ed instructive and ardent appreciation
of art for its own sake; and that, like his cultivation of
intellectual society or learning, his cultivation of art was rather
that of a man determined to be on a level with the culture of his
times. Nevertheless the fact is palpable, that the cultivation was
there, and was displayed in public architecture and in household
embellishment in a way which puts the modern world to shame. With us
art is a luxury for the few, and a keen enjoyment for still fewer; in
the age of Nero it penetrated the life of every class.

In architecture the native Roman gift was for the practical combined
with the massive and grandiose. The structures in which they
themselves excelled were the amphitheatre, the public baths, the
triumphal arch, the basilica, the bridge, and the aqueduct. Their
mastery of the arch, their excellent concrete, and their engineering
genius, enabled them to produce works in this kind which had had no
parallels in the Greek world. Nor had the Greeks felt the same need
for such buildings. They had been innocent of gladiatorial shows, and
they had been unfortunately too innocent of large conceptions in the
way of water-supply. When an amphitheatre or aqueduct of the Roman
kind was to be found in the graecized half of the empire, it was
constructed under Roman influence. The modern may well afford to
wonder at and envy the profusion of such structures in the ancient
world. How noble and at the same time how strong was the work of the
Romans when they undertook to supply even a provincial town with
abundant and adequate water, is manifest from such aqueducts as are
still to be seen at Nimes (FIG. 1) or at Segovia. In other
architectural conceptions the Romans of the time of Nero mainly
followed the Greek lead and employed Greek artists. The architectural
"orders" were Greek, with sundry Graeco-Roman modifications,
particularly in the way of more ornate or fantastic Corinthian
capitals; the notions of sculptural decoration were equally of
Hellenic origin. Their theatres also were of the Greek kind adapted in
non-essentials to the somewhat different conditions of a Roman
performance. The Greek taste in decoration was the simpler and purer:
the Roman cultivated the sumptuous and the ornate, sometimes, with
conspicuous success, often with an overloaded effect. As Friedlander
(who, however, deals with a much longer period than ours) puts the
matter: "Nowhere, least of all at Rome, was a