=25. Discomforts of Life in Rome.=--People also tell you that at night there is no small peril of being brained by loose tiles which rattle down from the lofty house-tops, or less dangerous but most disgusting, of being drenched by buckets of filthy slops flung recklessly from upper windows into the streets. Then toward dawn your sleep is ruined by the incessant rumbling of the wagons with timber, brick, building stone, cement, and all kinds of food supplies which have to be excluded from the city in the day hours. These are all part of the general discomforts of life in Rome, along with the squalid flat-buildings, the peril from the collapse of rickety houses, the occasional great floods of the Tiber, the fearful conflagrations, the ubiquitous throngs of people, and the grievous absence of privacy. The complaints are incessant. “School masters in the morning; corn grinders at night; and braziers’ hammers day and night” are subjects for standard diatribes of poets like Martial and Juvenal. And they, like everybody, first praise the quiet simple life possible in the Italian country towns--and then they remain in Rome. The great city with its multitudes, its ceaseless variety of all things good and bad, its appeal to every kind of human interest holds them with so many other mortals fascinated. They are unhappy while in Rome; but still more unhappy until they can return to her. So much for the merely outward side of a typical street on the slopes of the Esquiline. We can now penetrate the homes of the people, first visiting an _insula_, a great tenement block of the lowly, and then investigating a more elegant _domus_, the residence of a magnate. CHAPTER III THE HOMES OF THE LOWLY AND OF THE MIGHTY =26. The Great _Insulæ_--Tenement Blocks.=--Perhaps another age will imagine that most Romans have lived in vast marble palaces, moving through spacious halls amid stately pillars and spraying fountains. Nothing like this is the case for the great majority. A census report declares “there are some 44,000 tenement blocks (_insulæ_) in the city and only about 1750 separate ‘mansions’ (_domus_).”[14] Such figures can merely imply that an overwhelming proportion of “the toga-wearing race, the Lords of the world” (to quote Virgil’s threadbare line) are flat-dwellers.