Apotheca
ἀποθήκη
Apotheca (ἀποθήκη), a storehouse or magazine (Thuc. 6.97; Cic. Phil. 2.27, Vatin. 5; Dig. 33, 7, 12; Vulg. Par. 1, 27, 28, &c.) for books (Luc. Indoct. 5); a burial-place (id. Contempl. 22); especially a place in the upper part of the house in which the Romans kept their wine in amphorae. It was usually above the fumarium, since it was thought that the passage of the smoke through the room tended greatly to increase the flavour of the wine. (Col. 1.6.20; Hor. Carm. 3.8.11, Sat. 2.5, 7). Hence Horace's expression (Carm. 3.21, 7) Descende, testa. The apotheca was thus quite distinct from the cella vinaria, in which wine was kept in dolia and cupae until it was fit to be bottled (diffundere), as we should say, into the amphorae, or, if it was not considered good enough to mature (aetatem ferre), was drunk straight from the larger vessels. (Becker-Göll, Gallus, iii. pp. 50, 427.)
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.