THE FORUM.
Diomed's Inn.—The Niche of Minerva.—The Appearance and The Monuments of the Forum.—The Antique Temple.—The Pagan ex-Voto Offerings.—The Merchants' City Exchange and the Petty Exchange.—The Pantheon, or was it a Temple, a Slaughter-house, or a Tavern?—The Style of Cooking and the Form of Religion.—The Temple of Venus.—- The Basilica.—The Inscriptions of Passers-by upon the Walls.—The Forum Rebuilt.
As you alight at the station, in the first place breakfast at the popina of Diomed. It is a tavern of our own day, which has assumed an antique title to please travellers. You may there drink Falernian wine manufactured by Scala, the Neapolitan chemist, and, should you ask for some jentaculum in the Roman style—aliquid scitamentorum, glandionidum suillam taridum, pernonidem, sinciput aut omenta porcina, aut aliquid ad eum modum—they will serve you a beefsteak and potatoes. Your strength refreshed, you will scale the sloping hillock of ashes and rubbish that conceals the ruins from your view; you will pay your two francs at the office and you will pass the gate-keeper's turnstile, astonished, as it is, to find itself in such a place. These formalities once concluded you have nothing more that is modern to go through unless it be the companionship of a guide in military uniform who escorts you, in reality to watch, you (especially if you belong to the country of Lord Elgin), but not to mulct you in the least. Placards in all the known languages forbid you to offer him so much as an obolus. You make your entrée, in a word, into the antique life, and you are as free as a Pompeian.
The first thing one sees is an arcade and such a niche as might serve for an image of the Madonna; but be reassured, for the niche contains a Minerva. It is no longer the superstition of our own time that strikes our gaze. Under the arcade open extensive store-houses that probably served as a place of deposit for merchandise. You then enter an ascending paved street, pass by the temple of Venus and the Basilica, and arrive at the Forum. There, one should pause.
At first glance, the observer distinguishes nothing but a long square space closed at the further extremity by a regular-shaped mound rising between two arcades; lateral alleys extend lengthwise on the right and the left between shafts of columns and dilapidated architectural work. Here and there some compound masses of stone-work indicate altars or the pedestals of statues no longer seen. Vesuvius, still threatening, smokes away at the extremity of the picture.
Look more closely and you will perceive that the fluted columns are of Caserta stone, of tufa, or of brick, coated with stucco and raised two steps above the level of the square. Under the lower step runs the kennel. These columns sustained a gallery upon which one mounted by narrow and abrupt steps that time has spared. This upper gallery must have been covered. The women walked in it. A second story of columns, most likely interrupted in front of the monuments, rested upon the other one. Mazois has reconstructed this colonnade in two superior orders—Doric below and Ionic above—with exquisite elegance. The pavement of the square, on which you may still walk, was of travertine. Thus we see the Forum rising again, as it were, in our presence.
Let us glance at the ruins that surround it. That mound at the other end was the foundation of a temple, the diminutive size of which strikes the newcomer at first sight. Every one is not aware that the temple, far from being a place of assemblage for devout multitudes, was, with the ancients, in reality, but a larger niche inclosing the statue of the deity to be worshipped. The consecrated building received only a small number of the elect after they had been befittingly purified, and the crowd remained outside. It was not the palace, but the mere cell of the god. This cell (cella) was, at first, the whole temple, and was just large enough to hold the statue and the altar. By degrees it came to be ornamented with a front portico, then with a rear portico, and then with side colonnades, thus attaining by embellishment after embellishment the rich elegance of the Madeleine at Paris. But the proportions of our cathedrals were never adopted by the ancients. Thus, Christianity rarely appropriates the Greek or Roman temples for its worship. It has preferred the vast basilicas, the royal name of which assumes a religious meaning.
