For a variety of reasons this volume has taken longer to write than it should have, and I am grateful to the series editors Paul Cartledge and Peter Garnsey, and to Michael Sharp at Cambridge University Press, for patiently awaiting the manuscript. Many of the individual case studies included here represent the result of long engagement with the material on which they are based. In the process, several potential chapters have eventually been excluded and will appear elsewhere. I hope that the sometimes lengthy history of those that remain has helped to make this a better book: I originally presented Chapter 2 as part of a series of seminars on Archaic Greece at Lincoln College, Oxford in 2001 and, in summary form, at a symposium in honour of Anthony Snodgrass held in Cambridge in the same year. Chapter 3 began as a Classical Archaeology seminar paper given in Cambridge in 2001 and a Classical Studies Department seminar paper given at the Open University in 2002; elements of my argument were also presented in summary form at the Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in 2005. An overview of the material included in Chapter 4 was given at the meeting of the Classical Association of the Mid-West and South in Madison in 2005. My work on the Pompeian evidence, discussed in Chapter 5, was presented to the Classics Department at the University of Cincinnati in 2006 and to the Archaeology Department at the University of Groningen in the same year.

INTRODUCTION

In Chapter 2 I suggested that the close association between the scale and layout of a house and the complexity of the society to which its inhabitants belonged offers a new perspective through which to explore the formation of the Greek polis or citizen-state. This chapter focuses on the development of one of the social institutions which were instrumental in structuring relationships within the polis, namely the symposium or drinking party (Small 1997, 113). Discussion of the symposium has tended to focus on ancient texts and on painted pottery which appears to show such occasions in progress, but, although it is assumed that they were frequently held in private houses and that the architectural setting played an important role in shaping the atmosphere, little attention has been paid to the archaeological evidence of housing as a source for understanding sympotic behaviour.

The preceding chapters highlight the broad spectrum of different scales which can be explored from a domestic perspective, ranging from the intra-household level such as the topic of the Classical Greek symposium or the relative (in)visibility of women and slaves at Pompeii, up to issues spanning whole communities or even regions, such as the self-presentation of elites in late Roman Africa, interaction between cultures in early Roman Delos, or the development of polis society in Early Iron Age Greece. Juxtaposing these different sets of issues and evidence highlights a number of recurrent themes and offers insights, both about the societies discussed and about the strengths and weaknesses of domestic material as a source of information on ancient social life more generally.

The character of houses as buildings clearly varies considerably through space and time within the ancient world, but there are some parallels between the different case studies considered here. Activities prominently represented in the archaeological record are the storage, preparation and consumption of food and drink. Relevant evidence comes from all the locations and periods where finds have been recorded since the most numerous objects preserved tend to be pottery vessels, the majority of which were used for these purposes. In Early Iron Age Greece, in houses where household space was even minimally subdivided, one of the primary, archaeologically visible, functional distinctions drawn was between living areas and those used for food storage.

INTRODUCTION

In previous chapters discussion has centred on the way in which the physical remains of ancient houses can be used as a means of exploring some of the social and cultural patterns by which those houses were shaped. In this chapter I shift the focus onto the representation of the domestic sphere, using the material record to look at the way in which a house can play a symbolic role as an expression of the ideas and values of its owner. To do so, I look at housing from North Africa between the second and fifth centuries ce, which is particularly well known for its large numbers of distinctive polychrome mosaic floors. It is these mosaics, and some of the ways in which their iconography seems to have been manipulated by the members of the North African elite to convey a distinctive ideology, which are the subject of this chapter.

INTRODUCTION

In relative contrast with the houses discussed in the other chapters of this volume, those from the Roman town of Pompeii have been intensively studied for more than 200 years, and it is easy to see why they have attracted so much attention. The Campania region of southern Italy in which they lie was covered in volcanic material by the eruption of Vesuvius in August 79 ce.

INTRODUCTION: ISSUES AND APPROACHES

Homeric descriptions like that of the extensive and opulent palace of King Alcinoös in the Odyssey, quoted above represent our earliest surviving descriptions of housing from the ancient Greek world. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century archaeologists were tempted to associate these poetically imagined structures with the monumental palatial buildings being unearthed at the time at sites such as Tiryns and Mycenae. But it became clear that whereas the palaces were probably destroyed before 1200 bce, the Homeric poems did not come together in their final form until about the eighth century bce.

INTRODUCTION

In the 2002 film comedy My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the Greek American screen parents of actress Nia Vardalos host a dinner for her fiancé's White Anglo-Saxon Protestant mother and father, so that the families can meet each other for the first time. The event is held at their home in a Chicago suburb, yet to the guests of honour it is obvious from the outset that this is not going to be quite the dinner party they had anticipated. Drawing up at the house they are greeted by a large, extended family gathered outside. Two whole lambs are roasting on spits over an open fire in the middle of the front lawn. In the background the house itself is an unremarkable two-storey building but it has been customised by the owners: an up-and-over garage door has been painted to resemble a Greek flag, and replica Classical statues of the Greek goddess Aphrodite watch over the assembled crowds. As the evening unfolds, the Greek Americans continue to confound their guests' expectations: a contribution brought to the evening meal has to be identified as a cake for the hostess.

Apuleius' Psyche already knew that dedicatory inscriptions were the quickest way to learn who the divine incumbent of a sanctuary was – most dedications addressed the main divinity worshipped in a sanctuary, so she quickly identified Juno as the incumbent of a sanctuary she stumbled upon. From their study of a growing number of ancient objects, Renaissance antiquarians were familiar with the combination of a divine image and a dedicatory inscription on its base, and the author of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, among other things a delightful document of early Renaissance antiquarianism, invented such epigraphical monuments of divinities that were relevant to his story. In the study of ancient gods, however, inscriptions rarely played a large role. Historians used epigraphical evidence mainly when describing local cults: well before Lewis Farnell (1856–1934) in his Cults of the Greek States printed the relevant epigraphical texts among his references, scholars such as Sam Wide (1861–1918) combined epigraphy with the literary and archaeological evidence. But not being epigraphers, these authors used inscriptions mostly in a rather cursory fashion, and since many of these monographs were written in the late nineteenth century, before the collection of the Inscriptiones Graecae were available, their usefulness is rather limited nowadays. No scholar, as far as I know, has looked at the Greek gods uniquely through the lens of a corpus of evidence characterized by its material conditions only, instead of its content or literary genre.