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[70] When the supply came to be large
enough, the owners of insulae and domus were allowed to have water
laid on by private pipes, as we have it in modern towns; but it is not
certain when this permission was first given.
3. But we must return to the individual Roman of the masses, whom we
have now seen well supplied with the necessaries of life, and try
to form some idea of the way in which he was employed, or earned a
living. This is by no means an easy task, for these small people, as
we have already seen, did not interest their educated fellow-citizens,
and for this reason we hear hardly anything of them in the literature
of the time. Not only a want of philanthropic feeling in their
betters, but an inherited contempt for all small industry and retail
dealing, has helped to hide them away from us: an _inherited_
contempt, because it is in fact a survival from an older social
system, when the citizen did not need the work of the artisan and
small retailer, but supplied all his own wants within the circle of
his household, i.


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