This chapter brings together Greek documentary papyri from family archives in and around the town of Tebtynis in the Fayyum, with the archaeological record for housing across the region. In so doing, it presents a case for understanding the ownership, transactions and leasing of houses, or parts of houses, as a means to develop or preserve social status and standing in these towns and villages. The chapter explores transactions in the papyri between known individuals, against the context of the observed physical life cycle of houses and their associated outside space. It concludes that, for those individuals of specific social status (primarily gymnasial), both close and extended kinship ties were an important part of the considerations when financial transactions took place involving housing. Such activities were crucial to the operation of social positioning within the middle and upper echelons of these relatively small communities in the Fayyum. The extent to which these patterns may be said to be typical of similar elements of kinship and social structures across Roman Egypt is debatable, but the approach taken by this chapter provides a means of exploring these relationships further.

Like those studying other aspects of the ancient world, archaeologists working on housing frequently use textual evidence to provide a framework within which the archaeological material can be understood. This chapter suggests that the reverse can also be helpful, namely using archaeology to provide a context which facilitates a clearer understanding of some of the textual evidence. As an example, I choose three passages from Demosthenes which allude to the character of housing and other buildings in the city of Athens. I read these against the background of broader changes in the architecture of houses being constructed at Athens and other cities in the first half of the 4th century BCE, as well as the new evidence for the lavish palatial building at Vergina, which suggests it was originally constructed by Philip II. I argue that this material shows Demosthenes' allusions are actually veiled references to contemporary politics, and that they highlight an issue which was a matter of debate at Athens during the time he was writing, namely, the increasing use of the house as a symbol of personal wealth and power.

This introduction probes the relationship between textual and material approaches to houses of the ancient Mediterranean. Drawing on the contributions to the volume, it traces some of the ways in which documentary and archaeological sources, and the relationships between these, have shaped our knowledge of the housing and households of the Graeco-Roman world.

In addition to being the primary locus of family interaction and daily activity, the house is a mediating space where individual lifestyles, social order and cultural conventions meet. This chapter investigates the domestic ritual material remains related to the Italian Lares compitales cult on Delos, in the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE, focusing on the shrines’ relationship with the expression and negotiation of different forms of group identities, and drawing on archaeological and textual evidence. Lares compitales shrines represent the material remains of the repeated social practice related to the expression of membership within this public cult, which in turn functioned as a means of group identity (or community) creation for freedmen, a newly formed civic group increasing in number during this period. Locating domestic space and associated activities within a liminal zone existing within, and/or confounding, the realms of public and private, this contribution contends that these shrines not only provided a physical location for certain activities related to this cult, but also performed a social function as a means of communicating and negotiating identities through the material expression of repeated social practice.

Penelope Allison’s 2001 article on using material and written sources to study Roman domestic space has framed the debate on the topic more broadly for ancient world housing. In this chapter, she revisits that contribution and responses to it, and surveys the theoretical and methodological frameworks of the chapters in the volume. By examining the nature of the data, analytical and interpretative approaches to them, and the research questions, Allison assesses the extent to which the two decades since her critique have produced more critically engaged scholarship, particularly in approaches to relationships between textual and material evidence.

Perhaps the most commonly invoked aspects of the home found on Athenian vases are doors, which suggest transitions. In the case of marriage scenes, these transitions are the beginnings and ends of the gamelia, the procession from the bride’s home to the groom’s. The doors represent transition and help us to envision the gamelia, as noted in textual sources, but some, perhaps more importantly, provide a glimpse into the home itself, particularly the thalamos or wedding chamber in which the marriage is culminated. A synthesis of sources here aids a more thorough understanding of the importance of the marriage bed and its room, the thalamos, in the home as well as through the wedding ritual. This in turn brings our attention most appropriately to the essential role of the home in the marriage, on the occasion of the wedding and thereafter.

