1.  It was of course impossible in a city like Rome that each man, married or unmarried, should have his own house; this is not so even in the great majority of modern industrial towns, though we in England are accustomed to see our comparatively well-to-do artisans dwelling in cottages spreading out into the country.  At Rome only the wealthy families lived in separate houses (domus), about which we shall have something to say in another chapter.  The mass of the population lived, or rather ate and slept (for southern climates favour an out-of-door life), in huge lodging-houses called islands (insulae), because they were detached from other buildings, and had streets on all sides of them, as islands have water.[42] These insulae were often three or four stories high;[43] the ground-floor was often occupied by shops, kept perhaps by some of the lodgers, and the upper floors by single rooms, with small windows looking out on the street or into an interior court.  The common name for such a room was coenaculum, or dining-room, a word which seems to be taken over from the coenaculum of private houses, i.e. an eating-room on the first floor, where there was one.  Once indeed we hear of an aedicula, in an insula, which was perhaps the equivalent of a modern “flat”; it was inhabited by a young bachelor of good birth, M. Caelius Rufus, the friend of Cicero, and in this case the insula was probably one of a superior kind.[44] The common lodging-house must have been simply a rabbit-warren, the crowded inhabitants using their rooms only for eating and sleeping, while for the most part they prowled about, either idling or getting such employment as they could, legitimate or otherwise.

In such a life there could of course have been no idea of home, or of that simple and sacred family life which had once been the ethical basis of Roman society.[45] When we read Cicero’s thrilling language about the loss of his own house, after his return from exile, and then turn to think of the homeless crowds in the rabbit-warrens of Rome, we can begin to feel the contrast between the wealth and poverty of that day.  “What is more strictly protected,” he says, “by all religious feeling, than the house of each individual citizen?  Here is his altar, his hearth, here are his Di Penates:  here he keeps all the objects of his worship and performs all his religious rites:  his house is a refuge so solemnly protected, that no one can be torn from it by force."[46] The warm-hearted Cicero is here, as so often, dreaming dreams:  the “each individual citizen” of whom he speaks is the citizen of his own acquaintance, not the vast majority, with whom his mind does not trouble itself.