#Roman Insula

[5-turtleducks-in-a-trenchcoat]

Everytime I listen to the Ancient Rome Sidequest it destroys me emotionally. But who knows, maybe somewhere there's a world where nothing terrible happens and it's just Sasha and Grizzop having fun adventures in ancient Rome.

[greekmythcomix]

IO SATURNALIA!

Here’s reallly a kind of last post before Christmas: an illustration I made a few years ago for CambridgeAmarantus.com - the FREE Cambridge Latin Course prequel made by CSCP (Caecilius est in horto), teaching ancient history and material culture through telling the story of Amarantus, freedman proprietor of the bar in Insula 1.9, in a research-based story by Caroline Lawrence (The Roman Mysteries).

Here’s the end of the familia Saturnalia feast, Amarantus in his pileus cap playing panpipes and Coquus enjoying a bit of a rest. I loved putting all the little character details in, like puppy Potiscus getting a bone almost as big as himself, and the fabulous fresco background of the real-life triclinium!

I hope you all get a nice break and some lovely times over the holiday week. IO SATURNALIA! And thanks for liking my stuff x

And look out for *something else* coming on Boxing Day…

[historywaitsfornoone]

Did Roman apartment houses have a "Super" on site, or a doorman? Was parking included for your horse and wagon? What happened if your insula went condo? In this video you'll learn about Roman apartment houses, or insulae; who lived in an insula, and on what floors; the floor plan of a typical insula; and what a typical insula would have looked like.

[jg-sims-build]

A city of brick, a city of marble.

I finally built the shell of the Mamertine Prison. I moved and embellished two of the insulae and moved them to the foot of the Capitoline hill.  Also, I built a smaller version of the Porticus Deorum Consentium.

This basically begins the first of the actual street scenes leading into the city center and creates a very big contrast between the Augustan Forum in its splendor and the blighted lives of the Empire’s working classes. My next task is to sculpt and landscape the Capitoline hill then work my way outward to the other geographic features.

Cross-posted from my art blog.

[ancientromebuildings]

Via della Fontana, Ostia Antica

July 2015

[ it was pretty hot, as you can see :) ]

[laivinduroriginal]

Viața Cotidiană în Imperiul Roman: Pax Romana

Imperiul Roman timpuriu (27 î.Hr.–284 d.Hr.) a marcat o epocă de pace relativă, prosperitate economică și înflorire culturală, cunoscută adesea sub numele de Pax Romana. Pentru cetățeanul roman obișnuit, viața de zi cu zi era profund influențată de clasa socială, ocupație și locație, fie că trăia în orașele aglomerate, fie în mediul rural. Cu toate acestea, teme comune precum centralitatea…

[fidogo]

thinking about Ghost as a recently freed gladiator

(18+ for some explicit content at the end, also this is just some thoughts so may develop into something with more substance l8r lol)

Gladiator Ghost earns his freedom and sticks around Rome since he sure as shit doesn't want to go home, and wants to help train Soap and Gaz so they survive the Colosseum (like Price did with him).

But he's having trouble adjusting to freedom. Hell, he wears a toned-down version of his helmet in public. It keeps people at arm's length, but the stares follow him everywhere he goes. Better his stupid mask than his scarred face...

But now, he's stuck at a stall staring at two different types of olive oils that the vendor swears are popular choices (The oil that was given to the gladiators to clean themselves was some cheap, generic, crap, and he sure as shit doesn't know what they bought).

Suddenly, you crop up next to him, telling him not to buy that, and you whisk him to an upscale taberna and buy him a fancy little amphorae of olive oil as a celebratory gift for winning his freedom. "If you're hoping for anonymity, my dear Ghost, your fortune may improve if you leave your helm in the arena."

He barely had time to process before you disappeared into the crowd, leaving him with nothing but an I'll see you around the Colosseum.

But Ghost can't stop thinking of you.

Most Romans cowered before him. He's a massive brute who they've watched sow carnage and violence for years, he can hardly blame them. Watching a beast in a cage is amusing. Sharing a bathhouse with that same beast is something else.

You had been so soft and pretty, draped in expensive silk. You had been a brave little thing, walking right up to a known killer, but he had followed you like a dog.

He wants to sink his teeth into you.

He lets the oil you bought him run down his abs and drip onto his cock, stroking himself harshly. The oil feels luxurious on his skin, and a pleasant aroma wafts towards him. This was a quality product, must be why you liked it...

He's rough with himself, rougher than you would be. And his hands are calloused and tough. He imagines your head leaned against his thigh, one soft hand stroking his cock and the other fondling his balls.

He cums embarrassingly hard, letting his groans reverberate around his tiny apartment. The insulae was loud enough, his neighbors wouldn't care.

