Chapter III: The Ruins of Pompeii39

Since you last heard from me we have been to see Pompeii and we are now waiting for the return of spring weather, to visit, first Pæstum, and then the islands; after which we shall return to Rome. I was astonished at the remains of this city. I had no conception of anything so perfect yet remaining. My idea of the mode of its destruction was this: first an earthquake came and shattered it, and unroofed almost all its temples and split its columns; then a rain of light small pumice-stones fell; then torrents of boiling water mixt with ashes filled up its crevices.

A wide flat hill from which the city was excavated is now covered with woods, and you see the tombs and theaters, the temples and houses, surrounded by uninhabited wilderness. We entered the town from the sides toward the sea, and first saw two theaters; one more magnificent than the other, strewn with the ruins of the white marble which formed their seats and cornices, wrought with deep bold sculpture. In the front between the stage and the seats is the circular space occasionally occupied by the chorus. The stage is very narrow but long and divided from this space by a narrow enclosure parallel to it, I suppose for the orchestra. On each side are the Consuls' boxes, and below in the theater of Herculaneum were found two equestrian statues of excellent workmanship, occupying the same space as the great bronze lamps did at Drury Lane. The smallest of the theaters is said to have been comic, tho I should doubt. From both you see, as you sit on the seats, a prospect of the most wonderful beauty.

You then pass through ancient streets; they are very narrow and the houses rather small, but are constructed on an admirable plan, especially for the climate. The rooms are built round a court, or sometimes two, according to the extent of the house. In the midst is a fountain sometimes surrounded with a portico, supported on fluted columns of white stucco; the floor is paved with mosaics sometimes wrought in imitation of vine leaves, sometimes in quaint figures, and more or less beautiful according to the rank of the inhabitant. There were paintings on all, but most of them have been removed to decorate the royal museums. Little winged figures and small ornaments of exquisite elegance yet remain. There is an ideal life in the forms of these paintings of an incomparable loveliness, tho most are evidently the work of very inferior artists. It seems as if from the atmosphere of mental beauty that surrounds them, every human being caught a splendor not his own.

In one house you see how the bedrooms were managed: a small sofa was built up, where the cushions were placed; two pictures, one representing Diana and Endymion and the other Venus and Mars, decorate the chamber; and a little niche which contains the statue of a domestic god. The floor is composed of a rich mosaic of the rarest marbles, agate, jasper and porphyry; it looks to the marble fountain and the snow white columns, whose etablatures strew the floor of the portico they supported. The houses have only one story, and the apartments, tho not large, are very lofty. A great advantage results from this, wholly unknown in our cities.

The public buildings, whose ruins are now forests as it were of white fluted columns, and which then supported entablatures loaded with sculpture, were seen on all sides over the roofs of the houses. This was the excellence of the ancients: their private expenses were comparatively moderate; the dwelling of one of the chief senators of Pompeii is elegant indeed, and adorned with the most beautiful specimens of art, but small. But their public buildings are everywhere marked by the bold and grand designs of an unsparing magnificence. In the little town of Pompeii (it contained about twenty thousand inhabitants) it is wonderful to see the number and grandeur of their public buildings.

Another advantage, too, is that in the present case the glorious scenery around is not shut out, and that unlike the inhabitants of the Cimmerian ravines of modern cities, the ancient Pompeiian could contemplate the clouds and the lamps of heaven; could see the moon rise high behind Vesuvius, and the sun set in the sea, tremulous with an atmosphere of golden vapor, below Inarnine and Misenum.

We next saw the temples. Of the temple of Æsculapius little remains but an altar of black stone, adorned with a cornice imitating the scales of a serpent. His statue in terra-cotta was found in the cell. The temple of Isis is more perfect. It is surrounded by a portico of fluted columns, and in the area around it are two altars, and many ceppi for statues; and a little chapel of white stucco, as hard as stone, of the most exquisite proportions; its panels are adorned with figures in bas-relief, slightly indicated, but of workmanship the most delicate that can be conceived. They are Egyptian subjects executed by a Greek artist, who has humanized all the unnatural extravagance of the original conception into the supernatural loveliness of his country's genius. They scarcely touch the ground with their feet, and their wind uplifted robes seem in the place of wings. The temple in the midst, raised on a high platform and approached by steps, was decorated with exquisite paintings, some of which we saw in the museum at Porticai. It is small, of the same materials as the chapel, with a pavement of mosaic, and fluted Ionic columns of white stucco, so white that it dazzles you to look at it.