The Romans built their temples in this wise: The augur—that is to say, the priest who read the future in the flight of birds—traced in the sky with his short staff a spacious square, which he then marked on the soil. Stakes were at once fixed along the four lines, and draperies were hung between the stakes. In the midst of this space, the area or inclosure of the temple, the augur marked out a cross—the augural cross, indicating the four cardinal points; the transverse lines fixed the limits of the cella; the point where the two branches met was the place for the door, and the first stone was deposited on the threshold. Numerous lighted lamps illuminated these ceremonies, after which the chief priest, the pontifex maximus, consecrated the area, and from that moment it became settled and immovable. If it crumbled, it must be rebuilt on the same spot, and the least change made, even should it be to enlarge it, would be regarded as a profanation. Thus had the dwelling of the god that rises before us at the extremity of the Forum been consecrated.
Like most of the Roman temples, this edifice is elevated on a foundation (the podium), and turned toward the north. One ascends to it by a flight of steps that cuts in the centre a platform where, perhaps, the altar stood. Upon the podium there remain some vestiges of the twelve columns that formed the front portico or pronaos. Twelve columns, did I say?—three on each side, six in front; always an even number at the facades, so that a central column may not mask the doorway and that the temple may be freely entered by the intercolumnar middle space.
To the right and the left of the steps were pedestals that formerly sustained statues probably colossal. Behind the pronaos could be recognized the place where the cella used to be. Nothing remains of it now but the mosaic pavement and the walls. Traces of columns enable us to reconstruct this sanctuary richly. We can there raise—and it has been done on paper—two colonnades—the first one of the Ionic order, supporting a gallery; the second of the Corinthian order, sustaining the light wooden platform of painted wood which no longer exists. The walls, covered with stucco, still retain pretty decorative paintings. Three small subterranean chambers, of very solid construction, perhaps contained the treasury and archives of the State, or something else entirely different—why not those of the temple? In those times the Church was rich; the Saviour had not ordained poverty as its portion.
What deity's house is it that we are visiting now? Jupiter's, says common opinion, upon the strength of a colossal statue of which fragments have been found that might well have fitted the King of the Gods. Others think it the temple of Venus, the Venus Physica (the beautiful in nature, say æsthetic philosophers) being the patroness of Pompeii. We shall frequently, hereafter, meet with the name of this goddess. Several detached limbs in stone and in bronze, which are not broken at the extremity as though they belonged to a statue, but are polished on all sides and cut in such a manner as to admit of being suspended, were found among the ruins; they were votive offerings. Italy, in becoming Catholic, has retained these Pagan customs. Besides her supreme God, she worships a host of demi-gods, to whom she dedicates her towns and consecrates her temples, where garlands of ex-voto offerings testify to the intercession of the priests and the gratitude of the true believers.
On the two sides of the temple of Jupiter—such is the generally-accepted name—rise arcades, as I have already remarked. The one on the left is a vaulted entrance, which, being too low and standing too far forward, does not correspond with the other and deranges, one cannot exactly make out why, the symmetry of this part of the Forum. The other arcade is evidently a triumphal portal. Nothing remains of it now but the body of the work in brick, some niches and traces of pilasters; but it is easy to replace the marbles and the statues which must have adorned this monument in rather poor taste. Such was the extremity of the Forum.
Four considerable edifices follow each other on the eastern side of this public square. These are, going from south to north, the palace of Eumachia, the temple of Mercury, the Senate Chamber, and the Pantheon.
What is the Eumachia palace? An inscription found at that place reads: "Eumachia, in her name and in the name of her son, has erected to Concord and to august Piety, a Chalcidicum, a crypt and porticoes."
What is a Chalcidicum? Long and grave have been the discussions on this subject among the savans. They have agreed, however, on one point, that it should be a species of structure invented at Chalcis, a city of Eubea.
However that may be, this much-despoiled palace presents a vast open gallery, which was, certainly, the portico mentioned above. Around the portico ran a closed gallery along three sides, and that must have been the crypt. Upon the fourth side—that is to say, before the entry that fronts the Forum—stood forth a sort of porch, a large exterior vestibule: that was probably the Chalcidicum.
