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The common word domus can mean both "house" and "home". How can I make a distinction between a house and a home in Latin? For example, I might buy a house but it doesn't feel like a home yet, or I might have a home despite having no house or apartment to live in. You can replace "house" with any physical place where people live, like an apartment; my goal is to find a way to distinguish a place built for the purpose of living (a house) and a place where I belong and feel safe (a home).

Does the Latin literature perhaps have this distinction somewhere? The closest thing that came to mind is the saying ubi cor ibi patria, but it doesn't really help disambiguating between houses and homes. What I would really like is a pair of words which could be used for "house" and "home". It seems that casa (and probably others as well) could be used to mean "house but not home" (although it does refer to low-end housing) but I found no word for "home but not house".

Do you have any suggestions for "house" and "home" in Latin?

Joonas Ilmavirta
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    Perhaps some distinction could be made with habito vs versor? – Nickimite Jul 21 '20 at 18:39
  • @Nickimite Making the distinction with verbs never crossed my mind, but that sounds like a good idea. Especially if those two are an attested contrasting pair in that sense, that would be great. – Joonas Ilmavirta Jul 21 '20 at 18:47
  • @Joonas llmavirta: In English "at home" has a feeling of comfort; security; peace-of-mind. Americans invite guests to "make themselves at home". In Latin "domi" = "at home"; "postquam domi suae lesum hospitio recepit..." = "after welcoming Jesus to his home..." (Glosbe: Uses of domi). – tony Jul 22 '20 at 10:54
  • @tony That is precisely the sense of "home" I am after. Indeed, domus can mean this but it can also refer to the physical building. The distinction is hard to make with it, although it's certainly the most important word in this topic. – Joonas Ilmavirta Jul 22 '20 at 11:04

2 Answers2

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A word for “house” is probably the easy part:

  • aedes, -ium, f. literally means “rooms.” Only fits if your dwelling has more than one room, although, if it has only one, you could call it aedis.
  • domicilium and habitatio are pretty generic terms

However, I am partial to tectum (roof) in the metonymical sense, which I think emphasises the function of a living place to shelter you from the elements, and no more.

For “home” as the place where you belong and feel safe, I would suggest lar. It literally refers to the lares domestici, the Roman household gods that belonged to the house and often had a small shrine near the hearth, but metonymically also stands for someone's home. Lar familiaris seems to have been used in the sense of “familiar home,” e.g. Sallust quotes Catilina holding a speech about social inequality (that might as well have been held by a Frenchman in 1789 or a Russian in 1917):

Etenim quis mortalium, cui virile ingenium est, tolerare potest […] illos binas aut amplius domos continuare, nobis larem familiarem nusquam ullum esse?
What mortal with a manly character can bear it […] when they are joining two or more houses together, while we have nowhere a familiar hearth?

So if you wanted to say (for example after moving to a city): “I've found a place to live, but I haven't established a home yet.” – you could say: Tectum subii, sed etiamnum sine lare familiari sum.

Sebastian Koppehel
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    Excelent suggestion! I would have thought that the plural lares would be more common, but your quote from Sallust gainsays my prejudice. – Figulus Jul 21 '20 at 23:11
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    Excellent indeed. Spanish uses hogar, a hearth, which is exactly the same idea minus gods. The only snag might be if you wanted to say that Rome is a city of half a million lares, because that implies (which is absurd) one lar per household. It is one of those cases where one needs plurals of plurals... – Martin Kochanski Jul 22 '20 at 06:56
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    As a portugese speaker, we use a lot "LAR" to mean home. I can have a home, even if I dont have house. I, and my wife and kids, can have a home, even if we live over the streets, one street each day. As we still hold together, support each other, rely on each other, we have a quit strong LAR, even without house. – Tiago Marques Jul 22 '20 at 09:01
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    Just adding, I hope, an interesting "cent" to enforce the "lar" as a good word for what you are looking for.

    I believe "Home, sweet home" has become an american saying (just learnt this origin is a song) and I believe people use it exactly to express a place they feel comfortable, at ease, safe and enjoy being at.

    In Portuguese, the same would be "Lar, doce lar" which is also used to express the same and as far as I could find it comes directly from the latim "LAR".

