vast mass of suffering humanity, both bond and free with which the Roman dominion was populated; to disregard misery, except when they found it among the privileged classes, had become second nature to them.  We can better realise this if we reflect that even at the present day, in spite of the absence of slavery and the presence of philanthropical societies, the average man of wealth gives hardly more than a passing thought to the discomfort and distress of the crowded population of our great cities.  The ordinary callousness of human nature had, under the baleful influence of slavery, become absolute blindness, nor were men’s eyes to be opened until Christianity began to leaven the world with the doctrine of universal love.

CHAPTER VIII

THE HOUSE OF THE RICH MAN, IN TOWN AND COUNTRY

We saw that the poorer classes in Rome were lodged in huge insulae, and enjoyed nothing that can be called home life.  The wealthy families, on the other hand, lived in domus, i.e. separate dwellings, accommodating only one family, often, even in the Ciceronian period, of great magnificence.  But even these great houses hardly suggest a life such as that which we associate with the word home.  As Mr. Tucker has pointed out in the case of Athens,[375] the warmer climates of Greece and Italy encouraged all classes to spend much more of their time out of doors and in public places than we do; and the rapid growth of convenient public buildings, porticoes, basilicas, baths, and so on, is one of the most striking features in the history of the city during the last two centuries B.C.  Augustus, part of whose policy it was to make the city population comfortable and contented, carried this tendency still further, and under the Empire the town house played quite a subordinate part in Roman social life.  The best way 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]