mean, unless the walls shine with great
costly slabs, unless marbles of Alexandria are picked out with reliefs
of Numidian stone, unless the whole ceiling is elaborately worked with
all the variety of a painting, unless Thasian stone encloses the
swimming baths, unless the water is poured out from silver taps."
These, indeed, are comparatively humble. "What of the baths of the
freedmen? a mass of statues! What a multitude of pillars supporting
nothing, but put there only for ornament! What an amount of water
running over steps with a purling noise--and all for show!"

[Illustration: FIG. 44.--SPECIMEN OF WALL-PAINTING. (Pompeii.)]

CHAPTER X

THE COUNTRY HOMESTEAD AND COUNTRY SEAT

Throughout the romanized parts of the empire--in other words, wherever
Romans settled, in Italy, Spain, Gaul, Britain, and also wherever the
richer natives imitated the Roman fashions--the house in any city or
considerable town was built as nearly as possible after the type
described.

In the country the poor naturally had their much simpler cottages and
cabins of a room or two, commonly thatched or shingled, knowing
nothing of hall and court and all these arrangements of art and
luxury. In the case of the more well-to-do country people of
Italy--the larger farmers, wine-growers, olive-growers, and the
like--the homestead was of a kind which made for simplicity and
comfort. It was in such homes that one would find the most wholesome
life and the soundest moral fibre of the time.

Normally the homestead would be a large, and often a rambling,
building of one storey, except where a tower served as a store-room
for the mellowing wine or a loft for the mellowing fruit. When we read
in Horace about the liberal stack of wood to be kept in readiness near
the hearth, and about the wine-jar drinking in the smoke in the
store-room we must think of his country homestead on the Sabine Hills,
not of a house in Rome, for at Rome there was no blazing hearth to sit
round and no smoky tower-loft for the ripening of the Caecuban.

You enter an open court or yard, round the sides of which may run the
stalls of the horses and oxen of the farm, the tool-rooms, the lofts
of hay and corn, the quarters of the labourers--herdsmen, ploughmen,
vine-dressers--and the great farm-kitchen. It is in this kitchen that
you will find the bright hearth in winter-time, where all the members
of the homestead gather round the fire. It is here that they then all
ea