ROMAN URBAN TOPOGRAPHY in Britain and the western Empire

a premium in these buildings.
A cut above this were the boarding-houses which
offered quarters to both permanent residents and transient
guests. Single bedrooms were provided for the
lodgers and a communal dining-room and sitting-room
were available for the guests, whose meals were prepared
by a resident catering staff engaged by the proprietor. Life
in such a boarding-house, or rather, a near-riot, is
recorded in the Satyricon. Petronius’s hero has been
caught by the manager doing, as he mistakenly interprets
an equally disreputable episode, a midnight flit. The
residents, loyal to their landlord, set upon the defaulter
(Satyricon, 95):
Meantime Eumolpus was being set upon on both
sides by cooks and tenants alike. One of them kept
jabbing at his eyes with a loaded kebab skewer,
another snatched a fork from the sideboard and
struck a gladiatorial pose. But above all a blearyeyed
old hag took the lead. Dressed in a filthy linen
house-coat and teetering on a pair of wooden clogs of
different heights, she held onto a huge hound which
she sicked on Eumolpus.
This led to the police being called, who, like the fire
brigade, contrived to cause more damage in establishing
the peace than the tenants had caused fighting among
themselves.
Cheek-by-jowl with establishments such as these were
the higher-class residences of the affluent or very rich.
Few, in the major cities of the Empire, resided in the
traditional Roman-style house, or domus, with its series of
rooms arranged around internal light-wells; life was more
often lived in apartments in high-rise developments. Some
of these, like the Insula Felicula which towered above the
Pantheon and the Column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome,
evoked astonishment and ridicule in their own time just
as, for instance, the Barbican scheme in the City of
London does today. Needless to say, the same disregard
for aesthetics, convenience, and amenity stimulated the
ancient property developer in his pursuit of profit as his
modern counterpart. Within such buildings each floor was
divided into suites of apartments offering a range of rooms
which could be allocated functions by the tenants. The
elegance that could be achieved can still be judged by some
of the surviving structures at Ostia, themselves not in the
highest class of aristocratic housing (Meiggs 1973).
But it is not the architectural details of urban housing,
or its interior decoration, which are my main concern;
rather it is the reconstruction of the form of tenure and the
quality of life. Some aspects of these can be glimpsed in
the ancient legal texts. These date from the heyday of
Roman jurisprudence, the early 3rd century, and are a
compilation of judgements by the most eminent lawyers of
the day. Although they date to the Severan period, they
represent a body of law which is the accumulated
experience of a society, and these cases reflect the
problems which arose over a long period of time between
owners, occupiers, and purchasers of property.
Generally speaking, when not operated by their own
agents, property was leased by owners to middlemen for
exploitation, thus distancing the aristocracy from the
odium of commerce. These middlemen sub-leased units
within the property to sub-tenants. This led to a complex
45
Casey: The Roman housing marker
legal situation, since in Roman law the concept of usufruct
was very firmly established. In essence this doctrine
established that a property owner had a strong right to
exploit the value of the property and that nothing, except
the equal and conflicting rights of other property owners,
should impede that right. Thus an owner could terminate
a lease and repossess his property at any time. A very
humble property transaction from Egypt makes this clear.
It is a lease dating to AD 496 which reads, in part:
I voluntarily undertake to lease.. .a room in good
condition on the ground floor, facing the south, with
all appurtenances and rights, and will pay a rent of
one tremissis annually . . .and whenever you wish I
will surrender to you the aforesaid room in the
condition which I received it for possession. (Pap
Oxyrhync, 1889)
In reality the owner could override the rights of his
principal lessee and evict the sub-tenants. This might
occur if the owner wished to redevelop his property to
maximize his profits. In the event of a resale without
redevelopment the sitting tenants had the right to continued
residence or to demand accommodation of an equal
standard elsewhere from the dispossessed principal lessee.
On the whole, though, it was in the interests of the owners
and lessees to treat the tenants with commercial caution,
since another Roman institution gave the tenant an
informal protection against his landlord. This was because
the terms of a Roman lease on property made no provision
for the rent to be paid in advance. Indeed the rent was
normally paid at the termination of the lease or at the end
of each year in the case of long leases. Property was let out
on annual terms in many cases, or from two to five years.
Leases terminated on the last day of June, and 1 July was,
therefore, a very important day in the Roman commercial
calendar. For a period before the end of the lease the
landlord could have access to the premises in order to
show prospective new lessees around. This led to some
arm-twisting on both sides, the landlord pressuring the
sitting tenant to renew at a higher rent and the tenant
trying to call the landlord’s bluff until the last moment.
Failure to clinch a deal is the theme of one of Martial’s
verses which describes the fate of a tenant who is reduced
to trailing around apartment blocks on 1 July pleading for
shelter from the porters and managers (xii.32.2W).
The fear that the tenants would not pay the rent was a
constant one, and Roman law allowed for the distraint of
goods so that the furniture could be seized by the landlord
and the tenant locked out. A fine point of law arose in the
case of a slave who was locked in with the furniture as part
of the household effects in law; he chose not to starve
slowly to death whilst his master raised the arrears of rent,
but hopped out of the window and fled. It is conceivable
that as the dread day of 1 July came closer, so the hot
nights of late June witnessed the clandestine removal of
furniture in towns across the Roman Empire. Martial
(xii.32.14) again provides the image to suit the situation:
Oh the kalends of July - I’ve seen you, Vaccera,
creeping off down the street with your few sticks of
furniture carried by your red-headed wife. . . the bits
the landlord didn’t grab in lieu of two years’ rent.