Read Ebook: Pompeii Its Life and Art by Mau August Kelsey Francis W Francis Willey Translator

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This population was by no means homogeneous. The original Oscan stock had not yet lost its identity; inscriptions in the Oscan dialect are found scratched on the plaster of walls decorated in the style prevalent after the earthquake of the year 63. From the time when the Roman colony was founded no doubt additions continued to be made to the population from various parts of Italy. The Greek element was particularly strong. This is proved by the number of Greek names in the accounts of Caecilius Jucundus, for example, and by the Greek inscriptions that have been found on walls and on amphorae. The Greeks may have come from the neighboring towns; most of them were probably freedmen. In a seaport we should expect to find also Greeks from trans-marine cities; and, in fact, an Alexandrian appears in one of the receipts of Jucundus. There were Orientals, too, as we shall see when we come to the temple of Isis.

Another interesting bit of evidence is a wall painting, which appears to have as its subject the Judgment of Solomon . On a tribunal at the right sits the king with two advisers; the pavilion is well guarded with soldiers. In front of the tribunal a soldier is about to cut a child in two with a cleaver. Two women are represented, one of whom stands at the block and is already taking hold of the half of the child assigned to her, while the other casts herself on her knees as a suppliant before the judges. It is not certain that the reference here is to Solomon; such tales pass from one country to another, and a somewhat similar story is told of the Egyptian king Bocchoris. The balance of probability is in favor of the view that we have here the Jewish version of the story, because this is consistent with other facts that point to the existence of a Jewish colony at Pompeii.

The names Maria and Martha appear in wall inscriptions. The assertion that Maria here is not the Hebrew name, but the feminine form of the Roman name Marius, is far astray. It appears in a list of female slaves who were working in a weaver's establishment, Vitalis, Florentina, Amaryllis, Januaria, Heracla, Maria, Lalage, Damalis, Doris. The Marian family was represented at Pompeii, but the Roman name Maria could not have been given to a slave. That we have here a Jewish name seems certain since the discovery of the name Martha.

FOOTNOTE:

It seems strange that traces of other buildings of the same period have not been discovered; but, on the other hand, it is far from probable that the temple was first erected, and that the city afterward grew up around it, for in that case the temple must have been placed further west, on the highest point of the elevation, overlooking the sea.

Previous to the terrible eruption of 79, Vesuvius was considered an extinct volcano. "Above these places," says Strabo, writing in the time of Augustus, "lies Vesuvius, the sides of which are well cultivated, even to the summit. This is level, but quite unproductive. It has a cindery appearance; for the rock is porous and of a sooty color, the appearance suggesting that the whole summit may once have been on fire and have contained craters, the fires of which died out when there was no longer anything left to burn."

Earthquakes, however, were of common occurrence in Campania. An especially violent shock on the fifth of February, 63 A.D., gave warning of the reawakening of Vesuvius. Great damage was done throughout the region lying between Naples and Nuceria, but the shock was most severe at Pompeii, a large part of the buildings of the city being thrown down. The prosperous and enterprising inhabitants at once set about rebuilding. When the final catastrophe came, on the twenty-fourth of August, 79 A.D., most of the houses were in a good state of repair, and the rebuilding of at least two temples, those of Apollo and of Isis, had been completed. This renewing of the city, caused by the earthquake, may be looked upon as a fortunate circumstance for our studies.

Our chief source of information for the events of August 24-26, 79, is a couple of letters of the Younger Pliny to Tacitus, who purposed to make use of them in writing his history. Pliny was staying at Misenum with his uncle, the Elder Pliny, who was in command of the Roman fleet. In the first letter he tells of his uncle's fate. On the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, the admiral Pliny set out with ships to rescue from impending danger the people at the foot of Vesuvius, particularly in the vicinity of Herculaneum. He came too late; it was no longer possible to effect a landing. So he directed his course to Stabiae, where he spent the night; and there on the following morning he died, suffocated by the fumes that were exhaled from the earth. The second letter gives an account of the writer's own experiences at Misenum.

To this testimony little is added by the narrative of Dion Cassius, which was written a century and a half later and is known to us only in abstract; Dion dwells at greater length on the powerful impression which the terrible convulsion of nature left upon those who were living at that time. With the help of the letters of Pliny, in connection with the facts established by the excavations, it is possible to picture to ourselves the progress of the eruption with a fair degree of clearness.

