Such is my opinion, but, as one runs the risk of muddling everything by changing names already accepted, I do not insist upon it.  So let us enter the house of Pansa the aedile.

This dwelling is not the most ornate, but it is the most regular in Pompeii, and also the least complicated and the most simply complete.  Thus, all the guides point it out as the model house, and perceiving that they are right in so doing, I will imitate them.

In what did a Pompeian’s dwelling differ from a small stylish residence or villa of modern times?  In a thousand and one points which we shall discover, step by step, but chiefly in this, that it was turned inwards, or, as it were, doubled upon itself; not that it was, as has been said, altogether a stranger to the street, and presented to the latter only a large painted wall, a sort of lofty screen.  The upper stories of the Pompeian houses having nearly all crumbled, we are not in a position to affirm that they did not have windows opening on the public streets.  I have already shown you maeniana or suspended balconies from which the pretty girls of the place could ogle the passers-by.  But it is certain that the first floor, consisting of the finest and best occupied apartments, grouped its rooms around two interior courts and turned their backs to the street.  Hence, these two courts opening one behind the other, the development of the front was but a small affair compared with the depth of the house.

These courts were called the atrium, and the peristyle.  One might say that the atrium was the public and the peristyle the private part of the establishment; that the former belonged to the world and the second to the family.  This arrangement nearly corresponded with the division of the Greek dwelling into andronitis and gynaikotis, the side for the men and the side for the women.  Around the atrium were usually ranged—­we must not be too rigorously precise in these distinctions—­the rooms intended for the people of the house, and those who called upon them.  Around the peristyle were the rooms reserved for the private occupancy of the family.

I commence with the atrium.  It was reached from the street by a narrow alley (the prothyrum), opening, by a two-leaved door, upon the sidewalk.  The doors have been burned, but we can picture them to ourselves according to the paintings, as being of oak, with narrow panels adorned with gilded nails, provided with a ring to open them by, and surmounted with a small window lighting up the alley.  They opened inwards, and were secured by means of a bolt, which shot vertically downward into the threshold instead of reaching across.