Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

Behind the poecile open small chambers, of which some are vaulted. Skeletons were found in them, and the inference was that they were prisons. Lower down extends along the Forum the lateral wall of the temple of Venus. In this wall is hollowed a small square niche in which there rose, at about a yard in height from the soil, a sort of table of tufa, indented with regular cavities, which are ranged in the order of their capacity; these were the public measures. An inscription gives us the names of the duumvirs who had gauged them by order of the decurions. As M. Breton has well remarked, they were the standards of measurement. Of these five cavities, the two smallest were destined for liquids, and we still see the holes through which those liquids flowed off when they had been measured. The table of tufa has been taken to the museum, and in its place has been substituted a rough imitation, which gives a sufficient idea of this curious monument.

The temple of Venus is entered from the neighboring street which we have already traversed. The ruin is a fine one--the finest, perhaps, in Pompeii; a spacious inclosure, or peribolus, framing a portico of forty-eight columns, of which many are still standing, and the portico itself surrounding the podium, where rose the temple--properly speaking, the house of the goddess. In front of the entrance, at the foot of the steps that ascend to the podium, rises the altar, poorly calculated for living sacrifices and seemingly destined for simple offerings of fruit, cakes, and incense, which were consecrated to Venus. Besides the form of the altar, an inscription found there and a statue of the goddess, whose modest attitude recalls the masterpiece of Florence, sufficiently authorize the name, in the absence of more exact information, that has been given to this edifice. Others, however, have attributed it to the worship of Bacchus; others again to that of Diana, and the question has not yet been settled by the savans; but Venus being the patroness of Pompeii, deserved the handsomest temple in the little city.

The columns of the peribolus or inclosure bear the traces of some bungling repairs made between the earthquake of 63 and the eruption of 79. They were Doric, but the attempt was to render them Corinthian, and, to this end, they were covered with stucco and topped with capitals that are not becoming to them. Against one of these columns still leans a statue in the form of a Hermes. Around the court is cut a small kennel to carry off the rain water, which was then caught in reservoirs. The wall along the Forum was gaily decorated with handsome paintings; one of these, probably on wood, was burned in the eruption, and the vacant place where it belonged is visible. Behind the temple open rooms formerly intended for the priests; handsome paintings were found there, also--- among them a Bacchus, resting his elbow on the shoulder of old Silenus, who is playing the lyre. Absorbed in this music, he forgets the wine in his goblet, and lets it fall out upon a panther crouching at his feet.

We now have only to visit the temple itself, the house of the goddess. The steps that scaled the basement story were thirteen--an odd number--so that in ascending the first step with the right foot, the level of the sanctuary was also reached with the right foot. The temple was _peripterous_, that is to say, entirely surrounded with open columns with Corinthian capitals. The portico opened broadly, and a mosaic of marbles, pleasingly adjusted, formed the pavement of the _cella_, of which the painted walls represented simple panels, separated here and there by plain pilasters. Our Lady of Pompeii dwelt there.

The last monument of the Forum on the south-west side is the Basilica; and the street by which we have entered separates it from the temple of Venus. The construction of the edifice leaves no doubt as to its destination, which is, moreover, confirmed by the word _Basilica_ or _Basilaca_, scratched here and there by loungers with the points of their knives, on the wall. _Basilica_--derived from a Greek word which signifies _king_--might be translated with sufficient exactness by _royal court_. At Rome, these edifices were originally mere covered market-places sheltered from the rain and the sun. At a later period, colonnades divided them in three, sometimes even into five naves, and the simple niche which, intended for the judges' bench, was hollowed out at the foot of its monuments, finally developed into a vaulted semicircle. At last, the early Christians finding themselves crowded in the old temples, chose the high courts of justice to therein celebrate the worship of the new God, and the Roman Basilica imposed its architecture and its proportions upon the Catholic Cathedral. In the semicircle, then, where once the ancient magistracy held its justice seat, arose the high altar and the consecrated image of the crucified Saviour.

The Basilica of Pompeii presents to the Forum six pillars, between which five portals slid along grooves which are still visible. A vestibule, or sort of chalcidicum extends between these five entrances and five others, indicated by two columns and four pillars. The vestibule once crossed, the edifice appears in its truly Roman grandeur; at first glance the eye reconstructs the broad brick columns, regularly truncated in shape (they might be considered unfinished), which are still erect on their bases and which, crowned with Ionic volutes, were to form a monumental portico along the four sides of this majestic area paved with marble. Half columns fixed in the lateral walls supported the gallery; they joined each other in the angles; the middle space must have been uncovered. Fragments of statues and even of mounted figures proclaim the magnificence of this monument, at the extremity of which there rose, at the height of some six feet above the soil, a tribune adorned with half a dozen Corinthian columns and probably destined for the use of the duumvirs. The middle columns stood more widely apart in order that the magistrates might, from their seats, command a view of the entire Basilica. Under this tribune was concealed a mysterious cellar with barred windows. Some antiquaries affirm that there was the place where prisoners were tortured. They forget that in Rome, in the antique time, cases were adjudged publicly before the free people.

Some of the walls of the Basilica were covered with _graphites_, that is to say, with inscriptions scratched with the point of a nail or of a knife by loungers on the way. I do not here copy the thousand and one insignificant inscriptions which I find in my rambles. They would teach us nothing but the names of the Pompeian magistrates who had constructed or reconstructed this or that monument or such-and-such a portion of an edifice with the public money. But the graphites of the Basilica merit a moment's attention. Sometimes, these are verses of Ovid or of Virgil or Propertius (never of Horace, singular to say), and frequently with curious variations. Thus, for example:

"Quid pote durum _Saxso_ aut quid mollius unda?
Dura tamen molli _Saxsa_ cavantur aqua."
(_Ovid_.)

