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.
[Illustration: 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 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.
[Illustration: 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
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."