The subterranean fires of Vesuvius pressed upward to find an outlet. The accumulations of volcanic dust and pumice stone that had been heaped up on the mountain by former eruptions were again hurled to a great height, and came down upon the surrounding country. On the west side of Vesuvius they mingled with torrents of rain, and flowed as a vast stream of mud down over Herculaneum. On the south side, driven by a northwest wind as they descended from the upper air, they spread out into a thick cloud, which covered Pompeii and the plain of the Sarno. Out of this cloud first broken fragments of pumice stone--the average size not larger than a walnut--rained down to the depth of eight to ten feet; then followed volcanic dust, wet as it fell by a downpour of water, to the depth of six or seven feet. With the storm of dust came successive shocks of earthquake.

Such was, in outline, the course of the eruption. It must have begun early in the morning of the twenty-fourth, and the stream of mud must have commenced immediately to move in the direction of Herculaneum; for shortly after one o'clock on that day the admiral Pliny at Misenum received letters from the region threatened, saying that the danger was imminent, and that escape was possible only by sea. Even then the Younger Pliny saw, high above Vesuvius, the cloud, shaped like an umbrella pine, which was to rain down destruction on Pompeii. Toward evening, the ships off Herculaneum ran into the hail of pumice stone, which, during the night, reached Stabiae and so increased in violence that the admiral Pliny was obliged to leave his sleeping room from fear that the door would be blocked up by the falling masses.

Early in the morning of the twenty-fifth there was a severe shock of earthquake, which was felt as far as Misenum. Then the dust began to fall, and a cloud of fearful blackness, pierced through and through with flashes of lightning, settled down over land and sea. At Misenum, even, it became dark; "not," says Pliny, "as on a cloudy night when there is no moon, but as in a room which has been completely closed."

How long the fall of dust lasted we can only infer from this, that when it ceased the sun had not yet set. In Misenum, which the shower of pumice stone had not reached, everything was covered with a thick layer of dust. Although the earthquake shocks continued, the inhabitants went back into their houses. But Pompeii and Stabiae had been covered so deep that only the roofs of the houses, where these had not fallen in, projected above the surface; and Herculaneum had wholly disappeared.

All the plain of the Sarno was buried, as were also the slopes of the mountains on the south. Stabiae, as we have seen, lay at the foot of the mountains, on the coast. It had been destroyed by Sulla in the Social War; its inhabitants, forced to scatter, settled in the surrounding country. In the years 1749-82 numerous buildings were excavated in the vicinity, in part luxurious country seats, in part plain farm buildings; but the excavations were afterward filled up again. The covering of Stabiae was like that of Pompeii, only not so deep.

Herculaneum was covered with the same materials; they were not, however, deposited in regular strata, but were mixed together, and being drenched with water, hardened into a kind of tufa which in places reaches a depth of sixty-five feet. Excavating at Herculaneum is in consequence extremely difficult; and the difficulty is further increased by the fact that a modern city, Resina, extends over the greater part of the ancient site. The excavations thus far attempted have in most cases been conducted by means of underground passageways. The statement that Herculaneum was overflowed by a stream of lava, though frequently repeated, is erroneous.

The woodwork of buildings in Pompeii has in many cases been preserved, but in a completely charred condition. Frequently where walls were painted with yellow ochre it has turned red, especially when brought immediately into contact with the stratum of dust--a change which this color undergoes when it is exposed to heat. Nevertheless, the inference would be unwarranted that the products of the eruption fell upon the city red-hot and caused a general conflagration. The fragments of pumice stone could scarcely have retained a great degree of heat after having been so long in the air; it is evident from Pliny's narrative that they were not hot.

With the dust a copious rain must have fallen; for the bodies of those who perished in the storm of dust left perfect moulds, into a number of which soft plaster of Paris has been poured, making those casts of human figures which lend a melancholy interest to the collections in the little Museum at Pompeii . The extraordinary freshness of these figures, without any suggestion of the wasting away after death, is explicable only on the supposition that the enveloping dust was damp, and so commenced immediately to harden into a permanent shape. If the dust had been dry and had packed down and hardened afterwards, we should be able to trace at least the beginnings of decay.

Neither the pumice stone nor the dust, then, could have set wood on fire. The woodwork must have become charred gradually from the effect of moisture, as in the case of coal, and the change in the color of the yellow ochre must be due to some other cause than the presence of heat. This is all the more evident from the fact that vestiges of local conflagrations, confined within narrow limits, can here and there be traced, kindled by the masses of glowing slag which fell at the same time with the pumice stone, or by the fires left burning in the houses.