Notice the _s_ in the _saxo_ and the _quid pote_ instead of _quid magis_; it is a Greekism.

Elsewhere were written these two lines:

"Quisquis amator erit Scythiæ licet ambulet oris:
Nemo adeo ut feriat barbarus esse volet."

Propertius had put this distich in an elegy in which he narrated a nocturnal promenade between Rome and Tibur. Observe the word _Scythiæ_ instead of _Scythicis_, and especially, _feriat_, which is the true reading,--the printed texts say _noceat_. Thus an excellent correction has been preserved for us by Vesuvius.

Here are other lines, the origin of which is unknown:

"Scribenti mi dictat Amor, monstrat que Cupido
Ah peream, sine te si Deus esse velim!"

How many modern poets have uttered the same exclamation! They little dreamed that a Pompeian, a slave no doubt, had, eighteen centuries before their time, scratched, it with a nail upon the wall of a basilica. Here is a sentence that mentions gold. It has been carried out by the English poet, Wordsworth:

"Minimum malum fit contemnendo maximum,
Quod, crede mi, non contemnendo, erit minus."

Let us copy also this singular truth thrown into rhyme by some gourmand who had counted without his host:

"Quoi perna cocta est, si convivæ adponitur,
Non gustat pernam, lingit ollam aut caccabum."

This _quoi_ is for _cui_; the caccabus was the kettle in which the fowl was cooked.

Here follows some wholesome advice for the health of lovers:

"Quisquis amat calidis noil debet fontibus uti:
Nam nemo flammis ustus amare potest."

I should never get through were I to quote them all. But how many short phrases there are that, scratched here and there, cause this old monument to spring up again, by revealing the thoughts and fancies of the loungers and passers-by who peopled it so many years ago.

A lover had written this:

"Nemo est bellus nisi qui amavit."

A friend:

"Vale, Messala, fac me ames."

A superlative wag, but incorrect withal:

"Cosmus nequitiae est magnussimae."

A learned man, or a philosopher:

"Non est exsilium ex patria sapientibus."

A complaining suitor:

"Sara non belle facis.
Solum me relinquis,
Debilis...."

A wrangler and disputant threatening the other party with a law-suit:

"Somius _Corneilio_ (Cornelio) jus _pendre_ (perendie?)"

A sceptic who cherishes no illusions as to the mode of administering justice:

"Quod pretium legi?"

A censor, perhaps a Christian, who knew the words addressed by the Jews to the blind man who was cured:

"Pyrrhus Getae conlegae salutem.
Moleste fero quod audivi te mortuom (sic).
Itaque vale."

A jovial wine bibber:

"Suavis vinari sitit, rogo vas valde sitit."[B]

A wit:

"Zetema mulier ferebat filium simulem sui nec meus erat, nec mi
simulat; sed vellem esset meus, et ego volebam ut meus esset."

Tennis-players scribble:

"Amianthus, Epaphra, Tertius ludant cum Hedysio, Incundus Nolanus
petat, numeret Citus et Stacus Amianthus."

Wordsworth remarks that these two names, Tertius and Epaphras, are found in the epistles of St. Paul. Epaphras (in Latin, Epaphra; the suppressed letter _s_ shows that this Pompeian was merely a slave) is very often named on the walls of the little city; he is accused, moreover, of being beardless or destitute of hair (_Epaphra glaber est_), and of knowing nothing about tennis. (_Epaphra pilicrepus non es_). This inscription was found all scratched over, probably by the hand of Epaphras himself, who had his own feelings of pride as a fine player.

Thus it is that the stones of Pompeii are full of revelations with reference to its people. The Basilica is easy to reconstruct and provide with living occupants. Yonder duumviri, up between the Corinthian columns; in front of them the accused; here the crowd; lovers confiding their secrets to the wall; thinkers scribbling their maxims on them; wags getting off their witticisms in the same style; the slaves, in fine, the poor, announcing to the most remote posterity that they had, at least, the game of tennis to console them for their abject condition! Still three small apartments the extremity of which rounded off into semicircles (probably inferior tribunes where subordinate magistrates, such as commissioners or justices of the peace, had their seats); then the school of Verna, cruelly dilapidated; finally a small triumphal arch on which there stood, perhaps, a _quadriga_, or four-yoked chariot-team; some pedestals of statues erected to illustrious Pompeians, to Pansa, to Sallust, to Marcus Lucretius, Decidamius Rufus; some inscriptions in honor of this one or that one, of the great Romulus, of the aged Æneas,--when all these have been seen, or glanced at, at least, you will have made the tour of the Forum.

You now know what the public exchange was in a Roman city; a spacious court surrounded by the most important monuments (three temples, the bourse, the tribunals, the prisons, etc.), inclosed on all sides (traces of the barred gates are still discernible at the entrances), adorned with statues, triumphal arches, and colonnades; a centre of business and pleasure; a place for sauntering and keeping appointments; the Corso, the Boulevard of ancient times, or in other words, the heart of the city. Without any great effort of the imagination, all this scene revives again and becomes filled with a living, variegated throng,--the portico and its two stories of columns along the edge of the reconstructed monuments; women crowd the upper galleries; loiterers drag their feet along the pavement; the long robes gather in harmonious folds; busy merchants hurry to the Chalcidicum; the statues look proudly down from their re-peopled pedestals; the noble language of the Romans resounds on all sides in scanned, sonorous measure; and the temple of Jupiter, seated at the end of the vista, as on a throne, and richly adorned with Corinthian elegance, glitters in all its splendor in the broad sunshine.

