Housing the Dead: the tomb as house in Roman Italy - Divinity School

suggested, tombs seem to tell us more about the role of the freemen and servile household in the
family than about the nuclear family (Hope 1997).
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To begin to assess the significance of the tomb/house link, we need also to understand its limits.
Scholars can be curiously uncritical about this. In particular, the brick-built ‘house-tombs’ that
characterise the Vatican necropolis (Fig.2) and the Isola Sacra, have led to enthusiastic
appropriation of the analogy. Saller (1994, 97) well quotes Toynbee and Ward-Perkins’ evocative
commentary on the Vatican St Peter’s necropolis (1956, 113f.):
‘the Vatican house-tombs, and their counterparts elsewhere, so simple without, so richly
decked and colourful within, were surely regarded as places in which the dead, in some
sense or at some times, resided. Hidden away behind stout doors and seen only by members
of the owners’ families on anniversaries and feast-days, when sacrifices, ceremonial meals,
and ritual washings took place, all this luxuriant internal ornament and art must have been
designed as much to delight the dead as to gratify and instruct the survivors.’
Here the ancient trope of the grave as the eternal house of the dead is put to work to explain an
apparent paradox, the disproportionate investment in the artistic decoration of the invisible inside of
the tomb (‘behind stout doors’), rather than the visible outside. And yet the explanation contains its
own visible contradiction. The authors are well aware that the family of the dead regularly penetrate
behind those stout doors for festival celebrations, and yet it is assumed that the decoration is for the
benefit of the dead not the living. Or at least the survivors are building ‘as much to delight the dead
as to gratify’ themselves. But the most spectacularly decorated of these house-tombs, that of
Valerius Herma, as the inscriptions tell us, was built by Valerius in his lifetime. Are the survivors
building for the dead Herma, or is the living Herma building for the living, and to ensure a
continued presence of the survivors at his own tomb?
The tomb/house analogy is partial. As Regina Gee, who is working on this tomb, points out to me,
even the house-like appearance of the façade is misleading. We are so used to suburban houses with
pitched roofs, that we instantly recognise a house in the formula of a rectangular front with door and
windows and a pitched roof. But did not Roman domus roofs pitch inwards to the impluvium?
Then, what sort of a house opens inwards to a single chamber? Sometimes there is provision for the
sloping couches of a triclinium, either inside the tomb as in the very interesting examples of the
tombs outside the gates of Ostia studied by Boschung (1987) (Fig.3), or immediately outside as in
the tomb, as in the case of the tomb of Verria Zosime at the Isola Sacra. But while the triclinium is
an evident derivative of, and allusion to, domestic arrangements, there is no attempt to evoke the