west, the initial colony of A.D. 96-7 is in the foreground, occupying a rocky spur between two wadis; the more irregular second-century suburb lies outside the
south gate, at the right.
It was above all in the West that living conditions were transformed, by the growth of cities and the development of those resources most conducive to public health,
economic development, and organized leisure. Rome itself saw an immense change, achieved by huge capital outlay on the part of Augustus and his successors,
which not only altered the appearance of the city, as Augustus rightly claimed for his own achievement, from one of brick to one of marble, but raised the quality
and reliability of its food and water supplies to unheard-of levels. The gang of slave maintenance-workers assembled by Agrippa for the upkeep of the aqueducts
was on his death inherited by Augustus and transferred by him to public ownership (that is, to the domain of the curator aquarum). We should not forget that in the
cities of the Empire most men lived, not in palaces or the town houses of Pompeii and Herculaneum, with their gardens, fountains, statuary, and frescoed rooms, but
in the plain tenement blocks best known to us from the remains of Ostia (above, pp. 722 f.). After the fire of Rome in 64, remedies were undertaken which have
much to say about the general conditions of life in first-century Rome and, no doubt, in other large cities also. Limits were fixed to the permitted height of
residential buildings, which must possess their own walls and not adjoin others directly; a proportion of the construction must be of fireproof stone, without timber
frames; financial incentives were offered for early completion of building works; unauthorized tapping of the water system was prevented by government inspectors,
to ensure an adequate flow to the public supply, and householders were required to keep fire-fighting equipment in an easily accessible place. All agreed that the
new city was more gracious than the old; some claimed (it being impossible to please everyone) that it was less healthy than the old city, whose narrow streets and
high buildings had provided shade and coolness which the new open spaces did not allow. A more pertinent complaint might have concerned the area of the city
taken up by Nero's dream, the 'Golden House' (below, pp. 784 ff), with lawns, lakes, and rustic landscapes devised by its builders, as Tacitus said, to make good by
art the deficiencies of nature.
Although the city was the fundamental unit of ancient social and administrative life, many were those who lived outside its range, in different ways; in tribal
reservations which, at least in certain parts of north Africa, persisted to the late Empire and beyond; in townships (uici) and the great villas which in the northern
provinces were quite as important a facet of the economic and social process of Romanization as were the cities. In mountain areas, such as exist in north Africa (the
Kabylie and Aures) and Isauria in southern Asia Minor, lived enclaves of mountain folk hardly touched by Roman civilization but a threat to it if economic
conditions turned against them, for then they would descend on the agricultural territories of Roman cities. On the desert fringes to the south and to the east
transhumant peoples, and in the north barbarians, moved in and out of Roman territory in a way that paid little regard to the formal barriers of the frontier systems.