Those usual adjuncts of a room in modern times, a fire-place and chimney, were unknown until after their employment by the later Romans. The Greek rooms were usually warmed by portable stoves, or braziers, in which charcoal or wood was burnt. Some of these stoves were, of course, fixed for the common culinary purposes; and in all cases the smoke found its way out as it best could. Externally the Greek houses were plain in appearance, and destitute of the marble facings so frequent in those of Rome. A glance at the mansions of the wealthy in the latter days of the Roman Republic and under the Emperors, discloses a scene of magnificence perhaps without parallel even in our own days. The thatched or tiled cottages, built of sun-dried bricks and wood, with plainly washed walls and scanty accommodation, where the floors were of rough stone or hardened earth, whence the hardy warriors had issued forth to conquer the world, were no places for the refined luxury of the magnates of the imperial city. Foreign conquest brought the arts ministering to luxury, and the wealth requisite for splendor. Then came the age of splendid palaces in the city, and elegant country villas, seated on shaded and sheltered slopes, and adorned with every mark of urban splendor in the midst of the most attractive rural scenes--mansions and villas crowded with articles of vertù, with costly statues and paintings, with Babylonian tapestries, with Corinthian bronze, moulded, to all the forms that Greek fancy could suggest. Marble columns, of weight so great as to endanger the arches of the sewers over which they passed in their transit to the destined spot, were erected in their lofty halls, and the profuse aristocracy of rank and wealth oftentimes squandered immense fortunes on a dwelling. The house of Publius Clodius cost 131,000_l._; and one of the Scauri possessed a Tusculan villa, valued--together with its furniture, decorations, and works of art--at the vast sum of 885,000_l._