From the number of skeletons discovered in the past few decades, since an accurate record has been kept, it has been estimated that in Pompeii itself, about two thousand persons perished. As the city contained a population of twenty thousand or more, it is evident that the majority of the inhabitants fled; since the eruption commenced in the morning, while the hail of pumice stone did not begin till afternoon, those who appreciated the greatness of the danger had time to escape. It is, however, impossible to say how many fled when it was already too late, and lost their lives outside the city. Mention has already been made of some who perished at the harbor; others who went out earlier to the Sarno may have made good their escape. Of those who remained in the city part were buried in the houses--so with twenty persons whose skeletons were found in the cellar of the villa of Diomedes; others, as the hail of pumice stone ceased, ventured out into the streets, where they soon succumbed to the shower of dust that immediately followed. As the bodies wasted away little except the bones was left in the hollows formed by the dust that hardened around them, and the casts already referred to, which have been made from time to time since 1863, give in some cases a remarkably clear and sharp representation of the victims.

The Emperor Titus sent a commission of senators into Campania to report in what way help could best be rendered. A plan was formed to rebuild the cities that had been destroyed, and the property of those who died without heirs was set aside for this purpose. Nothing came of it, however, so far as our knowledge goes. Pompeii is indeed mentioned in the Peutinger Table, a map for travellers made in the third century, but the name was apparently given to a post station in memory of the former city. Conclusive evidence against the existence of a new city is the absence of any inscriptions referring to it.

The first excavations at Pompeii were undertaken by the survivors shortly after the destruction of the city. As the upper parts of the houses that had not fallen in projected above the surface, it was possible to locate the places under which objects of value were buried. Men dug down from the surface at certain points and tunnelled from room to room underneath, breaking through the intervening walls. This work was facilitated by the stratification of the volcanic deposit; the loose bits of pumice stone in the lower stratum were easily removed, while the stratum of dust above was compact enough to furnish a fairly safe roof for narrow passageways. Only infrequently is a house discovered that was left undisturbed; from this we understand why comparatively little household furniture of value has been found. Not only were rich house furnishings in demand,--the excavators carried away valuable building materials as well. So eagerly were these sought after that large buildings, as those about the Forum, were almost completely stripped of their marble.

In the Middle Ages Pompeii was quite forgotten. Possibly some remains of the ancient buildings were yet to be seen; at any rate it seems to have been believed that a city once existed there, for the site was called La Civita.

In the years 1594-1600 Domenico Fontana was bringing water from one of the springs of the Sarno to Torre Annunziata, and in the course of the work cut an underground channel through the site of Pompeii and discovered two inscriptions; but no further investigations were made. The indifference of Fontana may be explained by the fact that the water channel was not dug out from above, like a railway cutting, and then covered over, but was carried as a tunnel through the hill on which the city stood, so that the workmen came to the ancient surface at only a few points. In the part now excavated, the original level was disturbed in but one place, near the temple of Zeus Milichius; here the inscriptions were probably found.

The first digging was done north of Nola Street, near the Casa del Torello; then the men were set at work on the Street of Tombs, near the Herculaneum Gate; and a part of the Amphitheatre also was cleared. In 1750 the work was stopped, because the results were thought to be unimportant.

Attention was again directed to Pompeii in 1754, when workmen engaged in constructing the highway that runs just south of the city discovered a number of tombs. About the same time, west of the Amphitheatre, the extensive establishment of Julia Felix, arranged like a villa, and some buildings lying north of it, were excavated; but they were all covered up again, as was also the so-called villa of Cicero, which was uncovered in 1763.

The parts excavated were not left clear until after 1763, when the discovery of the inscription of Suedius Clemens, on the Street of Tombs, had established the fact that the site was that of Pompeii. Important discoveries were made soon after. In the years immediately following 1764 the theatres, with the adjacent buildings, and the Street of Tombs, together with the villa of Diomedes, were laid bare. The excavations were conducted slowly and without system, yet with scientific interest fostered by the Herculaneum Academy , which had been founded in 1755.

Under Joseph Bonaparte and Murat, 1806-15, the work received larger appropriations, and was prosecuted with greater energy, particularly in the quarter lying between the Herculaneum Gate and the Forum. In the same period the Forum was approached from the south side also. In 1799, at the time of the Parthenopean Republic, the French general Championnet had excavated, south of the Basilica, the two houses which are still called by his name. From these, in 1813, the excavators made their way into the Basilica, whence, in November of the same year, they pushed forward into the Forum. However, the excavation of the Forum itself with the surrounding buildings, prosecuted less vigorously and with limited means in the period of the Restoration, was not completed till 1825; by this time the temple of Fortuna and the Baths north of the Forum had also been uncovered. The following years, to 1832, brought to light the beautiful houses on the north side of Nola Street--the houses of Pansa, of the Tragic Poet, and of the Faun--and those on Mercury Street; later came excavations south of Nola Street and in various parts of the city.