An air of pomp and grandeur--a breath of Rome--has swept over this collection of public edifices. Let us descend from these heights and walk about through the little city.

[Footnote B: For _sitiat_.]

III.

THE STREET.

THE PLAN OF POMPEII.--THE PRINCELY NAMES OF THE HOUSES.--APPEARANCE
OF THE STREETS, PAVEMENTS, SIDEWALKS, ETC.--THE SHOPS AND THE
SIGNS.--THE PERFUMER, THE SURGEON, ETC.--AN ANCIENT
MANUFACTORY.--BATHING ESTABLISHMENTS.--WINE-SHOPS, DISREPUTABLE
RESORTS.--HANGING BALCONIES, FOUNTAINS.--PUBLIC PLACARDS: LET US
NOMINATE BATTUR! COMMIT NO NUISANCE!--RELIGION ON THE STREET.

You have no need of me for this excursion. Cast a glance at the plan, and you will be able to find your own way. You will there see an oval inclosure, a wall pierced with several entrances designated by the names of the roads which ran from them, or rather of the cities at which these roads terminated--Herculaneum, Nola, Stabiæ, etc. Two-thirds of the egg are still immaculate; you discover a black spot only on the extreme right, marking out the Amphitheatre. All this white space shows you the part of Pompeii that has not yet been designated. It is a hillside covered with vineyards, gardens, and orchards. It is only on the left that you will find the lines marking the streets, the houses, the monuments, and the public squares. The text gives us the fancied names attributed to the streets, namely: the Street of Abundance, the Street of Twelve Gods, the Street of Mercury, the Street of Fortune, the Street of Fortunata, Modest Street, etc. The names given to the houses are still more arbitrary. Most of them were christened, under the old system, by the august or illustrious personages before whom they were dug out for the first time. Thus, we have at Pompeii the house of Francis II., that of Championnet, that of Joseph II.; those of the Queen of England, the King of Prussia, the Grand Duke of Tuscany; that of the Emperor, and those of the Empress and of the Princes of Russia; that of Goethe, of the Duchess de Berry, of the Duke d'Aumale--I skip them by scores. The whole Gotha Almanac might there be passed in review. This determined, ramble through the streets at will, without troubling yourself about their names, as these change often at the caprice of antiquaries and their guides.

The narrowness of these streets will surprise you; and if you come hither to look for a Broadway, you had better have remained at home. What we call great arteries of traffic were unknown to the Pompeians, who cut only small paved paths between their houses--for the sake of health, they said. We entertain different views of this question of salubrity.

The greatest width of a Pompeian street is seven yards, and there are some which are comprised, sidewalks and all, within a space of two yards and a half. These sidewalks are raised, very narrow, and paved very variously, according to the wealth or the fancy of the proprietors, who had to keep them in good order. Here are handsome stone flags; further on merely the soil beaten down; in front of the next house are marble slabs, and here and there patches of _opus signinum_, a sort of rudimentary mosaic, to which we shall refer further on. These sidewalks were intersected with curbstones, often pierced with holes--in front of shops, for instance--perhaps for tethering the cows and donkeys of the peasants who every morning brought the citizens milk or baskets of vegetables to their own doors. Between the sidewalks was hollowed out the street, paved with coarse blocks of lava which time has not worn down. When Pansa went to the dwelling of Paratus his sandals trod the same stones that now receive the impress of our boots. On rainy days this street must have been the bed of a torrent, as the alleys and by-ways of Naples are still; hence, one, sometimes three, thicker blocks were placed so as to enable foot passengers to cross with dry feet. These small fording blocks must have made it difficult for vehicles to get by; hence, the ruts that are still found traceable on the pavement are the marks of wagons drawn slowly by oxen, and not of those light chariots which romance-writers launch forth so briskly in the ancient city. Moreover, it has been ascertained that the Pompeians went afoot; only the quality had themselves drawn about in chariots in the country. Where could room have been found for stables and carriage-houses in those dwellings scarcely larger than your hat? It was in the suburbs only, in the outskirts of the city, that the dimensions of the residences rendered anything of the kind possible. Let us, then, obliterate these chariots from our imagination, if we wish to see the streets of Pompeii as they really were.

After a shower, the rain water descended, little by little, into the gutters, and from the latter, by holes still visible, into a subterranean conduit that carried it outside of the city. One of these conduits is still open in the Street of Stabiæ, not far from the temple of Isis.

As to the general aspect of these ancient thoroughfares, it would seem dull enough, were we to represent the scene to our fancy with the houses closed, the windows gone, the dwellings with merely a naked wall for a front, and receiving air and light only from the two courts. But it was not so, as everything goes to prove. In the first place, the shops looked out on the street and were, indeed almost entirely open, like our own, offering to the gaze of the passers-by a broad counter, leaving only a small space free to the left or the right to let the vendors pass in and out. In these counters, which were usually covered with a marble slab, were hollowed the cavities wherein the grocers and liquor-dealers kept their eatables and drinkables. Behind the counters and along the walls were stone shelves, upon which the stock was put away. Festoons of edibles hung displayed from pillar to pillar; stuffs, probably, adorned the fronts, and the customers, who made their purchases from the sidewalk, must have everywhere formed noisy and very animated groups. The native of the south gesticulates a great deal, likes to chaffer, discusses with vehemence, and speaks loudly and quickly with a glib tongue and a sonorous voice. Just take a look at him in the lower quarters of Naples, which, in more than one point of view, recall the narrow streets of Pompeii.

