Ancient Roman Country Houses 
sions of parasites, suitors, 
dependents and politi¬ 
cians ; the noise and 
smells and other “disa¬ 
greeables” of the city 
streets. Yet all these 
we must take into con¬ 
sideration before we can 
grasp the full significance 
of country life to the 
Roman, or read with 
intelligent appreciation 
the letters of Cicero to 
Atticus, or of Pliny to 
Gall us and Appollinaris, 
describing their villas at 
Tusculum, Laurentinum, 
Puteoli, and others in the 
hills of Tuscany. 
Rome was a city unlike 
those of our day. A large 
part of its area was given 
up to public buildings — 
temples, theatres, basili¬ 
cas, baths; and another 
large part to places of 
public resort—fora, 
gardens and colonnades. 
The mass of the popu¬ 
lation was housed in a 
comparatively restricted 
area, crowded into tene¬ 
ment blocks or insulae , 
piled up in many stories, 
dark and insalubrious. 
The saving element in the lives of the teeming 
thousands in these insulae^N^ the Roman habit 
of life in the open ; the house was a mere 
aggregation of sleeping cells, to which the 
workingman or slave retired like a mole to his 
burrow. Around this city of vast open spaces, 
superb monuments and squalid insulae , 
spread a fringe of suburban residences, more 
and more spacious as one proceeded out 
towards the green Campagna; and finally 
beyond these, a vast ring of villas or groups 
of villas, extending far out towards the Alban 
Mountains in the southeast, towards Tivoli 
and Subiaco to the east, and northwards 
along the innumerable affluents of the Tiber. 
Daily the man of affairs was borne in his 
litter to and fro between Rome and his villa 
or suburbanum, in the nearer circuits of 
A ROMAN ROOM AT POMPEII 
With IHosaic Floor and Panned IValls 
country houses; while in those more remote, 
the jaded politician, the wealthy patrician, 
and the official whom business no longer 
called to the Forum or basilica, sought rest 
and pleasure far from the city’s turmoil. 
Fanned by mountain breezes and lulled by 
the murmur of mountain streamlets turned 
to service in the fountains and cascades of 
his terraced gardens, he rested from the cares 
of business or of state. The wealthy 
Roman was not content with a villa or two : 
he must have a half dozen or more, so 
variously situated and appointed as to fur¬ 
nish him with a resort for every change of 
mood or of the weather. Pliny the Younger 
mentions five in his letters ; Cicero had as 
many. The lot of a literary politician in 
those days seems not to have been a hard 
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