quantity of curios and works of art collected by the conquering or
travelled Roman that greater space was needed for the exhibition of
their rarity or splendour. This space was gained by the removal from the
Atrium of all the domestic obstacles with which it had once been
cumbered. It might now be made slightly smaller in its proportion to the
rest of the house and yet appear far more ample than before. The space
by which its sides were diminished could now be utilised for the
building of two wings or Alae, which served the threefold purpose of
lighting the hall from the sides, of displaying to better advantage, as
an oblong chamber always does, the works of art which the lord of the
mansion or his butler[28] displayed to visitor or client, and lastly of
serving as a gallery for the family portraits, which were finally
removed from the Atrium, to be seen to greater advantage and in a better
light on the walls of the wings. These now displayed the family tree
through painted lines which connected the little shrines holding the
inscribed _imagines_ of the great ancestors of the house.[29] It is also
possible that the Alae served as rooms for more private audiences than
were possible in the Atrium.[30] From the early morning crowd which
thronged the hall individuals or groups might have been detached by the
butler, and led to the presence of the great statesman or pleader who
paced the floor in the retirement of one of these long side-galleries.
[31] Business of a yet more private kind was transacted in the still
greater security of the Tablinum, the archive room and study of the
house. Here were kept, not only the family records and the family
accounts, but such of the official registers and papers as a magistrate
needed to have at hand during his year of office.[32] The domestic
transaction of official business was very large at Rome, for the State
had given its administrators not even the skeleton of a civil service,
and it was in this room that the consul locked himself up with his
quaestor and his scribes, as it was here that, as a good head of the