The Wonders of Pompeii Part 2

"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 sit.i.t, rogo vas valde sit.i.t."[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 c.u.m Hedysio, Incundus Nola.n.u.s 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 dest.i.tute 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 ill.u.s.trious Pompeians, to Pansa, to Sall.u.s.t, to Marcus Lucretius, Decidamius Rufus; some inscriptions in honor of this one or that one, of the great Romulus, of the aged aeneas,--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 s.p.a.cious 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 Chalcidic.u.m; the statues look proudly down from their re-peopled pedestals; the n.o.ble 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, Stabiae, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 G.o.ds, 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 ill.u.s.trious 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 d.u.c.h.ess de Berry, of the Duke d'Aumale--I skip them by scores. The whole Gotha Almanac might there be pa.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ce 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 coa.r.s.e 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 pa.s.sengers 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 Stabiae, 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 pa.s.sers-by a broad counter, leaving only a small s.p.a.ce free to the left or the right to let the vendors pa.s.s 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 a.s.s 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 Thermae, 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 laeserit!_ (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 Chalcidic.u.m, have been more exactly designated not only by a sign on which there was seen a serpent (one of the symbols of aesculapius) 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 archaeology. 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-gla.s.ses--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 ent.i.tled _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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.ddess 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 a.s.semble 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-gla.s.s. 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 a.s.s 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 pa.s.sers-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 inst.i.tution 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Discoveries of Loaves of Bread baked 1800 years ago in a Baker's Oven.]

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 a.n.a.lyzed 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 pa.s.sers-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 cas.e.m.e.nts, frequently depicted in the paintings. There the fair Pompeian could have taken her station in order to partic.i.p.ate 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Closed House with a Balcony, recently discovered.]

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 pa.s.sers-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, dest.i.tute 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.