The Republican Houses of the Roman Colonies in Ancient Magna Graecia. Cultural Exchange from a Western Perspective

Abstract

This article presents an analysis that is being carried out within the framework of the ‘Tetrastylon project’ (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellowship). This project is designed to create the scientific basis for the identification and definition of a new type of Roman domus. This typological item is the result of the hybridisation of a house scheme drawn from the Greek and Roman conceptions of housing. In the recent decades, some studies have found a particular type of Roman house in different parts of the Empire. The structural scheme of this domus joins, in the first place, the developmental concept of the Greek dwelling with the use of the Roman atrium as the central distribution area of the house. As a result of this cultural symbiosis, it is possible to observe Roman distribution areas within housing built following Greek structural conceptions and the combination of very different architectural influences between both cultures. The house, tentatively termed ‘the tetrastyle courtyard house’, has been observed in different Roman cities with a Greek past, but in different geographical contexts and chronologies. This type of house, with its variants, has not been sufficiently analysed in the Roman domestic architecture studies. This article will present different examples of this type of house within the territorial context of ancient Magna Graecia under the influence of the Roman dominion. This approach will show the same exchanges between the Greeks and the Romans in the East, but from the western perspective and at an earlier chronological stage.