Roman villas in the Maltese Archipelago

Abstract

In their guest to dominate the European and Mediterranean world, the Romans faced many different climates, topographies, and native traditions, but they brought with them some standard ideas of what houses - in urban centers, in the countryside, or on the coast - might be in the way of amenities and decoration. When Roman agricultural estates were established on the two larger islands (Malta and Gozo), such importations were naturalized in the archipelago at the center of the mare internum, separated from Sicily by a stretch of sea only 90 km broad but perceived to be wide and dangerous. However, the much greater distance (290 km) between the archipelago and the African coast (east coast of Tunisia) is more significant for our purposes: the Roman agricultural estates appear to have replaced or continued earlier agricultural enterprises that had pre-existed the Roman presence, namely those of the Punic or Carthaginian hegemony over the islands which had existed long before the defeat of Carthage in the Second Punic War (218-201 BCE). Only the larger of the two islands of the Maltese archipelago was fully inhabited in Roman times: Malta having an area of 246 km2 (known as Melite; Map II). The much smaller island of Gozo (known as Gaulos) with an area of 67 km2 was less developed, but both islands formed separate administrative entites (civitates) within the province of Sicily, each with an eponymous town administering its own territory. Archaeological work in Melite, the chief town of the larger island in Roman times, has revealed important houses, and while these are urban domus rather than villas, the most impressive of them (the domus of Rabat) had a near-suburban setting, views, a plan, and very fine decorations and contents that distinctly gave it the character of a villa suburbana.