Consuming little, and content with a life of simplicity and poverty, the ancients had no need to produce much or to produce at great speed. So they had no requirement for machines, whether steam- or electricity-driven. The few simple machines, which the hand of man or the muscular force of domestic animals can operate,—the domestic loom, the horse-propelled mill,—sufficed. Therefore, they had no need of science to help them to construct new machines of greater size and power. They had no need to work at high pressure. They could work slowly, with their hands and with a few simple instruments, and with them produce beautiful, accurate, and finished articles, which aspired to a lofty and difficult ideal of perfection. Accordingly, art occupied in the ancient world the position which science occupies in modern civilisation. It was not a refined luxury for the few, but an elementary and universal necessity. Governments and wealthy citizens were obliged to adorn their cities with monuments, sculptures, and pictures, to embellish squares, streets, and houses, because the masses wished the cities to be beautiful, and would have rebelled against an authority which would have them live in an unadorned city; just as nowadays they would rebel against a municipal authority which would have them dwell in a city without light, or against a government which placed obstacles and hindrances in the way of the construction of railways. In those times, the requirement was that everything, down to the household utensils, even of the most modest description and destined for the use of the poorer classes, be inspired with a breath of beauty. Anyone who visits a museum of Greco-Roman antiquities, in which are exposed to view objects found in rich and highly cultivated districts,—that of Naples, for example, where so many objects excavated from the ashes of Pompeii are to be seen,—can easily convince himself of this curious phenomenon, and realise more vividly, by contrast, the carelessness, roughness, and commonplace vulgarity of the objects made by modern machinery. In short, if the quantity of the things produced by the industry of the ancients was small, for that very reason, and by way of compensation, their quality was refined and excellent.