Thence through other porticoes and labyrinths of walls and columns, some broken, some entire, their entablatures strewed under them. The temple of Jupiter, of Venus, and another temple, the Tribunal, and the hall of public justice with the forests of lofty columns, surround the Forum. Two pedestals or altars of an enormous size (for whether they were the altars of the temple of Venus before which they stand the guide could not tell) occupy the lower end of the Forum. At the upper end, supported on an elevated platform, stands the temple of Jupiter. Under the colonnade of its portico we sat and pulled out our oranges and figs and bread (sorry fare, you will say) and started to eat. Here was a magnificent spectacle. Above and between the multitudinous shafts of the sunshiny columns was seen the sea, reflecting the purple heaven of noon above it, and supporting, as it were, on its lips the dark lofty mountains of Sorrento, of a blue indescribably deep, and tinged toward their summits with streaks of new fallen snow. Between was one small green island. To the right was Capreæ, Inarnine, Prochyta, and Misenum. Behind was the single summit of Vesuvius, rolling forth volumes of thick white smoke, whose foam-like column was sometimes darted into the clear dark sky and fell in little streaks along the wind. Between Vesuvius and the nearer mountains, as through a chasm, was seen the main line of the loftiest Apenines to the east. The day was radiated and warm. Every now and then we heard the subterranean thunder of Vesuvius; its distant and deep peals seem to shake the very air and light of day, which interpenetrated our frames with a sudden and tremendous sound. The scene was what the Greeks beheld (Pompeii, you know, was a Greek city). They lived in harmony with nature, and the interstices of their incomparable columns were portals, as it were, to admit the spirit of beauty which animates this glorious universe to visit those whom it inspired. If such is Pompeii, what was Athens? What scene was exhibited from the Acropolis, the Parthenon, and the temples of Hercules, and Theseus and the Winds? The islands and the Ægean Sea, the mountains of Argolis, and the peaks of Pindus and Olympus, with the darkness of the Boeotian forests interspersed?

From the Forum we went to another public place, a triangular portico half enclosing the ruins of an enormous temple. It is built on the edge of the hill overlooking the sea. The black point is the temple. In the apex of the triangle stand an altar and a fountain, and before the altar once stood the statue of the builder of the portico.

Returning hence and following the consular road, we came to the eastern gate of the city. The walls are of enormous strength and inclose a space of three miles. On each side of the wall beyond the gate are built the tombs. How unlike ours! They seem not so much hiding-places for that which must decay as voluptuous chambers of immortal spirits. They are of marble radiantly white; and two especially beautiful are loaded with exquisite bas-relief. On the stucco wall that encloses them are little emblematic figures, of a relief exceedingly low, of dead and dying animals and little winged genii, and female forms bending in groups in some funereal office. The higher reliefs represent, one a nautical and the other a Bacchanalian one. Within the cell stand the crematory urns, sometimes one, sometimes more. It is said that paintings were found within; which are now, as has been everything movable in Pompeii, removed and scattered about in royal museums. These tombs were the most impressive things of all. The wild woods surround them on either side; and along the broad stones of the paved road which divides them, you hear the late leaves of autumn shiver and rustle in the stream of the inconstant wind, as it were like the steps of ghosts. The radiance and magnificence of these dwellings of the dead, the white freshness of the scarcely finished marble, the impassioned or imaginative life of the figures which adorn them, contrast strangely with the simplicity of the houses of those who were living when Vesuvius overwhelmed them.

I have forgotten the amphitheater, which is of great magnitude tho inferior to the Coliseum.

I now understand why the Greeks were such great poets; and above all, I can account, it seems to me, for the harmony, the unity, the perfection, the uniform excellence of all their works of art. They lived in a perpetual commerce with external nature, and nourished themselves upon the spirits of its forms. Their theaters were all open to the mountains of the sky. Their columns, the ideal type of a sacred forest, with its roof of interwoven tracery, admitted the light and wind. The odor and the freshness of the country penetrated the cities. Their temples were mostly unparthaic; and the flying clouds, the stars and the deep sky were seen above. Oh, but for that series of wretched wars which terminated in the Roman conquest of the world; but for the Christian religion which put the finishing stroke on the ancient system; but for those changes that conducted Athens to its ruin--to what an eminence might not humanity have arrived!

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 37: From an essay written sometime in 1820-21, and suggested by an article on poetry which his friend, Thomas Love Peacock, had contributed to the _Literary Miscellany_. John Addington Symonds, one of Shelley's biographers, cites this paper as containing some of the finest prose writing of Shelley.]

[Footnote 38: One of Shelley's many letters to his friend, Thomas Love Peacock, of which Symonds says: "Taken altogether, they are the most perfect specimens of descriptive prose on the English language; never overcharged with color, vibrating with emotions excited by the stimulating scenes of Italy, frank in criticisms, and exquisitely delicate in observation. Their transparent sincerity and unpremeditated grace, combined with natural finish of expression, make them masterpieces of a style at once familiar and elevated." It was among the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla that Shelley wrote his poem "Prometheus Unbound." Of this poem Shelley wrote from Florence on December 26, 1819, a letter the original of which is now owned in New York by Louis V. Ledoux: "My 'Prometheus' is the best thing I ever wrote."]

[Footnote 39: A letter to Thomas Love Peacock, dated "Naples, Jan. 26, 1819."]

GEORGE GROTE

Born in 1794, died in 1871; educated at the Charterhouse;
entered his father's bank in 1810 and devoted himself
thenceforth to banking; elected to Parliament in 1833,
serving until 1841; published his "History of Greece" in
1846-56; wrote also "Plato and Other Companions of
Socrates," which was published in 1865.