Houses are often assumed to be reliable mirrors of society, fossils of family structures, social hierarchies and mental maps of worlds now vanished. This is particularly true of the elite houses of the third to sixth centuries AD, which have been read as material symptoms of Rome's decline. The great dining and reception halls of urban houses sound the death-knell of participatory government and the rise of patronage politics, while in their sheer size and splendour later Roman houses seem to encapsulate a fin-de-siecle world of have and have-nots, separated by unbridgeable social chasms....