ALFRED E. LEE.
[The ruins of Pompeii perhaps surpass in general interest any other of the exhumed remains of man’s ancient industry, and the story of them has been very frequently told. For a good general description we go to the “European Days and Ways” of Alfred E. Lee, who also deals with Vesuvius as well as with its victim. He tells us the whole history of the excavation, of which we can but say here that up to 1860 not more than one-third of the town was excavated, and that in 1863 the archæologist Fiorelli was appointed to supervise the work, which has gone on steadily since.]
The ancient Pompeiians who gazed upon and admired the beauteous groves and pastures which covered the symmetrical cone up to the very rim of its smokeless, silent crater must have had but a faint idea of the real nature of their terrible neighbor. But in the year 63 they received a most impressive and—had it been heeded—timely warning of what they were to expect. A fearful earthquake shook down their temples, colonnades, and dwellings, giving awful premonition of the reawakening of the stupendous forces of nature, which had been slumbering for centuries. The city was a wreck, but it was immediately rebuilt, and was greatly improved by conforming its architecture more nearly than before to the style of imperial Rome. A reaction from the depressing effects of disaster was at high tide, and Pompeii was doubtless more splendid and more gay than ever, when, on the 24th of August, 79, it was overtaken by the supreme catastrophe, the details of which, in the absence of authentic narrative, have been supplied by the romance of Bulwer. First came a dense shower of ashes, which covered the town to the depth of three feet, impelling most of its inhabitants to fly from its precincts. This was followed by a delusive lull, during which many of the fugitives returned to seek their valuables, and perhaps to care for the sick and infirm who could not be readily removed. But directly the shower of ashes was succeeded by a heavy rain of red-hot cinders and pumice, called rapilii, from which there was no escape. This covered the town with another stratum, seven to eight feet thick, burning the wooden upper stories from the houses, and extinguishing the last vestige of animal life. On top of this the remorseless Cyclops shook down more showers of ashes and then fiery rapilii, until the superincumbent mass attained an average thickness of twenty feet, and the beautiful city of the Sarno was literally smothered,—buried alive, with scarcely a single trace of it above ground. For nearly seventeen centuries Pompeii, except as a name and memory, disappeared from history. In ancient times its ruins were ransacked, partly by the survivors of its wreck, in recovering their valuables and the dead bodies of their friends, and partly in the search for decorative materials with which to embellish temples and other buildings. In this way the city was stripped of nearly everything easily accessible which was worth carrying away. Subsequent Vesuvian eruptions covered it still more deeply, vegetation grew over it, and a village bearing its name rose upon the ground which covered its ancient site. During the Middle Ages the place was entirely unknown. In 1592 a subterranean aqueduct, which is in use to this day, was carried under it without leading to its discovery. In 1748 some statues and bronze utensils, discovered by a peasant, attracted the attention of the reigning king of Naples and Sicily, Charles III., who caused excavations to be made. At that time the theatre, amphitheatre, and other portions of the buried town were brought to light, discoveries which caused great surprise and enthusiasm throughout the civilized world....