These shops are now dismantled. Nothing of them remains but the empty counters, and here and there the grooves in which the doors slid to and fro. These doors themselves were but a number of shutters fitting into each other. But the paintings or carvings which still exist upon some side pillars are old signs that inform us what was sold on the adjoining counter. Thus, a goat in terra cotta indicated a milk-depot; a mill turned by an ass showed where there was a miller's establishment; two men, walking one ahead of the other and each carrying one end of a stick, to the middle of which an amphora is suspended, betray the neighborhood of a wine-merchant. Upon other pillars are marked other articles not so readily understood,--here an anchor, there a ship, and in another place a checker-board. Did they understand the game of Palamedes at Pompeii? A shop near the Thermæ, or public warm baths, is adorned on its front with a representation of a gladiatorial combat. The author of the painting thought something of his work, which he protected with this inscription: "_Abiat (habeat) Venerem Pompeianam iradam (iratam) qui hoc læserit!_ (May he who injures this picture have the wrath of the Pompeian Venus upon him!)"

Other shops have had their story written by the articles that they contained when they were found. Thus, when there were discovered in a suite of rooms opening on the Street of Herculaneum, certain levers one of which ended in the foot of a pig, along with hammers, pincers, iron rings, a wagon-spring, the felloe of a wheel, one could say without being too bold that there had been the shop of a wagon-maker or blacksmith. The forge occupied only one apartment, behind which opened a bath-room and a store-room. Not far from there a pottery is indicated by a very curious oven, the vault of which is formed of hollow tubes of baked clay, inserted one within the other. Elsewhere was discovered the shop of the barber who washed, brushed, shaved, clipped, combed and perfumed the Pompeians living near the Forum. The benches of masonry are still seen where the customers sat. As for the dealers in soap, unguents, and essences, they must have been numerous; their products supplied not only the toilet of the ladies, but the religious or funeral ceremonies, and after having perfumed the living, they embalmed the dead. Besides the shops in which the excavators have come suddenly upon a stock of fatty and pasty substances, which, perhaps, were soaps, we might mention one, on the pillar of which three paintings, now effaced, represented a sacrificial attendant leading a bull to the altar, four men bearing an enormous chest around which were suspended several vases; then a body washed and anointed for embalming. Do you understand this mournful-looking sign? The unguent dealer, as he was called, thus _made up_ the body and publicly placarded it.

From the perfumery man to the chemist is but a step. The shop of the latter tradesman was found--so it is believed, at all events in clearing out a triple furnace with walled boilers. Two pharmacies or drug-stores, one in the Street of Herculaneum, the other fronting the Chalcidicum, have been more exactly designated not only by a sign on which there was seen a serpent (one of the symbols of Æsculapius) eating a pineapple, but by tablets, pills, jars, and vials containing dried-up liquids, and a bronze medicine chest divided into compartments which must have contained drugs. A groove for the spatula had been ingeniously constructed in this curious little piece of furniture.

Not far from the apothecary lived the doctor, who was an apothecary himself and a surgeon besides, and it was in his place that were discovered the celebrated instruments of surgery which are at the museum, and which have raised such stormy debates between Dr. Purgon and Dr. Pancratius. The first, being a doctor, deemed himself competent to give an account of these instruments, whereat the second, being an antiquary, became greatly irritated, seeing that the faculty, in his opinion, has nothing to do with archæology. However that may be, the articles are at the museum, and everybody can look at them. There is a forceps, to pull teeth with, as some affirm; to catch and compress arteries, as others declare; there is a specillum of bronze, a probe rounded in the form of an S; there are lancets, pincers, spatulas, hooks, a trident, needles of all kinds, incision knives, cauteries, cupping-glasses--I don't know what not--fully three hundred different articles, at all events. This rich collection proves that the ancients were quite skilful in surgery and had invented many instruments thought to be modern. This is all that it is worth our while to know. For more ample information, examine the volume entitled _Memoires de l'Academie d'Herculaneum_.

Other shops (that of the color merchant, that of the goldsmith, the sculptor's atelier, etc.) have revealed to us some of the processes of the ancient artists. We know, for instance, that those of Pompeii employed mineral substances almost exclusively in the preparation of their colors; among them chalk, ochre, cinnabar, minium, etc. The vegetable kingdom furnished them nothing but lamp-black, and the animal kingdom their purple. The colors mixed with rosin have occasioned the belief that encaustic was the process used by the ancients in their mural paintings, an opinion keenly combatted by other hypotheses, themselves no less open to discussion; into this debate it is not our part to enter. However the case may be, the color dealer's family was fearfully decimated by the eruption, for fourteen skeletons were found in his shop.

As for the sculptor, he was very busy at the time of the catastrophe; quite a number of statues were found in his place blocked out or unfinished, and with them were instruments of his profession, such as scissors, punchers, files, etc. All of these are at the museum in Naples.

