Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Rome (Yesterday's Classics) by James Baikie Page B

fair idea of the Roman home when he shows us through it. 5
    The building covers a whole street-block, or "island," as the Romans call it; but that does not mean that Publius himself occupies the whole. The average Roman does not mind so much about the outside of his house, so long as the inside pleases him, and Publius has planned his house so that the frontage and the two sides are divided into little shops, which are let to various tenants, and bring him in a good round sum every year. We knock at a door between two of these shops, and after we have waited a moment in the narrow vestibule till the porter has taken a glance at us through his spy-hole in one of the door-posts, the leaves of the door slide back in their groove and we enter the inner hall, stepping across a threshold inscribed with the word "Salve!" (Welcome) in mosaic.
    This inner hall leads us to what in old Republican days was the chief room of every Roman house. We have a greater variety of rooms now, but the "atrium," as it is called, still keeps a kind of official position in the house. It is a large oblong room, lit only from the centre of the roof, where there is a square opening, which admits light, fresh air, and all the rain that is going. Beneath this roof-window lies an open tank bordered with coloured marbles, into which the rain from the house roof pours through terra-cotta spouts—a picturesque and cool arrangement, but decidedly damp and unwholesome, especially in rainy weather. The floor is laid with mosaic pavement, and the walls are painted with a crimson dado, and with frescoes of landscape and legend. Near the tank stand the images of the household gods, and a little altar, consecrated to them, which is supposed to typify the hospitable hearth of the house. Round the atrium are grouped six bedrooms, small and stuffy, like most Roman sleeping-rooms.
    At the far end of the atrium heavy curtains are hung from a row of four pillars. Drawing the central curtain aside, we enter a small room, gorgeously decorated with paintings and floored with beautiful mosaic. It is the room where all the family records are kept, and its sumptuousness shows the importance which a Roman household attached to its history. On the left side of this sacred chamber is the little library of the master of the house, with a cabinet of antique gems and coins in which he takes great pride; on the right, beyond a lobby, lies a small breakfast-room.
    The lobby leads us out into a beautiful open court. Round the four sides of it runs a broad shady veranda, up whose pillars climbing plants twine their tendrils; and several other bedrooms open on this gallery. In the centre of the court, and embowered in flowering shrubs, lies the basin of a fountain which sends its jet of clear water from the Sabine hills high into the sunlight. One or two graceful statues rise among the greenery around the fountain, and altogether, the shade, the coolness, and the pleasant tinkling of the falling waters make this one of the most attractive parts of the house, especially on a day of blazing sunshine.
    The large dining-room, with its horseshoe table, opens off this court to the right; while on the other side of the court, behind the bedrooms, lie the kitchen and the other workrooms of the house. Last of all, we pass between the pillars at the back of the court into the garden, which is laid out in formal beds, gay with colour, and backed by a handsome colonnade, in the centre of which stands a kind of summer lounge, where meals are often brought when the fine weather tempts one to live out of doors.
    Such is the house where we shall live for a while in Rome, and you may take it as a fair specimen of the home of a good, well-to-do Roman citizen of the upper middle-class. On the whole, while it has a good deal of dignity, the luxurious folks of later ages might object that it inclined to be chilly and draughty, and altogether lacking in the cosiness that really makes a house home; but the Roman