Fig. 218.—Ruins of a bakery, with millstones.
On the opposite side of the street is the election notice: Postumium Proculum aed. offectores rog[ant],—'The dyers request the election of Postumius Proculus as aedile.' The house on which this inscription is painted (IX. iii. 2) contained three kettles similar to those already mentioned; the dyers of both establishments may have united in supporting the candidacy of Proculus.
A potter's workshop, with two ovens, is located outside the Herculaneum Gate, where the streets divide opposite the villa of Diomedes ([Plan V], 29-30). The ovens, which are not large, have an upper division, in which were placed the vessels to be baked, and a firebox underneath, the floor above being pierced with holes to let the heat through. The vault of one of the ovens was constructed of parallel rows of jars fitted into one another.
There was a shoemaker's shop on the northwest corner of Insula VII. i opening upon two streets. It is connected with the entrance hall of the adjoining house (No. 40), and near the middle is a small stone table. The identification rests upon the discovery here of certain tools, particularly leather-cutters' knives with a crescent-shaped blade; there was also an inscription on the wall, making record of some repairing done 'July 14, with a sharp-cornered knife (scalpro angulato) and an awl.' Apparently the porter of the house (ostiarius) was at the same time a cobbler, as frequently in Italy to-day.
On the same wall is another scribbling: M. Nonius Campanus mil. coh. VIIII pr. 𐆛 Caesi,—'Marcus Nonius Campanus, a soldier of the ninth praetorian cohort, of the century led by Caesius.' The name of the centurion, M. Caesius Blandus, is scratched twice on the columns of the peristyle in the same house. Captain and private may have come from Rome in the escort of an emperor. Perhaps the centurion was quartered in this house; the soldier, waiting to have his shoes mended, scratched his name upon the wall.
The better houses were so freely adorned with statuettes and other ornaments of marble that there must have been marble-workers in the city. The workshop of one was found, in 1798, on Stabian Street, near the Large Theatre. It contained various pieces of carving, as herms, table feet, and table tops; there was also an unfinished mortar, together with a slab of marble partly sawed, the saw being left in the cut.
Signs of shops are not often seen in Pompeii, but two or three may be mentioned. In the wall of a shop-front in the block containing the Baths north of the Forum, there is a terra cotta plaque with a goat in relief, to indicate the place of a milk dealer; and not far away we find a sign of a wineshop, a tufa relief of two men carrying between them an amphora hung from a pole supported on their shoulders.
Not all such reliefs, however, are signs of shops. Near the Porta Marina (at the northwest corner of Insula VII. xv), a tufa block may be seen near the top of the wall, showing a mason's tools in relief; above it is the inscription, Diogenes structor, 'Diogenes the mason.' This is not a sign—the inscription can hardly be read from below; it is, moreover, on the outside of a garden wall, with no house or shop entrance near it. It is rather a workman's signature; Diogenes had built the wall, and wished to leave a record of his skill.
In antiquity the miller and the baker were one person. We rarely find in Pompeii—and then only in private houses—an oven without mills under the same roof. There were many bakeries in the city. The portion already excavated contains more than twenty, each of them with three or four mills; bread was furnished, therefore, by a number of small bakeries rather than by a few large establishments.