The door is very symbolic in today’s society as it has been through out history; in the Roman world, the door was more then just a simple opening to ones home, but an expression of its place in society. Often “the door way” was used to explain the beginning of a journey, or entry into a new land. During the Roman Empire it was said that “all roads led to Rome“, and along the roads in Rome we find the doorways that lead to the homes and true essence of what made Rome great: its families.

In the first part, I will review the religious symbolism of the door and follow with the door’s social standing, and how the Romans built a door. Nonetheless, there are still large gaps in the writer’s knowledge about the ancient Roman door. Doors from all around the empire and throughout time allow only broad outlines of the Roman nature.

The Door in Roman Society

The Latin word for door, “ianua,” itself possibly came from the god Janus.¹ Janus was the ancient Roman god of gateways and doorways presiding over all beginnings. This god was crucial in Roman belief for he began success of any undertaking. He carried a face looking forward and another backward just as every door looked two ways.² James G. Frazer states that the god’s symbol guarded from evil the entrance to a Roman. ³

As such, houses had doors that opened inward. Roman society only permitted rare individuals of high honor to have doors that opened on to the street. Plutarch wrote that the Roman people complimented Marcus Valerius, a founder of the Roman Republic, after his triumph with a house built on the Palatine at public expense. While the doors of other houses opened inwards, the people constructed his doors to open outwards as perpetual recognition of his merit “he might be constantly partaking of public honor.”⁴ Caesar was given this plus an additional pediment which Livy mentioned as a decree by the senate for of honor and distinction. ⁵

For the Roman homeowner, the entrance to his house paralleled his political life. The door appeared to be the only acceptable solution for self-promotion in his façade. A passerby could see the door as the one component of the exterior façade connecting with the interior. The door must be easily accessible and always open to invite the public, for to be public was to participate fully in political and social life. Openly inviting people symbolically showed a willingness to serve the community. ⁶ Every time the door opened, it afforded a glimpse into the homeowner’s personal space. The door was, therefore, an indisputable part of the Roman community and an opportunity to impress one’s equals.⁷

Once the guest entered into the fauces, the paterfamilias controlled the boundaries of his house. Some scholars have compared his authority over the domus to that of the Etruscan and Roman soothsayers who stood on a temple platform to define the physical boundaries of its sacred power.⁸

The paterfamilias’ authority began with the framing of the room’s view on entering the doorway. The physical form and function of this area changed little from the late Republic. Although open doors would have allowed a glimpse from the street, the inside keeps this lavish impression controlled. The magnificence of the house is ultimately the interior domain.

Only through the entrance can the paterfamilias emit his character onto public space. Despite the ostensibly public view of the façade, the remainder of the house lay secluded behind the walls. These walls enclosed the estate, interrupted occasionally by small windows set high out of reach.⁹

The reader should understand that though the street door was the front of a house, the street door was not always the main entrance nor was it the most often used. The two did not always agree. The Romans understood that the street door to the house was the main entrance leading through the fauces into the atrium. A majority of older houses had impressive entranceways flanked by half columns or pilasters, an architectural component borrowed from public architecture, particularly of course, the Roman temple. The great door of the Casa del Fauno provides a good example. Other houses complement this architecture with further elaboration. Pompeii’s House II.2.4, for example, has a relief of a commemorative wreath over the entranceway, evocative of the honors awarded to Augustus and displayed at his doorsill. The entrance of the Casa del Epidius Rufus goes much further in commanding the entrance as public space for the household. A large platform runs along the façade like a mini Rostrum at Rome.

The platform of Epidius Rufus is an unusual expression of private incursion into public space. Although it typically was the ‘grandest’ entrance, the number of individuals that passed through the street entrance was often less than other entrances. If the reader was to assess which part of a house was relatively more private, knowing which doorway was used more frequently and by whom is vital.¹⁰

Formal reception with strangers probably used the entrance to the atrium while the inhabitants used other doors exclusively like that of the Casa del Fauno in Pompeii. The peristyle entrance was distant from the rest of the establishment so we might feel more confident in suggesting that this entrance was used infrequently and mainly by the inhabitants.¹¹

