Until a decade or two ago, our knowledge of town-houses in ancient Italy had been obtained almost entirely by digging at Pompeii, and the dwellings uncovered in that town were regarded without question as typical of ancient Roman houses in general. The houses which thus came to be accepted as the pattern, and are still represented as such in English text-books, consisted down to the 2nd century B.C. of rooms arranged round a central atrium, and later, when Hellenistic influences had become paramount in Italy, of a combination of atrium and peristyle, the latter being added in imitation of the άυλή of a Greek house. Of late years, however, the view that these houses were typical of all Italian towns in antiquity has been challenged. The systematic excavation which is going on at Ostia, the ancient port of Rome, has revealed houses very different from those of Pompeii, comprising, not an atrium and peristyle, but many-storeyed blocks of flats, built around a central cortile, in the manner of the casamenti of modern Rome. As a result of these discoveries the pendulum tended to swing to the other extreme and the view gained ground that, if we wish to find a house representative of large cities in antiquity, it is to Ostia rather than to Pompeii that we must look. Confirmation of this view was seen in the discovery of a house of the Ostian type, dating from the 2nd century A.D., on the slope of the Capitol in Rome.