The rhetoric of Roman moralising has often seemed alien to modern readers. This book, in linking together studies of apparently diverse topics, might be seen as appropriating a trope of Roman moralistic discourse, presenting arguments concerning different subjects as parallel so that they may serve to reinforce one another. A better understanding of this and similar literary devices, as they operate in Roman moralising texts, can help us to make sense of some features of those texts which modern readers have found puzzling. We begin with an apparently bizarre example of this kind of rhetoric (included in the book of rhetorical exercises put together by the elder Seneca).

The archetypical elite Roman house (domus) was entered through the vestibulum. In what is the locus classicus, Aulus Gellius defines the vestibulum as a ‘vacant place before the entrance, midway between the door of the house and the street’ (Gellius 16.5). More than a hundred classical texts inform us about the characteristics of vestibula, but for all this textual evidence, ‘real’ vestibula have been remarkably hard to find in the archaeological record. This chapter offers a study of Roman domestic vestibula on the basis of both literary and archaeological sources. In the first part, it is argued that most architectural rooms or spaces that have been labelled as vestibula do not correspond to vestibula as described in the textual evidence. In the second part, a number of reasons for this mismatch are reviewed, after which new ways of dealing with both kinds of evidence are offered, to overcome the discrepancies between the sources.