There were artists, then, in Pompeii, but above all, there were artisans. The fullers so often mentioned by the inscriptions must have been the most numerous; they formed a respectable corporation. Their factory has been discovered. It is a peristyle surrounded with rooms, some of which served for shops and others for dwellings. A painted inscription on the street side announces that the dyers (_offectores_) vote for Posthumus Proculus. These _offectores_ were those who retinted woollen goods. Those who did the first dyeing were called the _infectores. Infectores qui alienum colorem in lanam conficiunt, offectores qui proprio colori novum officiunt_. In the workshop there were four large basins, one above the other; the water descended from the first to the next one and so on down to the last, there being a fifth sunken in the ground. Along the four basins ran a platform, at the end of which were ranged six or seven smaller basins, or vats, in which the stuffs were piled up and fulled. At the other extremity of the court, a small marble reservoir served, probably, as a washing vat for the workmen. But the most curious objects among the ruins were the paintings, now transferred to the museum at Naples, which adorned one of the pillars of the court. There a workman could be very distinctly seen dressing, with a sort of brush or card, a piece of white stuff edged with red, while another is coming toward him, bearing on his head one of those large osier cages or frames on which the girls of that region still spread their clothes to dry. These cages resemble the bell-shaped steel contrivances which our ladies pass under their skirts. Thus, in the Neapolitan dialect, both articles are called drying-horses (_asciutta-panni_). Upon the drying-horse of the Pompeian picture perches the bird of Minerva, the protectress of the fullers and the goddess of labor. To the left of the workmen, a young girl is handing some stuffs to a youthful, richly-dressed lady, probably a customer, seated near by. Another painting represents workmen dressing and fulling all sorts of tissues, with their hands and feet in tubs or vats exactly like the small basins which we saw in the court. A third painting shows the mistress of the house giving orders to her slaves; and the fourth represents a fulling press which might be deemed modern, so greatly does it resemble those still employed in our day. The importance of this edifice, now so stripped and dilapidated, confirms what writers have told us of the Pompeian fullers and their once-celebrated branch of trade.

However, most of the shops the use of which has not been precisely designated, were places where provisions of different kinds were kept and sold. The oil merchant in the street leading to the Odeon was especially noticeable among them all for the beauty of his counter, which was covered with a slab of _cipollino_ and gray marble, encrusted, on the outside, with a round slab of porphyry between two rosettes. Eight earthenware vases still containing olives[C] and coagulated oil were found in the establishment of this stylish grocer.

The bathing concerns were also very numerous. They were the coffee-houses of the ancient day. Hot drinks were sold there, boiled and perfumed wine, and all sorts of mixtures, which must have been detestable, but for which the ancients seem to have had a special fancy. "A thousand and a thousand times more respectable than the wine-shops of our day, these bathing-houses of ages gone by, where men did not assemble to shamefully squander their means and their existence while gorging themselves with wine, but where they came together to amuse themselves in a decent manner, and to drink warm water without risk."... Le Sage, who wrote the foregoing sentence, was not accurately informed. The liquors sold at the Pompeian bathing-houses were very strong, and, in more than one place where the points of the amphorae rested, they have left yellow marks on the pavement. Vinegar has been detected in most of these drinks. In the tavern of Fortunata, the marble of the counter is still stained with the traces of the ancient goblets.

Bakeries were not lacking in Pompeii. The most complete one is in the Street of Herculaneum, where it fills a whole house, the inner court of which is occupied with four mills. Nothing could be more crude and elementary than those mills. Imagine two huge blocks of stone representing two cones, of which the upper one is overset upon the other, giving every mill the appearance of an hour-glass. The lower stone remained motionless, and the other revolved by means of an apparatus kept in motion by a man or a donkey. The grain was crushed between the two stones in the old patriarchal style. The poor ass condemned to do this work must have been a very patient animal; but what shall we say of the slaves often called in to fill his place? For those poor wretches it was usually a punishment, as their eyes were put out and then they were sent to the mill. This was the menace held over their heads when they misbehaved. For others it was a very simple piece of service which more than one man of mind performed--Plautus, they say, and Terence. To some again, it was, at a later period, a method of paying for their vices; when the millers lacked hands they established bathing-houses around their mills, and the passers-by who were caught in the trap had to work the machinery.

Let us hasten to add that the work of the mill which we visited was not performed by a Christian, as they would say at Naples, but by a mule, whose bones were found in a neighboring room, most likely a stable, the racks and troughs of which were elevated about two and a half feet above the floor. In a closet near by, the watering trough is still visible. Then again, religion, which everywhere entered into the ancient manners and customs of Italy, as it does into the new, reveals itself in the paintings of the _pistrinum_; we there see the sacrifices to Fornax, the patroness of ovens and the saint of kitchens.

But let us return to our mills. Mills driven by the wind were unknown to the ancients, and water-mills did not exist in Pompeii, owing to the lack of running water. Hence these mills put in motion by manual labor--the old system employed away back in the days of Homer. On the other hand, the institution of complete baking as a trade, with all its dependent processes, did not date so far back. The primitive Romans made their bread in their own houses. Rome was already nearly five hundred years old when the first bakers established stationary mills, to which the proprietors sent their grain, as they still do in the Neapolitan provinces; in return they got loaves of bread; that is to say, their material ground, kneaded, and baked. The Pompeian establishment that we visited was one of these complete bakeries.

