the rarity of window glass, not widely available before the first century A.D., created a lighting problem, since openings created to admit light would
let out the heat. This is one reason why the older parts of houses had few and small windows. By the time of Seneca the darkness of old-style
bathrooms was a matter for comment, but even now the problem of lighting must have remained in many rooms, whether in baths or elsewhere, if the
owner could not afford the luxury of window glass and was obliged to employ shutters or hangings to retain the heat. The candelabra and oil lamps
used in antiquity would have provided, at best, an inefficient light and would have contributed to the fumes emitted by braziers. Under the
circumstances it was often felt appropriate to decorate the walls of badly illuminated rooms with light colour schemes; but there are just as many
examples where the heavy polychromy of the murals increased the gloom.
Generally speaking, however, amenities improved as time went on. The increasing use of window glass led to a better lit and more efficiently heated
style of housing; the gradual introduction of more durable and fire-resistant building materials, notably (from Augustan times onwards) brick-faced
concrete, brought new standards of stability and safety; and the steady expansion of aqueduct schemes provided running water to cities which had
previously relied on wells and rainwater cisterns. Even now, however, running water reached very few private houses. In Pompeii, while well-to-do
proprietors such as the Vettii and D. Octavius Quartio could service elaborate garden fountains and water-plays which looked forward across the
centuries to the aquatic showpieces of Renaissance Italy, the vast majority of householders, including even the family which lived in the imposing
House of the Menander, had to use rainwater or fill their pitchers at the street side fountains.
The improvements in amenities were accompanied by general changes in the style of urban housing. The domus, laid out chiefly on one floor, was
prodigal of space and belonged primarily to those periods and those cities in which there was plenty of room for expansion. But right from the first it
was not the only, or even the predominant, mode of dwelling. In second-century B.C. Pompeii, a remarkably prosperous town, there were innumerable
small 'lower-class' houses and shops, many of which consisted of only a couple of rooms or a single room containing a mezzanine storey; and in
contemporary Rome population pressures were already promoting the development of 'high-rise' apartment blocks. We have a fascinating report in
Livy of an ox which, as early as 218, climbed to the third storey of a house near the Roman cattle-market, whence it fell to its death; and in 191 two
oxen in another quarter of Rome went up the stairs right to the roof (they survived the climb but were immolated for their efforts). By the late first
century B.C. the architectural writer Vitruvius was able to refer to tower blocks with fine views, and Augustus was obliged, for safety reasons, to limit
their height to 70 feet. An echo of this development is discernible at Pompeii, where upper storeys were added piecemeal to many of the older houses,
and new blocks such as the Forum Baths, built soon after 80 B.C., were provided from the start with upstairs flats accessible directly from the street.
By A.D. 79 Herculaneum had at least two new-style shop-and-apartment blocks, one of which has survived to a height of three storeys. Pressure on
space and the growth of the small commercial classes also led to the break-up of the old mansions, many of which, like the Victorian houses of
modern Britain, came to be divided into independent rented units.
The House Of Diana At Ostia, a fine example of brick-faced tenement architecture of the mid second century AD. It rose at least four floors, with
separate small apartments grouped round a central light-well. The broad shop-openings, the small windows lighting mezzanine floors above them,
and the shallow balcony carried on arched corbels, are all characteristic of this building type.