Domus Publica

The pontifex maximus was the senior priest of the Roman state, elected by popular vote from the same senatorial class that filled the magistracies. He presided over the college of pontiffs, controlled the religious calendar, and chose and disciplined the Vestals. The office also carried a residence owned by the Roman state.

The Domus Publica was that residence, the public house, occupied by whoever held the office. It stood in the Forum on the Sacra Via, immediately east of the Atrium Vestae, where the six Vestals lived, and west of the wealthy houses climbing the north slope of the Palatine. A line of shops fronting the street screened it from public traffic, and the priest entered through a vestibule squeezed between two of them.

A second building served him, and the two are easily confused. The Regia, whose name means royal house, was the office: it held the pontifical archives, the calendar, and the shrines of Mars and Ops Consiva. The Domus Publica was where he slept, built around an atrium like other aristocratic houses and large enough to host the state rites that had to take place in a magistrate’s home.

Each December the rites of the Bona Dea were performed in the home of a senior magistrate, with every man and every male image removed. In 62 BC that home was the Domus Publica, where Julius Caesar had lived since his election as pontifex maximus the previous year. Suetonius says he had occupied a modest house in the Subura before that, so the priesthood moved him from an unfashionable district into the centre of the city’s religious life. His wife Pompeia and his mother Aurelia presided. No man could be admitted, so Publius Clodius Pulcher came in women’s dress; ancient writers say he was pursuing Pompeia. He was recognised, and prosecuted for sacrilege against the Roman state. Caesar declined to testify and divorced Pompeia regardless, saying, in Plutarch’s version, that his wife had to be above suspicion. He kept the house nineteen years, and after his murder in 44 BC his body was carried back to it.

Marcus Lepidus, the former triumvir, held the priesthood from Caesar’s death until his own, so Augustus took it only in 12 BC. He declined to move in. Instead he made part of his own house on the southwest Palatine public property, dedicated a shrine to Vesta inside it on 28 April, and gave the Domus Publica away to the Vestals next door. The requirement was met, and the Forum house ceased to be the priest’s residence. In Ovid’s account one part of the house belonged to Apollo, a second to Vesta, and the rest to Augustus.

The building lost its purpose that year and its shape soon after. Absorbed into the Vestals’ complex, it was buried when the fire of AD 64 forced a rebuilding on a new alignment. Excavation has recovered a fragmentary atrium plan and the republican wall along its western edge; the southern and eastern limits are unknown, and the outlines on modern plans are drawn by symmetry. The Vestals held the ground until their college was dissolved late in the fourth century AD.

FURTHER READING

1. Scott, Russell T., et al. “Excavations in the Area Sacra of Vesta (1987–1996).” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. Supplementary Volumes, vol. 8, 2009, pp. i–167. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25759485. Accessed 30 July 2026.
2. Eichengreen, Amelia W. “A Monumental Archaic Complex on the Sacra Via: A New Interpretation of the Domestic Remains on the North Palatine Slope.” Journal of Roman Archaeology 36.2 (2023): 332–367. Web. 
3. Stark, Casey M. Vesta, her virgins and the worship of her cult during the Roman imperial period. The University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2015.
4. Henderson, Paul, et al. “ATRIUM VESTAE: THE 1996 SEASON.” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, vol. 42, 1997, pp. 249–54. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/4238753. Accessed 30 July 2026.