Read Online Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Rome (Yesterday's Classics) by James Baikie - Free Book Online Page A

have made yourself useful in your neighbourhood, your friends will subscribe enough to give you a better house than the one you have lost. Look at this smart new house, for instance. It belongs to a rather shady gentleman named Tongilianus, and it cost him, or rather the friends out of whom he squeezed the money, 10,000 sesterces. The house that he used to live in, before the ever-to-be-lamented fire which obliged him to build this new one, cost 200! Misfortune, you see, is sometimes a blessing in disguise.
    But besides their duties as firemen, the police have a big, and indeed an almost hopeless task, as guardians of the public safety. Rome is a huge city; it has the usual proportion of rascals in its vast population; perhaps it has even more than the usual proportion, being, as it is, the centre of the whole world. And there is one circumstance that makes it very difficult to preserve order, and to keep the streets safe. Perhaps some day in the far-off future a great genius will arise who will invent some method of lighting the streets at night, but at present there is no sign of him. Rome has not so much as one solitary public lamp in all her miles of crowded streets. Imagine a city of, shall we say, a million and a half of people, ranging from the greatest wealth to the most desperate poverty, without one spark of light to guide the wayfarer! He may carry his own light, of course—a smoking, dripping torch, or a miserable apology for a lantern, with a bronze frame and horn sides, but such makeshifts only make darkness visible.
    The result is that, whenever the evening shadows begin to fall, all shops are shut and bolted, and the dark and gloomy streets present a very suspicious and sinister appearance. If you go abroad much after sunset, you go at your own risk, and you had better go well armed and with a guard of your own slaves; for cut-throats and pickpockets abound. Many a man who set out in the dark, merely to go from one street to another, has made a much longer journey than that, and has been fished out of the Tiber half-way to Ostia next morning. Nor is this the only danger. A couple of slaves and a torch may protect you against the thieves, but if you happen to meet a gang of young bloods of the upper class coming home from a supper-party where the wine has got above the wit, you had better take to your heels, for it is not a couple of slaves who will protect you! Only the other night one of Publius's neighbours, a most respectable man, was set upon by a party of these drunken rowdies, youths of consular and knightly families, and was insulted, beaten, stripped, and left lying senseless on the ground, so that he was nearly frozen to death when the police found him in the morning. Of course the "vigiles" do their, best, but the task is quite beyond them, and nothing but light, and plenty of it, will ever make the streets of Rome safe.
    But we have spent enough time over the police and the rascals of Rome, and we turn city-wards again. We pass along the road between the Esquiline and Cælian hills, to where the builders are working on the site of the Flavian Amphitheatre, and then turn southwards between the Cælian and the Palatine and pass the Circus Maximus, the huge enclosure where the chariot-races take place. That house just overlooking the Circus was made part of the Imperial Palace by the Emperor Caligula, who was so fond of chariot-racing and jockeys that he wanted to live as near the race-course as possible. Now it has been turned into a school for the pages of the Court, and you can see some of the young aristocrats at their games. They seem very much like other schoolboys, after all. See, some of them have been scribbling on the walls: "Corinthus is leaving school!" "Marianus Afer is leaving school!" What became of Corinthus and Marianus Afer in the big world, I wonder? One young rascal has a taste for art, it seems. Here is his drawing—a donkey turning a mill; and what is this he has written