=45. Spurious Antiques.=--Publius Calvus is happy in possessing undeniably genuine antiques. He can afford to laugh at the collection of the rich freedman across the way. That poor fellow, anxious to “keep in style” and to display an art collection, has fallen into the clutches of unscrupulous dealers. He has filled his atrium with absurd specimens such as “cups from the table of Laomedon, a double vase that belonged to Nestor and a tankard used by Achilles.” His citrus tables are of very thin veneer, and in his atrium his impossible wife has actually on display a ponderous golden box in which her husband’s first beard is deposited. It is also gossiped about that this crude fellow actually pretended sickness lately, merely that he might receive condoling friends in bed and display to them the gold chasings on the bedstead, the magnificent scarlet coverlets, and proclaim his riches by having the mattress steeped in expensive perfumes. =46. Pet Animals.=--One thing more must be stated about the house of the Calvi before passing to its human denizens. There are a great many tame animals in evidence. Over the doorway one already notes the caged magpie. From a dark corner within a large cage blinks a morose-looking owl. The master’s fine greyhound has a litter of puppies which are now scrambling around the peristylium with a special slave to look after them. Behind a column is seen gliding a slinky civet. The children delight in a small monkey tethered now in the garden. Gratia especially has her own beloved lap dog and its personal slave-boy custodian. She does not, however, imitate a certain female friend who dotes upon snakes, and who has a whole cage of the creatures which she often twines about her neck to scare her companions. So much for the material aspects of a Roman insula and a Roman domus. It is time to examine their inhabitants. CHAPTER IV ROMAN WOMEN AND ROMAN MARRIAGES =47. Honorable Status of Roman Women.=--Calvus is the lordly senator when his litter swings him down to the Curia by the Old Forum to participate in what is still the most venerable council in the world, but in his own house his authority is divided. He is not even sure that one-half the power is really his. In all private matters his sway is shared by his spouse Gratia. Many are the evils inflicting Imperial Rome, but oppression of women is not one of them. By the age of Hadrian it has long since come to pass what Cato the Elder sadly predicted three centuries earlier, when Roman women were learning the way to freedom: “On the day that women are our equals, they will be our masters.”