He dozes on his shitty bed, rubbing the mixture of oil and cum into his skin. It's gross, but he's been covered in worse. And he feels his cock twitch when his thoughts stray towards you again.

He'll nap, jack off again, and just clean up after.

Ghost hopes you meant it, that he'd see you at the Colosseum.

He's got every intention of fucking you if you'll let him. He'll gladly be your hound. He drifts off to thoughts of you riding him, your hand around his throat.

[ancientcharm]

Roman House of Celio. Underground archaeological site. Case Romane del Celio. Photos : © Archaeology Travel

The buildings that make up the Case Romane del Celio are located on top of Caelian Hill, one of the famous seven hills of Rome, long known as the home for some of Rome’s wealthiest elites. The earliest structures that make up the Case Romane del Celio date from the second century AD when the buildings at this site were part of an early roman domus or residential building for Rome’s upper class. At the beginning of the third century AD, the site was transformed into an insula or middle-class apartment block. Artisan shops took up the bottom floors with apartments above them, going along a small alley which still cuts through the site today.

Text © Archaeology Travel. Travel Guides Crafted by Experienced Archaeologists & Historians (archaeology-travel.com)

Photo: © Your History Guide

[literaryvein-reblogs]

More Roman Art Vocabulary

for your next poem/story

Denarius: the most common Roman silver coin.

Domus: a single-family house.

Encaustic: a painting technique in which heated wax was mixed with pigment. Used for the painting of mummy portraits in Roman Egypt.

Engaged column: a column set into the wall of a building so that only half projects.

Fasces: bundles of elm or birch rods bound together with an ax, used as a symbol of the magisterial power to punish.

Forum: the center of political and administrative activities in a Roman town. It was a large open space containing government buildings, markets, and temples.

Freedman: an emancipated slave with most rights of a citizen. Slaves could sometimes buy their way to the status of freedman, or they might be freed by their owner in his will. Children of freedmen were full citizens.

Fresco: a wall-painting technique in which the pigment is applied to newly plastered walls; the paint bonds with the plaster as both dry, creating a very durable surface.

Hypocaust system: a device used in Roman baths. The floor of a room to be heated was raised on small brick stilts, and then hot air from a central furnace was pumped under the floors to heat them. The heat would also rise up through the walls to heat the entire room.

Iconography: the meaning or symbolism of a work of art.

Imperator: general or commander, the root of the word “emperor.”

Insula: a Roman apartment house, usually with five or six stories. Several apartments on each floor surrounded a central courtyard. Often there were shops on the ground floor. The structures were usually built with brick-faced concrete.

Lararium: a shrine to the Roman household gods called lares. Every private home had one.

Lares: the Roman household gods.

Lenos: a sarcophagus shaped like a bathtub, with rounded corners.

Mosaic: patterns or pictures made by embedding small pebbles or pieces of stone or glass (tesserae) on floors or walls.

Necropolis: a “city of the dead”—a cemetery, always located outside the city walls.

Orchestra: the flat space in front of the stage building in a theater where the actors perform.

Papyrus: a plant that grows in the Nile River. Its fibers can be processed to make a form of writing paper that was used in Roman

Paterfamilias: the male head of a Roman family.

Source ⚜ More: Word Lists

[transgenderer]

The insulae could be built up to nine storeys, before  Augustus  introduced a height limit of about 70 Roman feet (20.7 m). Later, this was reduced further, to about 60 Roman feet (17.75 m).[10][11] The notably large Insula Felicles or Felicula was located near the Circus Flaminius in Regio IX; the early Christian writer  Tertullian condemns the hubris of multiple-story buildings by comparing the Felicles to the towering homes of the gods.[12] It is posited that a typical insula would accommodate over 40 people in only 3,600 sq ft (330 m2); however, an entire structure could comprise about six to seven apartments, each covering about 1,000 sq ft (93 m2) in floor area.[citation needed] The only surviving insula in Rome is the five storey Insula dell'Ara Coeli  dating from the 2nd century AD, which is found at the foot of the Capitoline Hill.[13][14]

[memecucker]

The name Islas Canarias is likely derived from the Latin name Canariae Insulae, meaning "Islands of the Dogs", perhaps because monk seals or sea dogs were abundant, a name that was evidently generalized from the ancient name of one of these islands, Canaria – presumably Gran Canaria. According to the historian Pliny the Elder, the island Canaria contained "vast multitudes of dogs of very large size".[25] The connection to dogs is retained in their depiction on the islands' coat-of-arms.

Other theories speculate that the name comes from the Nukkari Berber tribe living in the Moroccan Atlas, named in Roman sources as Canarii, though Pliny again mentions the relation of this term with dogs.[26]

The name of the islands is not derived from the canary bird; rather, the birds are named after the islands.

[script-a-world]

Submitted via Google Form:

Since a lot of the desert is not very habitable, my world has a lot of underground buildings in the desert very high tech so that the natural land isn't very important. What do I need to consider for this?