Keeping Out the Unwanted

Judging by recent literature on Roman houses, the reception primarily involves the patron receiving his clients during the morning ritual of salutatio. Although such formal ceremonies were certainly part of the reception, it was a broad concept. The viewing area such as the atrium placed elaborate decoration and I found no case where other entrances carried more decoration than the street entrance. Hillier and Hanson state that the back door was left ajar for the working class and to encourage neighbors coming in unannounced. Since the back door typically leads to the kitchen, an important room to a house, the entrance carries a high level of presence availability. In contrast, the front door was the entrance for more formal visitors who were usually received in the atrium.¹²

For the visitor, the doors of a Roman house were not flush with the street façade but were set well within the entryway and opened inward to create a picture-like frame for the guest. Inside an onlooker could only see the narrow width fauces under a low ceiling and what lay straight ahead. With a set architectural formula, the paterfamilias controlled the guest’s gaze. The visitor emerged from the confines of the fauces sloping inward and directly faced the paterfamilias at the end of the axis in the tablinum.¹³

Occasionally the fauces floor carried a warning or greeting from the resident. Some places, such as the Casa del Fauno, painted or inlaid mosaic signs with “have” (welcome) or “cave canem” (beware of dog). Inside the door an inner part of the corridor had an ostium from where a trusted doorkeeper sometimes kept his watchdog to deter unwanted guests.¹⁴

Numerous ancient poems remind us of this in amusement. The genre regularly finds the plea of the despondent lover to the stubborn door or even the lament of the door itself, bemoaning its unrelenting task. In Amore, Ovid laments to the doorkeeper blocking his way to his mistress.¹⁵ Tibullus pleads with the locked door before him while Propertius plays as the door in his own work airing out his views.¹⁶

The use of a doorkeeper was also detraction for the paterfamilias. Guests possibly would not feel as welcome to come into a person’s domus with a doorkeeper or warning on the floor. As such, he had to be careful that it balanced well with his public life. Plutarch reminds us of this when he explains that Cicero “did not have a doorkeeper, nor did anyone ever see him lying in bed, but early in the morning he would stand or walk in front of his chamber and receive those who came to pay him their respects.”¹⁷

To try finding an understanding to these apparently incompatible styles of reception between the public and private nature of the Roman house, the reader might turn again to the panegyric delivered to Trajan by Pliny the Younger. The author intentionally contrasts the ease of access in a visit to Trajan with the obstacles put up by his predecessor, Domitian to ensure his own privacy. Here the rhetoric displays moralistic openness with the good emperor and the secrecy with the former tyrant.

“Your father [Nerva] had shown his magnanimity by giving the title of ‘house of the people‘ to what had been a stronghold of tyranny… no forum, no temple is so free of access… There are no obstacles, no grades of entry to cause humiliation, nor a thousand doors to be opened only to find still more obstacles barring the way… where recently that fearful monster [Domitian] built his defenses with untold terrors…or emerged to plot the massacre and destruction of his most distinguished subjects. Menaces and horror were the sentinels at his doors…”¹⁸

Pliny the Younger interpreted that an unwillingness to participate with the community was the same as a willingness to engage in a destructive manner against the community. The Roman inability to see behind closed doors caused fear and suspicion, an implication that the paterfamilias had something to hide. A place of concealment was a place of potential revolution as can be seen by the conspirator Catiline in 63 BC. Sallust wrote that Catiline gathered his most trusted friends behind closed doors to attempt overthrowing the Republic.¹⁹ Without public knowledge, Catiline’s house became a place of revolution.

Door Materials

For the ancient Romans, the various rooms within a house were separated from each other by doors or often merely by curtains. These interior doors were made of wood like the street doors. They mostly used cypress, oak, or deal and used hard wood such as box-tree, oak, olive, or elm for the bolts and pivots. The wood had to be aged, and after the carpenters glued it, they often left it in the press for years in order to prevent it from warping. To prevent warping of the wood, the doors were not constructed of boards but were provided with paginae (panels).²⁰ These paginae were let in beneath the surface, and the angle linking the frame and paginae were filled in by molded fillet. The doors of the upper class were veneered and adorned with bronze, ivory, and other ornaments. Ancient doors did not turn on hinges but instead swung round on pivots fixed in the doorsill and the lintel.²¹ If the pivots were not of hardwood, the smiths sometimes cast the pivots in bronze.