     – FEST Jul 22 '20 at 15:28
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    @Figulus To be sure, the dictionaries also list plural uses in this sense. For some reason, in one example Ovid prefers the plural tecta, but still the singular larem: “nunc avis in ramo tecta laremque parat” (Fasti III 242). Who knew birds had lares too? – Sebastian Koppehel Jul 26 '20 at 11:07
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    @FEST This Portuguese use is most fascinating. I would have thought lar might be a bit too culturally specific to be used in a context where we, well, do not believe in domestic lares, but at least the Portuguese seem not to have thought so. Apparently in Spanish you also can say lar for hogar, but it seems to be a latter-day “learned borrowing” from Latin. – Sebastian Koppehel Jul 26 '20 at 11:11
  • This answer has been nominated as one of the best answers of 2020. – Joonas Ilmavirta Jul 08 '21 at 10:52
  • Your suggestion of lār for 'home' is a welcome surprise to me, and even more fascinating is the fact it's still used for 'hearth' in Galician-Portuguese, esp. metonymically. But I would like to offer corrections as well: 1) habitatium should be *habitātiō;* cf. the rare habitāculum. 2) tēctō subiī should be *tēctum* and the meaning is "I've walked under a roof, covered myself with a roof", i.e. "entered a house". It describes physical movement/change of location and cannot be used to mean "I've found a place to live". 3) etiam requires -num or -dum to mean "still, yet". – Unbrutal_Russian Apr 15 '22 at 23:56
  • @Unbrutal_Russian Thank you, I have corrected these. It is not clear to me why you object to the dative tecto; do you agree with this person that «[apud Virgilium saltem, verbum subire] accusativo adiuncto significat intrare, dativo prope accedere»? On what grounds do you think it must be read literally? Caesar wrote, «Germani, exercitatissimi in armis, qui inter annos XIII tectum non subissent» (BG I, 36; they had been in the field fourteen years, not exactly the same thing, but surely Ariovist was not … – Sebastian Koppehel Apr 16 '22 at 12:10
  • … suggesting they had never sought shelter from rain, I think). – Sebastian Koppehel Apr 16 '22 at 12:10
  • Yes it's clear that "to enter inside the location" is expressed with the accusative, and "to approach it" with the dative, as that commentary says and as you can see for yourself by consulting L&S.—The grounds for reading it literally is the same as in any language I know - the verb in question expresses physical entrance into a space. tēctum means "roof of a house" - the soldiers hadn't entered a house for 13 years, being on a continuous campaign. In English "he hasn't stepped inside a house" can be used in the same way, but "he stepped inside a house" can't mean "He found a place to live" – Unbrutal_Russian Apr 16 '22 at 14:08
  • sēdēs, is f. abode, residence (see Gaffiot), which could stand for home. In «Fabulae Faciles: A First Latin Reader», by Ritchie, 1884, you read ille matrem et puerum benigne excepit, et eis sedem tutam in finibus suis dedit – pápilió Apr 17 '22 at 18:01
  • @Unbrutal_Russian that does not seem so clear to me. What are we to make of this example, quoted by L&S: aut dumis subit, albenti si sensit in aethra librantem nisus aquilam, lepus (Sil. 5, 283)? The rabbit does presumably not just approach the shrubbery. – Sebastian Koppehel Apr 23 '22 at 12:24
  • I'm unsure how to answer so I'll flip it around. Suppose you as a fluent English & German speaker read the sentence "I've gone to the house", which the author claims to mean 'Ich hab eine Wohnung gefunden'. You explain to them that 1) it should be 'gone into the house' because to means 'zum, in Richtung Haus gehen' expressing direction, and in means 'das Haus betreten'; but most importantly 2) 'das Haus betreten' cannot mean 'einen Wohnungsplatz finden'. Because there's no such custom, ritual or cultural metaphor where you become a permanent occupant of any house that you enter. – Unbrutal_Russian Apr 23 '22 at 15:50
  • —And that person says: "but what about 'John went to the shop to buy some food while his mother went to the cinema'? Presumably he didn't just approach the shop, while his mother probably didn't just walk in the direction of the cinema and come back." How would you reply? – Unbrutal_Russian Apr 23 '22 at 15:50
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If you want to refer to home as in a special place, domus is the word to use, though there are also figurative options, like focus, meaning hearth, or by metonymy, home. I believe similar terms have been mentioned in another answer.

If you want to talk about a house, the word casa was used to mean house in Late and Medieval Latin, while in Classical Latin it meant hut, cottage, or cabin. Another answer mentions aedes, which works in Classical Latin.

Mansio means a dwelling, according to Lewis and Short, when used with a genitive:

II. Transf. (post-Aug.), a place of abode, a dwelling, habitation. A. In gen.: pecorum mansio, Plin. 18, 23, 53, § 194: aestivae, hibernae, vernae, auctumnales, Pall. 1, 9, 5; 1, 12: mansionem apud eum faciemus, Vulg. Joann. 14, 23: multae mansiones, id. ib. 14, 2.

Mansio also is a night quarters or inn, or, in the context of a journey, a stopping place/station.

Habitatio can mean dwelling, but also the rent for a dwelling.

Keep in mind, with habitatio and mansio, they're derived from the verbs habitare and manere; they still both retain their meanings as action nouns.

NanoEta
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