Fig. 50.—Etruscan Vase.
It is a misfortune to us that no Greek house of the time of
Fig. 51.—Etruscan Vase.
Pericles, the perfect day of a most remarkable and highly-æsthetic civilization, remains; either its stone-walls, or in pictures on its temple-walls or on its vases. The great catastrophe which overwhelmed Herculaneum and Pompeii has secured to us the means of knowing how the luxurious Roman lived in those little seaside cities eighteen hundred years ago; a time when Cæsar was hardly dead, and Jesus almost unknown. Every house in Athens and in Corinth, in Samos and in Melos, has been swept away by the besom of war or the feathered wing of Time. We know what we do know from the verses of the poets or the allusions of the playwrights, and that is all; but from these we gather that the house or home was a place rather for the woman than for the man; that in it the woman, though not exactly a prisoner as in the harems of the Asiatic kings, was expected to stay and to find “her sphere.” The porter sat at the door of the house, and when the woman walked forth she went accompanied by her slave, and it was known for what she went.