Note 070 Read the whole third Satire, but particularly 166, 223, etc. The description of a crowded insula, or lodging-house, in Petronius (c. 95, 97), perfectly tallies with the complaints of Juvenal; and we learn from legal authority that, in the time of Augustus (Heineccius, Hist. Juris Roman. c. iv. p. 181), the ordinary rent of the several caenacula, or apartments of an insula, annually produced forty thousand sesterces, between three and four hundred pounds sterling (Pandect. 1. xix. tit. ii. No. 30), a sum which proves at once the large extent and high value of those common buildings.

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The History Of The Decline and Fall Of The Roman Empire— Chapter 31