KITCHENS AND DINING ROOMS AT POMPEII ... - Get a Free Blog

This fourth century A.D. quote is the only specific evidence for cooking in the atrium, and its
reasoning is based upon a contested etymology. 69 Most modern scholars have nevertheless
assumed that the hearth of the archaic Roman house was commonly located in the atrium. 70 L.
Richardson, Jr. has expressed a different view: "the latrine, like the kitchen and stables, had no
place in the atrium complex" at Pompeii or elsewhere. 71
Allison has taken the presence of a hearth in the atrium of I.6.13 and a brazier in the
peristyle of I.10.11 to mean that both of these areas had been 'downgraded' in terms of their
presentation and consequently their importance (presumably because slaves were doing the
cooking). 72 She presumes that atria and peristyles intended for formal display were devoid of
utilitarian objects and installations. Berry has demonstrated, however, that these areas were in
fact the centers of domestic (as well as social) life, and that in some houses, cooking was an
integral part of that life. 73 The atria of some houses did contain hearths or kitchens, as the
archaeological data will affirm, but the atrium was by no means the only or most common
location for the hearth in either the Republican or Imperial periods.
In postico Varro, as quoted by Nonius, reports that the kitchen was located in the back
part of the house (in postica parte):
At either end would be the front and the back [parts of the house]. In the back
part was the kitchen (culina), so-called because people were fostering (colebant)
the fire there. Houses of the wealthy will have been crowded more than poor,
cramped properties, the authorities themselves explain. 74
The location of the kitchen is clear, but the meaning of the last, difficult sentence is not. It may
imply that the kitchen was placed in the back of the house because the front parts (of rich houses)
were particularly crowded with free and slave members of the household, or with clients and
69 Var. L. 5.161 (reported also by Serv. A. 1.726) argues that atrium takes its name from the Etruscan town of
Atria, whence the architectural model supposedly came: Atrium appellatum ab Atriatibus Tuscis: illinc enim
exemplum sumptum (Loeb text).
70 Marquardt I, 256-259; McKay 1975, 21; Salza Prina Ricotti 1978/80, 248. Carandini 1990 reconstructs a
hearth in one ala of a fragmentary 6th-3rd c. B.C. house on the slopes of the Palatine on the basis of an actual
hearth found in analagous position in an adjacent house. Scheffer 1981, 94-95 argues that hearths found in
the atria of Etruscan houses at Acquarossa and Veii cannot securely be identified as having been used for
cooking rather than heating, but these two functions are not mutually exclusive.
71 Richardson 1988a, 384.
72 Allison 1992b, 253-254, 259 (I.6.13); 227-228 (I.10.11).
73 Berry 1994, based on the concentrations of domestic utensils and goods found in the atria, courts, and
peristyles of insula I.9 (as documented in Berry 1993).
74 Var. Vita Populi Romani, frg. 28 (Non. p. 55M): qua fini sit antica et postica. In postica parte erat culina, dicta ab
eo quod ibi colebant ignem. Locupletiorum domus quam fuerint angustiis paupertinis coactae, ipsa nomina declarant
(Lindsay 1964 text, author's translation).
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