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 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 would be wasted on rustic toil.[35] In every part of the establishment the taste and wealth of the owner might be tested by the courtliness and beauty of its living instruments. The chained dog at the gate had been replaced by a human janitor, often himself in chains.[36] The visitor, when he had passed the porter, was received by the butler in the hall, and admitted to the master's presence by a series of footmen and ushers, the show servants of the fore-part of the house, men of the impassive dignity and obsequious repose that servitude but strengthens in the Oriental mind.[37] In the penetralia of the household each need created by the growing ideal of comfort and refinement required its separate band of ministers. The body of the bather was rubbed and perfumed by experts in the art; the service of the table was in the hands of men who had made catering and the preparation of delicate viands the sole