Ancient Roman Country Houses 
same period, corresponding to the variety in 
the purse and taste of their builders, as well 
as in the situation and purpose of the various 
villas of the same owner. While some were 
no doubt splendid with marble columns, 
carving and sculpture, others, and perhaps 
the majority, were probably quite plain in 
external design. Rubble and brick, heavily 
stuccoed, were probably the commonest 
materials for walls, and the roots were low- 
pitched, framed of timber and covered with 
tiles like those one sees all through Southern 
Europe to-day. The chief elegance of these 
houses was in their various courtyards— 
atria or peristyles, as they were called—such 
as one sees in ruined Pompeii, but much 
larger. These, planted with trees, flowers 
and grass, refreshed by fountains and marble 
basins of crystal water, shaded by trees or 
by rich awnings, surrounded by sumptuously 
decorated colonnades, paved with marble 
and adorned with statues, marble tables and 
exedras , and an altar, were the chief centers 
of the family life. In a large villa there 
were several of these, of different sizes and 
exposures, with open-fronted triclinia or 
dining-rooms and small cubicula or sleeping- 
Fig. VII-TYPES OF TOWER-LIKE STRUCTURES 
From Pompeiian IFall Paintings 
rooms opening upon some, and libraries, 
1 o u n g i n g-r o o m s and withdrawing-rooms 
opening upon others. The villas spread 
over a vast extent of ground, with open 
porticoes and enclosed passages ( cryptopor - 
ticus) connecting the several parts, and were 
for the most part but one story high, though 
here and there were square towers, turrets or 
pavilions rising with two or three stories 
above the rest, providing seclusion and a 
wide prospect. These square towers with 
broad eaves and low roofs are a familiar 
element in modern Italian architecture. 
Undoubtedly the finest feature of the 
antique villas was their formal gardening, to 
which reference has already been made. In 
these terraced gardens, with their marble 
walks and balustrades, their niches, exedras 
and fountains, their clipped boxwood hedges, 
their clumps of myrtle and laurel and rose, 
their beds of violets and other fragrant 
Fig. VIII-TOWER-LIKE BUILDINGS 
WITH THATCHED BARN 
From Pompeiian IVall Paintings 
flowers, the Roman bestowed a large part of 
the works of art which we gather into 
museums; for in these gardens he lived much 
of his social life. He bought Greek statues 
as American millionaires buy Trench paint¬ 
ings. Cicero was constantly ordering them 
of his agents. “ Your Hermathena pleases 
me greatly,” he writes. “It stands so prettily 
that the whole lecture-room looks like a 
chapel of the deity.” And again : “ As for 
the statues you sent me before, I have not 
seen them. They are at Formiae ” (the 
Newport or Lenox of Cicero’s time; “it is a 
public hall I have here, not a country house” 
he once wrote from Formiae),—“whither 1 am 
now about to go. But I shall remove them all 
to my place at Tusculum.” (Cicero, Letters; 
Ad Atticum, I, 4, 2.) In the gardens also 
were shrines and aedicules. One form of gate¬ 
like structure constantly reappearing in the 
paintings and reliefs (see Fig. IV) appears to 
be a tree-shrine, erected in connection with a 
sacred tree or tree dedicated to some deity. 
III. 
In considering the various representations 
from paintings, it must be remembered that 
in most cases the drawing is of the most 
summary character, and no dependence can 
be placed upon the correctness of the pro¬ 
portions or details. Most of them may be 
8 
