The best way to realise this out-of-door life, lazy and sociable, of the Augustan age, is to read the first book of Ovid's _Ars Amatoria_,--a fascinating picture of a beautiful city and its pleasure-loving inhabitants.

But with the Augustan age we are not here concerned.
Yet the Roman house, like the Italian house in general, was in origin and essence really a home.

The family was the basis of society, and by the family we must understand not only the head of the house with his wife, children, and slaves, but also the divine beings who dwelt there.

As the State comprised both human and divine inhabitants, so also did the house, which was indeed the germ and type of the State.
Thus the house was in those early times not less but even more than a house is for us, for in it was concentrated all that was dear to the family, all that was essential to its life, both natural and supernatural.

And the two--the natural and supernatural--were not distinct from each other, but associated, in fact almost identical; the hearth-fire was the dwelling of Vesta, the spirit of the flame; the Penates were the spirits of the stores on which the family subsisted, and dwelt in the store-cupboard or larder; the paterfamilias had himself a supernatural side, in the shape of his Genius; and the Lar familiaris was the protecting spirit of the farmland, who had found his way into the house in course of time, perhaps with the slave labourers, who always had a share in his worship.[376] It would probably be unjust to the Roman of the late Republic to assume that this beautiful idea of the common life of the human and divine beings in a house was entirely ignored or forgotten by him.