We might descant upon the lavish wall-paintings, representing landscapes real and imaginary, scenes from mythology and semi-history, floating figures, genre pictures, and pictures of still life; or upon the mosaics in floor and wall depicting similar subjects and often serving to the occupants not so much in the place of pictorial art as in the place of wall-papers and of Brussels or Kidderminster carpets.  We might speak of the profuse collections of statuary, of the gilding on ceiling and cornices, of the colours shed by the rich curtains and awnings of purple and crimson, of the grateful sound of water plashing in the fountains and basins or babbling over a series of steps like a broken cascade in miniature.  But perhaps too much of such description might only encourage still further the erroneous notion that the Roman houses were all of this nature, and that even the average Roman lived in the midst of an abundance of such domestic luxury and art.  It requires but a little sober thought to realise that such homes were, as they have always been, the exception.  It would be as reasonable to judge of an average London house by the most opulent specimens in Park Lane, or of an American house by the richest at Newport, as to judge of the abodes of Romans in the time of Nero by the examples which appeal so strongly to the novelist or the romancing historian.  Suffice it that beside the modest and frugal homes, the tenement flat, and the hovel, there were houses distinguished by immense luxury; and, since Romans have at all times sought the ostentatious and grandiose, perhaps such dwellings were larger and more pretentious in proportion to wealth than they are in most civilised countries at the present day.  Seneca, who made himself extremely comfortable in the days of Nero, exclaims upon the rage for costly decoration.  Says he of the bathing of the plutocrat:  “He seems to himself poor and mean, unless the walls shine with great costly slabs, unless marbles of Alexandria are picked out with reliefs of Numidian stone, unless the whole ceiling is elaborately worked with all the variety of a painting, unless Thasian stone encloses the swimming baths, unless the water is poured out from silver taps.”  These, indeed, are comparatively humble.  “What of the baths of the freedmen? a mass of statues!  What a multitude of pillars supporting nothing, but put there only for ornament!  What an amount of water running over steps with a purling noise—­and all for show!”

[Illustration:  FIG. 44.—­SPECIMEN OF WALL-PAINTING. (Pompeii.)]

CHAPTER X

THE COUNTRY HOMESTEAD AND COUNTRY SEAT

Throughout the romanized parts of the empire—­in other words, wherever Romans settled, in Italy, Spain, Gaul, Britain, and also wherever the richer natives imitated the Roman fashions—­the house in any city or considerable town was built as nearly as possible after the type described.