The Home—City and Country. Where did the family live? In the city, especially in Rome, crowded conditions meant that most people lived in small apartments in an insula, or apartment building. These multistoried buildings (as high as seventy feet) provided small rooms, few windows, no indoor plumbing on the upper floors, and little in the way of comfort. Worse, these buildings easily caught fire. Those who lived on the upper floors often lost all of their possessions, if not their lives, in conflagrations. During the Republic there were no firemen, so the fire was put out only by those who volunteered to help at the moment. Plutarch records that Marcus Licinius Crassus, one of the Republic's richest men, used to send agents to a burning building to offer to buy it from the owner at a greatly reduced price. And...