The excavation of the insula (block) along the main street of Pompeii has uncovered the remains of a house that it small in size but as opulent in decoration as much larger, luxurious villas on the block like its immediate neighbor, the House of the Painters at Work, and the House of the Chaste Lovers. One of the vivid frescoes depicts the myth of Hippolytus and Phaedra, so archaeologists have dubbed it the House of Phaedra.
In the 1st century A.D., the design of the Roman villa had been unchanged for six hundred years or so. The model domus was centered around the atrium. It had a pool (impluvium) in the middle and small rooms (alae and cubicula) on the sides. The triclinium (banquet hall) was used as the receiving room where clients during the day, and the tabulina (a room across the atrium from the entrance that opened onto a back peristyle garden) is where the portraits of the family’s ancestors and booty won in wars by the masters of the house were displayed. By the 2nd century, the atrium would be replaced by a central peristyle courtyard that public and private rooms opened onto.
The first signs of this architectural transformation can be seen in some of the homes trapped in time by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Of the 1076 habitations excavated at Pompeii, 20% of them had an atrium. The vast majority of the rest were storefronts with living quarters behind or apartments above. A small but significant number of homes have the ornate, high-quality decorations of the grand villas, but forgo the traditional atrium. It’s not because the homes lacked the square footage to accommodate an atrium. There are homes of the same dimensions that squeezed atria in, albeit restricted in size. The House of Phaedra is one those ultra-modern, atriumless houses.
The two rooms currently being investigated are located in the rear part of the house. In the first, in addition to the mythological painting with Hippolytus and Phaedra , the splendidly decorated walls in the 4th style show other scenes taken from the repertoire of classical myths: a representation of a symplegma (embrace) between a satyr and a nymph , a painting with a divine couple, perhaps Venus and Adonis, as well as a scene, unfortunately damaged by the Bourbon explorations, in which one can probably recognize a Judgement of Paris.
A window, next to the small painting with Hippolytus and Phaedra , opens onto a small courtyard, where building work was in progress at the time of the eruption, characterised at the entrance by the presence of a small lararium (domestic altar) with a rich painted decoration with plant and animal motifs on a white background .
The courtyard has a covered area preceding a large pool with red painted walls. A small channel ran around it, allowing rainwater to be conveyed to the mouth of a well connected to a cistern below.
In the decoration of the lararium, a bird of prey in flight stands out in the upper part, probably an eagle, holding a palm branch in its talons, and in the lower part the main scene composed of two facing snakes, framing an altar with a circular and grooved shaft on which the offerings are placed. From the left, we can recognize: the pine cone, a raised element supporting an egg, what appear to be a fig and a date. Filling the background of the scene are two shrubs with lanceolate leaves and yellow and red berries on which three sparrows are moving.
The actual lararium altar mirrors the offerings depicted in the fresco. Archaeologists found the last offering still in the niche when Vesuvius buried the city. An incense burner and lamp bear traces of burning, and behind them were the remains of twigs from aromatic plants and a dried fig. Strips of colored marble and a small relief of a Dionysian figure, likely Silenus, were also found on the altar’s surface. A molded marble base and an iron knife were on the front part of the altar.
The excavation of the House of Phaedra is ongoing, but it provides archaeologists with the opportunity to study the transition the villas with atria to homes with luxurious appointments but a much smaller footprint and an architecture that broke from six hundreds years of the past.
The atrium was an architectural expression of Roman societal hierarchy. It’s where clients of powerful men came to petition their patrons and fulfill their obligations to them in the morning salutatio. The nobility of the family, their ancestry, war trophies, currently wealth, their position in the social 
and political structure was telegraphed throughout the atrium. The change in the architecture reflected a transformation in Roman society of the imperial age. The ancient traditions that made the atrium a direct representation of the owner’s dignitas (history/reputation/standing) no longer held in a newly upwardly-mobile era where freedmen and merchants who had no ancestor portraits or great-great-grandpa’s Punic War booty to display could rise to the top rungs of the socio-political ladder. They had other, more individualized ways of displaying rank, like wearing trendy clothing and jewelry, which were also portable in an era of increasingly widespread travel in an expanding empire.
* This article was originally published here
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