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

distinction, because the front of the house was traditionally accessible to uninvited visitors (e.g.
during the morning salutatio). The threshold of each space crossed on the way to the dining room
marked another barrier of social distinction surmounted by the visitor.
Perceptibility
Perceptibility is the ability of banqueters to perceive cooking from their place in a dining
room. Perceptibility is measured through the three long-range senses of sight, sound, and smell.
T. M. Ciolek, an experimental psychologist, has determined the theoretical limits of perception
for each of these senses: unobstructed sight has a range of 91.4 m., sound at the level of
conversation (60-70 decibels) has a maximum range of 30.2 m., and smell, even through doors
which are not completely sealed, has a limit of 9.1 m. 171 Perceiving the preparation of a meal
through sight, sound and smell, without actually eating it, creates anticipation for the meal and
begins physiological processes (such as salivation) needed to digest the food. Perceptions are
part of the sensory pleasure experienced during a meal.
A single house at Pompeii, the Casa del Fauno (VI.12.2+5), approaches the visual limit of
perceptibility; the distance from its front door at entrance #2 to the back of exedra (50) is ca. 90
meters. 172 I will therefore consider sight-lines for houses in my sample not in terms of their
distance, but in terms of their visibility. I will categorize the sight-line from a dining area to a
cooking area in one of three ways: 1) the cooking area is not visible at all, 2) only the entry to the
cooking area is visible (where cooks and servers could be seen going in and out), 3) some part of
the interior of the cooking area is visible.
In determining the limit of sound, I categorize dining rooms simply according to whether
they are within the theoretical sound range (30.2 m.) of cooking. 173 Kitchens beyond this range
may indicate an owner's desire to prevent the sound of cooks and cooking from reaching the
banqueters' ears. In Plautus' Casina, the master is heard hurrying up the cooks in the kitchen.
171 Ciolek 1980, in a study of proxemics (the limits of one person being attentive to the presence, movement
and activity of another), found that "the total amount of space within which one individual is aware of
another's presence is rarely greater than 182 meters in diameter." (Sanders 1990, 59, who uses this data in an
archaeological context). This range breaks down harmonically into smaller concentric circles based on the
radial range of the human senses, each one roughly one-ninth the area of the previous: vision (91.4 m.),
hearing (30.2 m.), smell (9.1 m.), reach-with-a-tool (2.7 m.), and personal contact (0.9 m.). The range of smell
has been verified in a 'blind test' conducted by the author in which an uninformed subject was able to smell
a covered pot of chicken soup cooking 9 meters away through a closed apartment door.
172 The Casa del Fauno covers an entire insula; see the 1:1000 plan of Pompeii in CTP III.
173 Fine distinctions in the range of sound depend on how loud the preparation of food was and the
particular acoustics of each building.
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