The edifice is curious. Behind the vestibule are two walls, not parallel, one of which follows the alignment of the Forum, and the other that of the interior portico. The space between this double wall is utilized and some shops hide themselves in its recesses. Thus the irregularity of the plan is not merely corrected—it is turned to useful account. The ancients were shrewd fellows. This portico rested on fifty-eight columns, surrounding a court-yard. In the court-yard, a large movable stone, in good preservation, with the ring that served to lift it, covered a cistern. At the extremity of the portico, in a hemicycle, stood a headless statue—perhaps the Piety or Concord to which the entire edifice was dedicated. Behind the hemicycle a sort of square niche buried itself in the wall between two doors, one of which, painted on the wall for the sake of symmetry, is a useful and curious document. It is separated into three long and narrow panels and is provided with a ring that should have served to move it. Doors are nowhere to be seen now in Pompeii, because they were of wood, and consequently were consumed by the fire; hence, this painted representation has filled the savants with delight; they now know that the ancients shut themselves in at home by processes exactly like our own.
Between, the two doors, in the square niche, the statue of Eumachia, or, at least, a moulded model of that statue, is still erect upon its pedestal. It is of a female of tall stature, who looks sad and ill. An inscription informs us that the statue was erected in her honor by the fullers. These artisans formed quite a respectable corporation at Pompeii, and we shall presently visit the manufactory where they worked. Everything is now explained: the edifice of Eumachia must have been the Palace of Industry of that city and period. This is the Pompeian Merchants' Exchange, where transactions took place in the portico, and in winter, in the crypt. The tribunal of commerce sat in the hemicycle, at the foot of the statue of Concord, raised there to appease quarrels between the merchants. In the court-yard, the huge blocks of stone still standing were the tables on which their goods were spread. The cistern and the large vats yielded the conveniences to wash them. In fine, the Chalcidicum was the smaller Exchange, and the niches still seen there must have been the stands of the auctioneers. But what was there in common between this market, this fullers' counter, and the melancholy priestess?
Religion at that period entered into everything, even into trade and industry. A secret door put the edifice of Eumachia in communication with the adjacent temple. That temple, which was dedicated to Mercury—why to Mercury?—or to Quirinus—why not to Mercury?—at this day forms a small museum of precious relics. The entrance to it is closed with a grating through which a sufficient view may be had of the bas-relief on the altar, representing a sacrifice. A personage whose head is half-veiled presides at the ceremony; behind that person a child carries the consecrated water in a vase, and the victimarius, bearing an axe, leads the bull that is to be offered up. Behind the sacrificial party are some flute-players. On the two sides of the altar other bas-reliefs represent the instruments that were used at the sacrifices; the lituus, or curved staff of the augur; the acerra, or perfuming censer; the mantile, or consecrated cloth that—let us simply say, the napkin,—and, finally, the vases peculiar to these ceremonies, the patere, the simpulum, and the prefericulum.
That altar is the only curiosity in the temple. The remainder is not worth the trouble of being studied or reconstructed. The mural paintings form an adornment of questionable taste. A rear door puts the temple in communication with the Senaculum, or Senate-house, as the neighboring structure was called; but the Pompeian Senators being no more than decurions, it is an ambitious title. A vestibule that comes forward as far as the colonnade of the Forum; then a spacious saloon or hall; an arch at the end, with a broad foundation where the seats of the decemviri possibly stood; then, walls built of rough stones arranged in net-work (opus reticulatum), some niches without statues—such is all that remains. But with a ceiling of wood painted in bright colors (the walls could not have held up a vaulted roof), and completely paved, completely sheathed with marble, as some flags and other remnants indicate, this hall could not have been without some richness of effect. Those who sat there were but the magistrates of a small city; but behind them loomed up Rome, whose vast shadow embraced and magnified everything.
