8The Victims of Vesuvius

One day in 1711 a peasant digging a well on his property in Resina, on the bay five miles southeast of Naples, came upon a level of white and polychrome architectural marbles, obviously ancient. This chance find led to the discovery of what proved to be the buried town of Herculaneum, destroyed in the eruption of Vesuvius of August 24,A.D.79. Workmen digging in 1748 by the Sarno canal, nine miles farther along the bay, found bronzes and marbles on a site which an inscription, discovered fifteen years later, identified as Herculaneum’s more famous sister city, Pompeii. Thus began a saga of excavation which has told the modern world more about ancient life than any other dig in the long history of archaeology, and this in two towns which have left almost no record in literature. In a few hours of a summer afternoon the eruption stopped the life of two flourishing little cities dead in its tracks: dinner on the tables, the wine-shops crowded, sacrifices at the moment of being offered, funerals in progress, prisoners in the stocks, watchdogs on their chains. The townsfolk had not even time to gather their possessions. Ironically, going back for their little hoards of gold and silver spelled death for many of them, under the hail of pumice-stone and ashes(or, at Herculeaneum, the river of lava) which asphyxiated (Fig. 8.1) or engulfed them. At Herculaneum, on the afternoon of the eruption, rain turned the volcanic ash to mud, which solidified, burying the town thirty to forty feet deep. Electric drills and mechanical shovels are needed to dig there, so progress has been slow. Even Pompeii, under its shallower layer of pumice-pebbles and light ash, is still only about three-fifths excavated.

Fig. 8.1Pompeii, victims of Vesuvius, from House of Cryptoporticus.(V. Spinazzola,Pompeii: ... Via dell’ Abbondanza, 1, p. 443)

Fig. 8.1Pompeii, victims of Vesuvius, from House of Cryptoporticus.

(V. Spinazzola,Pompeii: ... Via dell’ Abbondanza, 1, p. 443)

For a century and a half after their rediscovery the two sites were treated almost entirely as a quarry for works of art, as a plaything for the various dynasties that misruled Naples, and as a romantic stop on the Grand Tour. The discovery of ancient artifacts here revolutionized the taste of Europe: Ludwig of Bavaria built a replica of a Pompeian house at Aschaffenburg; Winckelmann, the great Romantic art historian, conceived here many of his notions of the wonders of Greek art; Casanova’s brother copied someof the paintings, and did a brisk business in forgeries. Nelson’s mistress, Lady Hamilton, was a frequent visitor: her husband was British ambassador to Naples. Goethe was impressed by Pompeii’s smallness; Napoleon’s marshal Murat supervised the dig, and Garibaldi made Alexandre Dumas his Director of Antiquities here. A generation of Victorians sobbed overThe Last Days of Pompeii, and the young Queen herself visited the Site in 1838.

But it was not till the era of scientific archaeology—which came to Pompeii and Herculaneum with Fiorelli in 1860—that the buried cities began to add their never-ceasing stores to the sum of our knowledge of ancient town-planning, public life, private life in town and country houses, trade and tradesmen, religion, and art.

*****

Fig. 8.2Pompeii, air view. (University of Wisconsin Classics Dept. collection)

Fig. 8.3Pompeii, plan. (MPI)

One of the results of scientific excavation at Pompeii was to reveal at last the town plan (Fig. 8.2), after decades spent in sporadic digging for treasure trove, in cutting paintings out of walls, filling in the excavated houses, and moving on without system to a new area. The plan as now revealed (Fig. 8.3) shows the least regular streets in the southwest quadrant of the town around the Forum; this, therefore, should be the oldest part; and in fact architectural terracottas found here, in the so-calledForo triangolare, are dated in the sixth centuryB.C.Elsewhere the pattern of a rectangular grid is clear, making possible the division of the city for purposes of archaeological reference into nine regions. Each region is subdivided into numbered blocks, orinsulae; eachinsulainto numbered houses. The whole 160 acres, big enough for a population of from fifteen to twenty thousand, is surrounded by a wall, in which archaeologists, on the basis of building materials and techniques, have detected four phases. The earliest, with a facing of squared limestone, dates from the fifth centuryB.C.; the latest, marked by the addition of high towers, from thetime of Sulla, who settled some of his veterans here in a colony grandiosely named theColonia Veneria Cornelia Pompeianorum. Masons’ marks from the third phase (280–180B.C.) are in Oscan letters, the alphabet of ancient Italy’s major language, next after Latin and Greek. Inscriptions (street signs for example) show that Oscan persisted as Pompeii’s third language, along with Latin and Greek (for the area around Naples had originally been settled by Greeks, and they kept their culture), down almost to the time of the eruption. The wall shows the marks of the stone catapult-balls of the Sullan siege; some of the balls were found preserved as souvenirs in houses. After the Sullan phase the wall was allowed to fall into disrepair, mute evidence of the security of the Augustan peace.

