same love of a real holiday that we all know so well in our modern life.  “Leisure,” says Cicero, is not “contentio animi sed relaxatio”; and in a charming passage he goes on to describe Scipio and Laelius gathering shells on the sea-shore, and becoming boys again (repuerascere).[389] This desire for ease and relaxation, for the chance of being for a while your true self,—­a self worth something apart from its existence as a citizen, is apparent in the Roman of Cicero’s day, and still more in the hard-working functionary of the Empire.  Twice in his life the morbid emperor Tiberius shrank from the eyes of men, once at Rhodes and afterwards at Capreae,—­a melancholy recluse worn out by hard work.

Everyman had to provide his own “health resort” in those days:  there was nothing to correspond to the modern hotel.  Even at the great luxurious watering-places on the Campanian coast, Baiae and Bauli, the houses, so far as we know, were all private residences.[390] I do not propose to include in this chapter any account of these centres of luxury and vice, which were far indeed from giving any rest or relief to the weary Roman; the society of Baiae was the centre of scandal and gossip, where a woman like Clodia, the Lesbia of Catullus, could live in wickedness before the eyes of all men.[391] Let us turn to a more agreeable subject, and illustrate the country-house and the country life of the last age of the Republic by a rapid visit to Cicero’s own villas.  This has fortunately been made easy for us by the very delightful work of Professor O.E.  Schmidt, whose genuine enthusiasm for Cicero took him in person to all these sites, and inspired him to write of them most felicitously.[392]

There being no hotels, among which the change-loving Roman of Cicero’s day could pick and choose a retreat for a holiday, he would buy a site for a villa first in one place, then in another, or purchase one ready built, or transform an old farm-house of his own into a residence with “modern requirements.”  In choosing his sites he would naturally look southwards, and find what he sought for either in the choicer parts of Latium, among the hills and woods of the Mons Albanus and Tusculum, or in the rich Campanian land, the paradise of the lazy Roman; in the latter case, he would like to be close to the sea on that delicious coast, and even in Latium there were spots where, like Scipio and Laelius, he might wander on the sea-shore.  All this country to the south was beginning to be covered with luxurious and convenient houses; in the colder and mountainous parts of central Italy the villa was still the farm-house of the older useful type, of which the object was the cultivation of olive and vine, now coming into fashion, as we have already seen.  For Cicero and his friends the word villa no longer suggested farming, as it invariably did for the old Roman, and as we find it in Cato’s treatise on agriculture; it meant gardens, libraries, baths, and collections of works of art, with plenty