At length we have before us the Pantheon, the strangest and the least easy to name of the edifices of Pompeii. It is not parallel to the Forum, but its obliquity was adroitly masked by shops in which many pieces of coin have been found. Hence the conclusion that these were tabernæ argentariæ, the money-changers' offices, and I cannot prove the contrary. The two entrance doors are separated by two Corinthian columns, between which is hollowed out a niche without a statue. The capitals of these columns bear Cæsarean eagles. Could this Pantheon have been the temple of Augustus? Having passed the doors, one reaches an area, in which extended, to the right and to the left, a spacious portico surrounding a court, in the midst of which remain twelve pedestals that, ranged in circular order, once, perhaps, sustained the pillars of a circular temple or the statues of twelve gods. This, then, was the Pantheon. However, at the extremity of the edifice, and directly opposite to the entrance, three apartments open. The middle one formed a chapel; three statues were found there representing Drusus and Livia, the wife of Augustus, along with an arm holding a globe, and belonging, no doubt, to the consecrated statue which must have stood upon the pedestal at the end, a statue of the Emperor. Then this was the temple of Augustus. The apartment to the left shows a niche and an altar, and served, perhaps, for sacrifices; the room to the right offers a stone bench arranged in the shape of a horse-shoe. It could not be one of those triple beds (triclinia) which we shall find in the eating saloons of the private houses; for the slope of these benches would have forced the reclining guests to have their heads turned toward the wall or their feet higher than their heads. Moreover, in the interior of this bench runs a conduit evidently intended to afford passage to certain liquids, perhaps to the blood of animals slaughtered in the place. This, therefore, was neither a Pantheon nor a temple of Augustus, but a slaughter-house (macellum.) In that case, the eleven apartments abutting to the right on the long wall of the edifice would be the stalls. But these rooms, in which the regular orifices made in the wall were to hold the beams that sustained the second story, were adorned with paintings which still exist, and which must have been quite luxurious for those poor oxen. Let us interrogate these paintings and those of all these walls; they will instruct us, perhaps, with reference to the destination of the building. There are mythological and epic pieces reproducing certain sacred subjects, of which we shall speak further on. Others show us winged infants, little Cupids weaving garlands, of which the ancients were so fond; some of the bacchanalian divinities, celebrating the festival of the mills, are crowning with flowers the patient ass who is turning the wheel. Flowers on all sides—that was the fantasy of antique times. Flowers at their wild banquets, at their august ceremonies, at their sacrifices, and at their festivals; flowers on the necks of their victims and their guests, and on the brows of their women and their gods. But the greatest number of these paintings appear destined for banquetting-halls; dead nature predominates in them; you see nothing but pullets, geese, ducks, partridges, fowls, and game of all kinds, fruits, and eggs, amphoræ, loaves of bread and cakes, hams, and I know not what all else. In the shops attached to this palace belong all sorts of precious articles—vases, lamps, statuettes, jewels, a handsome alabaster cup; besides, there have been found five hundred and fifty small bottles, without counting the goblets, and, in vases of glass, raisins, figs, chestnuts, lentils, and near them scales and bakers' and pastry-cooks' moulds. Could the Pantheon, then, have been a tavern, a free inn (hospitium) where strangers were received under the protection of the gods? In that case the supposed butcher-shop must have been a sort of office, and the triclinium a dormitory. However that may be, the table and the altar, the kitchen and religion, elbow each other in this strange palace. Our austerity revolts and our frivolity is amused at the circumstance; but Catholics of the south are not at all surprised at it. Their mode of worship has retained something of the antique gaiety. For the common people of Naples, Christmas is a festival of eels, Easter a revel of casatelli; they eat zeppole to honor Saint Joseph; and the greatest proof of affliction that can be given to the dying Saviour is not to eat meat. Beneath the sky of Italy dogmas may change, but the religion will always be the same—sensual and vivid, impassioned and prone to excess, essentially and eternally Pagan, above all adoring woman, Venus or Mary, and the bambino, that mystic Cupid whom the poets called the first love. Catholicism and Paganism, theories and mysteries; if there be two religions, they are that of the south and that of the north.
