d be tempting to indulge in rhetoric and to dwell upon the
magnificence of some of the more luxurious houses of the wealthy
Romans; to describe their ostentation of rich marbles in pillar, wall,
or floor--the white marbles of Carrara, Paros, and Hymettus; the
Phrygian marble or "pavonazzetto" its streakings of crimson or violet;
the orange-golden glow of the Numidian stone of "giallo antico"; the
Carystian marble or "cipollino" with its onion-like layers of white
and pale-green; the serpentine variety from Laconia, and the porphyry
from Egypt. We might descant upon the lavish wall-paintings,
representing landscapes real and imaginary, scenes from mythology and
semi-history, floating figures, genre pictures, and pictures of still
life; or upon the mosaics in floor and wall depicting similar subjects
and often serving to the occupants not so much in the place of
pictorial art as in the place of wall-papers and of Brussels or
Kidderminster carpets. We might speak of the profuse collections of
statuary, of the gilding on ceiling and cornices, of the colours shed
by the rich curtains and awnings of purple and crimson, of the
grateful sound of water plashing in the fountains and basins or
babbling over a series of steps like a broken cascade in miniature.
But perhaps too much of such description might only encourage still
further the erroneous notion that the Roman houses were all of this
nature, and that even the average Roman lived in the midst of an
abundance of such domestic luxury and art. It requires but a little
sober thought to realise that such homes were, as they have always
been, the exception. It would be as reasonable to judge of an average
London house by the most opulent specimens in Park Lane, or of an
American house by the richest at Newport, as to judge of the abodes of
Romans in the time of Nero by the examples which appeal so strongly to
the novelist or the romancing historian. Suffice it that beside the
modest and frugal homes, the tenement flat, and the hovel, there were
houses distinguished by immense luxury; and, since Romans have at all
times sought the ostentatious and grandiose, perhaps such dwellings
were larger and more pretentious in proportion to wealth than they are
in most civilised countries at the present day. Seneca, who made
himself extremely comfortable in the days of Nero, exclaims upon the
rage for costly decoration. Says he of the bathing of the plutocrat:
"He seems to himself poor and