A source-book of ancient history - The Search For Mecca

498 From Principate to Monarchy
IV.
City and Country Life Contrasted
Falling
houses.
Juvenal,
Satires, iii.
Scene at a
Are; Ucalegon
burned
out.
"Buy a
country
home."
(The Pythagoreans
were
vegetarians;
Greece, 95.)
"You cannot
sleep in
Rome."
(The emperor
Claudius
Drusus
and the sea-
Who fears, or ever has feared, the falUng of a house at
cool Prseneste, or at Volsinii seated among the wooded
hills, or at primitive Gabii, or on the heights of sloping
Tibur? We inhabit a city propped up to a great extent
with thin buttresses; for in this way the steward prevents
the houses from falling;
and when he has plastered over
the gaping of an old crack, he bids us sleep secure, with
ruin overhanging us. The place to live in is where there
are no fires, no nocturnal alarms.
Already Ucalegon is calling for water, already he is
removing his chattels, already your third story is smoking:
you yourself know nothing about it; for if the alarm begins
from the bottom of the stairs, he will be the last to burn
whom the tiling alone protects from the rain, where the
soft
doves lay their eggs.
If you are capable of being torn away from the games
of the Circus, an excellent house can be procured at Sora,
or Fabrateria, or Frusino, for the same price at which you
now hire a dark hole for a single year. There you have a
little garden; and a shallow well, that does not require to
be worked with a rope, irrigates your tender plants
with
easy draught. Live in love with your hoe, and be the
overseer of your own trim garden, from which you could
furnish a banquet for a hundred Pythagoreans. It is
something, in whatever place,
to have made yourself the
owner of a single lizard.
Many a sick man here dies from want of sleep, the indisposition
itself having been produced by food undigested,
and clinging to the fevered stomach. For what hired lodgings
allow of sleep? Rich men alone can sleep in the city.
Hence the origin of the disease. The passage of carriages