The excavated portion of the city, together with its museum and library, are under the care of a corps of government guards, who, for a European wonder, are forbidden to accept gratuities. Quite agreeably to me, my visit fell on a holiday, when the guides were off duty, so that I was permitted to wander at will among the silent streets, unembarrassed by long and apocryphal verbal explanations. A previous visit had familiarized me with the principal streets, buildings, and localities, so that I had no difficulty in finding my way. Besides a considerable region which had been excavated since my first visit, eighteen months before, there were some important buildings which I had not then been able to inspect. Among these was the Villa Diomed, so conspicuous in Bulwer’s romance. This villa—more properly speaking, the house of M. Arrius Diomedes—was one of the largest and most splendid of the Pompeiian residences, and, in addition to the usual conveniences and luxuries of an elegant mansion of that day, enclosed an interior court, or garden, one hundred and seven feet square, open to the sky, surrounded by a colonnade, and embellished by a central fountain. Beneath this court, on three sides, are long vaulted chambers, reached by stair-ways, and lighted by narrow apertures in the upper pavement. These cellars, now entirely cleared of rubbish, are believed to have been used in the summer season as family promenades. “In them,” says Bulwer, “twenty skeletons (two of them babes, embracing) were discovered in one spot by the door, covered by a fine ashen dust that had evidently been slowly wafted through the apertures until it had filled the whole space. There were jewels and coins, and candelabra for unavailing light, and wine, hardened in the amphoræ, for a prolongation of agonized life. The sand, consolidated by damps, had taken the forms of the skeletons as in a cast, and the traveller may yet see the impression of a female neck and bosom, of young and round proportions, the trace of the fated Julia! It seems to the inquirer as if the air had been gradually changed into a sulphurous vapor; the inmates of the vaults had rushed to the door and found it closed and blocked up by the scoriæ without, and in their attempts to force it had been suffocated with the atmosphere. In the garden was found a skeleton with a key by its bony hand, and near it a bag of coins. This is believed to have been the master of the house, the unfortunate Diomed, who had probably sought to escape by the garden, and been destroyed either by the vapors or some fragment of stone. Beside some silver vases lay another skeleton, probably a slave.” The impression of a girl’s breast in the ashes, which Bulwer’s fancy represents as the sole remaining trace of one of his heroines, is still preserved in the museum at Naples, and is as shapely and perfect as if the flesh of the fair young victim had been moulded but yesterday instead of eighteen hundred years ago. The bodies found in the Diomedan corridors had their heads wrapped up, and were half covered by the fine infiltrated ashes, in which was preserved even the imprint of the chemises worn by the women and children. The bodies had decayed, like those embedded in other parts of the town, but their forms had been moulded in the ashes with wonderful precision and distinctness.
In many cases such cavities, after the skeletons contained in them had been carefully removed, were filled with liquid plaster, which produced an accurate and durable image of the imprinted form. The museum at Pompeii contains a collection of such images, which impress upon the beholder, more vividly, perhaps, than any other objects, the horror and consternation of those awful days when the rain of volcanic ashes turned noon to night and overwhelmed the doomed city. One of these figures is that of a girl with a ring on her finger; another, that of a woman enceinte; a third, a man whose features are singularly distinct and natural. A group of three includes father, mother, and daughter, found lying near one another. The figure of a female shows even the folds of her drapery and the arrangement of her hair. The attitudes are generally those which follow a short and fierce death-struggle. Some of the victims seem to have fallen upon their faces and died suddenly in their flight. Others, who were perhaps asphyxiated by vapors, have the calm attitude of sleep, as though death had been but a pleasant dream.
Near the Great Theatre an open court with a peristyle of seventy-four columns is surrounded by a series of detached cells. This is supposed to have been a barrack for confinement of the gladiators who were chosen for the contests of the arena. Sixty-three skeletons found here are believed to have been those of soldiers who remained on duty during the eruption. In one of the chambers, used as a prison, the skeletons of two presumable criminals were found, together with the stocks and irons with which they were bound for punishment. The story that the people were assembled, in great numbers, to witness some spectacular entertainment at the time the volcano began to belch upon them its rain of ashes is probably a myth. The theatre had been badly wrecked by the earthquake of 63, and its restoration was yet far from complete when the eruption broke forth. The streets of Pompeii are generally narrow, not over twenty-four—some of them not over fourteen—feet in width, and are paved with blocks of lava, with high stepping-stones at intervals, for the convenience of foot-passengers in rainy weather. At the street corners public fountains are placed, from which the water poured through the decorative head of a god, a mask, or some similar ornament. Trade signs are rare, but political announcements are frequently seen, conspicuously printed in red letters. Phallic emblems, boldly cut in stone and built into the walls, surprise and shock us by their frequency, notwithstanding their innocently meant purpose as a means of protection against witchcraft. The architecture of the temples and other public buildings is a clumsy mixture of the Greek and Roman style, the columns being invariably laid up in brick or travertine, and covered with stucco. The dwellings, built of the same materials, or of travertine, have very little exterior adornment. Yet at the time of its catastrophe Pompeii must have been a highly decorated town. Marble was but little used architecturally, but the stucco which took its place was admirably adapted to decorative painting, and this means of ornamentation was lavishly employed.
