Armarium
Armarium (locus, ubi quarumcunque artium instrumenta ponuntur, Isidor. 15.5), a cupboard, set upright in the wall of a room, for food, clothes, books, money, and household utensils in general. Tradesmen appear to have kept their stock in armaria; Jahn gives a representation of one in a cutler's shop, and there is another, from a shoemaker's shop, figured in the Pitture d'Ercolano, i. p. 187. The armarium was generally placed in the atrium of the house. (Dig. 33, tit. 10, s. 3; Cato, Cat. Agr. 11, 3; Plaut. Capt. 4.4, 10, Ep. 2.3, 3, Men. 3.3, 8; Cic. Cluent. 64, 169, Cael. 21, 52; Petron. Sat. 29; Plin. Nat. 29.101; Hieron. Ep. 22.) The same name was given to a cupboard for holding books (Plin. Ep. 2.17, 8), and to the divisions of a library. (Vitruv. vii. Praef. § 10; Vopisc. Tac. 8; Dig. 32, tit. 1, s. 52, § § 3, 7.) We find armarium distegum mentioned as a kind of sepulchre in an inscription (Orelli, Inscript. No. 4549).
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.