the public edifices.  This done, he must remember that we now possess only portions of the walls without the roofs, and that in such circumstances apartments always appear to be much smaller than they are by actual measurement, or than they appear when they contain their furniture and appointments properly disposed.  Finally, he must not take a Pompeian house, even the most spacious, as a fair example of either the size or splendour of the great houses in the metropolis.  Pompeii was but a small place, with a population of no great wealth or standing, and its houses would have cut but a provincial figure among those of the same date on the Aventine, Caelian, Esquiline, or Quirinal Hills.  Nevertheless they are extremely useful to us in reconstructing the type.  It is that type and not the exception which we now consider.

A town house might either be detached or it might stand in a street, like one of the tenement-blocks, with shops let into the less important parts of the outer wall of the ground floor.  Much would naturally depend upon the means and dignity of the owner.  In any case the interior portions would belong to the private residence.  As a rule the exterior of the ordinary house was little regarded.  No architecture was wasted upon it; decoration and other magnificence belonged to the interior.  Provided a house possessed a more or less imposing doorway its exterior walls might be left either to shops or to a dull monochrome of stucco, pierced here and there, if necessary, at 9 or 10 feet from the ground by barred slits, which cannot be called windows, for the admittance of light.  The general principle of a Roman house, as of a Greek, was that of rooms surrounding spaces lighted from within.  Privacy from the outer world was not indeed so scrupulously sought by the Romans as by the Athenians—­principally because of the more free position occupied by the Roman women—­nevertheless it was secured by the absence of ground-floor windows opening on any thoroughfare.

[Illustration:  FIG. 29.—­TYPICAL SCHEME OF ROMAN HOUSE.]

Before the actual door there was commonly an open recess or space a little backward from the street, in which callers could wait until the door was opened.  This was the “vestibule,” and in the case of the larger houses of the nobles it was often adorned with honorary statues, on horseback or otherwise, while above the door might be seen the insignia of triumphs won by the family, a decoration in some measure corresponding to the modern hatchment, except that it was permanently fixed.  This regularly remained as a mark of the house even when it changed owners.  It was in such a vestibule of his Golden House that Nero erected his own colossal statue, destined afterwards to give its name to the Colosseum.  Over the larger vestibules there might be a partial roof, but generally, and perhaps always at this date, they were without cover.