The disturbances of the period of Revolution caused a cessation of work for two years, from July 3, 1848, to September 27, 1850. During the next nine years effort was expended chiefly in clearing Stabian Street and the Stabian Baths.

The fall of the Bourbon dynasty and the passing over of Naples to the Kingdom of Italy caused another interruption, which lasted a year, from December 5, 1859, to December 20, 1860. On the last date the excavations were resumed under the direction of Giuseppe Fiorelli, a man of marked individuality, who left a permanent impress upon every part of the work. To him is due the present admirable system, excellent alike from the technical and from the administrative point of view. We owe it to him, that better provision is made now than formerly for the preservation and care of excavated buildings and objects discovered; the earlier efforts in this direction naturally left room for improvement, and the painstaking of the present administration is especially worthy of commendation.

Fiorelli put an end to haphazard digging, to excavating here and there wherever the site seemed most promising. He first set about clearing the undisturbed places lying between the excavated portions; and when in this way the west part of the city had been laid bare, he commenced to work systematically from the excavated part toward the east. Since 1860 only one public building has been excavated--the baths at the corner of Stabian and Nola streets; but many private houses have been uncovered, some of which are of much interest. Fiorelli remained in charge of the excavations until 1875, when he was called to Rome to become General Director of Museums and Excavations; he died in 1896, at the age of seventy-two. His successors, first Michele Ruggiero, then Giulio de Petra, have worked according to his plans, and in full sympathy with his ideals.

Up to the present time about three-fifths of Pompeii have been excavated. In 1872 Fiorelli made the calculation that if the excavations should continue at the rate then followed the whole city would be laid bare in 74 years. Since that time the work has progressed more slowly, partly in consequence of the greater care taken for the preservation of the remains. At the present rate of progress we may believe that the twentieth century will hardly witness the completion of the excavations.

Articles of furniture and objects of art that can easily be moved, as the statuettes often found in the gardens, are ordinarily taken to the Museum in Naples; a few things have been placed in the little Museum at Pompeii. Now and then small sculptures have been left in a house exactly as they were found; but the necessity of keeping such houses locked and of guarding them with especial care prevents the general adoption of this method of preservation.

In respect to the preservation of paintings the practice has varied at different periods. Generally, however, the best pictures have been cut from the walls and transferred to the Museum, while the decorative framework has been left undisturbed. It is keenly to be regretted that in this way the effect of the decorative system as a whole has been destroyed, for the picture forms the centre of a carefully elaborated scheme of decoration which needs to be viewed as an artistic whole in order to be fully appreciated; and the removal of a painting can hardly be accomplished without some damage to the parts of the wall immediately in contact with it. A far better method would be to leave intact all walls containing paintings or decorative work of interest, providing such means of protection against the weather as may be necessary. A good beginning in this respect has been made in the case of the house of the Vettii, the beautiful and well preserved paintings of which have been left on the walls and are preserved with the greatest care.

The treatment of a mosaic floor is an altogether different problem. While the floor as a whole, with its ornamental designs, is left in place, fine mosaics representing paintings, which are delicate and easily destroyed, are wisely taken up and placed in the Museum.

NOTES TO PLAN I

The Regions are given as they were laid out by Fiorelli , the boundaries being marked by broken lines. The Insulae are designated by Arabic numerals.

The towers of the city wall are designated by numbers, as they are supposed to have been at the time of the siege of Sulla, in 89 B.C. .

The outline of Pompeii, with its network of streets, may be traced on the accompanying plan.

The city took its shape from the end of the old lava stream on which it lay, which ran southeast from Vesuvius. It formed an irregular oval a little less than four fifths of a mile long and a little more than two fifths of a mile wide in its greatest dimensions. On three sides, west, south, and east, the wall of the city ran along the edge of the hill; on the northwest side, between the Herculaneum and Capua gates, it passed directly across the ridge formed by the lava.

The eight gates are known by the modern names given on our plan. Two of them, the Herculaneum and Capua gates, lie at the points where the wall comes to the edge of the lava bed on either side; the streets that led from them descended to the plain. At the Herculaneum Gate the much travelled highway from Naples, passing through Herculaneum, entered the city; the Capua Gate does not seem to have been built to accommodate a large traffic. Between these two lay the Vesuvius Gate, through which the Pompeians passed out upon the ridge toward Vesuvius.