The main entry into apartment houses typically took the shape of two wooden leaves that swiveled in pivots fixed into the doorsill and lintel blocks and opened inwards. Other doorways, for example those of the tabernae (shops) were secured every night by means of vertical wooden shutters that set into the travertine doorsill and lintel blocks, although at night and perhaps during midday break access might be made through a small entrance located inside the larger door.²²

At times, the doors had special timbers called azones that projected from the top and bottom as tenons. These azones moved in mortises or bronze bearing that the doorsill and the lintel let into. More regularly, pivots fastened directly to the bronze caps or bronze shoes covered the pivots as well as the mortises.

Later on, the smiths gave a tip underneath the bronze shoes to give the door stability, and to ensure the permanence of the device. Pessuli (bolts) secured the door by sliding into a lintel and doorsill, or by means of bars that positioned across the door and fitted into inlets within the door supports. A peculiar way of locking the door from the inside was to lodge a support tightly at an angle against it and secure a stone into the floor. This stone was left projected holding the lower end in place. Alongside these contraptions, however, the Romans used locks during most of antiquity.²³

The door is very symbolic in today’s society as it was through out Roman history. In the Roman world the door was more then an opening to one’s home, but an expression of the owner’s place in society. The door could be many shapes, sizes, material, and even open in different directions, but it always represented the character of the household. The doorway was the first impression a visitor carried of the family within. The choice of a doorkeeper or message written in mosaics said more about a family than the exterior of the often-plain homes covering the hills through out the Roman city and helped modern scholars understand the interaction between guest and owner. Neighbors and clients entered the house the same way as the family while strangers used the street door. With this respect it is possible to believe that those who entered like family were treated like family while all others were given the respect and caution they deserved by coming in from the street entrance. In Roman culture, the front door was always open to a stranger and community but to understand and be treated equal to the family, one had to approach from other means.

END NOTES

^{^}1 James G. Frazer, trans., Ovid’s Fasti (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, UP, 1939), 387.

^{^}2 Cassell’s Dictionary. 438.

^{^}3 James G. Frazer, trans., Ovid’s Fasti (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, UP, 1939), 387.

^{^}4 Plutarch, Publicola, 20.

^{^}5 Plutarch, Caesar, 63.

^{^}6 Shelley Hales, Roman House and Social Identity (NYC: Cambridge UP, 2003), 38

^{^}7 Ibid., 104.

^{^}8 John R. Clarke, The Houses of Roman Italy 100 BC-AD 250 (Los Angeles: U of California P, 1991), 6.

^{^}9 Shelley Hales, Roman House and Social Identity (NYC: Cambridge UP, 2003), 106.

^{^}10 Mark Grahame “Public and Private in the Roman house: the spatial order of the Casa del Fauno,” Domestic Space in the Roman World: Pompeii and Beyond, eds., Ray Laurence and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 1997), 140.

^{^}11 Ibid., 161.

^{^}12 Ibid., 159.

^{^}13 John R. Clarke, The Houses of Roman Italy 100 BC-AD 250 (Los Angeles: U of California P, 1991), 4.

^{^}14 Albert Neuburger, Technical Arts and Sciences of the Ancients, (NYC: Barnes & Nobles, Inc., 1969), 329. Fronto’s Epistulus Graeci. 5.1 discusses the importance of a door keeper: “For each of us private men, if the door keeper did not guard the doors and was not wholly alert, excluding from entrance those not invited, but allowing the inhabitants to walk outside freely whenever they want, then he would not but guarding the house properly. And whereas public colonnades, groves, altars, gymnasia and baths are open freely to all, private ones are barred with iron and doorkeepers.”

^{^}15 Ovid, Amores, 1.6.

^{^}16 Tibullus, Elegiae, 1.2.7-14; Propertius, Opera Omnia, 1.16.

^{^}17 Plutarch, Cicero, 36.3.

^{^}18 Pliny Secundus, Panegyricus, 47.5-48.4.

^{^}19 Sallust, Bellum Catilinae, 20.1

^{^}20 Pliny the Elder, Natura Historica, 16.225

^{^}21 Albert Neuburger, Technical Arts and Sciences of the Ancients, (NYC: Barnes & Nobles, Inc., 1969), 335.

^{^}22 A. G. McKay, Houses, Villas and Palaces in the Roman World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1975), 90.

^{^}23 Albert Neuburger, Technical Arts and Sciences of the Ancients, (NYC: Barnes & Nobles, Inc., 1969), 335.