the town establishment or were let to strangers who possessed no
dwelling of their own;[23] the still larger lodging-houses or "islands,"
which derived their name from their lofty isolation from neighbouring
buildings,[24] continued to spring up, and even private houses soon came
to attain a height which had to be restrained by the intervention of the
law. An ex-consul and augur was called on by the censors of 125 to
explain the magnitude of a villa which he had raised, and the altitude
of the structure exposed him not only to the strictures of the guardians
of morals but to a fine imposed by a public court.[25] Great changes
were effected in the interior structure of the houses of the
wealthy--changes excused by a pardonable desire for greater comfort and
rendered necessary both by the growing formality of life and the large
increase in the numbers of the resident household, but tending, when
once adopted, to draw the father of the family into that most useless
type of extravagance which takes the form of a craze for building. The
Hall or Atrium had once been practically the house. It opened on the
street. It contained the family bed and the kitchen fire. The smoke
passed through a hole in the roof and begrimed the family portraits that
looked down on the members of the household gathered round the hearth
for their common meal. The Hall was the chief bedroom, the kitchen, the
dining-room and the reception room, and it was also the only avenue from
the street to the small courtyard at the back. The houses of the great
had hitherto differed from those of the poor chiefly in dimensions and
but very slightly in structure. The home of the wealthy patrician had
simply been on a larger scale of primitive discomfort; and if his large
parlour built of timber could accommodate a vast host of clients, the
bed and the cooking pots were still visible to every visitor. The chief
of the early innovations had been merely a low portico, borrowed from
the Greeks by the Etruscans and transmitted by them to Rome, which ran
round the courtyard, was divided into little cells and chambers, and