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Colonnaded Houses
Although Greek houses are typically of a standard size, Roman houses and their colonnaded gardens are of quite uneven sizes. Wallace-Hydrill analyzed three different blocks of houses in Pompeii and Herculaneum from A.D. 79 (a total of 234 houses) and then described four different types of houses that vary from 900 to 9,000 square feet or larger. No architectural format is standard:
- Type 1 is a shop and back room;
- Type 2 has three rooms, one of which may be a main room;
- Type 3 has a main room and a rear garden; Fifty seven of the [two hundred and thirty four] houses in the sample are type 3, the "average" size in these two cities, between 1500 and 3105 total square feet; [which is about the size of a modern North American detached family home today.]
- Type 4 has both a main room and a colonnaded garden, and in addition may have a horticultural plot, a second main room, and/or a second colonnaded garden. 58 houses are type 4, with between 3,100 and 27,000 total square feet. [which would be very expensive and luxurious even by today's standards.]1
1"Families in the New Testament World - Households and House Churches" by Carolyn Osiek and David L. Balch.
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