Unequal housing in Pompeii: using house size to measure inequality

ABSTRACT

House size is often used as a tool to calculate wealth in ancient societies, and thus it is also a potential source for the study of inequality. The site of Pompeii, on the Bay of Naples in southern Italy, was first inhabited about 800 years before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius buried it 79 CE. The city provides one of the largest data sets of private architecture in the Roman world, and it has been utilized to calculate the level of inequality in a Roman urban setting. Nonetheless, to understand the inequality of the entire society of the city, these calculations need to be developed. This article uses quantitative and statistical methods, such as Gini coefficients, Lorenz Curves, and also simpler graphs and their interpretation to advance establish methods for exploring inequality through house and building size. A method is proposed for identifying the top economic elite in this urban setting, and the article develops the calculation of inequality further, to encompass even individuals who did not own buildings. As a result, excavated Pompeii’s top economic elite is estimated to have comprised 50 to 100 households, with a high level of inequality evident in this ancient city during its final phase, the year 79 CE.

KEYWORDS:

• House size
• Pompeii
• statistics
• population
• Gini coefficient

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Kaius Tuori, Antonio Lopez Garcia, Juhana Heikonen, Anna-Maria Wilskman, Vesa Heikkinen and Pyry Koskinen, my fellow members of the project Law, Governance and Space: Questioning the Foundations of the Republican Tradition, for providing help and support. Additionally, a huge thank to Miko Flohr for his work, data, and help with it. I am also grateful to Ray Laurence and Ville Vuolanto, who helped me with my questions. Thanks to Christopher TenWolde for proofreading and guiding my text towards proper English. The remaining mistakes are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The size score is a combination of the house area and room number, which is explained in detail later in this section as a name F-score.

2. Here mosaic tesserae are small and laid in asymmetric patterns that highlight the subject of the mosaics.

3. Flohr’s (2017, 63–64) estimates of the population are based on the buildings that he has classified in his database. Every building that he has identified as a taberna is estimated to have had a maximum of four inhabitants and a minimum of three, and furthermore a quarter of the tabernae are considered to not have been inhabited at all in the calculation of the minimum amount of inhabitants, while every unit classified as an apartment has a maximum of five and minimum of two inhabitants, houses twelve and eight, and the group called ‘other’ eight and four.

4. The inscription is from a monumental tomb outside the Stabian Gate (Figure 1) dated to just before the eruption. The tomb lacks a name, however, the person was wealthy and influential, organizing banquets and games and making philanthropic donations (Osanna 2018, 311–315, 320–322). The inscription mentions a toga virilis celebration offered to Pompeians. The toga virilis rite focused on the masculine realm and the male members of the household were in the central role. There were 456 triclinium-groups (∏-shaped dining couch groups), and each of them had places for 15 people providing 6840 positions for this occasion. Osanna argues this is the number of adult males in Pompeii.

5. Osanna’s estimate is high compared to previous ones (Cfr. Flohr 2017, 53–54), and the inscription can possibly be read differently depending on the interpretation of the word homines. The Italian translation in Osanna’s article has uomini but English persons. The first suggests males, when the second would also include other genders; homines can be translated in both ways. Yet, if the inscriber – or whoever ordered the inscription – wanted to clearly refer to only males, there were other options, such as viros. Although the toga virilis rite centers around the male members of family, it was also an important occasion for the entire household to participate in (Harrill 2002, 255–266; Dolansky 2008) and we know of several powerful women from ancient Pompeii (Savunen 1997, 50–51, 56–58, 78–79) and several paintings with women shown banqueting with men (Dunbabin 2003, 52–68). Consequently, we cannot assume the number of inhabitants calculated on the basis of the triclinia refers only to the male population.

Additional information

Funding

The project is funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 771874).

Notes on contributors

Samuli Simelius

Samuli Simelius is a teacher of ancient cultures in the University of Helsinki, Finland, and a post-doctoral researcher in the project Law, Governance and Space: Questioning the Foundations of the Republican Tradition (funded by the European Research Council). He has recently published a book Pompeian Peristyle Gardens (Routledge, 2022).