From Dykes book "Introduction to Traditional Astrology", and Obert's "Introduction to Traditional Natal Astrology", they are all talking about stength and power of planets, when in certain signs, but never strong house or powerful houses.
Houses are just areas of life especially in Tradition Astrology, they are saying. Of course the houses have Angularity, such as Angular, Succendent and Cadent, but it is only meaningful when and which planets are posited in them?
I'd have to defer to Benjamin Dykes, who is one of only a handful of Hellenistic astrologers fluent in ancient Greek and Latin.
I have read in English translation, most of the readily available published sources (plus Valens, available in its entirety on lines, with some portions of it translated in book form.) These date from the first century to the late 6th century CE. My impression is that there were differences in how the authors interpreted and used houses. (Dorotheus (heavily glossed by a Muslim translator,) Manilius, Valens, Ptolemy, Firmicus Maternus, and Rhetorius are the main literary sources, with shorter works or fragments by other authors. We also have some archaeological finds of horoscopes, but they are in verbal, not graphic form for the most part.)
Angularity, esp. the ascendant and MC, did give a planet extra strength, for all the authors. Whether or how the astrologers divided up the quadrants into houses is a matter of some disagreement. So far as I can make out, our concept of houses derived from different systems, ranging from systems of telling time prior to the invention of clocks, and the Egyptian solar religion. prior to any surviving records of how the horoscope houses were developed. This probably happened in Hellenized Egypt.
Even without houses but with a quadrant system, the Hellenistic astrologers all used signs. The Mesopotamians had worked out ephemerides. So even if you didn't use houses back then, you could tell which sign was on the ascendant-DC or MC. Recall that with whole sign houses, the angles typically fall within a sign, not as the house cusps, which they do with quadrant systems.
I've paid attention to debates on the oldest horoscopic house system, and after some resistance, I do think whole signs were the primary system used in Antiquity, although other systems were known.
So, for example, if you determined that a baby was born with the sun in Pisces in late morning, just before the sun reached its highest point on its circuit, that would put the sun in an angular position.
The matters ruled by untenanted houses would depend upon the situation of the planet ruling the house cusp. (In whole signs, it would be zero degrees of a sign.) If the MC house/sign ruled by Pisces, for example, had no planets on it, the condition of Jupiter in the chart would tell you a lot about the person's public image. If Jupiter were in a cadent position, and not being helped out by the ascendant's trine relationship with the 9th house/sign, (for example, in the 6th house position, just after after sunrise,) and lacking in essential dignity, then the native's 10th house might not fare so well.
My general impression, which might be flawed, is that with a whole-signs house system, it wasn't so important to talk about houses, because you could just talk about signs in a relative position to one another.
There's a whole lot more there when you get into the particular sources.
But I think you will find the ancient names given to particular houses, as well as planetary joys:
1 ascendant, horoscope (point,) helm (as of a ship.) Mercury
2. provisionment of life, the "casting up" from the underworld.
3. brothers, the goddess. moon
4. father, or parents
5. good fortune. Venus
6. bad fortune. Mars
7. sometimes marriage, sometimes women generally
8. death, the "casting down" into the underworld
9. the god (sun)
10. midheaven
11. good daemon (spirit.) Jupiter
12. bad daemon. (Saturn)
So obviously, Having Jupiter in the 11th house would have put some points in Jupiter's column. Having Jupiter in the cadent house of bad fortune would have subtracted points.
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