“O good old house, alas! how differentAnd in these times that may be said of many a house!1
The owner who now owneth thee!
”
[139]
The truth is, a man's dignity may be
enhanced by the house he lives in, but not wholly
secured by it; the owner should bring honour to his
[p. 143]
house, not the house to its owner. And, as in
everything else a man must have regard not for
himself alone but for others also, so in the home of
a distinguished man, in which numerous guests must
be entertained and crowds of every sort of people
received, care must be taken to have it spacious.
But if it is not frequented by visitors, if it has an
air of lonesomeness, a spacious palace often becomes
a discredit to its owner. This is sure to be the
case if at some other time, when it had a different
owner, it used to be thronged. For it is unpleasant,
when passers-by remark:
1 Members of Caesar's party were now occupying the houses that had been the homes of Pompey's friends. Antony, for example, lived in Pompey's house.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.