*****

Whatever curtailment of liberty seemed a price worth paying for security in Rome, Pompeii at least enjoyed an active political life. The evidence is a vast series of election “posters,” painted in red and black on house and shop walls. In these, individuals and groups (for example, the fullers or laundrymen, the fruit-vendors, the fishermen, dyers, bakers, goldsmiths, muleteers, and a private club of gay blades who call themselves theseribibi, late drinkers) urge their fellow-citizens to vote for candidates for aedile, the highest municipal office. For one block of supporters the candidate’s gratitude must have been extremely limited: the notice read: “The sneak-thieves support Vatia for the aedileship.” The bases for the invitations to vote for a candidate like “Vote forX: he won’t squander public funds,” will have a strong appeal for the modern reader.

There was no interference with due process, to judge by the basilica in the Forum, where Pompeii’s legal business was transacted: it is Pompeii’s largest and most important public building. Tiles found in it stamped in Oscan come from a level which shows that the building dates at leastfrom 120B.C.Across the Forum from the basilica is thecomitium, for town meetings and elections: at the south end of the Forum are three buildings, identified as the meeting-place of the town council, with municipal offices on either side.

Pompeii was well-supplied, too, with public amenities. The streets were paved, and supplied at the main intersections with stepping stones, which did not interfere with the passage of high-axled wagons, though some stepping stones were removed in 1815 to allow the Queen of Naples’ coach to pass. (Nowadays visitors with a taste for ostentation can be carried through Pompeii in a sedan chair.) Lead water-pipes found everywhere show that all but the very humblest houses were supplied with running water. There were no less than three sets of public baths, of which the largest was under construction when the catastrophe came. The baths had radiant heating and elegant stuccoed vaults. There were separate sets of rooms for men and for women, and an enormous number of lamps found in one establishment shows that it was in use also in the evening hours.

That the intellectual as well as the physical needs of the population were catered to is deduced from the existence of two stone theaters, one open to the sky, with a capacity of 5,000; one roofed, athéatre intime, for about 800. Both antedate the earliest stone theater in Rome. But the Pompeians did not push the intellectual life to extremes. The portico behind the large theater was remodelled in Nero’s reign to make a barracks for gladiators, complete with armory and lock-up, where three of them were found asphyxiated in the stocks. The amphitheater has seats for 20,000. Legends scrawled on its walls, and on house-walls all over town, testify to the gladiators’ popularity with their fans: gladiatorial records are registered (twenty-four fights, twenty-four victories; the losers most often are murdered and forgotten), and one champion is recorded asSVSPIRIVM PVELLARVM, the one the girls sigh for.

Fig. 8.4Pompeii, House of the Moralist.(Spinazzola,op. cit., 2, p. 728)

Fig. 8.4Pompeii, House of the Moralist.

(Spinazzola,op. cit., 2, p. 728)

Fig. 8.5Pompeii, House of the Moralist, reconstruction.(Spinazzola,op. cit., 2, p. 756)

Fig. 8.5Pompeii, House of the Moralist, reconstruction.

(Spinazzola,op. cit., 2, p. 756)

Fig. 8.6Pompeii, House of the Moralist, triclinium.(Spinazzola,op. cit., 2, p. 752)

Fig. 8.6Pompeii, House of the Moralist, triclinium.

(Spinazzola,op. cit., 2, p. 752)

