THE VICES AND VIRTUES OP ROME 101 



payment by the poor. The municipalities everywhere 

 were compelled to maintain these. 1 The municipality 

 of Rome also provided a number of free medical men, 

 and medical treatment could be had free at any 

 temple of the healing god iEseulapius. 



The workers had their Trade Unions, or " Colleges " 

 as they called them. In every district the builders, 

 smiths, tanners, etc., had their own club-room, and 

 met periodically for suppers. They provided burial- 

 funds, and it is clear from the frequent condemnation 

 of them by the authorities that they were used for 

 keeping up wages, if not for political purposes. The 

 practice was borrowed from the Greek workers ; and 

 the early Guilds of the Middle Ages, which were at 

 first severely condemned by the Church, were- merely 

 continuations of the Roman trade combinations. 



We must also bear in mind that the civic heart of 

 Rome, the rows of magnificent buildings in the centre 

 of the city, were second only to those of Athens, and 

 were more available to the Roman workers than public 

 buildings are in any great city to-day. In Rome one 

 lived out of doors most of the year ; and the two great 

 crowded quarters, where the workers lived in four- 

 and five-story tenements, were close to the centre. 

 A few small rooms in a block — with a good supply of 

 pure water (free) and a sewage system such as the 

 world would not see again until the nineteenth 

 century — sufficed for the worker and his family. The 

 most distant was not a mile from the Forum, the old 

 market-place, now transformed into a double row of 

 marble palaces — law-courts, halls, temples, etc. The 



1 All these schools were saturated with Paganism — the only class- 

 books being Pagan literature — so that it is strange to claim that the 

 Church inspired them. It destroyed them as soon as it could. 



