early Republican house, consisted of an entrance corridor (fauces), a main room (atrium) open to the sky with a central basin for the collection of rainwater, a series of small bedrooms (cubicula), an office area (tablinum), a dining room (triclinium), a kitchen (culina), and perhaps a small garden (hortus). The front rooms of the house might open onto the street and serve as shops.

During the late Republic and early empire, Roman houses became ever more elaborate. Greek-style columns were installed in the atrium, the old hortus was expanded and framed by a colonnade (peristyle), and the decoration became quite lavish. The wealthiest city dwellings might occupy an entire block, as did the so-called House of the Faun at Pompeii, built early in the 2nd century bc.

G.2.

The Villa and the Palace

Suburban villas, such as those owned by the statesman and orator Cicero and other famous Romans, often incorporated fields, lakes, shrines, and thermal complexes. The finest of the preserved imperial villas is that (begun ad 118) of Hadrian at Tivoli. The first emperor, Augustus, who reigned from 27 bc to ad 14, lived in a relatively austere residence on the Palatine Hill in Rome, but under Domitian a great imperial palace (begun about ad 81, dedicated ad 92) was constructed nearby by the architect Rabirius (flourished ad 63-100). Domitian’s Domus Augustana also served as the headquarters of succeeding emperors. It had grand reception halls, public dining areas, fountains, and a garden in the form of a stadium, in addition to a residential wing.

G.3.

The Insula

City dwellers of the imperial period who could not afford private residences lived in insulae, multistory brick and concrete structures strikingly similar to modern apartment houses. The best-preserved examples are at Ostia, the port of Rome at the mouth of the Tiber River, and date from the 2nd and 3rd centuries.

H.

Roman Tombs

One kind of building that was almost always located outside the city proper was the tomb. Roman tombs, usually set up beside the major roads leading in and out of the cities, exhibit an extraordinary variety of forms because they reflect the personal tastes of private patrons and because their simple function—to house the bodies or cremated remains of the dead—could be satisfied with almost any shape.

The emperor Augustus had his own huge mausoleum built at Rome between 28 and 23 bc in the form of a great concrete drum surmounted by a mound, recalling the monumental earthen tumuli of Etruscan times. Across the Tiber the emperor Hadrian had an even larger mausoleum built (ad 135-139) for himself and his successors; it was converted (5th century) to a fortress, now known as Castel Sant’Angelo.

A wealthy contemporary of Augustus, Gaius Cestius, chose to be buried in a pyramid tomb about 15 bc, while at the same time a successful baker, Marcus Virgilius Eurysaces, had his tomb decorated with grain measures and a frieze detailing the various stages in the baking of bread. Persons of lesser means, especially freed slaves, were usually buried in communal tombs called columbaria in which the ashes of the deceased were deposited in one of hundreds of small niches marked with simple plaques.

Great tower tombs were also erected, such as that in honor of the Julii family of St-Rémy-de-Provence (France). Their mausoleum, built about 25 bc, consists of a large base topped by a four-sided arch and a small round temple housing two portrait statues. Burial chambers might also be located in mountain cliffs with elaborate facades carved into the sheer faces of the rock, as in the Roman cemetery at Petra, in present-day Jordan.

I.

Building Materials and Methods

Quarried stone, used in conjunction with timber beams and terra-cotta tiles and plaques, was the essential Roman building material from Republican times on. The stone chosen ranged from central Italian tufa and travertine to gleaming white marble shipped from Greece and Asia Minor—or, from the time of Caesar on, from Luna (modern Luni, near Carrara) in Italy—and multicolored marbles imported from quarries all over the ancient world. Thin revetment plaques of fine marble were often used to sheathe walls constructed of cheaper stone blocks or rubble.

Marbles lent splendor to the Romans’ buildings, as they did to those of the Greeks before them. However, it was a material invented by the Romans—concrete—that revolutionized the history of architecture and permitted the Romans to put up buildings that were impossible to construct with the traditional stone post-and-lintel system of earlier architecture. Roman concrete was an amalgam of aggregate and a mortar of lime and pozzolana, a volcanic sand. It provided Roman architects with the means to cover vast spaces with great vaults (see Arch and Vault) and to liberate architectural design from the canonical rectilinear patterns that were used in classical architecture.

Concrete vaulting made possible the construction of the great amphitheaters and baths of the Roman world, as well as the dome of the Pantheon and such spectacular hillside sanctuaries as that of the Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia (late 2nd century bc) at Palestrina. Because concrete walls and ceilings were fashioned in molds, architects were encouraged to experiment with irregular configurations that lent visual excitement to the interior of buildings. Although Roman concrete could be faced with a variety of materials, the most popular during the empire was brick. Indeed, during the first two centuries after Christ, brick first came to be appreciated as a building facing in its own right; brick-faced concrete quickly became the favored material for large buildings such as apartment houses, baths, and horrea, or warehouses (for example, the horrea of Epagathius, ad 145-150, at Ostia).