The lower halves of the columns are generally painted red, with harmonizing colors on the capitals. Interior walls are also laid with bright, gay coloring, usually red or yellow. But the most attractive and striking of the mural decorations are the paintings, the wonderful variety and delicacy of which are only surpassed by the more astonishing wonder of their preservation. The subjects of these pictures are generally drawn from poetry or mythology, as, for instance, Theseus abandoning Ariadne, Ulysses relating his adventures to Penelope, Cupid holding a mirror up to Venus, Apollo and the Muses, Polyphemus receiving Galatea’s letter from Cupid, Leda and the Swan, Diana surprised in her bath by Actæon, Achilles and Patroclus, and representations of Venus, Cupid, Bacchus, Silenus, Mercury, and the fauns in endless variety. A favorite subject was the beautiful youth Narcissus, son of the river-god Cephisus and the nymph Liriope. According to the Greek fable, this youth, seeing his image in a fountain, became enamoured of it, and, in punishment for his hardness of heart towards Echo and other nymphs, pined away and was changed to a flower. In consequence of its origin, this flower loves the borders of streams, and, bending on its fragile stem, seems to seek its own image in the waters, but soon fades and dies.
The larger and finer dwellings of Pompeii have generally been named from their supposed possessors, or from the works of art found in them. The House of the Tragic Poet, so called from the representation of a poet reading found in its tablinium, was one of the most elegant in Pompeii. From the pavement of its vestibule was taken a celebrated mosaic, now in the museum at Naples, representing a chained dog barking, with the legend “cave canem”—“beware of the dog." The periphery of the columns of the peristyle is fluted, except the lower third of the shaft, which is smooth and painted red. The walls of the interior are decorated with paintings, among which are Venus and Cupid fishing, Diana with Orion, and a representation of Leda and Tyndarus, which is very beautiful and remarkably well preserved. This house, which figures in Bulwer’s “Last Days of Pompeii” as the home of Glaucus, was probably the dwelling of a goldsmith. One of the most palatial residences yet brought to light is the House of Pansa,—one hundred and twenty-four by three hundred and nineteen feet,—which finely illustrates, in its complete and well-preserved appointments, the plan of an aristocratic Pompeiian mansion of the imperial epoch. Entering from the street by a vestibule, in the floor of which the greeting, “Salve,” was wrought in beautiful mosaic, we reach a large interior court (atrium), which, owing to the absence of glass or exterior openings, was necessary for the admission of light and air to the surrounding chambers. A reservoir for rain-water (impluvium) occupies the centre of the atrium. Passing from the atrium through a large apartment called the tablinium, we enter, towards the rear, the strictly domestic part of the house, which occupies more than half the space within its walls, and is also provided with an interior court. The family apartments open into this court, and derive from it their light and ventilation. It encloses a garden surrounded by a peristyle, and hence takes the name of peristylium. The front part of the house, surrounding the atrium, was that in which the proprietor transacted his business and held intercourse with the external world; the rear part, surrounding the peristylium, was devoted to domestic use exclusively. The roof, sloping inward, and open over the interior courts, discharged the rain which fell upon it into the impluvium. The images of the household gods usually occupied a place in the vestibule. The House of Sallust, so named from an epigraph on its outside wall, appears from later discoveries to have been the property of A. Cossius Libanus. This house was finished in gay colors and embellished with mural paintings, one of which—a representation of Actæon surprising Diana at her bath—is singularly well preserved. Other subjects treated are the rape of Europa (badly defaced), and Helle in the sea extending her arm to Phryxus. Opposite to the Actæon is a dainty chamber, arbitrarily named the venereum, surrounded by polygonal columns painted red. The impluvium was adorned with a bronze group—now in the museum at Palermo—representing Hercules contending with a stag. Out of the mouth of the stag, in this group, the waters of the fountain gushed. Some of the bedrooms of this house were floored with African marble.
