Roman homes: everything you wanted to know

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. If you could sneak a peek past the front door of a Roman home, what would you expect to find? Why was having a hole in your ceiling a clever feat of engineering in the ancient world? How could sharing a communal toilet actually still be a very private act? And why was central heating a luxury in ancient Rome?

Emily Briffitt is joined by Dr. Hannah Platz as they step inside the ancient Roman home to uncover more. As we're covering a vast slathe of land here over a very long time period, I'm sure there's going to be a lot of caveating as we're talking to clarify how it differs. But first and foremost, I just want to ask you, how did geography, and I suppose with that climate, influence the architecture of Roman homes across this vast swathe of lands? It's a really, really important question, actually, to be thinking about that notion of empire, the size of empire, and that idea of regulating where you're living, regulating the temperature, dealing with the elements, dealing with the environment.

At its biggest, the Roman Empire stretched, you know, from Spain to Mesopotamia, Judea and Syria, and then from Britain down to North Africa, you know, Morocco, sort of Egypt. So we are thinking of a really vast swathe of lands, I should say. We're talking also about possibly a population of maybe a hundred million people. All in all, there's going to be a huge amount of variety. All these parts of the empire had very different climates, very different of environments.

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