the case of the 'urban villas'

Jason Linn
Ph.D. candidate, History
University of California at Santa Barbara
Snuggling with your identity: Beds in Roman culture
What attitudes did Romans have about beds? They had beds for different life circumstances:
the birth bed, the marriage bed, the sick bed, the death bed. In this paper, however, I focus on
its most frequent and private function—the sleeping bed. Using literary sources from the first
century BC to late antiquity, I argue that Romans believed beds indicated who you were—
your civilization, your social status, and even your character.
Beds distinguished the civilized from uncivilized. Romans considered peoples who
slept without beds to be uncivilized. The Huns slept on horses; the Cynegi in trees; Iberian
mountaineers on the floor. Beds separated humans from animals. In fact, Romans disdained
anything linked with animals, such as using skins as covers or hay as mattress stuffing. Thus,
Romans believed in a correlation: the more unnatural the bed, the greater degree of
civilization achieved.
Beds could also be luxury items, reinforcing elite identity by separating them from
commoners. A change in bed could connote a demotion or promotion in status, such as
Nero’s squalid sleeping arrangements after he became a fugitive. Contrary to locally-made
commoner beds, elite beds were foreign-made. Tyrian purple sheets, Leuconian mattresses,
and many small pillows marked an elite bed.
Beds also revealed an individual’s and a society’s character. Although beds were
often shared, the one place that connoted private space—underneath the pillow—disclosed a
person’s character. Plutarch envisaged Spartans designing their austere beds to create battle-
hardened men. Romans debated how beds affect the body. Some writers chided soldiers for
sleeping in soft beds, believing that comfortable sleep effeminizes. Medical writers posited
that hard beds caused disease, while moralists asserted that beds did not affect one’s
constitution. In short, I contend that Roman beds were divisive objects.