---
title: "House of Lucius Caecilius Iucundus V.1.26 - Pompeii Online"
description: "The House of Lucius Caecilius Iucundus is renowned for its archive of wax tablets and a lararium relief depicting the AD 62 earthquake."
url: "https://www.pompeionline.net/en/buildings-and-places/regio-v/house-of-lucius-caecilius-iucundus-v-1-26"
date: "2026-09-16T12:49:53+00:00"
language: "en-GB"
---

#  House of Lucius Caecilius Iucundus V.1.26

The **House of Lucius Caecilius Iucundus V.1.26** is one of Pompeii’s most important residences for understanding the city’s economic and social life. Its fame rests not only on its architecture and decoration, but above all on the exceptional discovery of the archive of **Lucius Caecilius Iucundus**, a businessman and financial intermediary active in the first century AD.

More than 150 wax tablets were found inside the house, recording economic transactions that had actually taken place at Pompeii in the years before the eruption. These documents preserve names, payments, sales, purchases, rents, and business relationships with a level of precision rarely possible for a Roman city.

The house also preserves remarkable evidence of the **earthquake of AD 62**: a relief from the lararium depicts Pompeii’s public monuments shaken by the disaster. Private life, the economy, and the city’s history therefore come together within a single residence.

### A large house of Samnite origin

The domus was first laid out in the **Samnite period, between the third and second centuries BC**. Its austere tufa doorway and other constructional features attest to the monumentality it had already achieved by the second century BC. The house followed the traditional plan of a large aristocratic Pompeian residence, with an entrance, atrium, tablinum, and open spaces at the rear.

The building underwent many changes over its long history. At a later stage the property was enlarged by incorporating most of the rooms of the neighbouring house at V.1.23, while its decoration was also extensively renewed. Several rooms received **Third Style** paintings, followed in some areas by **Fourth Style** interventions.

The house visible in AD 79 was therefore the result of centuries of transformation, although one of its most important phases coincided with the period when the property passed to the **Caecilii** family.

### The atrium and reception route

The main entrance, opening onto the street at doorway 26, led into the large **atrium**, around which the principal rooms in the front part of the house were arranged. Alae and cubicula flanked the route towards the tablinum and rear sector, following a plan typical of the larger Pompeian domus.

Mosaic pavements and wall paintings helped convey the family’s status. TESS records numerous two-colour geometric floors and decorations belonging to the building’s different phases, showing how the house was progressively updated without completely erasing its earlier features.

At the rear was a porticoed viridarium, around which additional rooms were created. The remodelling of the property also led to the creation of a second entrance, reflecting the complex’s increasing articulation.

### Lucius Caecilius Iucundus

The figure who made the house famous is Lucius Caecilius Iucundus, identified by the Archaeological Park’s official guide as the owner of the residence in the first century AD. He was a businessman whom modern sources generally describe as a “banker”, although the transactions recorded on the tablets show above all that he acted as an intermediary at auctions and collected sums on behalf of others.

His work included managing payments arising from the sale of his clients’ property. Once an auction had concluded, Caecilius could pay the proceeds to the seller while retaining a commission for himself.

The goods involved in these transactions also included enslaved people, stark evidence of how fully slavery was embedded in the ordinary workings of the Roman economy.

### The archive of wax tablets

The most important discovery in the house was an archive traditionally described in the Archaeological Park’s guide as comprising 154 wax tablets. Most of the documents directly connected with the work of Lucius Caecilius Iucundus date from approximately AD 52 to 60, while the collection also includes records from the years immediately preceding, or around, the earthquake of 62.

The tablets were originally covered with a layer of wax on which text could be written with a stylus. Many documents took the form of sets of tablets that could be closed, tied, and sealed, creating formal contractual records.

These were therefore not merely personal notes. The archive contained receipts and attestations of economic transactions, naming citizens, freedpeople, enslaved people, and representatives of the municipal administration.

### How Caecilius conducted business

The tablets make it possible to reconstruct some of Caecilius’s activities in concrete terms. At auctions he acted as an intermediary between sellers and buyers, and could advance or transfer the sums owed to the seller while retaining a percentage for his service.

According to the Archaeological Park’s official guide, the documented commissions could range from 1 to 4 per cent. The transactions mainly concerned the sale of goods and the collection of rents, but some tablets also record payments made to the city of Pompeii itself for publicly owned property or land granted on lease.

The archive is therefore an exceptional source for the practical workings of the urban economy. Alongside the major commercial activities of the Mediterranean existed a dense local network of auctions, loans, rents, property, and financial intermediation.

### A record of Pompeian society

Caecilius Iucundus is not the only person named on the tablets. The documents preserve the names of many others involved in the transactions, allowing us to observe a section of Pompeian society at work.

They include free citizens, freedpeople, and enslaved people carrying out business on behalf of their owners or the administration. Some documents were written by scribes, while others reveal different hands, offering glimpses of varying levels of literacy and different ways of using written Latin.

The archive thus transforms a large private house into one of the principal sources for studying the economy and everyday writing of Roman Pompeii.

### The portrait of Caecilius Iucundus

A marble herm with a bronze portrait of Lucius Caecilius Iucundus was found in front of the tablinum and is now held by the National Archaeological Museum of Naples.