But Pompeii’s greatest contribution is to our knowledge, almost indecently intimate, of the private life of its inhabitants. This information comes primarily from the town houses and the suburban and rustic villas. The best guidebooks go into some detail on seventy-eight of these in Pompeii, and thirty-one in Herculaneum; hundreds more go unrecorded. In the face of thisembarras de richesse, rigorous selection is necessary, and a description of a few houses and villas must suffice. To represent town houses I choose the “House of the Moralist” (RegioIII,Insulaiv, House 2–3), on the Via dell’ Abbondanza, a shopping street of average houses. (The aristocratic quarter was inRegioVI.) Excavations on this street by Vittorio Spinazzola between 1910 and 1923 were carried out according to a method new in Pompeii, which made the dead street come alive with extraordinary vividness. Spinazzola’s meticulousness preserved and reconstructed the traces of upper stories, with windows, balconies, and loggias; of gardens, with the discovered roots of their trees and plants replaced by modern ones of the same species. The colorful painted signs and notices on the house and shop fronts, instead of being detached as in the past and transferred to the museum in Naples, were leftin situ, protected by glass and awnings, and the house interiors, with their furniture and wall-paintings, were kept intact. All this Spinazzola published in 1953 in a colossal book of 1110 folio pages, with over 1000 figures and ninety-six large plates. His account is the more important because the House of the Moralist, having been kept inviolate by volcanic ashes for so many centuries, was badly damaged by Allied bombs in 1943. (There were Germans quartered in the hotels near the excavation entrance.) The ground floor plan (Figs.8.4and8.5) of that house shows two dwellings thrown into one. The smaller, on the left, has typical features: its vestibule leading to anatriumor patio off which open a summer and a winter dining room and a light-well planted with flowers and shrubs.The winter dining-room is frescoed in glossy black; it has a vaulted, coffered ceiling, and a high window closed by a shutter planned to slide into the wall. The usual peristyle, or rectangular portico behind theatrium, is missing, its function supplied by the loggias on the upper floor and the large sunken garden behind the larger house. The garden was planned as a little grove sacred to Diana. Her statue was found in the middle of the garden, with a little bronze incense-burner in the shape of a ram still in place on its pedestal, and large trees planted around it. The pleasant summer dining room fills the garden’s southwest corner. In it the marble-topped table was found set for a meal or sacrifice (Fig. 8.6). In the corner was a brazier and a pitcher for hot water. Three couplets painted on the wallprescribed etiquette for the diners, and give the house its name: “Don’t put your dirty feet on our couch covers; if you bicker at table you’ll have to go home; be modest and don’t make eyes at another man’s wife.” There was a dumb-waiter to serve the pleasant loggias on the upper floor overlooking the garden. The pointed jars, amphorae, in the basement, suggest that the Moralist was a wine merchant. A stamp found there gives his name: Gaius Arrius Crescens. Election notices painted on the house front show that he and his family were up to their ears in local politics.

A sumptuous suburban dwelling is the sixty-room Villa of the Mysteries outside Pompeii’s Herculaneum gate, the noblest and grandest known of its kind. It was built on a seaward-facing slope, with a terrace and subterranean vaults. A careful analysis by its excavator, Amedeo Maiuri, of its building materials and décor shows six phases, of which the earliest, in squared blocks of local limestone, includes the rectangular block of rooms numbered 2–8 and 11–21 in the plan (Fig. 8.7), and is dated 200–150B.C.At this stage the villa was surrounded on three sides by a pleasant open portico, and the curved exedra or belvedere (see the plan) did not yet exist. The next stage is marked by the use of handsome light gray tufa instead of limestone, includes the peristyle and smallatrium(atriolumin the plan), and the modest bathing rooms (42–44) beyond. It dates from the time of Sulla. The next two periods are dated from the prevalent styles of wall-painting, to be discussed in the section on art below. They take the villa’s building history through the reign of Augustus. In the Julio-Claudian period—the date is again made precise by the style of painting—the villa became useful as well as ornamental: the rustic quarters 52–60 were added, and an upper floor overlooking the vestibule. The latter is more elegant than the rustic quarters, less so than the noble eastern rooms. The inference is that in this period the owner used the villa only occasionally, leaving the management of its businessend to a resident factor who lived on the upper floor (see the reconstruction,Fig. 8.8) where he could keep his eye on the bailiff and the slave farm-hands. The portico (P 1–4) was now provided with a windowed wall between its columns, and the sunrooms (9–10) were created, with their splendid view, open to the southern sunshine, ideal for a winter siesta.

Fig. 8.7Pompeii, Villa of the Mysteries.(A. Maiuri,La Villa dei Misteri, p. 41)

Fig. 8.7Pompeii, Villa of the Mysteries.

