Apartment Living: the Insula
The Other Side of Roman Housing
The grand atrium houses of Pompeii paint a compelling picture of Roman domestic life, but they represent only the wealthiest fraction of the urban population. The majority of Romans in any city — the merchants, craftsmen, freedmen, labourers and the poor — did not live in sprawling domus houses with colonnaded gardens. They lived in insulae (singular: insula): multi-storey blocks of rented accommodation that crowded the streets of every Roman city. Understanding the insula is essential for understanding the full reality of Roman urban life, not just its gilded highlights.
The Insula of Diana at Ostia
The best-preserved example of a Roman insula is the Insula of Diana at Ostia, the port city of Rome. This building, which survives to a height of approximately four storeys in some parts, gives us a clear picture of how a mid-range apartment block was designed and used. The Insula of Diana takes its name from a terracotta relief of the goddess Diana (the Roman goddess of hunting, equivalent to the Greek Artemis) found on one of its facades. The block was built around a central courtyard with a fountain, which provided residents with access to water. Around the courtyard on each floor ran corridors giving access to individual apartment units.
The ground floor of the Insula of Diana was given over largely to commercial premises: taverns and shops whose wide doorways opened directly onto the street. This arrangement was typical of Roman insulae throughout the empire: the most accessible and commercially valuable space — ground level with street frontage — was used for business, while living quarters occupied the upper floors. The rental value of the lower floors was high; a taberna at ground level in a busy Roman city could command a substantial income for its landlord.
The Insula of Diana at Ostia survives to approximately four storeys and is organised around a central courtyard with a fountain. The ground floor contained shops and taverns; the upper floors held rented apartment units. This is the standard arrangement for Roman insulae across the empire.
Life Inside an Insula Apartment
Life in an insula apartment was very different from life in a domus. Apartments on the lower floors were more spacious and better lit; those on the upper floors were cramped, darker and further from the street. Most insula apartments had no kitchen and no private latrine. Residents cooked, when they cooked at all, on small portable braziers that burned charcoal, or they bought food from the thermopolia (hot food stalls) that lined the streets below. Residents could fetch water from public fountains, but some insulae had piped water. Human waste was disposed of in public latrines or, less respectably, thrown from windows into the street — a practice that the satirist Juvenal described with biting scorn in his Satire 3.
Noise and smell were constant companions in insula living. Workshops, taverns and market stalls occupied the street level; carts delivering goods to the city rumbled past at night; neighbours were never far away. Privacy, in any modern sense, barely existed. And yet the insula was not simply a slum. The better apartments at Ostia and elsewhere were equipped with mosaic floors and wall paintings of a modest quality, suggesting that their occupants had some disposable income and took pride in their surroundings. The social range of insula residents was wide, from the modestly comfortable freedman who rented a lower-floor apartment to the genuinely poor family crowded into a single room at the top of the building.
The insula posed serious dangers to its inhabitants. Fire was the greatest risk. With no running water upstairs, no kitchen facilities — forcing residents to cook on open braziers — and buildings constructed partly of timber, fires spread rapidly through the upper floors. Rome suffered catastrophic fires repeatedly throughout its history; the Emperor Nero was famously associated with a fire that destroyed much of the city in AD 64, though ancient accounts of his responsibility are not reliable. In response to the threat of fire, Roman authorities issued regulations limiting the height of insulae (Augustus reportedly set the limit at 20 metres; later emperors adjusted this), but enforcement was irregular and owners routinely violated the rules.
Structural collapse was an equally pressing danger. Landlords who built quickly and cheaply to maximise profit often skimped on foundations and materials. Juvenal mocked the flimsiness of Roman apartment buildings: he described how a single crack in the wall could presage the collapse of an entire structure, and how a wealthy Roman who could afford a house in the hills was far safer than the poor man clinging to his room at the top of a swaying insula. Pliny’s letters, written in the late first and early second century AD, also allude to the chaotic and dangerous conditions of urban life, providing a complementary literary source to Juvenal’s satirical exaggeration.
Insula versus Domus: Rich and Poor in the Same City
The contrast between the domus and the insula tells us much about how Roman society was organised. A wealthy domus owner occupied a single-storey house that spread outward over a large ground-floor footprint, with rooms arranged for the performance of status. The insula resident lived in a vertical stack of rented rooms, with no control over the building, no permanent water supply, no private outdoor space, and no ability to use the home as a stage for social performance. The two building types existed side by side in Roman cities: in Pompeii, a fine atrium house might share a block with a row of cramped rented rooms. This proximity made the social contrasts of Roman city life constantly visible.
The Roman writer Petronius, in his satirical novel the Satyricon, gives fictional but revealing portraits of freedmen who have made money and now live in the messy borderland between insula and aspiration. In the famous “Dinner with Trimalchio” episode (Satyricon 26–78), the nouveau riche freedman Trimalchio throws an extravagant dinner party that satirises Roman snobbery about wealth, taste and social status. The elaborate and excessive banquet — with course after absurd course, live entertainments, and a host who reads his own will aloud to his guests — is Petronius’s vehicle for mocking a social world where money could buy the trappings of high status but not genuine refinement.
The main dangers of insula living were fire (from open braziers and timber construction) and structural collapse (from cheap building). Roman authorities tried to limit insula heights, but regulations were poorly enforced. Juvenal’s Satire 3 and Pliny’s letters both describe the hazards of urban apartment life from different literary perspectives.
We have two main types of source for insula life: material remains (the Insula of Diana at Ostia) and literary descriptions (Juvenal’s Satire 3, Petronius’s Satyricon). These complement each other but each has limitations. The Insula of Diana is physical evidence — it tells us about building design, scale and materials — but it cannot tell us about the daily experience of living there, the noise, the smells, the social tensions. Literary sources give us the lived experience, but both Juvenal and Petronius were writing for educated, wealthy audiences and had satirical purposes: Juvenal exaggerated dangers for comic effect, and Petronius’s Trimalchio is a caricature. The best approach is to use both types of source together, checking each against the other, and remaining alert to the purposes and perspectives of each author.