When 19th-century excavators uncovered domestic buildings at classical Greek urban sites, they also uncovered a problem: words and walls did not match. The clash between sources led to a clash between scholars. This chapter explores the origin of this perceived gap between words and walls and shows that it is the result of clashing philosophies, rather than faulty sources. Discussions of ancient Greek houses began in 16th-century Italy, at a time when no Greek houses were available to study. Scholars created their own plans, drawing on ancient texts and surviving Roman remains. Their designs were intended to facilitate philosophical discussions, not to rebuild the past. In contrast, archaeologists wanted to rebuild. They needed labels to describe the buildings they had found. They mined ancient texts to create a terminology for domestic spaces and features. Inevitably, text and archaeology did not match. It is time to step away from the gap and re-evaluate our approach to investigating ancient houses. Through a re-examination of evidence for 4th-century BCE Athenian houses in texts and material remains, this chapter demonstrates how different ancient sources can work in parallel to advance knowledge of domestic life in the ancient Greek city.

Philosophical studies of the interpretation of sensory information have emphasized the central role of senses in the body’s experience of the world as well as highlighting the plurality and overlap in one’s sensory responses to it. This chapter investigates how far such concepts of experiencing space through a multisensory lens are valid for the ancient Roman villa residences of mainland Italy. Sensory responses to the Roman house have previously been restricted to examining sightlines within and outside the house, as well as movement and access within it. When we consider Pliny’s descriptions of his villas, Vitruvius’ guidance on developing a villa, or Seneca’s description of Scipio’s villa, however, it becomes clear that these residences could affect numerous sensorial responses. As such, foregrounding vision and movement above other senses experienced in the Roman domestic realm risks providing only a partial understanding of life in these residences. This chapter proposes the application of further theoretical frameworks, such as soundscapes and smellscapes, for studying the villa.

The Classical house can be understood also as a set of interactions between people, objects and valuable commodities that existed within and extended beyond the physical and temporal confines of the house. This chapter concerns ceramic oil jars, lekythoi, that date to the early 5th century BCE. It is argued that the small black-figured lekythoi, which were prolifically produced and widely traded during this time, may have held olive oil, not just perfume. The materiality of these pots and archaeological evidence from settlements, graves and other find-spots suggest that lekythoi could have functioned as oil pitchers to serve small portions of olive oil, perhaps of family production. Vase iconography indicates that such lekythoi were objects within easy reach, to be used on diverse occasions, such as dining, ritual and commercial activities. The offering of lekythoi in burials, irrespective of the presence of contents, could have alluded to the storage of olive oil in the household of the deceased and communicated a powerful message about a family’s claims to status, real or fictitious.

Scholarship on Early Greek housing has moved from creating fictional reconstructions based on Homeric poetry, through typological sorting of archaeological houses by shape and rooms, to analysing access patterns and functionalization. These more recent approaches have largely estranged epic poetry from archaeology. However, since they seek to understand domestic structures as experienced by living people, there is a way to build poetry back in by using it to explore the ways their inhabitants thought about domestic spaces. The phrase ‘in the halls’ is used abundantly in the Homeric and Hesiodic corpus as a metonymy for familial life and prosperity. The phrase should be read not as a reality to be sought in the archaeological record but abstractly as an indicator of the importance of physical space in a household’s formation and success. The link between prosperity, family and house can also be seen in the renovations and increasing complexities in some early Greek domestic architecture. Success and wealth modify and are expressed in the house. ‘In the halls’ thus refers to an important cultural idea, also seen in archaeology, linking house, home and family with prosperity.

This chapter uses the spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre to examine the way in which the Roman house operated as a ‘space of desire’ and to illuminate the processes of house and household formation and social reproduction. It draws on a variety of Roman examples, including Pliny’s villas, the luxury villas of the Roman imperial period and late antiquity, and the small houses of Roman Egypt. Spatial theory focuses attention on the processes of social reproduction in Roman societies. The chapter argues for the inclusion of agency (the desiring subject) in our understanding of houses, shifting analytical focus from taxonomies and formal architectural features. It traces the analytical shift between spaces on the ground to forms in society and argues that the slippage between the two reflects a fundamental perception that social forms have a spatial existence and that spatial forms have a social meaning.