The House of Meleager takes its name from one of its mural decorations illustrating the story of Meleager and Atalanta. Other frescos adorn its walls, representing the judgment of Paris, Mercury presenting a purse to Ceres, and a young satyr frightening a bacchante with a serpent. Its peristylium, sixty by seventy-three feet, is the finest yet found in Pompeii. The columns of the peristylium are covered with yellow stucco and its chambers are floored with mosaic. A colonnade rises on three sides of the dining-room, and one of twenty-four columns, red below and white above, supports the portico. A garden to the left of the atrium and in front of the portico is adorned by a pretty fountain. An exquisite bronze statuette of a dancing faun, now in the Naples museum, gave its present title to the most beautiful and also one of the largest houses in Pompeii. The discovery of this house was first made in 1830, in the presence of a son of the poet Goethe. A small pedestal, on which the statuette of the faun stood, is still seen in the marble-lined impluvium. In the mosaic floor of one of the rooms near by three doves are represented drawing a string of pearls from a casket. Mosaics in the dining-room represented Acratus (companion of Bacchus) riding on a lion, a cat devouring a partridge, and a group of crustaceans and fishes. The salutation, “Have,” (welcome) is wrought with colored marble in the pavement of the vestibule before the main entrance. The walls are covered with stucco made of cement, in imitation of colored marble.
The atrium, thirty-five by thirty-eight feet, is finished in the Tuscan style, but the twenty-eight columns surrounding the peristylium are Ionic. In the rear of the mansion opens a garden, one hundred and five by one hundred and fifteen feet, enclosed with a peristyle of fifty-six Doric columns. Various articles in gold, silver, bronze, and terra-cotta were found in this house, and also some skeletons, one of which was that of a woman with a gold ring on her finger engraved with the name Cassia. But the most important discovery of all made in the House of the Faun was that of the magnificent mosaic of Alexander in the battle of Issus. “This work, which is almost the only ancient historical composition in existence, represents the battle at the moment when Alexander, whose helmet has fallen from his head, charges Darius with his cavalry and transfixes the general of the Persians, who has fallen from his wounded horse. The chariot of the Persian monarch is prepared for retreat, whilst in the foreground a Persian of rank, in order to insure the more speedy escape of the king, who is absorbed in thought at the sight of his expiring general, offers him his horse.”—Baedeker.
Such are some of the principal mansions of Pompeii and the objects found in them. All of the most precious works of art which were or could be detached, including many exquisite little mural frescos, have been removed and deposited in the museum at Naples. The ruins and the museum explain each other, and taken together furnish the most complete and vivid illustration of ancient life in the world. No books, no pictures, can tell us so clearly and comprehensively how the people of that day and country lived as the remains of this buried city. Its dwellings, shops, streets, prisons, temples, theatres, and tombs disclose with amazing fulness and accuracy the pursuits, habits, follies, vices, and even the thoughts of its inhabitants, just as they were living and moving when caught, overwhelmed, and forever stilled in the full tide of their existence. Well-curbs worn by the sliding rope, stepping-stones hollowed by the march of eager multitudes, pavements scarred by the stamp of horses’ hoofs, advertisements painted on public walls, shops and magazines containing the symbols and utensils of trade, fountains where the crystal torrent might have hushed but an hour ago its rippling voice, temples whose altars bear yet the marks of sacrificial fires, frescos whose color and outline are bright and delicate in spite of calamity and time, mosaic floors smooth and shining as if polished only yesterday by the dance of dainty feet,—these and a thousand more traces of the life of that ancient time help the imagination to re-people and restore the ruined city as it was in the day of its pride and splendor.