From the Herculaneum Gate nearly to the Stabian Gate, on the south side, ran a bluff, with a sharp descent. Nevertheless, as a gate was needed on the side nearest the sea, the Water Gate, Porta Marina, was placed here; through it a steep road led to the Forum, so steep that it could not have been much used by vehicles; but that may have mattered little to the fishermen bringing their catches to the market.

The Stabian Gate lay in a depression at the end of the lava bed and afforded a more convenient means of access to the city; thence a road ran to the harbor on the Sarno, and to Stabiae. At the left another road apparently branched off from this in the direction of Nuceria, which could be reached also from the conveniently located Nocera Gate further east; here also the slope of the hill was less pronounced. Two gates, finally, gave access to the city on the somewhat steeper east and northeast sides, the Sarno Gate, which takes its name, not from the river, but from the modern town of Sarno, and the Nola Gate; it is at least probable that the road passing through the latter led to Nola.

A glance at the plan will make it plain that the streets of Pompeii must have been laid out according to a definite system; an arrangement on the whole so regular and symmetrical would scarcely be found in a city that had developed gradually from a small beginning, in which the location of streets had been the result of accident.

Two wide streets that cross the city very nearly at right angles give the direction for the other streets running approximately north and south and east and west, Mercury Street with its continuations, and Nola Street. The former probably served as a base line in laying out the city; this we infer from the fact that while it is exceptionally broad, and the Forum lies on it, there is no gate at either end, and it could have been little used for traffic. Nola Street has a gate only at the east end; the west end opens into the Strada Consolare, which follows the line of the city wall and leads to the Herculaneum Gate at the northwest corner. That the other streets must have taken their direction from these two is clearly seen in the case of those in the northwest part of the city; on close examination it will be found that the arrangement of the rest also is in accordance with the same system, a fact which would perhaps be still more obvious if the unexcavated eastern portion of the city were laid bare.

In two instances, however, there is a deviation from this system. One is in the quarter near the Forum. For reasons which have not been satisfactorily explained, the Porta Marina was not placed on the prolongation of the street coming from the Sarno Gate, but further north. In order to reach this gate the street, as shown on the plan, makes a bend to the north which is reproduced in the other east and west streets lying south of Nola Street; west of the Forum, again, the streets converge in order to give access to this gate.

The other deviation, which affects Stabian Street, can be explained on grounds of convenience. This street, which runs from the Stabian to the Vesuvius Gate, abandoned the line of the north and south streets west of it in order to take advantage of a natural depression in the hill, by following which an easy grade could be established to the higher parts of the city; that the blocks along this important thoroughfare might not be too irregular in shape, the nearest parallel streets on the east were laid out in such a way as to follow the direction of Stabian Street. The street running south from the Capua Gate resumes, with slight variation, the north and south line of Mercury Street.

The public buildings of the city form two extensive groups. One group lies about the Forum ; with this we may reckon the Baths in the first block north, and the temples of Fortuna Augusta and Venus Pompeiana. The nucleus of the other is formed by the two theatres and the large quadrangular colonnade which, designed originally to afford protection for theatre-goers against the rain, was later turned into barracks for the gladiators . There are in addition only four public buildings that need to be mentioned. Two are bathing establishments, the Stabian Baths, and those at the corner of Stabian and Nola streets. The third is a small building near the Herculaneum Gate, consisting of a hall opening on the street, with a base for a statue near the rear wall; this on insufficient grounds has been called a custom-house. The fourth, the Amphitheatre, lies in the southern corner of the city.

As the public buildings were thus located in clearly defined groups, it is not probable that many yet remain in the portion of the city which has not been excavated. We may expect to find only bathing establishments, and perhaps one or two temples. There were priestesses of Ceres and of Venus, but the sanctuary of Ceres has not been discovered. Mention is made also of a priest of Mars; but the temple of Mars, according to the precept of Vitruvius would be outside the city.

In each Region every block, or Insula, has its number, and in the Insula a separate number is given to every door opening on a street. This arrangement is convenient because each house can be accurately designated by means of three numbers.

The names of several of the more important streets, as of the better known houses, are given in the text in the English form.

Six centuries lie between the dates of the earliest and the latest buildings at Pompeii; and in order to understand any structure rightly we must first of all ascertain to what period it belongs. It is indeed rarely possible to fix dates with exactness for the earlier time; but certain periods are so clearly differentiated from one another, that in most cases there is no room for doubt to which of them a building is to be assigned. Before undertaking to characterize these periods, however, it will be necessary briefly to notice what building materials were used, and how they were turned to account in construction.

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