We could still recognize the troughs that served for the manipulation of the bread, and the oven, the arch of which is intact, with the cavity that retained the ashes, the vase for water to besprinkle the crust and make it shiny, and, finally, the triple-flued pipe that carried off the smoke--an excellent system revealed by the Pompeian excavations and successfully imitated since then. The bake-oven opened upon two small rooms by two apertures. The loaves went in at one of these in dough, and came out at the other, baked. The whole thing is in such a perfect state of preservation that one might be tempted to employ these old bricks, that have not been used for eighteen centuries, for the same purpose. The very loaves have survived. In the bakery of which I speak several were found with the stamps upon them, _siligo grani_ (wheat flour), or _e cicera_ (of bean flour)--a wise precaution against the bad faith of the dealers. Still more recently, in the latest excavations, Signor Fiorelli came across an oven so hermetically sealed that there was not a particle of ashes in it, and there were eighty-one loaves, a little sad, to be sure, but whole, hard, and black, found in the order in which they had been placed on the 23d of November, 79. Enchanted with this windfall, Fiorelli himself climbed into the oven and took out the precious relics with his own hands. Most of the loaves weigh about a pound; the heaviest twelve hundred and four grains. They are round, depressed in the centre, raised on the edges, and divided into eight lobes. Loaves are still made in Sicily exactly like them. Professor de Luca weighed and analyzed them minutely, and gave the result in a letter addressed to the French Academy of Sciences. Let us now imagine all these salesrooms, all these shops, open and stocked with goods, and then the display, the purchasers, the passers-by, the bustle and noise peculiar to the south, and the street will no longer seem so dead. Let us add that the doors of the houses were closed only in the evening; the promenaders and loungers could then peep, as they went along, into every alley, and make merry at the bright adornments of the _atrium_. Nor is this all. The upper stories, although now crumbled to dust, were in communication with the street. Windows opened discreetly, which must, here and there, have been the framework of some brown head and countenance anxious to see and to be seen. The latest excavations have revealed the existence of hanging covered balconies, long exterior corridors, pierced with casements, frequently depicted in the paintings. There the fair Pompeian could have taken her station in order to participate in the life outside. The good housewife of those times, like her counterpart in our day, could there have held out her basket to the street-merchant who went wandering about with his portable shop; and more than one handsome girl may at the same post have carried her fingers to her lips, there to cull (the ancient custom) the kiss that she flung to the young Pompeian concealed down yonder in the corner of the wall. Thus re-peopled, the old-time street, narrow as it is, was gayer than our own thoroughfares; and the brightly-painted houses, the variegated walls, the monuments, and the fountains, gave vivid animation to a picture too dazzling for our gaze.

These fountains, which were very simple, consisted of large square basins formed of five stone slabs, one for the bottom and four for the sides, fastened together with iron braces. The water fell into them from fonts more or less ornamental and usually representing the muzzle of some animal--lions' heads, masks, an eagle holding a hare in his beak, with the stream flowing into a receptacle from the hare's mouth. One of these fountains is surrounded with an iron railing to prevent passers-by from falling into it. Another is flanked by a capacious vaulted reservoir (_castellum_) and closed with a door. Those who have seen Rome know how important the ancients considered the water that they brought from a distance by means of the enormous aqueducts, the ruins of which still mark all the old territories of the empire. Water, abundant and limpid, ran everywhere, and was never deficient in the Roman cities. Still it has not been discovered how the supply was obtained for Pompeii, destitute of springs as that city was, and, at the same time, elevated above the river, and receiving nothing in its cisterns but the rain-water so scantily shed beneath the relentless serenity of that southern sky. The numberless conduits found, of lead, masonry, and earthenware, and above all, the spouting fountains that leaped and sparkled in the courtyards of the wealthy houses, have led us to suppose the existence of an aqueduct, no longer visible, that supplied all this part of Campania with water.

Besides these fountains, placards and posters enlivened the streets; the walls were covered with them, and, in sundry places, whitewashed patches of masonry served for the announcements so lavishly made public. These panels, dedicated entirely to the poster business, were called _albums_. Anybody and everybody had the right to paint thereon in delicate and slender red letters all the advertisements which now-a-days we print on the last, and even on many other pages of our newspapers. Nothing is more curious than these inscriptions, which disclose to us all the subjects engaging the attention of the little city; not only its excitements, but its language, ancient and modern, collegiate and common--the Oscan, the Greek, the Latin, and the local dialect. Were we learned, or anxious to appear so, we could, with the works of the really erudite (Fiorelli, Garrucci, Mommsen, etc.), to help us, have compiled a chapter of absolutely appalling science in reference to the epigraphic monuments of Pompeii. We could demonstrate by what gradations the Oscan language--that of the Pompeian autonomy--yielded little by little to the Roman language, which was that of the unity of the state; and to what extent Pompeii, which never was a Greek city, employed the sacred idiom of the divine Plato. We might even add some observations relative to the accent and the dialect of the Pompeians, who pronounced Latin as the Neapolitans pronounce Tuscan and with singularly analogous alterations. But what you are looking for here, hurried reader, is not erudition, but living movement. Choose then, in these inscriptions, those that teach us something relative to the manners and customs of this dead people--dead and buried, but afterward exhumed.

The most of these announcements are but the proclamations of candidates for office. Pompeii was evidently swallowed up at the period of the elections. Sometimes it is an elector, sometimes a group of citizens, then again a corporation of artisans or tradesmen, who are recommending for the office of ædile or duumvir the candidate whom they prefer. Thus, Paratus nominates Pansa, Philippus prefers Caius Aprasius Felix; Valentinus, with his pupils, chooses Sabinus and Rufus. Sometimes the elector is in a hurry; he asks to have his candidate elected quickly. The fruiterers, the public porters, the muleteers, the salt-makers, the carpenters, the truckmen, also unite to push forward the ædile who has their confidence. Frequently, in order to give more weight to its vote, the corporation declares itself unanimous. Thus, all the goldsmiths preferred a certain Photinus--a fishmonger, thinks Overbeck--for ædile. Let us not forget _the sleepers_, who declare for Vatia. By the way, who were these friends of sleep? Perhaps they were citizens who disliked noise; perhaps, too, some association of nocturnal revellers thus disguised under an ironical and reassuring title. Sometimes the candidate is recommended by a eulogistic epithet indicated by seals, a style of abbreviation much in use among the ancients. The person recommended is always a good man, a man of probity, an excellent citizen, a very moral individual. Sometimes positive wonders are promised on his behalf. Thus, after having designated Julius Polybius for the ædileship, an elector announces that he will bring in good bread. Electoral intrigue went still further. _We_ are pretty well on in that respect, but I think that the ancients were our masters. I read the following bare-faced avowal on a wall: _Sabinum ædilem, Procule, fac et ille te faciet_. (Make Sabinus ædile, O Proculus, and he may make thee such!) Frank and cool that, it strikes me!