An inspection of the ruins of Pompeii deepens upon the mind its impressions of the sublimity and terror of Vesuvius. Physically speaking, the volcano is but a monstrous heap of ashes, stones, and scoriæ, hollow, or partially so, in the centre, and streaked with black, solidified lava-currents on the outside. From the crater, whirling volumes of steam and smoke constantly issue, each rotary gush representing an interior explosion, usually heard only on the summit. In the varying states of the atmosphere this monstrous volume of vapor rises in columnar form for thousands of feet, and is then borne far to seaward, or landward, by the upper currents of the air; or it falls in a dense, sulphurous, shapeless cloud, which envelops and conceals the upper part of the mountain. In the latter condition of things I made my first ascent; in the former my second. On the first occasion we went up from Portici and down to Pompeii; on the second, the route was reversed.
From Pompeii the summit may be made—on horseback as far as the foot of the cone—in about three hours. The railway on the Portici side ascends to the outside rim of the crater, within which, separated by fissured slabs of lava, which a yard below the surface yet glow with living fire, the main chimney or flue of the volcano rises some hundreds of feet higher. On the eastern side, below the rim, a lava stream of considerable magnitude had burst forth at the time of my visit, and was issuing with a fierce hissing sound. Its course could be traced down the slopes of the mountain for the distance of a mile. Its movement, at first quite rapid, was soon checked by the cooling effect of the atmosphere. The operations of the crater at this time were extremely interesting. Near the base of the finial cone a small secondary volcanic funnel had recently been formed, which sometimes almost silenced with its screeching and blubber the thunderous rumbling within the main chimney. Neither of the active craters could be approached with safety, but they made no objections to being looked at, and so, dismissing my guide, I remained about two hours on the summit, watching their antics. Sometimes the smaller crater, or safety-valve, as it seemed to be, would work itself up to a perfect frenzy of hysterical hissing and shrieking, as though all the misery of a hundred colicky locomotives were venting itself in one prolonged scream. During such spells the red liquid lava would bubble over the rim for a time, like the boiling of an overfilled pot; then suddenly some explosive interior force would throw it into the air in a sheaf of beautiful red spray, rising and descending in graceful parabolas all around the cone. After this performance, the little fellow would subside and keep tolerably quiet for ten minutes or so, when it would be seized with another paroxysm.
The larger crater, though also intermittent, was more progressive and less fidgety in its action. Its behavior had the dignified air of regular business, while the safety-valve demeaned itself more as a transient upstart, impatient of attracting popular attention. The masses of steam and smoke issuing from the main orifice were somewhat irregular, both in quantity and velocity, their increase in both respects being always accompanied by louder and more rapid interior explosions. At the moments of greatest activity showers of stones and lumps of red lava were hurled into the air to heights varying from three hundred to one thousand feet, and, descending, rolled rattling and smoking down the yellow, sulphurous sides of the cone. The spectacle was terrifically sublime at times, particularly when the safety-valve chimed in with its screaming accompaniment, and flung aloft its jet-d’eau-like pyrotechnics. The missiles projected from the main crater soared at an angle of about fifty degrees, and almost uniformly in the same direction, so that they fell on territory of which the spectator, looking on from the opposite point of the compass, was quite willing to accord monopoly of possession, with a liberal margin for unadjusted boundary.
As sunset approached, and the shades of evening were beginning to add new touches of grandeur to the sublime spectacle, I took leave of it reluctantly, and, with Brobdingnagian strides down the volcanic ash-heap, descended in not more than seven minutes a space which it had once cost me a weary half-hour and the help of two guides to climb. Three hours later the red currents of lava could be seen from my window in Naples, glittering far away in the darkness, and streaking the black sides of the volcano like descending streams of molten gold.