You have just explored the whole eastern part of the Forum. Pass now in front of the temple of Jupiter and reach the western part. In descending from north to south, the first monument that strikes your attention is a rather long portico, turned on the east toward the Forum. Different observers have fancied that they discovered in it a poecile, a museum, a divan, a club, a granary for corn; and all these opinions are equally good.
Behind the poecile open small chambers, of which some are vaulted. Skeletons were found in them, and the inference was that they were prisons. Lower down extends along the Forum the lateral wall of the temple of Venus. In this wall is hollowed a small square niche in which there rose, at about a yard in height from the soil, a sort of table of tufa, indented with regular cavities, which are ranged in the order of their capacity; these were the public measures. An inscription gives us the names of the duumvirs who had gauged them by order of the decurions. As M. Breton has well remarked, they were the standards of measurement. Of these five cavities, the two smallest were destined for liquids, and we still see the holes through which those liquids flowed off when they had been measured. The table of tufa has been taken to the museum, and in its place has been substituted a rough imitation, which gives a sufficient idea of this curious monument.
The temple of Venus is entered from the neighboring street which we have already traversed. The ruin is a fine one—the finest, perhaps, in Pompeii; a spacious inclosure, or peribolus, framing a portico of forty-eight columns, of which many are still standing, and the portico itself surrounding the podium, where rose the temple—properly speaking, the house of the goddess. In front of the entrance, at the foot of the steps that ascend to the podium, rises the altar, poorly calculated for living sacrifices and seemingly destined for simple offerings of fruit, cakes, and incense, which were consecrated to Venus. Besides the form of the altar, an inscription found there and a statue of the goddess, whose modest attitude recalls the masterpiece of Florence, sufficiently authorize the name, in the absence of more exact information, that has been given to this edifice. Others, however, have attributed it to the worship of Bacchus; others again to that of Diana, and the question has not yet been settled by the savans; but Venus being the patroness of Pompeii, deserved the handsomest temple in the little city.
The columns of the peribolus or inclosure bear the traces of some bungling repairs made between the earthquake of 63 and the eruption of 79. They were Doric, but the attempt was to render them Corinthian, and, to this end, they were covered with stucco and topped with capitals that are not becoming to them. Against one of these columns still leans a statue in the form of a Hermes. Around the court is cut a small kennel to carry off the rain water, which was then caught in reservoirs. The wall along the Forum was gaily decorated with handsome paintings; one of these, probably on wood, was burned in the eruption, and the vacant place where it belonged is visible. Behind the temple open rooms formerly intended for the priests; handsome paintings were found there, also—- among them a Bacchus, resting his elbow on the shoulder of old Silenus, who is playing the lyre. Absorbed in this music, he forgets the wine in his goblet, and lets it fall out upon a panther crouching at his feet.
We now have only to visit the temple itself, the house of the goddess. The steps that scaled the basement story were thirteen—an odd number—so that in ascending the first step with the right foot, the level of the sanctuary was also reached with the right foot. The temple was peripterous, that is to say, entirely surrounded with open columns with Corinthian capitals. The portico opened broadly, and a mosaic of marbles, pleasingly adjusted, formed the pavement of the cella, of which the painted walls represented simple panels, separated here and there by plain pilasters. Our Lady of Pompeii dwelt there.
The last monument of the Forum on the south-west side is the Basilica; and the street by which we have entered separates it from the temple of Venus. The construction of the edifice leaves no doubt as to its destination, which is, moreover, confirmed by the word Basilica or Basilaca, scratched here and there by loungers with the points of their knives, on the wall. Basilica—derived from a Greek word which signifies king—might be translated with sufficient exactness by royal court. At Rome, these edifices were originally mere covered market-places sheltered from the rain and the sun. At a later period, colonnades divided them in three, sometimes even into five naves, and the simple niche which, intended for the judges' bench, was hollowed out at the foot of its monuments, finally developed into a vaulted semicircle. At last, the early Christians finding themselves crowded in the old temples, chose the high courts of justice to therein celebrate the worship of the new God, and the Roman Basilica imposed its architecture and its proportions upon the Catholic Cathedral. In the semicircle, then, where once the ancient magistracy held its justice seat, arose the high altar and the consecrated image of the crucified Saviour.
