He might indeed, if he could afford it, remove outside the walls to a "domus suburbana," on one of the roads leading out of Rome, or on the hill looking down on the Campus Martius, like the house of Sallust the historian, with its splendid gardens, which still in part exists in the dip between the Quirinal and the Pincian hills.[384] But nowhere within three miles or more of Rome could a man lose his sense of being in a town, or escape from the smoke, the noise, the excitement of the streets.

After what has been said in previous chapters, the crowd in the Forum and its adjuncts can be left to the reader's imagination; but if he wishes to stimulate it, let him look at the seventh chapter of Cicero's speech for Plancius, where the orator makes use of the jostling in the Forum as an illustration so familiar that none can fail to understand it.[385] A relief, of which a figure is given in Burn's _Roman Literature and Roman Art_, p.

79, gives a good idea of the close crowding, though no doubt it was habitual with Roman artists to overcrowd their scenes with human figures.

Even as early as the first Punic war a lady could complain of the crowded state of the Forum, and, with the grim humour peculiar to Romans, could declare that her brother, who had just lost a great number of Roman lives in a defeat by the Carthaginians, ought to be in command of another fleet in order to relieve the city of more of its surplus population.

What then must the Forum have been two centuries later, when half the business of the Empire was daily transacted there! And even outside the walls the trouble did not cease; all night long the wagons were rolling into the city, which were not allowed in the day-time, at any rate after Caesar's municipal law of 46 B.C.Like the motors of to-day, one might imagine that their noise would depreciate the value of houses on the great roads.