Naples, Past and Present

by Arthur H. Norway

NAPLES—IN THE STRADA DI TRIBUNALI.

A man willing to go on foot from Resina to Pompeii might find much to amuse him by the way, especially if he have any care for tracing out the ravages of eruptions. The seashore is not unpleasant. The lava reefs that fringe it are curious, and the ports of Torre del Greco and Torre dell'Annunziata have their share of interest and picturesqueness. But the crumbs of knowledge to be picked up during such a walk seem insignificant beside the banquet which lies waiting at Pompeii; and only those who have already tasted the last dish of that banquet will care to loiter on the way.

I do not propose to add one more to the countless unscholarly rhapsodies which have been produced by visitors to Pompeii. Certain tragic feelings strike every one who enters the old grey streets. They are too obvious to need description. All else belongs to the domain of the guide-book or of the expert—to the latter more than to the former, since the best of guide-books is a sorry companion to a man who has neglected the works of Helbig or August Mau. It is not to be expected that the detailed descriptions of Murray or of Gsell-Fels can supply the broad principles and the general ideas which would have been a constant delight if acquired in advance. Many of the best intellects in Europe have been engaged in estimating the significance of the objects found from day to day in Pompeii. It is in their works that knowledge should be sought; for there is scarce any subject on which so much has been written, both so badly and so well, as on this lost city of the Campanian Plain.

It is, as I have said already, by wandering up and down the Strada Tribunali in Naples that one may prepare oneself to picture what would have struck a stranger on first entering Pompeii. A man passing to-day beneath the vault of the Porta Marina sees a grey street, its house-fronts perfect, but empty, and startlingly silent. This street runs into the Forum, and is in easy hearing distance of the babel of noise which issued constantly from that centre of the city. Under the colonnade of the Forum tinkers mended pots with clatter and din of hammers. Women hawked fruit and vegetables up and down, chanting their praises doubtless as loudly as the "padulani" of to-day in Naples. Ladies met their shoemakers under the cool shadows of the great arcade; and there, too, children chased each other up and down, screaming at their games like any urchins of to-day upon the steps of San Giovanni Maggiore. We know it, for they are all depicted in paintings found in neighbouring houses. There is the seller of hot food with his caldron, not unlike the stall at which the workman stops to-day in the Piazza Cavour and pays a soldo to have his hunch of bread dipped into hot tomato broth. What cheerful sounds must have risen up from all these occupations! How shall one picture them, except in the streets of some other crowded city? On the left, abutting on the south-west angle of the Forum, is the Basilica, a broad hall used as an extension of the market-place, and containing at the rear the tribunals of justice; while at the opposite, or north-east corner of the Forum, is the market proper, the Macellum, where the fish were sold. Certainly they were brought in by this Porta Marina, far nearer to the shore in those days than now. The scales scraped off the fish in the Macellum were found there in great numbers. Close by were pens for living sheep and counters for the butchers. What a reek of odours, what a hum of eager voices, must have risen up from this dense quarter of the busy, active town! The Pompeiians traded with their very hearts. "Lucrum gaudium!" "Oh, joyous gain!" such were the exclamations which they painted on their walls. And gain they did! Transmitting over the seas the commerce from Nola and Nocera, trading doubtless with ships of Alexandria, as Pozzuoli did; harbouring at their piers upon the Sarno, round which a suburb had sprung up, galleys of many a seaport city, Greek or Barbarian, carrying the industries, and not a few among the vices of the East. Both found a ready welcome in this full-blooded city, intensely alive to all delights and interests, whether pure or impure. Venus was protectress of the city, and was worshipped without stint. There were some within the city whom loathing of its wickedness had impelled to prophecy, so at least one must infer from the fact that the words "Sodoma Gomora" are scratched in large letters on one of the house-fronts.

To whom in that pagan city could Hebrew history have suggested so apt and terrible a foreboding? A Jew, perhaps, of whom there were multitudes in Rome; even possibly a Christian, but there is scant evidence of that. Doubtless the Pompeiians read those words without comprehending their horrible significance, and went their way to theatre or to wineshop, a laughing people, a gay, light-hearted nation, a mixed race, the blood of Oscans and of Samnite mountaineers mingling with the languid graces of the degenerating Greeks, loving easily, forgetting lightly, careless, passionate, and intensely human.

Such was Pompeii, a seething, noisy, eager city, filled with the reek of dense humanity. But now it is swept clean by winds and sunlight. Its very stews are fragrant. In the morning sweet air blows in from the sea; at night it steals down no less sweetly from the mountains. In all the city there is not one stench. The freshness and the silence of the long streets weigh upon the nerves. There is so little evidence of ruin, not an ash left, not a bank of earth in all the wide district which one enters first, nothing to remind us by the evidence of sight what it was that drove out the people from these once crowded streets and left the houses and the colonnades open to the whispering sea wind.

It was not so before the great director Fiorelli came. He it was who stopped haphazard digging, and cleared each quarter completely before beginning work upon another. Since, then, his methods have in great measure freed the city already of its débris, and set its inanimate life before us as it was, the wiser part at Pompeii is to try to grasp the arrangements of a Roman city, leaving the necessary musings on the tragedy to be got through elsewhere.

It is beyond my scope, as I have said already, to assume the authority of an expert on Pompeii. More experts are not wanted. The lack, at least in England, is of readers for those who exist. A man intending a tour in Italy will lay out ungrudgingly ten pounds upon his travelling gear, but he will scout the idea of spending the price of a new hat-box on August Mau's treatise, Pompeii, its Life and Art, though it would increase his pleasure tenfold more. Still less will he buy any book in a foreign tongue. I must, therefore, in my unlearned way, set down some few facts which will with difficulty be discovered in the guide-books or from the guides. And firstly as to the houses.