Munier, C., C. Gaston, and M. Carroll (2026). "House in the Rue du Palais de Justice in Vesontio." Gardens of the Roman Empire, accessed October 2, 2026. https://roman-gardens.github.io/id/b5bffe0dc7/

House in the Rue du Palais de Justice in Vesontio

Contributor: June Dorsch
Published: 2026-10-01
Last modified: 2026-10-02

Dates

Middle of the third century CE

Excavation Dates

2000-2001

Garden Description

In 2000-2001, at the time of construction a new judiciary facility, an area of 2000 square meters was excavated at the center of this loop. The results are in large part unpublished. On land that had been occupied since the end of the second century BCE, two houses of perishable materials were built in the eastern part of the site in the beginning of the first century CE. They were abandoned at the beginning of the Flavian epoch, and replaced by two imposing domus that lasted up to the middle of the third century. They stood on opposite sides of a property line wall (tinted in purple in Fig. 1) that was parallel to a cardo running in a northwest-to-southeast direction some hundred meters away. The two houses had slightly different orientations. The eastern house doubtless opened onto a southwest-northeast street passing 50 meters beyond the eastern limit of the excavation but partially brought to light in 1989-90 during excavations when a new parking facility was being built for the city hall. In this house, two independent structures (oecus) (tinted pink in the figure) with floors once decorated with mosaics since disappeared are wrapped about and connected by a portico (yellow tint) of complex plan with galleries 3 meters wide and opening onto an open space (green tint) covering 110 square meters. The counterpart of this portico is in part visible on the other side of the larger room. An incompletely known peristyle borders this oecus to the east (on the lower right edge of the plan). Its gallery was decorated with a terrazzo floor of opus signinum with accents of crustae, thin stone slices of which an opus sectile is made. In this phase, the north domus had a peristyle of 75 square meters with galleries on three sides. To the west (lower left corner of the plan), there was a large open space of nearly 500 square meters, which may have been a garden. At its west end, the wall of an incomplete building ran by a well and a masonry square 2.16 meters on a side which may have been the base of a shrine or monument. These structures were aligned with the property line wall. There was as yet no pool.

In the second half of the second century, the "garden" was restructured. The building on the west side was abandoned, the shrine or monument was kept, and a large pool put in at the eastern end supported against the wall of a terrace supporting the house to the east and consequently having the same orientation. This rectangular pool (21.2 x 3.5 m) had on the garden side a semicircular apse 6.9 meters in diameter. As part of the same architectural ensemble, a portico formed the retro-scene of the pool. Its opus signinum floor was 80 centimeters above the surface of the pool. Another, wider portico ran along the north side of the area. A shim-shaped gap existed between it and the property-line wall because of the difference in orientation. The monumental character of the pool and the north portico suggests that this garden may have been independent of both houses and was possibly a public space or belonged to a house further west, outside the limits of excavation.

At the beginning of the third century, the two domus were transformed. In particular, polychrome mosaics were installed in the east house and rooms with hypocausts in the north house. The little shrine or monument at the western end of the garden was eliminated, but the pool was reconstructed without alteration. The paving stones that had been in a pool were in part removed and used to build a 3.8 x 2.9 meter platform which served as the base, presumably, of a quadrangular fountain in the north house in an open space which replaced the peristyle, which was then destroyed.

Bibliography

  • C. Gaston, "Un bassin monumental et une fontaine dans les fouille du Palais de Justice de Besancon," Revue Archéologique de l'Est, t. 52, 2003, p.417-428.
  • Christophe Gaston: "Données récentes sur l'achitecture antique à Besançon," Archéopages/Inrap. No. 8, Nov. 2002, p. 28-35.
  • Laurent Vaxelaire, Philippe Barral, "Besançon: de l'oppidum à la ville romaine" in La naissance de la ville dans l'Antiquité, M. Reddé et al. ed., Paris, 2003, p. 254-256.

Keywords

Places