Tex: Do you have a particular desert in mind with this question? There’s a fair amount of deserts that are inhabited already by flora and fauna, if not to a hundred percent coverage, such as the Great Basin desert, Kalahari Desert, and the deserts of Australia.

Deserts that have less flora and fauna, and are of the more popular imagination, such as the Sahara, Gobi Desert, and Syrian Desert, will have pockets of inhabitation around places like wadis, where there’s enough underground pooled water for migrational animals - including humans - to travel to and from. It’s not unusual to see water, and thus inhabitation, around mountainous regions in the desert, or by the borders of a desert where climate zones shift based upon geological features.

Humans have been living in and around the desert for a very, very long time (Wikipedia). Because of this, they’ve developed methods of surviving, and while it might not necessarily be an analogue to denser human populations like New York City that’s teeming with life and a focus of travel, a life is made.

Aridity isn’t necessarily the domain of traditional deserts, either - mountains are a good example of this, as are certain popular examples of civilizations in these areas. Petra is a popular example, home to the Nabataeans and geographically within modern-day Jordan. A notable mountain peak, Tian Shan, in Central Asia, was one of many places the Yuezhi people lived, who were nomadic and lived not only in the surrounding area but also across places like the Tarim Basin and the Tibetan Plateau. There’s a lot of examples of similar situations in other parts of the globe, so this is not an isolated event in human history.

Now, what is your definition of high tech? Skyscrapers? Internet? Something else? Lighting is something humans have had for a while, in the form of candles, hearths, and lamps, and we’ve more or less had an electrical grid in some places since the late 1880s (Wikipedia).

Plumbing has existed for thousands of years in some form for both fresh and wastewater (Wikipedia 1, Wikipedia 2), as has architectural features such as bridges (Wikipedia) and other types of architectural works (Wikipedia). Multi-story buildings have also existed for a while, notable in Roman insulae and Egyptian city of Fustat.

Telecommunications has existed in some form for about as long as human civilization has existed (Wikipedia), but electronic telecommunications began at about 1830-1840 (Wikipedia). I don’t know if you consider this sufficiently old or sufficiently modern, but the information is there for your perusal. Accordingly, the predecessor to the modern internet, ARPANET, was a multi-country project that began in the 1960s and established by the US Department of Defense - and computing hardware has a before and after historical split in technological advances at about the same time (Wikipedia).

What are your goals with this setting and this technology? What are the reasons that your society is living in such an area with such a climate, and what are they using the technology for? Are the communicating with people outside of this area? Is the technology completely isolated, for archival purposes, or is it interacted with on a regular or frequent basis? How much of this is aesthetic, and how much of it is part of a plot or culture?

Utuabzu: Historically, there have been several cultures in arid environments that favoured partly or wholly underground structures, from the Ancestoral Puebloans of the American South West, who sometimes built into the sides of canyons to the Derinkuyu Underground City in south-eastern Türkiye, to the modern town of Cooper Pedy in South Australia. These sites vary significantly in form and in motivation, with the Ancestoral Puebloan canyonside structures built primarily for defense, Derinkuyu built partly for defense and partly just because the local stone was really easy to carve through and vast underground spaces made for convenient storage, and Cooper Pedy is underground to mitigate the worst of the desert heat, mostly utilising exhausted opal mines.

Any or all of these reasons could apply, and would impact your setting’s architecture and urban forms, but the biggest impact is always going to come from the reason people started living there in the first place. The Ancestoral Puebloans farmed the fertile river valleys, Derinkuyu lies in Cappadokia, a region that once gave rise to the Hittite Empire and has plenty of decent farmland and pasture, while Cooper Pedy is a major centre for opal mining. 

I’d suggest considering why this culture lives in the desert in the first place, and then researching what similar locations in the real world look like. Also, decide what sort of desert you’re working with. As Tex said, there’s a lot of different kinds of desert, and they have historically produced very different cultures and architectural traditions. What makes sense in the hot sandy deserts of the Arabian Peninsula or Northern Africa does not necessarily make sense in even the relatively nearby Iranian Plateau or Thar Desert, let alone the cold deserts of Central Asia or the high altitude Atacama or Tibetan Plateau.

[greekmythcomix]

Between 2018-2021 I worked with archaeologist Dr Sophie Hay, Ancient Historian Prof. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Director of the Cambridge Schools Classics Project (who make the CLC Latin course!) Caroline Bristow and her gorgeous team, and legendary historical children’s fiction author Caroline Lawrence, to illustrate a novel and ancient history course about the life of Pompeiian freedman Amarantus and his neighbours in Insula 1.9

The story is a year in the life of Amarantus, following the events he experiences, including the devastating earthquake of 63BCE and his manumission (by a certain local natural-history-loving magistrate), the traditions of a Roman life, and the likely inhabitants of the rest of his block, based on the buildings and finds in Insula 1.9.

