till you came to a building half wine-shop and store, half lodging-house.  Outside you might be told by an inscription and a sign that it was the “Cock” Inn, or the “Eagle,” or the “Elephant,” and that there was “good accommodation.”  Its keeper might either be its proprietor, or merely a slave or other tenant put into it by the owner of a neighbouring estate and country-seat.  Your horses or mules would be put up—­with a reasonable suspicion on your part that the poor beasts would be cheated in the matter of their fodder—­and you would be shown into a room which you might or might not have to share with someone else.  In any case you would have to share it with the fleas, if not with worse.

Perhaps you base brought your food with you, perhaps you send out a slave to purchase it, perhaps you obtain it from the innkeeper.  That is your own affair.  For the rest you must be prepared to bear with very promiscuous and sometimes unsavoury company, and to possess neither too nice a nose nor too delicate a sense of propriety.  Your only consolation is that the charges are low, and that if anything is stolen from you the landlord is legally responsible.

[Illustration:  FIG. 3.—­PLAN OF INN AT POMPEII.]

Doubtless there were better and worse establishments of this kind.  There must have been some tolerably good quarters at Rome or Alexandria, and at some of the resorts for pleasure and health, such as Balae on the Bay of Naples, or Canopus at the Nile mouth.  It is true also that for those who travelled on imperial service there were special lodgings kept up at the public expense at certain stations along the great roads.  Nevertheless it may reasonably be asked why, in view of the generally accepted standards of domestic comfort and even luxury of the time—­what may be called middle-class standards—­there was no sufficiency of even creditable hotels.  The answer is that in antiquity the class of people who in modern times support such hotels seldom felt the need of their equivalent.  In the first place, they commonly trusted to the hospitality of individuals to whom they were personally or officially known, or to whom they carried private or official introductions.  If they were distinguished persons, they were readily received, whether in town or country, on their route.  In less frequented districts they trusted to their own slaves and to the resources of their own baggage.  Their own tents, bedding, provisions and cooking apparatus were carried with them.  If they made a stay of any length in a town, they might hire a suite of rooms.

We must not dwell too long upon this topic.  Suffice it that travel was frequent and extensive, whether for military and political business, for commerce, or for pleasure.  Some roads, particularly that “Queen of Roads,” the Appian Way—­the same by which St. Paul came from Puteoli to Rome—­must have presented a lively appearance, especially near the metropolis.  Perhaps on none of these great