Phase IIIb: Augustan Modifications
 | | Fig. 18: The House of Diana, 20-40 A.D. (EF) |
While most of the substantial modifications to the house took place two generations or more after the initial reoccupation of the house, one significant change seems to have been made in the rear of the house relatively soon after its reconstruction. Here the northwestern column and half-column of the loggia were absorbed by a gray-mortared curtain wall (231) closing off the triclinium (K) from the garden. This new wall ended at the line of the wall between J and K (194), bonding with a wall stub that ran back toward the front of the house along the same line (193). This wall stub was mirrored by another built out from and abutting the wall between J and K; together, they formed the sides of a door separating K from the loggia (Q). On the pavement coinciding with the doorjambs, roughly square marks may indicate the position of wooden trim; they may also be the traces of cuts made in the floor to lay more solid foundations for a wall that would have borne the load of the back slope of the roof of the house. It is difficult to tell whether the wall reached the full height of the room, but its size and solid construction technique, as well as the possibility of new foundations cut through the extant floor, suggest that it did. The process of the construction of this wall seems also to have left its mark in the garden, where a thin, irregular patch of gray mortar (371) trampled into the Augustan garden surface near the gutter may be construction debris. The new wall was frescoed on both sides, and similar painting in the rest of the area of the garden probably dates to the same period.
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