public abacus — here is the heart of the great modern world, the world of financial enterprise, of science, sanitation and fire brigades. The Romans propitiated all the gods, but took the most practical measures besides; it was sometimes difficult to land cargoes at Ostia (the harbour was one of the problems of successive governments), but, once landed, he always considered his consignments safe. Later, perhaps, he would visit one of the large warehouses, or horrea, and commend the damp-proof floors and the wise fire regulations of Nero’s time that had prescribed separate walls and an air space of two feet between a warehouse and adjoining property. The entrance to the “Horrea Epagathiana” (Fig. 4) in cut bricks with two columns wide apart and a pediment pitched up (like a Wren doorway) is an uncommon classic type, yet it has a particular fitness: the mouldings arising from projecting courses are parent forms in tile work. The
first baked bricks, according to Vitruvius, were used in the upper projecting courses of clay walls to throw off the water. This entrance gives through a lobby upon an arcaded brick court resembling a Bolognese cortile and having a tile cornice at floor level. Round the court on the ground floor are the stores, and on the floor above are sets of rooms opening upon a 10-foot passage, also arcaded. Two of the angles are occupied with staircase (Fig. 5) having risers 8½ in., treads 114 in. — a going much less steep than in the public staircases surviving in the Colosseum. Each step consists of four
courses of brick carried on flat groining spanning from a brick arch to the wall. The floors above may have been independent flats or the residences of merchant princes: the little niche, or lararium, having semi-dome done in tufa triangles, unlike the Pompeian variety with colonettes, is seen between the arches of the cortile (Fig. 6).
Such shrines are common in court and garden. Our sensitive business man, after refreshing himself at the baths and dining at one of the select rooms in the large restaurant near the forum, might seat himself in the evening at one of the three large square
windows that gave upon the enclosed garden and notice a pious female domestic placing a garland and cakes upon a shrine of this kind in front of the statuette of the household god: he might wonder how much of this odd Roman religion of the hearth was “good form’’ and how much “superstition. ” The
Romans certainly spent a great deal of money on their tombs at Ostia, as at Rome. He had noticed somewhere that day a new tomb in the most expensive rubbed tiles. This whole city, with its great arches like eyebrows, seemed in the brick-shrine style. Its domestic decoration was not of the best, the paintings
on the walls round
him and on the flat cove of the ceiling were undistinguished. Yet the town had a style of its own. He approved the deep colonnades of the Via Decumana. He recollected the grand black Neptune on the mosaic floor of the baths (Fig. 7), where the slave, letting the water sluice over his feet, had agreeably attended him with a huge magenta sponge. The public sculpture, too, was good, the marble grilles, the doors to the colombaria. It seemed that this city, that owed so much to Hadrian, had in the matter of sculpture absorbed something of the notable good taste in this respect of its imperial patron.
The marbles of Ostia are dispersed in a hundred museums, but there remain by chance on the site one or two forms full of grace and an Italian strength. They are not separate from but a part of the fine culture that an architect recognises in the humane structures
and in the study of their anatomy. (To be concluded)
A statement, by a lecturer on geology at the Manchester University, that the stone of Liverpool Cathedral is already showing signs of decay, has been emphatically denied by Mr. O. Pittaway, Clerk of the Works at the Cathedral. Some Forest of Dean stone, used for paving in the early stages of construction, proved to be unsuitable in the Liverpool atmosphere and was cut out, but the Woolton stone with which the exterior is faced is quite unaffected. Fig. 7. — OSTIA: FLOOR OF BATHS: NEPTUNE IN BLACK AND
WHITE MOSAIC.
first baked bricks, according to Vitruvius, were used in the upper projecting courses of clay walls to throw off the water. This entrance gives through a lobby upon an arcaded brick court resembling a Bolognese cortile and having a tile cornice at floor level. Round the court on the ground floor are the stores, and on the floor above are sets of rooms opening upon a 10-foot passage, also arcaded. Two of the angles are occupied with staircase (Fig. 5) having risers 8½ in., treads 114 in. — a going much less steep than in the public staircases surviving in the Colosseum. Each step consists of four
courses of brick carried on flat groining spanning from a brick arch to the wall. The floors above may have been independent flats or the residences of merchant princes: the little niche, or lararium, having semi-dome done in tufa triangles, unlike the Pompeian variety with colonettes, is seen between the arches of the cortile (Fig. 6).
Such shrines are common in court and garden. Our sensitive business man, after refreshing himself at the baths and dining at one of the select rooms in the large restaurant near the forum, might seat himself in the evening at one of the three large square
windows that gave upon the enclosed garden and notice a pious female domestic placing a garland and cakes upon a shrine of this kind in front of the statuette of the household god: he might wonder how much of this odd Roman religion of the hearth was “good form’’ and how much “superstition. ” The
Romans certainly spent a great deal of money on their tombs at Ostia, as at Rome. He had noticed somewhere that day a new tomb in the most expensive rubbed tiles. This whole city, with its great arches like eyebrows, seemed in the brick-shrine style. Its domestic decoration was not of the best, the paintings
on the walls round
him and on the flat cove of the ceiling were undistinguished. Yet the town had a style of its own. He approved the deep colonnades of the Via Decumana. He recollected the grand black Neptune on the mosaic floor of the baths (Fig. 7), where the slave, letting the water sluice over his feet, had agreeably attended him with a huge magenta sponge. The public sculpture, too, was good, the marble grilles, the doors to the colombaria. It seemed that this city, that owed so much to Hadrian, had in the matter of sculpture absorbed something of the notable good taste in this respect of its imperial patron.
The marbles of Ostia are dispersed in a hundred museums, but there remain by chance on the site one or two forms full of grace and an Italian strength. They are not separate from but a part of the fine culture that an architect recognises in the humane structures
and in the study of their anatomy. (To be concluded)
A statement, by a lecturer on geology at the Manchester University, that the stone of Liverpool Cathedral is already showing signs of decay, has been emphatically denied by Mr. O. Pittaway, Clerk of the Works at the Cathedral. Some Forest of Dean stone, used for paving in the early stages of construction, proved to be unsuitable in the Liverpool atmosphere and was cut out, but the Woolton stone with which the exterior is faced is quite unaffected. Fig. 7. — OSTIA: FLOOR OF BATHS: NEPTUNE IN BLACK AND
WHITE MOSAIC.