But enough of elections; there is no lack of announcements of another character. Some of these give us the programme of the shows in the amphitheatre; such-and-such a troop of gladiators will fight on such a day; there will be hunting matches and awnings, as well as sprinklings of perfumed waters to refresh the multitude (_venatio, vela, sparsiones_). Thirty couples of gladiators will ensanguine the arena.

There were, likewise, posters announcing apartments to let.

Some of these inscriptions, either scratched or painted, were witticisms or exclamations from facetious passers-by. One ran thus: "Oppius the porter is a robber, a rogue!" Sometimes there were amorous declarations: "Augea loves Arabienus." Upon a wall in the Street of Mercury, an ivy leaf, forming a heart, contained the gentle name of Psyche. Elsewhere a wag, parodying the style of monumental inscriptions, had announced that under the consulate of L. Monius Asprenas and A. Plotius, there was born to him the foal of an ass. "A wine jar has been lost and he who brings it back shall have such a reward from Varius; but he who will bring the thief shall have twice as much."

Again, still other inscriptions were notifications to the public in reference to the cleanliness of the streets, and recalling in terms still more precise the "Commit no Nuisance" put up on the corners of some of our streets with similar intent. On more than one wall at Pompeii the figures of serpents, very well painted, sufficed to prevent any impropriety, for the serpent was a sacred symbol in ancient Rome--strange mingling of religion in the pettiest details of common life! Only a very few years ago, the Neapolitans still followed the example of their ancestors; they protected the outside walls of their dwellings with symbolical paintings, rudely tracing, not serpents, but crosses on them.

[Footnote C: These olives which, when found, were still soft and pasty, had a rancid smell and a greasy but pungent flavor. The kernels were less elongated and more bulging than those of the Neapolitan olives; were very hard and still contained some shreds of their pith. In a word, they were perfectly preserved, and although eighteen centuries old, as they were, you would have thought they had been plucked but a few months before.]

IV.

THE SUBURBS.

THE CUSTOM HOUSE.--THE FORTIFICATIONS AND THE GATES.--THE ROMAN
HIGHWAYS.--THE CEMETERY OF POMPEII.--FUNERALS: THE PROCESSION, THE
FUNERAL PYRE, THE DAY OF THE DEAD.--THE TOMBS AND THEIR
INSCRIPTIONS.--PERPETUAL LEASES.--BURIAL OF THE RICH, OF ANIMALS,
AND OF THE POOR.--THE VILLAS OF DIOMED AND CICERO.

"Ce qu'on trouve aux abords d'une grande cite,
Ce sont des abattoirs, des murs, des cimitieres:
C'est ainsi qu'en entrant dans la societé
On trouve ses egouts."

Alfred de Musset would have depicted the suburban quarters of Pompeii exactly in these lines, had he added to his enumeration the wine-shops and the custom-house. The latter establishment was not omitted by the ancients, and could not be forgotten in our diminutive but highly commercial city. Thus, the place has been discovered where the collector awaited the passage of the vehicles that came in from the country and the neighboring villages. Absolutely nothing else remains to be seen in this spacious mosaic-paved hall. Scales, steelyards, and a quantity of stone or metal weights were found there, marked with inscriptions sometimes quite curious; such, for example, as the following: _Eme et habbebis_, with a _b_ too many, a redundancy very frequent in the Naples dialect. This is equivalent, in English, to: Buy and you will have. One of the sets of scales bears an inscription stating that it had been verified or authorized at the Capitol under such consuls and such emperors--the hand of Rome!

Besides the custom-house, this approach to the city contained abundance of stables, coach-houses, taverns, bath-houses, low drinking-shops, and other disreputable concerns. Even the dwellings in the same quarter have a suspicious look. You follow a long street and you have before you the gate of Herculaneum and the walls.

These walls are visible; they still hold firm. Unquestionably, they could not resist our modern cannon, for if the ancients built better than we do, we destroy better than they did; this is one thing that must in justice be conceded to us. Nevertheless, we cannot but admire those masses of _peperino_, the points of which ascend obliquely and hold together without mortar. Originally as ancient as the city, these ramparts were destroyed to some extent by Sylla and repaired in _opus incertum_, that is to say, in small stones of every shape and of various dimensions, fitted to one another without order or regularity in the layers, as though they had been put in just as they came. The old structure dated probably from the time of Pompeian autonomy--the Oscans had a hand in them. The surrounding wall, at the foot of which there were no ditches, would have formed an oval line of nearly two miles had it not been interrupted, on the side of the mountains and the sea, between the ports of Stabiæ and of Herculaneum. These ramparts consisted of two walls--the scarp and counterscarp,--between which ran a terraced platform; the exterior wall, slightly sloping, was defended by embrasures between which the archer could place himself in safety, in an angle of the stonework, so soon as he had shot his arrow. The interior wall was also crested with battlements. The curvilinear rampart did not present projecting angles, the salients of which, Vitruvius tells us, could not resist the repeated blows of the siege machinery of those days. It was intersected by nine towers, of three vaulted stories each, at unequal distances, accordingly as the nature of the ground demanded greater or less means of defence, was pierced with loopholes and was not very solid. Vitruvius would have had them rounded and of cut stone; those of Pompeii are of quarried stone, and in small rough ashlars, stuck together with mortar. The third story of each tower reached to the platform of the rampart, with which it communicated by two doors.