(A. Maiuri,La Villa dei Misteri, p. 41)

When the volcano finally struck, the villa was undergoing extensive remodelling, having apparently not yet recovered from an earlier catastrophe for which there is other evidence, both archaeological and literary: an earthquake inA.D.62. The master’s quarters were found empty of their contents, as though after the earthquake he had moved out altogether, and sold his elegant furniture at auction. A stamp reveals the name of the new owner: Lucius Istacidius Zosimus. Istacidius is a noble Samnite (Oscan) name; Zosimus is Creek. The inference is that the new owner was a freedman of the former master, who bought up the property and turned the entire establishment into a farmhouse. Evidence of the tasteless change from elegance to stark practicality was found everywhere: piles of mortar, columns and architraves taken down and stored, rooms closed off, an ugly new wall run straight across one of the most tasteful rooms in the master’s quarters (6), a heap of onions piled on a mosaic floor in an alcoved master bedroom, farm tools in the graceful southwest sunroom (9). The apsidal room (25) was apparently destined to become a shrine to the Emperor. In it the statue of Augustus’ consort, the Empress Livia, in painted marble with the head inserted in a second-hand torso (which was found [Fig. 8.9] propped against the peristyle wall) was apparently to be set up.

Fig. 8.8Pompeii, Villa of the Mysteries, reconstruction.(A. Maiuri,op. cit., p. 56)

Fig. 8.8Pompeii, Villa of the Mysteries, reconstruction.

(A. Maiuri,op. cit., p. 56)

Fig. 8.9Pompeii, Villa of the Mysteries, Statue of Livia, as found.(A. Maiuri,op. cit., p. 227)

Fig. 8.9Pompeii, Villa of the Mysteries, Statue of Livia, as found.

(A. Maiuri,op. cit., p. 227)

On the rustic side of the villa, business was going on as usual. The winepress (Fig. 8.10) was ready for use in the coming vintage; rough wine was ready in large amphorae protected by woven straw like a modernfiasconeof Chiantior Vesuvio. Farm tools (picks, hoe, shovel, hammer, pruning hooks) were found hanging in a room (32) beside the vestibule. The porter was on duty. He was found dead in his dark little room (35), on his finger a cheap iron ring set with an engraved carnelian, by his side the five bronze coins which may have been his life savings. He must have heard the dying screams of the adolescent girl whose skeleton was found in the vestibule nearby. Three women were crushed in the rustic quarters (55) when the roof fell in. The excavators found their disordered skeletons, their gold rings and bracelets, a necklace of gold and glass paste beads, and, lying nearby, ten silver coins. In the cryptoporticus were found the bodies of four men, with wine or water jugs by their side. They had hoped the sturdy vaults would hold, and they did, but the mephitic fumes proved deadly. (Altogether, it is calculated that Vesuvius claimed 2,000 victims in Pompeii.) The nine wretched cadavers in the Villa of the Mysteries were the last inhabitants of a mansion which in its day had been one of the most elegant in all Italy.

Though space does not permit a detailed account of the fascinating things Herculaneum has to tell us, the subject of suburban villas cannot be left without mentioning a famous one there, still not fully explored, where in 1752 were found, in a narrow room with cupboards, a vast number of what were at first taken for charred billets of wood. Later, traces of writing were found on them: they turned out to be papyri, a whole library of 1800 rolls. A machine invented to unroll them ruined more scrolls than it unwound, but finally, by 1806, ninety-six were deciphered. They proved to be works of an Epicurean philosopher named Philodemus, to whose patron Lucius Calpurnius Piso (father of Caesar’s wife Calpurnia) and his descendants the villa may have belonged. It had a gracious peristyle, gardens, fishponds, and a belvedere overlooking the sea at the end of a long graveled walk. In the garden wasfound a whole gallery of sculpture in bronze and marble, now included among the most famous pieces in the National Museum in Naples. Here a cultured Roman patrician could combine in the ideal Epicurean way the calm contemplation of the beauties of nature and of art with the philosophic study of the atomic structure of the universe.

Fig. 8.10Pompeii, Villa of the Mysteries. Wine-press, reconstructed.(Maiuri,op. cit., p. 101)

Fig. 8.10Pompeii, Villa of the Mysteries. Wine-press, reconstructed.

