to realise this out-of-door life, lazy and
sociable, of the Augustan age, is to read the first book of Ovid's
_Ars Amatoria_,--a fascinating picture of a beautiful city and its
pleasure-loving inhabitants. But with the Augustan age we are not here
concerned.

Yet the Roman house, like the Italian house in general, was in origin
and essence really a home. The family was the basis of society, and by
the family we must understand not only the head of the house with
his wife, children, and slaves, but also the divine beings who dwelt
there. As the State comprised both human and divine inhabitants, so
also did the house, which was indeed the germ and type of the State.
Thus the house was in those early times not less but even more than a
house is for us, for in it was concentrated all that was dear to
the family, all that was essential to its life, both natural and
supernatural. And the two--the natural and supernatural--were not
distinct from each other, but associated, in fact almost identical;
the hearth-fire was the dwelling of Vesta, the spirit of the flame;
the Penates were the spirits of the stores on which the family
subsisted, and dwelt in the store-cupboard or larder; the
paterfamilias had himself a supernatural side, in the shape of his
Genius; and the Lar familiaris was the protecting spirit of the
farmland, who had found his way into the house in course of time,
perhaps with the slave labourers, who always had a share in his
worship.[376]

It would probably be unjust to the Roman of the late Republic to
assume that this beautiful idea of the common life of the human and
divine beings in a house was entirely ignored or forgotten by him. No
doubt the reality of the belief had vanished; it could not be said of
the city family, as Ovid, said of the farm-folk:[377]

ante focos olim scamnis considere longis
mos erat _et mensae credere adesse deos_.

The great noble or banker of Cicero's day could no longer honestly
say that he believed in the real presence of his family deities; the
kernel of the old feeling had shrunk away under the influence of Greek
philosophy and of new interests in life, new objects and ambitions.
But the shell remained, and in some families, or in moments of anxiety
and emotion, even the old feeling of _religio_ may have returned.
Cicero is appealing to a common sentiment, in a passage already
once quoted (_de Domo_, 109), when he insists on the real religious
character of a house: "h