Notwithstanding all that remains of them, the walls of Pompeii were no longer of service at the time of the eruption. Demolished by Sylla and then by Augustus, shattered by the earthquake, and interrupted as I have said, they left the city open. They must have served for a public promenade, like the bastions of Geneva.

Eight gates opened around the city (perhaps there was a ninth that has now disappeared, opening out upon the sea). The most singular of all of them is the Nola gate, the construction of which appears to be very ancient. We there come across those fine cut stones that reveal the handiwork of primitive times. A head considerably broken and defaced, surmounting the arcade, was accompanied with an Oscan inscription, which, having been badly read by a savant, led for an instant to the belief that the Campanians of the sixth century before Jesus Christ worshipped the Egyptian Isis. The learned interpreter had read: _Isis propheta_ (I translate it into Latin, supposing you to know as little as I do of the Oscan tongue). The inscription really ran, _idem probavit_.

It is worth while passing through the gate to get a look at the angle formed by the ramparts at this one point. I doubt whether the city was ever attacked on that side. Before reaching the gate the assailants would have had to wind along through a narrow gallery, where the archers, posted on the walls and armed with arrows and stones, would have crushed them all.

The Herculaneum gate is less ancient, and yet more devastated by time than the former one. The arcade has fallen in, and it requires some attention to reinstate it. This gate formed three entrances. The two side ways were probably intended for pedestrians; the one in the middle was closed by means of a portcullis sliding in a groove, still visible, but covered with stucco. As the portcullis, in descending, would have, thrown down this coating, we must infer that at the time of the eruption it had not been in use for a long while, Pompeii having ceased to be a fortified place.

The Herculaneum gate was not masked inside, so that the archers, standing upon the terraces that covered the side entrances, could fire upon the enemy even after the portcullis had been carried. We know that one of the stratagems of the besieged consisted in allowing the enemy to push in, and then suddenly shutting down upon them the formidable _cataracta_ suspended by iron chains. They then slaughtered the poor wretches indiscriminately and covered themselves with glory.

Having passed the gate, we find ourselves on one of those fine paved roads which, starting at Rome in all directions, have everywhere left very visible traces, and in many places still serve for traffic. The Greeks had gracefulness, the Romans grandeur. Nothing shows this more strikingly than their magnificent highways that pierce mountains, fill up ravines, level the plains, cross the marshes, bestride rivers, and even valleys, and stretched thus from the Tiber to the Euphrates. In order to construct them, they first traced two parallel furrows, from between which they removed all the loose earth, which they replaced with selected materials, strongly packed, pressed, and pounded down. Upon this foundation (the _pavimentum_) was placed a layer of rough stone (_statumen_), then a filling-in of gravel and lime (the _rudus_), and, finally, a third bed of chalk, brick, lime, clay, and sand, kneaded and pounded in together into a solid crust. This was the nucleus. Last of all, they placed above it those large rough blocks of lava which you will find everywhere in the environs of Naples. As before remarked, these roads have served for twenty centuries, and they are good yet.

The Herculaneum road formed a delightful promenade at the gates of Pompeii; a street lined with trees and villas, like the Champs Elyseés at Paris, and descending from the city to the country between two rows of jaunty monuments prettily-adorned, niches, kiosks, and gay pavilions, from which the view was admirable. This promenade was the cemetery of Pompeii. But let not this intimation trouble you, for nothing was less mournful in ancient times than a cemetery. The ancients were not fond of death; they even avoided pronouncing its name, and resorted to all sorts of subterfuges to avoid the doleful word. They spoke of the deceased as "those who had been," or "those who are gone." Very demonstrative, at the first moment they would utter loud lamentations. Their sorrow thus vented its first paroxysms. But the first explosion over, there remained none of that clinging melancholy or serious impression that continues in our Christian countries. The natives of the south are epicureans in their religious belief, as in their habits of life. Their cemeteries were spacious avenues, and children played jackstones on the tombs.

Would you like to hear a few details in reference to the interments of the ancients. "The usage was this," says Claude Guichard, a doctor at law, in his book concerning funereal rites, printed at Lyons, in 1581, by Jean de Tournes: "When the sick person was in extreme danger, his relatives came to see him, seated themselves on his bed, and kept him company until the death-rattle came on and his features began to assume the dying look. Then the nearest relative among them, all in tears, approached the patient and embraced him closely, breast against breast and face against face, so as to receive his soul, and mouth to mouth, catching his last breath; which done, he pressed together the lips and eyes of the dead man, arranging them decently, so that the persons present might not see the eyes of the deceased open, for, according to their customs, it was not allowable to the living to see the eyes of the dead.... Then the room was opened on all sides, and they allowed all persons belonging to the family and neighborhood, to come in, who chose. Then, three or four of them began to bewail the deceased and call to him repeatedly, and, perceiving that he did not reply one word, they went out and told of the death. Then the near relatives went to the bedside to give the last kiss to the deceased, and handed him over to the chambermaids of the house, if he was a person of the lower class. If he was one of the eminent men and heads of families, he committed him to the care of people authorized to perform this office, to wash, anoint, and dress him, in accordance with the custom and what was requisite in view of the quality, greatness, and rank of the personage."