family and a careful business man, he carefully perused the record of
income and expenditure, of gains and losses, with his skilled Greek
accountant.

The whole tendency of the reforms in domestic architecture was to
differentiate between the public and private life of the man of business
or affairs. His public activity was confined to the forepart of the
house; his repose, his domestic joys, and his private pleasures were
indulged in the buildings which lay behind the Atrium and its wings. As
each of the departments of life became more ambitious, the sphere for
the exercise of the one became more magnificent, and that which fostered
the other the scene of a more perfect, because more quiet, luxury. The
Atrium was soon to become a palatial hall adorned with marble
colonnades;[33] the small yard with its humble portico at the back was
to be transformed into the Greek Peristyle, a court open to the sky and
surrounded by columns, which enclosed a greenery of shrubs and trees and
an atmosphere cooled and freshened by the constant play of fountains.
The final form of the Roman house was an admirable type of the new
civilisation. It was Roman and yet Greek[34]--Roman in the grand front
that it, presented to the world, Greek in the quiet background of
thought and sentiment.

The growing splendour of the house demanded a number and variety in its
human servitors that had not been dreamed of in a simpler age. The slave
of the farm, with his hard hands and weather-beaten visage, could no
longer be brought by his elegant master to the town and exhibited to a
fastidious society as the type of servant that ministered to his daily
needs. The urban and rustic family were now kept wholly distinct; it was
only when some child of marked grace and beauty was born on the farm,
that it was transferred to the mansion as containing a promise that