Private Architecture

This chapter examines private architecture in Late Antiquity, highlighting its social, political, and religious significance within the urban and rural landscapes of the late Roman world. Despite growing scholarly interest, domestic architecture has long remained overshadowed by studies of monumental public and Christian religious buildings. The analysis demonstrates that late antique residential forms—ranging from imperial palaces (palatia) and governors’ residences (praetoria) to episcopal complexes (episcopia), villas, urban domus, and housing for lower social classes—reflect broader transformations in social organization, elite self-representation, and urban development. Elite residences increasingly adopted monumental and representative features, such as apsidal audience halls, triclinia, peristyles, baths, and richly decorated reception spaces, often blurring distinctions between public and private architecture. Palatial models influenced both secular and ecclesiastical buildings, with episcopal complexes in particular appropriating and reinterpreting elite architectural language. Villas and urban domus reveal significant typological and decorative changes, including the transformation of peristyles, the diffusion of sigma-shaped dining arrangements, and the growing emphasis on hierarchical spatial organization. At the same time, evidence for housing of the lower classes—insulae, artisanal quarters, and precarious dwellings—remains fragmentary, reflecting both archaeological limitations and social invisibility. Overall, the study underscores how late antique domestic architecture functioned not merely as living space but as a material expression of power, identity, religious affiliation, and shifting patterns of social interaction.