The Basilica of Pompeii presents to the Forum six pillars, between which five portals slid along grooves which are still visible. A vestibule, or sort of chalcidicum extends between these five entrances and five others, indicated by two columns and four pillars. The vestibule once crossed, the edifice appears in its truly Roman grandeur; at first glance the eye reconstructs the broad brick columns, regularly truncated in shape (they might be considered unfinished), which are still erect on their bases and which, crowned with Ionic volutes, were to form a monumental portico along the four sides of this majestic area paved with marble. Half columns fixed in the lateral walls supported the gallery; they joined each other in the angles; the middle space must have been uncovered. Fragments of statues and even of mounted figures proclaim the magnificence of this monument, at the extremity of which there rose, at the height of some six feet above the soil, a tribune adorned with half a dozen Corinthian columns and probably destined for the use of the duumvirs. The middle columns stood more widely apart in order that the magistrates might, from their seats, command a view of the entire Basilica. Under this tribune was concealed a mysterious cellar with barred windows. Some antiquaries affirm that there was the place where prisoners were tortured. They forget that in Rome, in the antique time, cases were adjudged publicly before the free people.
Some of the walls of the Basilica were covered with graphites, that is to say, with inscriptions scratched with the point of a nail or of a knife by loungers on the way. I do not here copy the thousand and one insignificant inscriptions which I find in my rambles. They would teach us nothing but the names of the Pompeian magistrates who had constructed or reconstructed this or that monument or such-and-such a portion of an edifice with the public money. But the graphites of the Basilica merit a moment's attention. Sometimes, these are verses of Ovid or of Virgil or Propertius (never of Horace, singular to say), and frequently with curious variations. Thus, for example:
"Quid pote durum Saxso aut quid mollius unda?
Dura tamen molli Saxsa cavantur aqua."
(Ovid.)
Notice the s in the saxo and the quid pote instead of quid magis; it is a Greekism.
Elsewhere were written these two lines:
"Quisquis amator erit Scythiæ licet ambulet oris:
Nemo adeo ut feriat barbarus esse volet."
Propertius had put this distich in an elegy in which he narrated a nocturnal promenade between Rome and Tibur. Observe the word Scythiæ instead of Scythicis, and especially, feriat, which is the true reading,—the printed texts say noceat. Thus an excellent correction has been preserved for us by Vesuvius.
Here are other lines, the origin of which is unknown:
"Scribenti mi dictat Amor, monstrat que Cupido
Ah peream, sine te si Deus esse velim!"
How many modern poets have uttered the same exclamation! They little dreamed that a Pompeian, a slave no doubt, had, eighteen centuries before their time, scratched, it with a nail upon the wall of a basilica. Here is a sentence that mentions gold. It has been carried out by the English poet, Wordsworth:
"Minimum malum fit contemnendo maximum,
Quod, crede mi, non contemnendo, erit minus."
Let us copy also this singular truth thrown into rhyme by some gourmand who had counted without his host:
"Quoi perna cocta est, si convivæ adponitur,
Non gustat pernam, lingit ollam aut caccabum."
This quoi is for cui; the caccabus was the kettle in which the fowl was cooked.
Here follows some wholesome advice for the health of lovers:
"Quisquis amat calidis noil debet fontibus uti:
Nam nemo flammis ustus amare potest."
I should never get through were I to quote them all. But how many short phrases there are that, scratched here and there, cause this old monument to spring up again, by revealing the thoughts and fancies of the loungers and passers-by who peopled it so many years ago.
