Little of this vast influx of money was spent upon public works. To begin with, there was not the taste for fine architecture at Rome, nor indeed for art of any sort. The private houses were still mainly built of unbaked bricks or tiles, often with thatched or shingled roofs: the interiors of the bare simplicity of a country farm-house. And then Roman religion, which, as we have seen, was always somewhat cold towards the high Olympian gods, offering its real devotion to obscurer rustic powers, made little claim for temples and stately shrines. Temples had been built under the Etruscan domination in the fifth century B.C. But thereafter for a period of four centuries there is an almost complete blank in the annals of Roman archæology. If anything was built between Tarquin and Sulla it was generally of wood and brick or rubble with no architectural pretensions. Augustus swept it all away with contempt. Of course it was the fashion for Cato and the old Roman party to say they preferred good old Roman temples with the painted terra-cotta ornaments to all the new-fashioned fripperies of Greece; but that is only the spleen of the outraged Philistine. These centuries of growth are empty of art. What the _nouveaux riches_ of the second century B.C. found to spend their money on it is hard to say. In 218 B.C. the people passed a resolution as the Lex Claudia forbidding senators to engage in foreign commerce. It is very unlikely that the senate would have allowed that if they had already been deeply involved in business. But this enactment checked the only fruitful use of wealth: it turned, and was possibly intended to turn, the money of the great houses into land speculation. This was followed by disastrous results. The Punic Wars had thrown millions of acres out of cultivation. That land which had belonged to rebels passed to the Roman state as public land and the scramble for it was the cause of momentous political conflicts in the succeeding generation. But rich senators acquired enormous estates without any deep interest in their economic productiveness. Like the old English squire the old Roman senator was not a professional nor even a very serious landowner, and moreover he was an absentee. Thus large tracts of Central Italy became the estates of rich men who added park to park and villa to villa rather as a hobby than for any good reason. The common notion of Italy before the Punic Wars as a vast smiling cornfield, dotted with little farm-houses and country cottages full of stalwart husbandmen, is both unhistorical and ungeographical. The Italian farmer lived--like the mediæval European farmer--mostly in townships which he called “cities,” and it was only the plain-land in the vicinity of a town which was regularly ploughed and sown. A glance at the map will show how little of Central Italy is suited for cereal cultivation. But, if the records are true, 400 Italian townships had been destroyed in the great wars and that meant, perhaps, 400,000