(Maiuri,op. cit., p. 101)

A more rustic villa, between Pompeii and Boscoreale to the north, shows what the establishment of a capital farmer of the first centuryA.D.was like. The owner’s quarters were modest. Business came first: most of the ground floor is taken up with stable, wine and oil presses, threshing floor, and slaves’ quarters. Slaves were a problem: one rustic villa has quarters for thirty and stocks for fourteen. The Boscoreale wine store had a 23,000 gallon capacity, and enough stone jars were found to hold 1,300 gallons of olive oil. The proprietor of this villa, however, was not without his fondness for aesthetic ostentation. In a wine vat here was found in 1895 a treasure of 108 embossed silver vessels and 1000 gold coins. They were bought by the banker Count Edward de Rothschild, much to Italian disgust, and presented to the Louvre. One pair of cups represents a series of skeletons, one garlanded, another with a heavy bag of money, a third with a roll of papyrus, a fourth with a lyre; the whole bears the legend, the tragic irony of which the proprietor of the villa was to discover: “Seize hold on life; tomorrow is uncertain.” Another treasure in silver, of 118 pieces, all now securely in the Naples museum, was discovered in 1930 in a nail-studded chest in the strong room under a town house (I.x.4) called the “House of the Menander” after a fresco of the dramatist on the walls.

*****

But it is not only the nabobs, their villas, and their treasures which Pompeii reveals to us. Ancient tradesmen, their lives, work, and tastes, about which literature tells us almost nothing, become more real for us here than anywhere elsein the ancient world except Ostia. In the market facing the Forum the excavators found fruit in glass containers, and the skeletons of fish and sheep. There are inns for muleteers and carters by the city gates, and innumerable wine shops, the bar open to the street, its top pierced to hold cool amphorae of wine or covered bronze vessels for hot drinks (Fig. 8.11). Wine prices are scratched on walls, together with othergraffitiof more or less extreme indecency, referring usually to the oldest of the professions. One says, “I am yours—for twoasses” (theaswas a small copper coin worth, at the time thisgraffitowas scribbled, about two-and-a-half cents). Another, in large letters over a bench at the Porta Marina, advises loungers to READ THIS SIGN FIRST, and offers the charms of a Greek prostitute named Attiké at sixteenasses. This sort of thing prompted the more sober-sided Pompeians to write more than once on the walls (of the large theater, amphitheater, and basilica) the couplet, one of the most famous of the hundreds found at Pompeii:

“I wonder, wall, that you do not go smash,Who have to bear the weight of all this trash!”

Othergraffiticomplain of unrequited love: “I’d like to bash Venus’ ribs in” (from the basilica), or “Here Vibius lay alone and longed for his beloved” (perhaps from an inn). Snatches from the love-poets, Ovid and (strangely) the tortured, neurotic Propertius, are frequent, and tags of Vergil remembered from schooldays.Graffitikeep a running account of daily purchases of cheese, bread, oil, and wine; or the number of eggs laid daily by the chickens. A reward is offered for the recovery of a stolen bronze pitcher. Income property is advertised for rent, or gentlemen’s upstairs flats (cenacula equestria). A metal worker, doing a brisk business in chamber pots, has scratched on his wall a memo of the days fairs are held in nearby towns. He madesurveyors’ instruments as well: our only example of a surveyor’s plane table (groma) comes from his shop. In a bronze-bound chest in the house of a rich freedman banker, Lucius Caecilius Jucundus, were found his complete (and involved) accounts, on 153 wax tablets. His bronze bust, with its shrewd, ugly, kindly face, warts and all (Fig. 8.12), was also found in the house. It reveals the very type of thenouveaux riches, not in the least ashamed of being “in trade,” who came to be the ruling class in the last days of Pompeii.

The wealth of tradesmen can be judged by the quality of the decoration of their houses, in which they often plied their trade, for the ancient world’s slave economy did not foster the factory system. Thus in the house of the jeweler Pinarius Cerialis (III,iv,4), his showcase was found containing fine engraved cornelians, agates, and amethysts, some of the work unfinished, and also the tiny, delicate tools of his trade. In the House of the Surgeon (VI.1,9–10) surgical instruments were found, including probes, catheters, gynaecological forceps, pliers for pulling teeth, and little spoons, perhaps for extracting wax from the ears. These provide our best evidence for ancient surgical techniques.

Stephanus’fullonica(laundry: I.vi.7) was found with the imprint of the fallen front door left clearly in the ashes. The padlock was on the outside, from which the inference is that this establishment served as laundry only; if it had been a dwelling, the lock would have been on the inside. A skeleton behind the door had with him a bag of 107 gold and silver coins. Since two-thirds of them had been minted years before, under the Republic, one assumes that this was not merely the day’s take, but a hoard; all the shop’s moveable capital. Built in at the back were the small vats where the dirty clothes were trodden, to get out the dirt and grease, and the larger ones for rinsing. The upper floor and courtyard were used for drying: in the courtyard wall were found the small putholes for the canes over which the wetclothes were hung. Near the entrance was the clothes press, in which a pressing board was worked down upon the folded clothes by means of a pair of large wooden screws.

