Luceiia took me on a tour of inspection. The entire villa was two-storeyed, and the walls surrounding the inner courtyard were of solid stone — huge granite pebbles, all smooth and rounded, bonded together by strong concrete. The extended wings flanking the outer courtyard were of timber framing and plaster mixed with broken flint.
The Britannicus family were justifiably proud of their villa. It had two completely separate sets of baths, one for the family itself and the other, a larger facility, for the servants and the tenants who farmed the surrounding land. Luceiia pointed out to me that all of the buildings flanking the inner courtyard were entered from the courtyard. This did not surprise me, and indeed seemed not worth mentioning, until she also pointed out that all the buildings flanking the outer yard opened into the fields surrounding the villa. Only four small doors permitted pedestrian access from these buildings to the outer courtyard. That did surprise me. She saw my surprise and smiled and told me to blame the anomaly of the outer courtyard on herself. When Caius had left for Africa, she had decided to beautify the place. She had transformed the courtyard, blocking up the entrances to all the buildings around it and opening new ones on the other side. Now the threshing floor, the entries to the cattle sheds, sheep pens and swine sties were hidden from the casual visitor. Having masked the front of the building, she had then proceeded with the construction of a great, sweeping arc of an entrance road leading to the main portico. She had seeded the entire yard with new grass and lavished attention on it, and when it had grown rich, she had planted formal gardens of flowers — roses, violets, pansies and poppies. The only remnants of the days before her changes were the twelve mighty trees that had always stood there: four oaks, three elms and five great copper beeches.
"Come, Publius, " she said after I had admired the scene. "You have some idea now of the layout of the place. Now we can look more closely. " That was when the humbling process began. I may have thought, as I listened to her talk about the plan of the villa, that I was getting some idea of what it was like, but I was wrong. The reality beggared description. The ground floor of the family quarters, for example, was palatial, and every room was differently floored. The floors in the main rooms were mosaic, in a multitude of colours, showing scenes of Greek myth and legend: I saw depictions of Europa and the Bull, Leda and the Swan, and Theseus and the Minotaur. The lesser rooms on that floor were merely tessellated, laid out in geometric shapes and patterns that dazzled the eyes with their brightness and colours.
The triclinium, the great dining room, held an open-sided arrangement of matched oaken dining tables that would seat upwards of sixty guests in comfort, and the walls were panelled in sheets of lustrous green and yellow marble so highly polished that I could see myself reflected in them. Against the walls, ranked side by side, were deep-shelved cabinets — some open-fronted, some with doors — that held the family's wealth of plate and dinnerware: platters and bowls and serving dishes and knives and utensils of gold and silver and copper and tin and bronze; exquisite Samian pottery, richly glazed and decorated; cups and beakers and vases of polished glass; and two enormous drinking cups of aurochs horn, polished and worn, glossy with age and ornamented with mounts of finely crafted gold.
The family slept on the upper floor, which was reached by a double flight of spacious, marble steps. Up there, I found real cause for astonishment. The floors were all of wood, for one thing, but such wood as I had never seen before. I asked Luceiia about them and she told me they were of pine, imported to Britain by her great-grandfather years before, and planed and then polished to a deep, reflective glaze by more than a hundred years of care and cleaning.
The most amazing thing of all, however, was that each of the ten sleeping-chambers on that upper floor had a window, and was therefore filled with light. The windows were small, and covered with wooden shutters fitted with louvered slats that could be closed completely, or angled to permit light and air to enter. I had heard of such things, and had even seen a few, but I had never seen them used so lavishly before. Normal Roman sleeping chambers were precisely that: tiny, lightless cubicles containing a bed, and perhaps a table. Because of the profusion of light, however, each of the ten chambers was decorated in a different colour, the walls and draped windows and the carpets on the floors blending their hues to give each room a character quite different from any other. My own room, which was separated from Caius's by a short, lateral corridor with a window at the eastern end and a chamber door on each side, was decorated in pale gold, while his was a spacious chamber of cool greens. Luceiia's own chamber was white and silver, with pale blue carpets and window drapes, and a bed covering of blue and silver silk the value of which must have been incalculable, made as it was in the distant lands far beyond Constantinople to the east.
The temperature throughout the entire house was uniform, thanks to the heated air carried to the various rooms by the hypocausts, hot-air ducts fed by the furnace that burned constantly beneath the bath house and was refuelled twice each day by the household servants. Luceiia led me from the upper floor to the family bath house by means of a stairway that descended to the inner courtyard from the passageway that ran along the outside of the upper floor.
Once again I was impressed beyond my expectations. The family bath house lacked none of the facilities one would expect to find in a major public bathing house. There was a spacious undressing room, divided by rod-hung curtains for privacy, and lined with niches for holding clothing. Directly outside this room were three pool rooms laid out in sequence —
cold, tepid, and hot — and beyond those, closed off by heavy, waterproofed curtains, was the sudarium, or steam room, which held a number of stone plinths and was looked after by an attendant skilled in massage and depilation.
We did not linger in the bath house, but I asked her about the glazed tiles that lined the walls and the pools, and she told me that they, too, had been imported from beyond the seas.
It was a relief to emerge again into the scented coolness of the inner courtyard where, even this late in the year, the air was redolent of green and growing things. This inner courtyard was split into four quarters by intersecting pathways. The two plots closest to the living quarters were ornamental, lined with privet hedge and planted with a profusion of red poppies, some of which still bloomed. The far plots were given completely to vegetables and fruits. I could tell from the pride with which she described the plants that this garden was Luceiia's special concern. She pointed out two plum trees, a cherry tree and two apple trees, all pruned severely and healthy-looking.
At the intersection of the two pathways, she turned right and led me to the kitchens and the bakery, pointing out that most of the household servants lived above these places. Both facilities were enormous, spotlessly clean and well enough equipped to serve two hundred people on the shortest notice.