The infant community of Rome grew up with neighbours who conceded a fairly high place to women. Etruscan sepulchral art suggests as much; the tomb paintings of early Campania show the womenfolk spruce, dignified, and house-proud; the authoritarian rule of the Sabine mother was traditional. Granted that in certain places and at certain times women were taboo, in a sense ‘infectious’, to use Warde Fowler's word, yet in the home the Roman wife had never been banished to a gynaeceum. The Atrium, the heart of the Roman house, was the wife's territory as much as the husband's. Though every Roman household was a monarchy with the paterfamilias as king, the womenfolk were no more, if no less, his subjects than the sons. When the Roman husband carried his wife into the Atrium, and she spoke the sacramental words ‘ubi tu Gaius ibi ego Gaia’, she made a claim that, in its due sphere, was admitted. In this sphere the Roman husband was more at home than the Greek, who hated not to be out of doors in the daytime. In a speech which Tacitus writes for Valerius Messalinus there is the truly Roman phrase ‘revertentibus post laborem quod honestius quam uxorium levamentum?’—‘the relief of a wife's society’—a society, that is, to quote another phrase from the same passage, ‘consortium rerum secundarum adversarumque’. When Lucretius writes:

iam iam non domus accipiet te laeta, neque uxor optima nee dulces occurrent oscula nati praeripere et tacita pectus dulcedine tangent the adjectives carry a weight of feeling.

The present war will leave architects unexpected and wonderful opportunities for replanning our cities and making them more worthy of the name ‘city’. The impressive schemes already laid before the public show that they intend to be ready when the moment comes. They will produce something better than a formless huddle of shops and slums or a wide but still formless expanse of suburbs. A more organic structure will be their object, built round a vital centre. In achieving this the creators of the new towns will be guided first and last by the needs and ways of life of those who will have to live in them. These will not be sacrificed to tradition or to artistic fancy. There will be no meaningless imitation and no appeal to precedent unless it is based on similar ways of life and similar ideas. For these reasons one hesitates to turn to classical precedents; but perhaps there is something in the ancient Greek city, the polis, which is not altogether foreign to the modern spirit, and arising out of this, elements in its architectural form which are applicable to modern needs.

The city in the best sense of the word was a Greek creation. The polis was a compact community in which life was so organized that each citizen could get the greatest benefit from his membership. It was not so large that he was completely swallowed up, but it was sufficiently large for him to enjoy a rich and full political and economic, social and intellectual life.

Among the scanty stage directions in the present text of Shakespeare's plays one reads things like ‘Alarums’ or ‘Drum heard’ or ‘Noise and tumult within’ or ‘March afar off and shot within’. The Elizabethan producer had, it seems, little apparatus and made much play with such a device as ‘noises off’. The simplicity, not to say crudity, of the means at his disposal may not have served him ill. Perhaps an audience is more easily stirred to pity and terror by the sound of distant gunfire than by a realistic battle-scene elaborately produced on a modern stage with its many resources of furniture and lighting. The eyes of the ignorant may be more learned than their ears, but the ears are more imaginative: at least they were when Agamemnon and Henry VIII first walked the stage. Aeschylus, at any rate, and Shakespeare did make effective use of sound effects. It is not altogether fanciful to suppose that all ancient poets practise a similar technique. Homer, Od. 1. 351: