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

aw foodstuffs into the kitchen, through the main door or subsidiary entrances. For those living
inside the house, accessibility is the marginalization of the slaves and their service quarters:
"One dominant imperative in a slave-owning society was to contrast adequately
the servile and 'seigniorial' areas of the house...It is only in the richest houses that
the slave/master distinction could and needed to be fully expressed. An
important architectural feature of the houses is the way in which service areas
are marginalised, thrust out to the edge of the imposing and often studiedly
symmetrical 'master's' quarters..." 165
Slave quarters are commonly described as 'marginal' in large houses. Yet slaves were
everywhere; they were involved in all aspects of internal household life. Wallace-Hadrill
explains: "The aim of such marginalization...was to render the low-status areas 'invisible' to the
visitor". 166 Servile areas are best defined not as 'where the slaves are', but as 'where the outside
guests cannot be'. Limits of access were set upon the visitor, and not upon the household
members. 167 The contrast was highlighted on occasions that involved visitors, such as a formal
evening dinner, when the dining room was the 'seigniorial' area, and the kitchen the 'servile' area.
Dining and cooking areas can be identified in houses of nearly all socio-economic means at
Pompeii, but it is more difficult to understand their social implications in poorer houses, where
the number or even presence of slaves is in doubt. 168
From the point of view of a visitor to the house, accessibility is permeability: how deep
one progresses into the house until one encounters a dining rooms or kitchen. Visitor
accessibility is the degree of penetration into parts of the house open to outsiders upon invitation
only. 169 Accessibility is linked to the social status of an invitee:
"...the Roman could carefully grade the degree of intimacy to which he admitted
his amici -- whether he received them promiscuously in the atrium, or
entertained them in a large group in his grandest room, in a small group in his
triclinium, or in ones and twos in his cubiculum." 170
Dinner-guests in houses with dining rooms far away from the entrance vestibule or the front
atrium experienced the social distinction afforded them by their penetration. Dinner guests to
houses with dining rooms easily gained from the front of the house could not claim such
165 Wallace-Hadrill 1988, 78-79.
166 Wallace-Hadrill, 1988, 81 (my emphasis).
167 Nevett 1993 has identified a similar pattern in Greek houses of the Classical and Hellenistic periods,
where outside male guests come to dinner are restricted from meeting women of the family elsewhere in the
house.
168 Wallace-Hadrill 1994, 44: "What is more elusive is the articulation of servile and free in more modest
houses...There is still much more to be learnt on this front." See the results of the archaeological analysis
throughout chapter three.
169 Vitr. 6.5.1-2; Wallace-Hadrill 1988, 55-56, 81-96.
170 Wallace-Hadrill 1988, 94.
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