What do the public and private buildings of Pompeii and Herculaneum reveal about urban life, the economy and social organisation in a Roman town?
Investigate and interpret sources for the public and private buildings of Pompeii and Herculaneum, including the forum, temples, baths, amphitheatre, the domus and insula housing, shops and workshops, and what they reveal about urban planning, economy and society
A focused answer to the QCE Ancient History Unit 3 dot point on the public and private buildings of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Covers the forum, temples, the Stabian Baths, the amphitheatre, the domus and insula, shops and workshops, and what the built environment reveals about urban planning, the economy and Roman social structure.
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What this dot point is asking
QCAA wants you to use the surviving buildings of Pompeii and Herculaneum as sources for reconstructing urban life, economy and society. You should describe the major public buildings (forum, temples, baths, amphitheatre, theatres) and the main private building types (the elite domus, the multi-occupancy insula, shops and workshops), and explain what each reveals about how the town worked. The skill is reading architecture and town planning as evidence.
The answer
Public buildings: the civic centre
The forum at Pompeii was the focal point of public life: a large rectangular open space, originally paved and lined with colonnades, closed to wheeled traffic. Around it clustered the buildings of government, religion and commerce. The Temple of Jupiter (the Capitolium) stood at the north end with Vesuvius behind it. The basilica, on the south-west, served as the law court and business exchange and is one of the oldest such buildings known. The Macellum (a covered produce and fish market), the Building of Eumachia (linked to the fullers and possibly the cloth trade), and the comitium (voting place) framed the square. The forum is a textbook reconstruction of how a Roman town integrated religion, law, politics and trade in one civic space.
Religious buildings extended beyond the Capitolium. The Temple of Apollo, the Temple of Isis (an Egyptian cult, rebuilt after the AD 62 earthquake and a key source for the spread of eastern religion), and various household and street shrines (lararia) show a layered religious life mixing Roman, Greek and Egyptian elements.
Public buildings: leisure and infrastructure
The Stabian Baths are the oldest of Pompeii's public baths, with the standard Roman sequence of apodyterium (changing room), tepidarium (warm room), caldarium (hot room) and frigidarium (cold room), heated by the hypocaust system of underfloor flues. Baths were central to daily social life and demonstrate advanced engineering.
The amphitheatre, built around 70 BC, is the earliest surviving permanent stone amphitheatre in the Roman world. It seated perhaps 20,000 and hosted gladiatorial games. A famous wall painting records a riot there in AD 59 between Pompeians and visitors from Nuceria, an event also reported by Tacitus, a rare case where a painting and a literary source corroborate each other. Two theatres (a large open-air theatre and a smaller roofed odeon) and the palaestra (exercise ground) complete the leisure infrastructure.
Private buildings: the elite domus
The Roman domus was the courtyard house of the wealthy, organised around two open spaces: the atrium (with its central impluvium pool collecting rainwater) at the front and the colonnaded peristyle garden at the rear. The House of the Faun, occupying an entire city block, is the grandest, named for its bronze statuette and famous for the Alexander Mosaic depicting Alexander the Great fighting Darius III. The House of the Vettii, owned by two freedmen who had grown rich in trade, shows how former slaves could accumulate wealth, and its frescoes and garden are among the best preserved. These houses reveal status display, the reception of clients (the morning salutatio), and the blending of public and private functions in elite life.
Private buildings: ordinary housing and work
Most Pompeians did not live in a domus. Many lived above or behind their shops in tabernae (the combined shop-and-dwelling), or in upstairs apartments. At Herculaneum the multi-storey insula and timber-framed buildings survive better because of the carbonising surges; the Trellis House (Casa a Graticcio) is a rare surviving example of cheap multi-occupancy housing built with a timber-and-rubble technique. Workshops and commercial premises are everywhere: bakeries with millstones and ovens (the House of the Baker preserved carbonised loaves), fulleries (cloth-cleaning workshops using urine as a cleaning agent), garum (fish sauce) production, and numerous bars (thermopolia) with sunken counters for serving hot food and drink.
What the buildings reconstruct
Read together, the buildings reconstruct a working town with a clear social hierarchy and a diversified economy. The forum and its surroundings show an integrated civic life; the baths and amphitheatre show shared leisure across classes; the contrast between the House of the Faun and the Trellis House shows steep inequality; and the workshops and bars show that trade, manufacturing and food service drove the local economy. The presence of freedmen like the Vettii in fine houses shows social mobility within that hierarchy.
The evidence must still be handled carefully. Excavation since 1748 was uneven and often poorly recorded; early excavators removed objects and frescoes, sometimes without provenance. Reconstructions of building function rely on combining architecture, painted decoration, inscriptions, graffiti and the artefacts found in situ.