Fig. 8.11Pompeii,thermopoliumor bar. (MPI)

Fig. 8.12Naples, National Museum. Bronze bust of Caecilius Jucundus, from Pompeii.(B. Maiuri,Il Museo Nazionale di Napoli, p. 71)

Fig. 8.12Naples, National Museum. Bronze bust of Caecilius Jucundus, from Pompeii.

(B. Maiuri,Il Museo Nazionale di Napoli, p. 71)

Fig. 8.13Pompeii, House of D. Octavius Quartio, garden, reconstruction. (Spinazzola,op. cit., 1, p. 418)

Across the street from the laundry a painted shop front shows the operations of a felter’s establishment, where wool was matted together with a fixative, under repeated manipulation and pressure, until it acquired a consistent texture, like a piece of cloth. Felt was in demand for caps, cloaks, slippers, and blankets (the latter for both man and horse). The shop sign shows workmen at tables holding the carding comb and knives of their trade. In the middle of the picture other men, naked to the waist, are at work at shallow troughs impregnating the wool with the coagulant (Pliny the Elder says it was vinegar) which is being heated by a stove beneath the troughs. To the right, the proprietor—his name was Verecundus—proudly holds up a red-striped finished sample. To the left, Mercury, the patron of tradesmen, is painted emerging from a Tuscan temple with a money bag in his hand (“Hurrah for profit,” says a Pompeiangraffito). Below is the proprietor’s wife at a table, in spirited conversation with a female customer who is trying on slippers. No literary discussion, primary or secondary, can match the vivid concreteness of this archaeological record.

The house (II.v.1–4) of Decimus Octavius Quartio (or Marcus Loreius Tiburtinus—authorities differ about the occupant’s name) belonged to a potter, to judge by a small kiln, with the potter’s stool and samples of his wares, found in a workroom. This is interesting enough, but more interesting still is this tradesman’s taste, as revealed by his house and garden. Hardly a corner of the house is left unfrescoed, and the paintings include two ambitious cycles; nine episodes from the saga of Hercules, and fourteen from theIliad. (The House of the Cryptoporticus [I.vi.2–4] presents twenty-fiveIliadepisodes from an original 86, badly damaged when the last owner, an obvious Babbitt, turned the cryptoporticus into a wine cellar and made over the diningroom for public use.) The potter was besides a connoisseur of gardens; his is the most charming that Pompeii can boast. Hisimpluvium—for catching rainwater in theatrium(courtyard or patio)—is double-walled, for flower-boxes; behind theatriumis a formal flower bed, with walks around it on three sides; the chief feature of the sunken back garden (Fig. 8.13), nearly twice the area of the house itself, is a pair of long narrow fish pools, planned perpendicular to each other to form a T, and trellised (Fig. 8.14) so that vines could grow over them. The walls of the pools were painted blue to deepen the color of the water. At one end of the crossbar of the T is the pleasantestal frescodining alcove imaginable. Statuettes embellish the alcove and the sides of the pool. There is a little shrine in the alcove; another, with a fountain, where the two pools meet; still another, with a fountain in front of it, two-thirds of the way along the upright of the T. Putholes in the garden wall show that there were shed roofs there to protect exotic plants and flowers. The plum trees, oaks, shrubs, arbors, and plants with which the garden was filled in orderly rows, with walks between, have been replanted, after identifying them from their roots found in the ashes. Forty-four amphorae were found buried to their necks in a row along one side of the garden. Perhaps they served as flower pots; it is equally possible that they were a wine store, for this potter’s house has no wine cellar. In a corner and under the arbors along the walks there were wooden seats and little marble tables, for rustic picnics in the pleached shade. The difference of levels, the fountains, shrines, statues, arbors, trees, and the painted colors, red, gray, green, yellow, and blue, all judiciously restored, make this age-old garden extraordinarily vivacious. Here archaeology has once more given the lie to the hackneyed stereotype of the lifelessness and colorlessness of classical antiquity, and has proved that in landscape-gardening, at any rate, there is something to be said for thebourgeoistaste of Pompeian tradesmen.Some had a taste for music, too, to judge by some frescoes in the small but gracious House of Fabia (I.vi.15). One portrays the mistress of the house with sheet music in her hand. Another shows what appears to be a music lesson, our only example of the lyre being played four hands. Indeed archaeology, by revealing these middlebrows to us in three dimensions, their shops and artifacts, inns and bars, street signs andgraffiti, loves licit and illicit, tools and equipment, their tastes and pleasures, has given us, especially in Pompeii, a truer picture of the average, ordinary ancient Italian man than Latin literature provides. For Latin literature, with some exceptions like Plautus’ plays, tends to be written by highbrows for highbrows. (Yet paradoxically, the best literary picture of an ancient Babbitt, Petronius’ Trimalchio,wasdrawn by a highbrow for highbrows.)

