In rural settings, a wealthy Roman could surround a
villa with
terraced gardens but often included a peristyle with the design; in a
domus in the city, Romans often used peristyle to create a garden or open space within the house. The columns or square pillars surrounding the garden supported a shady roofed
portico whose inner walls were often embellished with elaborate wall paintings of landscapes and ''
trompe-l'œil architecture. Sometimes the lararium'', a shrine for the
Lares, the gods of the household, was located in this portico, or it might be found in the
atrium. The courtyard might contain flowers and shrubs, fountains, benches, sculptures and even fish ponds. Romans devoted as large a space to the peristyle as site constraints permitted. In the grandest development of the urban peristyle house, as it evolved in
Roman North Africa, often one part of the portico was eliminated for a larger open space. The end of the Roman
domus is one mark of the extinction of
late antiquity. Simon P. Ellis wrote in the
American Journal of Archaeology that it represented "the disappearance of the Roman peristyle house marks the end of the ancient world and its way of life." "No new peristyle houses were built after A.D. 550." Noting that as houses and villas were increasingly abandoned in the fifth century, a few palatial structures were expanded and enriched, as power and classical culture became concentrated in a narrowing class, and public life withdrew to the
basilica, or audience chamber, of the magnate. In the
Eastern Roman empire, late antiquity lingered longer: Ellis identified the latest-known peristyle house built from scratch as the Villa of the Falconer at
Argos, Peloponnese, dating from the style of its floor
mosaics to about 530–550. Existing houses in many cases were subdivided to accommodate a larger and less elite population in a warren of small spaces, and columned porticoes were enclosed in small cubicles, as at the House of Hesychius at
Cyrene. ==Other uses==