The face is rendered with pronounced realism: its wrinkles, individual features, and physical characteristics are not idealised according to models of youthful beauty. The portrait belongs to a Roman tradition that placed great value on individual identity and family memory.

Its position in one of the house’s principal reception spaces is significant. Visitors encountered not only expensive decoration, but also the image of the man and family associated with the property.

### The lararium and the earthquake of AD 62

The atrium contained the lararium, the domestic shrine dedicated to the protective deities of the house and family. This small monument is exceptionally important because it was decorated with a relief referring to the effects of the major earthquake that struck Pompeii in AD 62.

One scene shows recognisable monuments of the Forum, including the Capitolium, or Temple of Jupiter, and a monumental arch, represented as though leaning under the force of the tremor. A sacrifice appears alongside the earthquake scene, placing the event within a religious context.

The relief is almost unique evidence that a resident of the city commissioned an image inside his own home of an event experienced by the Pompeian community.

### An image of the earthquake

The relief is particularly valuable because the earthquake of AD 62 was one of the decisive events in Pompeii’s final decades. Many public and private buildings were damaged, and reconstruction and renovation were still under way in many parts of the city in AD 79.

The relief should not, of course, be read as an exact visual record of the earthquake. It is an artistic and symbolic representation of the event, in which readily recognisable monuments served to evoke the violence of the tremor.

It nevertheless remains one of the very few known ancient representations of the effects of an earthquake that actually occurred.

### Caution concerning the second relief

A second representation, showing the Vesuvian Gate and the Castellum Aquae during the earthquake, has also traditionally been associated with the House of Caecilius Iucundus. Its provenance, however, is less secure than that of the Forum scene.

Studies of the excavation records have raised doubts as to whether this second relief was originally installed in the house’s lararium. For an archaeologically accurate account, the Forum relief, which is securely associated with the domestic shrine, should therefore be distinguished from the second scene, traditionally linked to the complex but of disputed provenance.

This is a useful example of how even very famous finds may require reassessment in the light of archaeological documentation.

### The house after the earthquake

The House of Caecilius Iucundus also bears traces of refurbishment undertaken during the city’s final phase. Some Third Style decoration was covered or supplemented by Fourth Style paintings, a practice well documented in many Pompeian houses.

Not every alteration can automatically be attributed to the earthquake of AD 62, since houses were continually modified in response to changing tastes and family needs. The earthquake was nevertheless a pivotal moment in the city’s final decades, and the lararium relief demonstrates how strongly the event affected the inhabitants’ memory.

When Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, Pompeii was therefore a city still bearing numerous traces of its recent transformations.

### Caecilius and the city of Pompeii

Caecilius Iucundus is important not because he held a monumental public office or commissioned great buildings in the Forum, but because his economic activity is so extensively documented. The tablets reveal the daily relationship between private wealth, the market, and municipal administration.

Some documents record payments connected with public property and personnel acting on behalf of the colony, demonstrating how closely private fortunes and the municipal economy were intertwined.

The house therefore reveals an aspect of Pompeii often concealed behind its temples, theatres, and frescoes: the world of transactions, contracts, and the circulation of money.

### A family of businessmen

Some of the archive’s earlier tablets are connected with Lucius Caecilius Felix, probably a member of the same family and perhaps Iucundus’s predecessor in business. This suggests that the Caecilii’s economic interests may have extended across more than one generation.

There is not, however, enough evidence to reconstruct the full genealogy or the development of the family business with certainty. It is therefore preferable to limit the account to what the documents support: the economic activity associated with the Caecilii did not necessarily begin with Lucius Caecilius Iucundus alone.

Here too, the tablets reveal the historical depth that can lie behind the modern name of a Pompeian house.

### The excavations

The house was first explored in 1844 and more extensively during the campaigns of 1875–76. Archaeologists uncovered not only its architecture and decoration, but also the body of documents and objects that would make the residence one of the principal sources for Pompeii’s economic history.

The discovery of the tablets was especially remarkable because organic materials such as wood and wax normally disappear almost completely. The conditions created by the eruption instead preserved enough traces for many of the documents to be read and studied.

Since then, the archive of Caecilius Iucundus has become a fundamental source not only for Pompeian archaeology, but also for the study of the Roman economy, law, and language.

### A house that preserves the city’s real life

The House of Caecilius Iucundus V.1.26 is important precisely because it takes us beyond an image of Pompeii composed solely of frescoes, temples, and monuments. Here it is possible to follow the activities of a person who actually lived and to read documents produced in the ordinary course of business.

The portrait gives Lucius Caecilius Iucundus a face; the tablets document his work; the house reflects the social standing achieved by his family; and the lararium relief preserves the memory of an earthquake that had shaken the entire community.

Few buildings at Pompeii therefore bring us so close to the practical realities of life in the first century AD. The House of Caecilius Iucundus is at once a large aristocratic residence, an economic archive, and evidence for the city’s history in the years immediately before its destruction.

###  Further reading

[Pompeii in Pictures](http://www.pompeiiinpictures.com/pompeiiinpictures/R5/5%2001%2026.htm) Detailed images of the building

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