Fig. 8.14Pompeii, House of D. Octavius Quartio, garden, with trellis and pool. (Spinazzola,op. cit., 1, p. 396)

*****

Pompeii has enriched, too, our knowledge of the ancient Italian’s relation to his gods. The archaeological documents for Pompeian religion include the temples, innumerable household shrines, wayside altars, frescoes, inscriptions, andgraffiti. Of the ten temples, three, ruined in the earthquake, had not been repaired at the time of the final débacle, seventeen years later. One had reverted to the use of a private association, and two were dedicated to the Imperial cult, to which generally only lip service was paid. One piece of evidence on this is the cynicalgraffitofrom a farm in nearby Boscotrecase: “Augustus Caesar’s mother was only a woman.” Of the rest, only the temple of the Egyptian Isis shows real signs of the prosperity that comes from devout support. The truth is that the real god of Pompeii—as of most other cities ancient and modern—was the God of Gain. The state religion, cold and formal, offered little comfort: the warmth and promise came from Oriental religions, of which Isis-worship was one and Christianity another. There is no evidence of Christianity’s having penetrated Pompeii byA.D.79, unless the ominousgraffito, “SODOMA, GOMORA,” be taken as a sign. But Pompeii, close to the Italian end of the trade-route from Alexandria, is permeated with things Egyptian, and there is much evidence of enthusiasm for the cult of Isis. The earliest building stones of the temple (VII.vii) belong to the end of the second centuryB.C., and were thrown down in the earthquake ofA.D.62. Butthistemple was not left derelict: it was immediately reconstructed from the ground up in the name of a six-year-old boy, who was rewarded for his piety by honorary membership in the town council. The cult, with its promise of personal immortality, received rich gifts from its votaries. Its marble lustral basin, for holy water; statues and statuettes, including of course the goddess herself, with her rattle that kept off evil spirits; the striking bronze bust of an actor-donor; lamps; sacrificial knives; the ornamental marble curb of a well; candelabra, and rich frescoes, some with likenesses of white-robed, shaven-headed priests, which decorated the precinct and the walls, are now among the treasures of the National Museum in Naples.

Family cults flourished in Pompeii more than the official religion, to judge by the fact that nearly every house and workshop has its private shrine, usually housing busts of ancestors (for in this the Romans were downright Japanese), and adorned with a picture of a snake, representing the family’s Genius, or guardian spirit. Sometimes, as in the House of the Cryptoporticus, there is a handsomely decorated private shrine to one of the Olympian deities, in this case Diana. The trades had their patron saints: Mercury (god also of thieves) for commerce; Minerva, who invented weaving, for the clothmakers; the hearth goddess Vesta for the bakers. The front of the felter’s shop described above is emblazoned with a magnificent Venus in a chariot drawn by four elephants. Sex, too, had its enthusiastic worshipers: a dyer’s vat (IX.vii.2) bears a relief of an enormous winged phallus, set in a temple whoseacroteriaare also phalluses, of smaller size. But perhaps the perfect symbol of thereligion of this tradesmen’s town is a fresco in the House of the Cryptoporticus, in which the family of Aeneas (the symbol of Rome) is shown guided to its destiny by Mercury, the god of trade.

*****

Is all this great art? A fair answer to the question should come from an analysis of what is usually regarded as the masterpiece of Pompeian painting, the fresco in Room 5 of the Villa of the Mysteries.

This analysis must be prefaced by a word about the four more or less successive styles into which archaeologists have succeeded in dividing the vast corpus of Pompeian painting. The First (or “incrustation”) Style, found in buildings (e.g., at Palestrina) dated by their fabric and technique from 150 to 80B.C., uses colored stucco to imitate marble dadoes, rusticated blocks, and revetments. The Second (or “architectural”) Style (80B.C.-A.D.14) imitates architectural forms, uses perspective, and throws the field to be painted open to mythical or religious subjects. The Third (or “Egyptianizing”) Style (A.D.14–62) flattens out painted architectural detail into painted “surrounds” or frames for panels which look like hanging tapestries, worked out with fine detail in a miniaturist’s technique. The Fourth (or “ornamental”) Style (A.D.62–79) features infinite vistas, with figures moving amid fantastic architecture. Examples of the last three styles are frequent in the Villa of the Mysteries, but the great sequence from which the Villa takes its name is of the Second Style and Augustus’ reign.

