It is a melancholy and significant fact that what little we do know from literature about this class is derived from the part they occasionally played in riots and revolutionary disorders.
It is fortunately quite impossible that the historian of the future should take account of the life of the educated and wealthy only; but in the history of the past and especially of the last three centuries B.C., we have to contend with this difficulty, and can only now and then find side-lights thrown upon the great mass of mankind.

The crime, the crowding, the occasional suffering from starvation and pestilence, in the unfashionable quarters of such a city as Rome, these things are hidden from us, and rarely even suggested by the histories we commonly read.
The three questions to which I wish to make some answer in this chapter are: (1) how was this population housed?
(2) how was it supplied with food and clothing?
and (3) how was it employed?
1.

It was of course impossible in a city like Rome that each man, married or unmarried, should have his own house; this is not so even in the great majority of modern industrial towns, though we in England are accustomed to see our comparatively well-to-do artisans dwelling in cottages spreading out into the country.

At Rome only the wealthy families lived in separate houses (_domus_), about which we shall have something to say in another chapter.

The mass of the population lived, or rather ate and slept (for southern climates favour an out-of-door life), in huge lodging-houses called islands (_insulae_), because they were detached from other buildings, and had streets on all sides of them, as islands have water.[42] These _insulae_ were often three or four stories high;[43] the ground-floor was often occupied by shops, kept perhaps by some of the lodgers, and the upper floors by single rooms, with small windows looking out on the street or into an interior court.