Insulae

This fine apartment building shows the second floor balconies where the Ostians loved to linger on sultry summer evenings. The arched doorways on the ground floor led to shops and a wonderfully preserved snack bar.

Perhaps another age will imagine that most Romans lived in vast marble palaces, moving through spacious halls amid stately pillars and spraying fountains. Nothing like this is the case for the vast majority. A census report declares "there are some 44,000 tenement blocks (insulae) in the city and only about 1750 separate mansions (domus). These numbers are from the fourth century. Such figures can imply that an overwhelming proportion of the "toga-wearing race, the Lords of the world" (to quote Virgil) are apartment dwellers.

Considering the extreme congestion of population, no other solution than this is possible if Rome is to remain Rome. There is a great profit in building these huge, ungainly islands of insulae. Nearly every Senator has his men of business caring for his housing investments and rentals, and the "realtor" is a very familiar personage.

It is complained also that many insulae are put up in a cheap and absolutely dangerous manner. The very name imples that they should be built with a free space all around them. The old law of Twelve Tables (450 BC) required a passage way (ambitus) of at least two and one half feet on either side, but this law was recklessly disregarded until the great fire of Nero enabled the government to enforce a better building code. However, even then, the insulae are often hemmed in on all sides by miserable back alleys hardly accessible.

"The immense size of Rome," wrote Vitruvius, about 1 AD, "makes it needful to have a vast number of habitations, and as the area is not sufficient to contain them all on the ground floor, the nature of the case compels us to raise them in the air."

The typical insulae

On the street, there are usually several shops and several separate entrances where the doorways give access to the extra select apartments above. But most tenants have to go through the central portal. Upon entering they will find themselves in a courtyard upon which open many windows of the tiers of rooms in the upper stories.


From the courtyard, several staircases rise to the tenements above. In the apartments on the first floor are the more comfortable suites, each with a series of rooms. The quality falls rapidly as the tenants scale higher. Juvenal writes, "If the (fire) alarm goes at ground level, the last to fry will be the attic tenant, way up among the nesting pigeons, with nothing but tiles between himself and the weather."

Daily Life in Ancient Rome, Jerome Carcopino, Yale University Press, 1968

A History of Private Life, Philippe Aries and Georges Duby, General Editors, Harvard University Press, 1992

Roman People, Second Edition, Robert B. Kebric, Mayfield Publishing Company, 1993

The Oxford History of the Classical World, John Boardman, Jasper Griffin, Oswyn Murray. Oxford University Press, 1986