Fig. 8.15Pompeii, Villa of the Mysteries, fresco: woman being scourged. (MPI)

In this sequence, against a background of brilliant Pompeian red, are painted, almost life-size, a series of twenty-nine figures subdivided into ten groups. At the left of the door in the northwest corner (as one enters from Room 4) a boy reads what is apparently a ritual from a papyrus roll; a woman, perhaps his mother, points to the words with a stylus. Next is a scene of ritual washing of a myrtle branch;one of the servers, in deep décolleté, and with pointed ears, carries the papyrus ritual roll at her waist in a fold of herstola. In the next group a fat, blonde-bearded, naked old Silenus plays a lyre, a faun plays his pipe, and his consort gives suck to a goat. Then comes the figure of a woman in motion so violent that her drapery swirls about her as she raises a hand in horror at one of the scenes that follows. But between her and the scene that repels her are three other groups. First, another trio, of a Silenus and two fauns. The Silenus is giving one of the fauns a drink out of a silver bowl; the other faun frightens the drinker with a Silenus mask held so as to be reflected in the surface of the wine. Second, the central scene, in the center of the east wall: a naked god, identified as Bacchus by the thyrsus (the staff tipped with a pine cone) which lies athwart his body, and by the vine leaves in his hair, leans back in the lap of a figure who must be his bride, Ariadne. Third, a kneeling woman unveils an erect purple-draped object, surely the Mystery of Mysteries, a phallus. Beyond her is the scene of horror (Fig. 8.15): a half-naked female figure with huge black wings raises a whip to scourge a woman, surely the candidate for initiation, who cowers, her back bare, her face buried, in the lap of a seated woman who strokes the victim’s dishevelled hair to comfort her. Beyond her a naked Bacchante whirls in an orgiastic dance, clicking castanets high in the air above her head. In the last two scenes a woman in bridal yellow, on an elegant ivory stool, does her hair while a Cupid holds a mirror. Another Cupid, with his bow, looks on. And finally, a matron, with her mantle draped over her head like a priestess, sits, leaning on a cushion of purple and gold, on a chair with a footstool, and watches gravely.

This fresco, which clearly portrays a Dionysiac ritual, and connects it with marriage and fertility, has undeniable power. It packs into a confined space—it is less than sixty feet long, on three sides of a room measuring only 16 × 23 feet—movement, rest, fear, horror, magic, abandon, andorgy. It illustrates better than anything else from Pompeii how the Augustan age assimilated Hellenistic Greek art into an Italian idiom. Yet somehow the final impression, here and in lesser examples of Pompeian painting, is that the artist is working from a memory of great paintings seen in collections or museums, from a repertory, or from sketch books of famous works of art. His work is well above the inn-sign or wallpaper level, he is competent and sophisticated; no hack, but no genius either. And so, with all respect for the natural enthusiasm of the excavator, the question with which this section began must be answered in the negative. This is not great art, but it is the next thing to it, and no modernbourgeoisiesince the sixteenth-century Dutch has had the taste to fill its houses with such able work. But we must conclude that the great value of Pompeian art is in documentation, of the practical taste of ordinary people.

*****

Maximilian, later to be Emperor of Mexico, when he visited Pompeii in 1851, found it terrible, its rooms like painted corpses. Since then, modern archaeological methods (scientific, not miraculous) have brought the corpses to life. What archaeology has presented to us here, as at its best it always does, is not things but people, at work and play, in house and workshop, worshiping and blaspheming, and after their fashion patronizing the arts. So vividly does archaeology reveal them that we are moved to say with Francis Bacon, “Theseare the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which we account ancient, by a computation backwards from ourselves.”

As the rain of ashes was covering Pompeii, and the river of lava engulfing Herculaneum, life in Rome, that Eternal City, went on. It was the age of the Flavians. Vespasian, thebourgeoisfounder of the dynasty, died just a month before Pompeii was buried. He and his sons, the good Titus and the wicked Domitian, enriched Rome with splendid art and architecture.

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