e could find only in his
country-houses. The first great Roman of whom we know that he had a
rural villa, not only or chiefly for farming purposes, but as a refuge
from the city and its tumult, was Scipio Africanus the elder. His
villa at Liternum on the Campanian coast is described by Seneca in his
86th epistle; it was small, and without the comforts and conveniences
of the later country-house; but its real significance lies not so much
in the increasing wealth that could make a residence possible without
a farm attached to it, but in the growing sense of individuality that
made men wish for such a retreat. There are other signs that Scipio
was a man of strong personality, unlike the typical Roman of his day;
he put a value upon his own thoughts and habits, apart from his duty
to the State, and retired to Liternum to indulge them. The younger
Scipio too (Aemilianus), though no blood-relation of his, had the same
instinct, but in his case it was rather the desire for leisure and
relaxation,--the same love of a real holiday that we all know so well
in our modern life. "Leisure," says Cicero, is not "contentio animi
sed relaxatio"; and in a charming passage he goes on to describe
Scipio and Laelius gathering shells on the sea-shore, and becoming
boys again (repuerascere).[389] This desire for ease and relaxation,
for the chance of being for a while your true self,--a self worth
something apart from its existence as a citizen, is apparent in the
Roman of Cicero's day, and still more in the hard-working functionary
of the Empire. Twice in his life the morbid emperor Tiberius shrank
from the eyes of men, once at Rhodes and afterwards at Capreae,--a
melancholy recluse worn out by hard work.

Everyman had to provide his own "health resort" in those days: there
was nothing to correspond to the modern hotel. Even at the great
luxurious watering-places on the Campanian coast, Baiae and Bauli, the
houses, so far as we know, were all private residences.[390] I do not
propose to include in this chapter any account of these centres of
luxury and vice, which were far indeed from giving any rest or relief
to the weary Roman; the society of Baiae was the centre of scandal and
gossip, where a woman like Clodia, the Lesbia of Catullus, could live
in wickedness before the eyes of all men.[391] Let us turn to a more
agreeable subject, and illustrate the country-house and the country
life of the last age of the Republic by a rapid visit to C