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In the accounts of contemporaries imperial Rome looms as the largest and most magnificent capital of its age, and it is only natural, therefore, that modern scholars have attempted to determine with some precision both the size of the city's population and the way in which that population was housed. The evidence relating to the two closely connected problems is both archaeological and written : the ruins of ancient houses which still exist in Rome and the literary works which deal in part with the number of inhabitants or the buildings in the capital.The remains of several relatively well-preserved antique structures in Rome lend substance to Guido Calza's assertion that the apartment-house was the most common form of domestic architecture in the imperial capital. The ruins of one such dwelling (Plate VI, 1) are embedded in the city walls built by the Emperor Aurelian in the third century A.D. Located just south of the Porta Tiburtina, the remains comprise the garden facade of a four-storey brick building which originally contained apartments whose plans varied from floor to floor. This variation in the layout of flats within the building may be traced today in the placement of windows on each level.

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