A lover had written this:
"Nemo est bellus nisi qui amavit."
A friend:
"Vale, Messala, fac me ames."
A superlative wag, but incorrect withal:
"Cosmus nequitiae est magnussimae."
A learned man, or a philosopher:
"Non est exsilium ex patria sapientibus."
A complaining suitor:
"Sara non belle facis.
Solum me relinquis,
Debilis...."
A wrangler and disputant threatening the other party with a law-suit:
"Somius Corneilio (Cornelio) jus pendre (perendie?)"
A sceptic who cherishes no illusions as to the mode of administering justice:
"Quod pretium legi?"
A censor, perhaps a Christian, who knew the words addressed by the Jews to the blind man who was cured:
"Pyrrhus Getae conlegae salutem.
Moleste fero quod audivi te mortuom (sic).
Itaque vale."
A jovial wine bibber:
"Suavis vinari sitit, rogo vas valde sitit."[B]
A wit:
"Zetema mulier ferebat filium simulem sui nec meus erat, nec mi simulat; sed vellem esset meus, et ego volebam ut meus esset."
Tennis-players scribble:
"Amianthus, Epaphra, Tertius ludant cum Hedysio, Incundus Nolanus petat, numeret Citus et Stacus Amianthus."
Wordsworth remarks that these two names, Tertius and Epaphras, are found in the epistles of St. Paul. Epaphras (in Latin, Epaphra; the suppressed letter s shows that this Pompeian was merely a slave) is very often named on the walls of the little city; he is accused, moreover, of being beardless or destitute of hair (Epaphra glaber est), and of knowing nothing about tennis. (Epaphra pilicrepus non es). This inscription was found all scratched over, probably by the hand of Epaphras himself, who had his own feelings of pride as a fine player.
Thus it is that the stones of Pompeii are full of revelations with reference to its people. The Basilica is easy to reconstruct and provide with living occupants. Yonder duumviri, up between the Corinthian columns; in front of them the accused; here the crowd; lovers confiding their secrets to the wall; thinkers scribbling their maxims on them; wags getting off their witticisms in the same style; the slaves, in fine, the poor, announcing to the most remote posterity that they had, at least, the game of tennis to console them for their abject condition! Still three small apartments the extremity of which rounded off into semicircles (probably inferior tribunes where subordinate magistrates, such as commissioners or justices of the peace, had their seats); then the school of Verna, cruelly dilapidated; finally a small triumphal arch on which there stood, perhaps, a quadriga, or four-yoked chariot-team; some pedestals of statues erected to illustrious Pompeians, to Pansa, to Sallust, to Marcus Lucretius, Decidamius Rufus; some inscriptions in honor of this one or that one, of the great Romulus, of the aged Æneas,—when all these have been seen, or glanced at, at least, you will have made the tour of the Forum.
You now know what the public exchange was in a Roman city; a spacious court surrounded by the most important monuments (three temples, the bourse, the tribunals, the prisons, etc.), inclosed on all sides (traces of the barred gates are still discernible at the entrances), adorned with statues, triumphal arches, and colonnades; a centre of business and pleasure; a place for sauntering and keeping appointments; the Corso, the Boulevard of ancient times, or in other words, the heart of the city. Without any great effort of the imagination, all this scene revives again and becomes filled with a living, variegated throng,—the portico and its two stories of columns along the edge of the reconstructed monuments; women crowd the upper galleries; loiterers drag their feet along the pavement; the long robes gather in harmonious folds; busy merchants hurry to the Chalcidicum; the statues look proudly down from their re-peopled pedestals; the noble language of the Romans resounds on all sides in scanned, sonorous measure; and the temple of Jupiter, seated at the end of the vista, as on a throne, and richly adorned with Corinthian elegance, glitters in all its splendor in the broad sunshine.
An air of pomp and grandeur—a breath of Rome—has swept over this collection of public edifices. Let us descend from these heights and walk about through the little city.