The social and economic development brought about by Rome's conquests across the Mediterranean exerted a transformative influence on tastes and lifestyle. Aristocratic families in Rome did not traditionally regard their homes (domus) as an exclusively private environment.
Such dwellings contained public areas intended for ritualized meetings between the master of the house and his retinue, the clientes. Despite attempts by the Senate to restrain the ruling classes from indulging in political self-promotion by regulating the number of guests in private banquets, the emerging élites of allied cities not yet under Roman jurisdiction displayed their wealth in homes of astonishing opulence, their architecture inspired by Hellenistic metropolises such as Alexandria, Antioch, Pergamon and Pella. The well-known House of the Faun in Pompeii, covering 3000 square meters, sums up the elements of this new architecture on a grand scale. The principal entrance to the public area is adorned by the reproduction of a small temple (domestic lararium), with the reception rooms arranged around a central basin and decorated with mosaics featuring animals and Dionysian themes, the work of artists from Alexandria.
The service rooms are organized around a tetrastyle atrium leading to a small thermal area and the kitchen. The columned exedra with the famous Alexander Mosaic, flanked by other rooms for the symposium, opens onto the central peristyle. The sumptuous main peristyle, equal in size to the courtyards of Hellenistic kings, surrounded a garden embellished with statues, with rooms for entertaining guests on the back.