In Roman houses of the time, one often followed a particular path from the entry or fauces, the jaws of the house, which might be guarded by a dog or watchman in a more elaborate home. Once inside you came to the atrium or the central area, which was open to the sky letting in light, air, and water, which could be stored in a cistern below the sunken central portion of the floor. Beyond it was a room used for entertaining or transitioning into the garden beyond. This room was called the tablinum, t-a-b-l-i-n-u-m. There would also be at least one dining room or triclinium, t-r-i-c-l-i-n-i-u-m, with couches to recline on and have cut-up food, scissored food to select with your fingers. There were, cubicula, c-u-b-i-c-u-l-a, or bedrooms for the family, a culina, c-u-l-i-n-a, or kitchen, and a bathroom or a latrinum, l-a-t-r-i-n-u-m, area, which might have necessitated the use of chamber pots, which were quite popular in Rome. Formal latrines, with flowing water, were available publicly, usually in areas where there were public baths nearby. The houses were decorated with paintings, which had advanced from that first style of simply decorated walls to the more illusionistic so-called second style, where the wall opened up more considerably, into smaller or larger vistas, or sometimes even into a virtual stage. One such example is the so-called Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, where we see within a large Roman villa at the edge of Pompeii, a special room, which appears to have belonged to the lady or the domina of the house. It was a special meeting room, with wall containing paintings which suggest an initiations ceremony into the cult of Dionysus, by a would be bride of the God. The ceremony is intricately depicted, yet some things are hidden from us. A near naked child reads the holy word, the Heros Logos, while the female priestesses attend and bring cake offerings. Some things are hidden from our eyes, such as perhaps the sacred symbolic phallus of the popular fertility god, which gets unveiled. The purification ceremony continues around the walls of the room, and includes ritual whipping, as well as the emerging bride, now purified and ready to take her place with the followers of the god. In the center of the back wall of the room, an apparently inebriated Dionysus reclines in the lap of what may be Ariadne, the bride he once rescued when she had been abandoned by the greek hero Theseus on the cycladic island of Naxos. The scene is second style, dates somewhere around 40, 30 BCE. The wall has been broken up as a flat surface, and the action now takes place on a stage. The sparse style of the figural detailing suggests artistic influence from the Hellenistic Greek world, at the end of the second and into the first century BCE. Well, of course, Romans didn't always stay home. Although family life was very important to them, entertainment in the first century BCE often consisted of going to see performances in a theater Sometimes, classic comedies and tragedies of the Greek world, by Sophocles or Aeschylus, or Euripides. But the Romans also had their own playwrights and classics from writers such as Terence and Plautus, comedy writers. There were also mime comedies with low-life characters speaking what was off color dialogue, doing slapsticks, singing, dancing, engaging in satire or thorus, and not wearing masks as the Greek actors did. There were also pantomimes, which featured a chorus and dancers, who performed interpretations of religious or historical subjects, and these were often spectacles with elaborate set design as well. For a long time in Rome theaters were considered too Greek, too effeminate, too decadent. But over time, the Roman thirst for entertainment went out, and large theaters were built in the Greek fashion. In the Greek theater, the orchestra, where the chorus performed, was a full circle. And the stage building, or skene, S-K-E-N-E, was an area that was set back from it, with a small proskenion, P-R-O-S-K-E-N-I-O-N, or stage, in front of the backdrop. So, skene in the back, and in front of it, the proskenion. The theatron, or seating area, was a little wider than a circle. In the Roman theater, this arrangement was, well, tightened up. The size of the orchestra was cut down, not so much used for performances. The theatron was made into a semicircle, called the cavea, and integrated with the stage area. The stage, itself, was lowered and broadened out into what is now, or what was called then a Pulpitum, but which resembles our modern stage. Pulpitum is P-U-L-P-I-T-U-M, and it's a long, broad area. In Rome, the first major permanent stone theater was the theater of Pompeii. Let's take a really brief look at what that theater of Pompeii must have looked like.
