e
atrium became a tetrastyle. Some authors mention still other kinds of
_atria_--the Corinthian, which was richly decorated; the _dipluviatum_,
where the roof, instead of sloping inward, sloped outward and threw off
the rain-water into the street; the _testudinatum_, in which the roof
looked like an immense tortoise-shell, etc. But these forms of roofs,
especially the last mentioned, were rare, and the Tuscan atrium was
almost everywhere predominant, as we find it on Pansa's house.

Place yourself at the end of the alley, with your back toward the
street, and you command a view of this little court and its
dependencies. It is needless to say that the roof has disappeared: the
eruption consumed the beams, the tiles have been broken by falling, and
not only the tiles but the antefixes, cut in palm-leaves or in lion's
heads, which spouted the water into the impluvium. Nothing remains but
the basin and the partition walls which marked the subdivisions of the
ground-floor. One first discovers a room of considerable size at the
end, between a smaller room and a corridor, and eight other side
cabinets. Of these eight cabinets, the six that come first, three to the
right and three to the left, were bedrooms, or _cubicula_. What first
strikes the observer is their diminutive size. There was room only for
the bed, which was frequently indicated by an elevation of the masonry,
and on that mattresses or sheepskins were stretched. The bedsteads often
were also of bronze or wood, quite like those of our time. These
cubicula received the air and the light through the door, which the
Pompeians probably left open in summer.

Next to the cubicula came laterally the _alae_, the wings, in which
Pansa (if not Paratus) received his visitors in the morning--friends,
clients, parasites. These rooms must have been rich, paved, as they
were, with lozenges of marble and surrounded with seats or divans. The
large room at the end was the _tablinum_, which separated, or rather
connected, the two courts and ascended by two steps to the peristyle. In
this tablinum, which was a show-room or parlor, were kept the archives
of the family, and the _imagines majorum_, or images of ancestors, which
were wax figures extolled in grand inscriptions, stood there in rows.
You have observed that they were conducted with great pomp in the
funeral processions. The Romans did not despise these exhibitions of
vanity. They clung all the more tenaciously to their ances