Happily, as Corbulo had considered it, this house had escaped in the conflagration of Rome under Nero. This, however, was a matter of some regret to Duilia, who would have preferred to have had it burnt, so that it might have been rebuilt in greater splendor and in newer style.
Nevertheless, although externally dingy, it was a commodious mansion within, and was well furnished, especially with carpets and curtains of Oriental texture, that had been wrought at, or purchased at the bazaars of Antioch and Damascus.
The centre of the house was occupied by the atrium, or hall, open to the sky above the water tank in the midst. On each side at the further end from the entrance extended the “wings” that contained the family portraits enclosed in gilded boxes or shrines, the doors of which were thrown open on festal occasions. In the centre, between the wings was the tablinum, the reception-room of the house, and on the right side of the entrance was the family money-chest, girded with iron.
On the ledge of the water tank before the reception room, smoked a little altar before an image of Larpater, the ancestor and founder of the family, regarded as the tutelary deity of the house.
The penates, the subsidiary household gods, that had formerly been retained in the hall, near the altar—curious, smoked, and badly-shaped dolls, some in rags, some in wood, others in terra cotta—were sometimes consigned to a family chapel, but in the house of the widow of Corbulo, as in many another, they had been relegated to a shelf in the kitchen near the hearth, and a lamp was maintained perpetually burning before them.
In primitive times, when life was simple, the hall had been the common room of the house, in which the wife cooked the meals at the hearth, and where also on seats, father, wife, children and domestics partook together of the common meal. But now all this was altered.
In winter the hall was too cold to be sat in. It was inconvenient to have the cooking done before all eyes. Consequently a separate kitchen and separate dining-rooms were constructed, and the smoking altar and the image by it alone remained in the hall as a reminiscence of the family hearth that once stood there.
It is more difficult to understand the meals and meal times of the old Romans, than the arrangement of their houses.
They rose vastly early in the morning, and took a snack of breakfast of the simplest description, which lasted them till lunch at 10 a. m. But such as were occupied abroad rarely returned home for this meal. At noon they bathed, and then came the great feed of the day, the cœna, which we translate “supper,” but which was begun at half-past one in winter and an hour later in summer.
This lasted the entire afternoon, and even on great occasions into the night. Some revellers did not break up till midnight, or even prolonged the orgy to dawn.