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Pompeii's Peristyle Gardens

© Kirk Johnson

A peristyle is a colonnade around a peripteral building or around a court. In his book De architectura (also known as The Ten Books on Architecture), the architect and engineer Vitruvius (first century BCE) described Greek houses as having rooms surrounding two peristyles, one for men and one for women. There is very little archeological evidence to support this. Houses in Classical Greece were very modest. It was only during the Hellenistic period that private displays of wealth became socially acceptable. Throughout Classical Greece, most homes had a courtyard with a covered walk on at least one side but it was rare for a home to have two courtyards, let alone two courtyards surrounded by peristyles. Most modern scholars think that Vitruvius was writing about luxury homes in the Hellenistic world, after the conquests of Alexander the Great.

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By the time that Vitruvius wrote his book, it was normal for Roman houses to have peristyle gardens, so Virtruvius doesn't try to explain what they are, he just focused on correct proportions for columns of the Doric order. It may come as a surprise that this attitude towards domestic architecture was only a few centuries old. It was only during the Hellenistic period that stone columns began to be used in private homes. During the Classical period, Doric columns were only used in temples and other public buildings.

Archeological evidence says that Hellenistic courtyards were paved like earlier Greek courtyards, no matter how grand the peristyles surrounding them. These courtyards may have been decorated with potted plants, but the peristyle garden seems to have been uniquely Italian.

We think of peristyle gardens as Roman, but they seem to have developed in southern Italy; before that area was conquered by Rome. We know that by the time of Vitruvius, courtyard gardens were a normal part of Roman houses, but during the first century BCE, most Roman Aristocrats lived in their old family homes along the via Sacra, beside the forum. These old houses all had the traditional arrangement of rooms opening onto an atrium, but many of them wouldn't have featured peristyle gardens. Most other Romans were living under rather congested conditions during this period, so we shouldn't assume that the city of Rome looked like Pompeii.

Pompeii was only conquered by Rome in about 80 BCE, before that, it had been a Samnite city since the 5th Century. Pompeii had probably never been a Greek colony, but it was strongly influenced by the Greek colonies of southern Italy. When Pompeii was destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, it was probably still more a part of Hellenistic civilization than the city of Rome was.

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