It acts as an Ancient History/Classical Civilisation (non-language) prequel to the Latin Caecilius stories (CLC Book 1) and there are some Caecilius-themed visual easter eggs 😁

The course has been designed for even non-specialists to be able to pick up and teach, entirely for free, to help bring Ancient History/Classics into schools.

We made the images in grayscale so they could be cheaply printed and reproduced in PoD books/PDFs for schools, but made some images in full colour for the website and book cover to show the diversity of the Pompeiian world. They’re all based on archaeological evidence and research and each one took hours of discussion and argument (and occasional paper models) to get right. (And I’m proud to say my rebuilding of some ruined structures like the Herculaneum Gate has been approved by other Pompeii experts, like the Cooleys 😁)

The entire book and course is massively researched and based on archaeological findings, and is FREE on the CSCP website: https://CambridgeAmarantus.com/home

Or you can buy the book PoD via these links: https://www.cambridgescp.com/array/buy-book

Bonus Roman Chickens (the precursors to my Roman History Chickens series!): the cockfighters Odysseus and Polyphemus! (And yes cockfighting is terrible and I’m glad we don’t have it any more)

[whencyclopedia]

As elsewhere, whether on a farm or in the city, daily life still centered on the home, and when people arrived in the city, their first concern was to find a place to live. Space was at a premium in a walled metropolis like Rome, and from the beginning little attention was paid to the housing needs of the people who migrated to the city - tenements provided the best answer. The majority of Roman citizens, not all of them poor, lived in these apartment buildings or insulae. As early as 150 BCE, there were over 46,000 insulae throughout the city. LEARN MORE --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47RPlvgi2VQ

[blueiscoool]

Archaeologists Uncover Two New Pompeii Victims Killed by Earthquake

Archaeologists working at Pompeii have found two new victims that they say were killed by an earthquake that accompanied the volcanic eruption of 79 AD.

The Italian city may be most closely associated with the destruction wrought by the eruption of Vesuvius, but these two men were in fact killed by walls knocked down by a simultaneous earthquake, according to the official Pompeii archaeological site.

“Part of the south wall of the room collapsed, crushing one of the men whose raised arm offers a tragic image of his vain attempt to protect himself from the falling masonry,” reads a press release on Tuesday.

“The conditions of the west wall demonstrate the tremendous force of the earthquakes that took place at the same time as the eruption: the entire upper section was detached and fell into the room, crushing and burying the other individual,” it continues.

The pair, who were at least 55 years old, were found during excavations of the Insula of the House of the Chaste Lovers during work to improve the safety of the building.

They were found lying in a utility room where they had sought refuge, and were killed by multiple traumas as parts of the building collapse.

Archaeologists found organic matter, which they believe to be a bundle of fabric, as well as glass paste, which is thought to be the beads of a necklace and six coins. The team also found an amphora leaning against a wall and a number of vessels, bowls and jugs.

In an adjoining room, archaeologists found a stone kitchen counter covered in powdered lime, which they say suggests that building work was being undertaken nearby at the time of the eruption.

The discovery “shows how much there is still to discover about the terrible eruption of AD 79 and confirms the necessity of continuing scientific investigation and excavations,” said Italy’s Minister of Culture Gennaro Sangiuliano in the release.

“Pompeii is an immense archaeological laboratory that has regained vigour in recent years, astonishing the world with the continuous discoveries brought to light and demonstrating Italian excellence in this sector,” he added.

Details of the excavation were published in the E-Journal of Pompeii.

The Roman city of Pompeii was buried under meters of pumice and ash in the calamitous eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.

Archaeologists have uncovered only around two thirds of the 66-hectare (163 acres) site since excavations began 250 years ago.

By Jack Guy.

[vecchiorovere]

Insieme agli scavi di San Clemente, le Case romane del Celio rappresentano uno dei luoghi più affascinanti della Roma sotterranea per la presenza di decorazioni originali e per le vicende che nei secoli hanno inciso profondi cambiamenti alla struttura

La straordinarietà dello stato di conservazione degli ambienti affrescati e l’altissimo valore artistico e di interesse religioso fanno delle Case romane del Celio una tappa fondamentale nella conoscenza della Roma antica.

Note anche come la "casa dei martiri Giovanni e Paolo", racchiudono oltre quattro secoli di storia e testimoniano il passaggio e la convivenza tra paganesimo e cristianesimo.

I vasti ambienti interni, in origine botteghe e magazzini di un edifico popolare a più piani (insula), furono infatti trasformati nel corso del III sec. d.C. in un’elegante domus. Qui è possibile ammirare alcuni tra gli affreschi più belli di età tardo-antica.