That this exciting social atmosphere, with its jostling and over−reaching in the Forum, and its callers and dinner−parties in the house, had some sinister influence on men's tempers and nerves, there can be no doubt. Romans dearly loved the life of the city. When he wrote from Cilicia to his more youthful friend Caelius, urging him to stick to the city, in words that are almost pathetic, it never occurred to him that he was prescribing exactly that course of treatment which had done himself much damage. The clear sight and strong nerve of Caesar, as compared with so many of his contemporaries, was doubtless largely due to the fact that between 70 and 50 B.C., i.e. in the prime of life, he spent some twelve of the twenty years in the fresher air of Spain and Gaul. Some men were fairly worn out with dissipation and the resulting ennui, and could get no relief even in a country villa. Lucretius has drawn a wonderful picture of such an unfortunate, who hurries from Rome into the country, and finding himself bored there almost as soon as he arrives, orders out his carriage to return to the city. To fill oneself with good things, yet never to be satisfied (explere bonis rebus, satiareque nunquam), was even for the true Epicurean a most dismal fate.

But there was at this time, and had been for many generations, a genuine desire to escape at times from town to country; Romans were themselves a keen lover of the ease and leisure which he could find only in his country−houses. The first great Roman of whom we know that he had a rural villa, not only or chiefly for farming purposes, but as a refuge from the city and its tumult, was Scipio Africanus the elder. His villa at Liternum on the Campanian coast is described by Seneca in his 86th epistle; it was small, and without the comforts and conveniences of the later country−house; but its real significance lies not so much in the increasing wealth that could make a residence possible without a farm attached to it, but in the growing sense of individuality that made men wish for such a retreat. There are other signs that Scipio was a man of strong personality, unlike the typical Roman of his day; he put a value upon his own thoughts and habits, apart from his duty to the State, and retired to Liternum to indulge them. The younger Scipio too (Aemilianus), though no blood−relation of his, had the same instinct, but in his case it was rather the desire for leisure and relaxation,—the same love of a real holiday that we all know so well in our modern life. “Leisure,” says Cicero, is not “contentio animi sed relaxatio”; and in a charming passage he goes on to describe Scipio and Laelius gathering shells on the sea−shore, and becoming boys again. This desire for ease and relaxation, for the chance of being for a while your true self,—a self worth something apart from its existence as a citizen, is apparent in the Roman of Cicero's day, and still more in the hard−working functionary of the Empire. Twice in his life the morbid emperor Tiberius shrank from the eyes of men, once at Rhodes and afterwards at Capreae,—a melancholy recluse worn out by hard work.

Everyman had to provide his own “health resort” in those days: there was nothing to correspond to the modern hotel. Even at the great luxurious watering−places on the Campanian coast, Baiae and Bauli, the houses, so far as we know, were all private residences.

There being no hotels, among which the change−loving Roman could pick and choose a retreat for a holiday, he would buy a site for a villa first in one place, then in another, or purchase one ready built, or transform an old farm−house of his own into a residence with “modern requirements.” In choosing his sites he would naturally look southwards, and find what he sought for either in the choicer parts of Latium, among the hills and woods of the Mons Albanus and Tusculum, or in the rich Campanian land, the paradise of the lazy Roman; in the latter case, he would like to be close to the sea on that delicious coast, and even in Latium there were spots where, like Scipio and Laelius, he might wander on the sea−shore. All this country to the south was beginning to be covered with luxurious and convenient houses; in the colder and mountainous parts of central Italy the villa was still the farm−house of the older useful type, of which the object was the cultivation of olive and vine, now coming into fashion, as we have already seen.

For Cicero and his friends the word villa no longer suggested farming, as it invariably did for the old Roman, and as we find it in Cato's treatise on agriculture; it meant gardens, libraries, baths, and collections of works of art, with plenty of convenient rooms for study or entertainment. Sometimes the garden might be extended into a park, with fishponds and great abundance of game; Hortensius had such a park near Laurentum, fifty jugera enclosed in a ring−fence, and full of wild beasts of all sorts and kinds. Varro tells us that the great orator would take his guests to a seat on an eminence in this park, and summon his “Orpheus” thither to sing and play: at the sound of the music a multitude of stags, boars, and other animals would make their appearance—having doubtless been trained to do so by expectation of food prepared for them. Such was the taste of the great master of “Asiatic” eloquence. We are reminded of the fairy tale of the Emperor of China and the mechanical leisure.

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