know
nothing about it. For if the alarm begin from the bottom of the stairs,
he will be the last to be burned whom a single tile protects from the
rain where the tame pigeons lay their eggs." (Clearly they had no
air-shafts in the Roman tenements!) "Codrus had a bed too small for his
Procula; six little jugs, the ornament of his sideboard, and a little
can, besides, beneath it.... What a height it is from the lofty roofs
from which a potsherd tumbles on your brains. How often cracked and
chipped earthenware falls from the windows.... Pray and bear about with
you the miserable wish that they may be contented with throwing down
only what the broad basins have held.... If you can tear yourself away
from the games in the circus, you can buy a capital house at Sora, or
Fabrateria, or Frasino, for the price at which you are now hiring your
dark hole for one year. There you will have your little garden ... live
there enamoured of the pitchfork.... It is something to be able in any
spot to have made oneself proprietor even of a single lizard.... None
but the wealthy can sleep in Rome."[3]

[Footnote 3: Satire III, Juvenal.]

One reads with a grim smile of the hold-ups of old: "'Where do you come
from?' he (policeman?) thunders out. 'You don't answer? Speak or be
kicked! Say, where do you hang out?' It is all one whether you speak or
hold your tongue; they beat you just the same, and then, in a passion,
force you to give bail to answer for the assault.... I must be off. Let
those stay ... for whom it is an easy matter to get contracts for
building temples, clearing rivers, constructing harbors, cleansing
sewers, etc."[4] Not even in the boss and his pull can we claim
exclusive right.

[Footnote 4: Satire III, Juvenal.]

Rome had its walls, as New York has its rivers, and they played a like
part in penning up the crowds. Within space became scarce and dear, and
when there was no longer room to build in rows where the poor lived,
they put the houses on top of one another. That is the first chapter of
the story of the tenement everywhere. Gibbon quotes the architect
Vitruvius, who lived in the Augustan age, as complaining of "the common
though inconvenient practice of raising houses to a considerable height
in the air. But the loftiness of the buildings, which often consisted of
hasty work and insufficient material, was the cause of frequent and
fatal accidents, and it was repeatedly enacted by Augustus as well as by
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