Pompeii, Its Life and Art

by August Mau

According to these sources the plan of a typical basilica is essentially that of the building before us ([Fig. 23]). An oblong space is divided by columns into a broad central hall and a corridor which runs around the four sides. The height of the columns, in the typical basilica, is equal to the width of the corridor, which is covered by a flat roof; the inner edge of this roof is carried by the entablature above the columns. The main room is higher than the corridor. Above the entablature is a low wall on which there is a second row of columns; these carry the main roof and form a clerestory, the light being admitted through the intercolumniations.

The main hall and the corridor were devoted to trade; the dealers perhaps occupied the former, while in the latter the throng of purchasers and idlers moved freely about. The place set aside for the administration of justice, the tribunal, was ordinarily an apse projecting from the rear end. In our Basilica, however,—and in some others as well,—it was a small oblong elevated room back of the central hall, toward which it opened in its whole length.

This ideal plan would answer very well for that of the early Christian basilicas, excepting in one respect; instead of a corridor on all four sides they have only aisles parallel with the nave, an arrangement which had already been adopted in some basilicas designed for markets. The Christian basilicas would give us a still truer idea of the arrangement and lighting of the pagan prototype if in most cases a part of the numerous windows had not been walled up, thus producing a dimness in keeping with a religious but not a secular edifice.

In pagan structures the ideal plan was by no means strictly followed. Vitruvius himself at Fano, and the architects of other basilicas the remains of which have been discovered, did not hesitate to depart from it. So the Basilica at Pompeii, as we shall see, presents a modification of the general plan in an important particular, the admission of light; and this deviation was carried out with finer artistic feeling than was displayed by Vitruvius in his building.

Our Basilica is undoubtedly of later date than the Basilica Porcia, but the Pompeians, who at the time when it was built were pupils of the Greeks in matters of art, found their model not in Rome but in a Greek city, perhaps Naples.

Five entrances, separated by tufa pillars, lead from the colonnade of the Forum into the east end of the basilica. First comes a narrow entrance court (a), extending across the entire building and open to the sky. On the walls, as also on the outside of the building, are remains of a simple stucco decoration; below, a yellow base with a projecting red border along the upper edge; above, a plain white surface. At the left outside the entrance court is a cistern for rain water collected from the roof; the stairway close by (shown on the plan) had nothing to do with the Basilica, but was connected with the upper gallery of the colonnade about the Forum.

Fig. 24.—View of the Basilica, looking toward the tribunal.

Mounting four steps of basalt we pass from the narrow court into the building. The five entrances here are separated by four columns. Those next to the two sides on the right and on the left were closed by a wall in which was a wide doorway; the three at the middle were left as open intercolumniations. The enclosed space before us measures 180⅓ English feet (200 Oscan feet) in length, 78¾ feet in breadth. Twenty-eight massive brick columns, 4 Oscan feet in diameter, separate the great central hall from the broad corridor running about it; only the lower part of the columns, built of small bricks evidently made specially for this purpose, is preserved ([Fig. 24]). Attached half-columns, with a diameter a little more than three fourths that of the others, project from the walls; the wall decoration, which imitates in stucco a veneering of colored marbles, is of the first style ([p. 41]). The columns of the entrance and those at the rear have the same diameter as the half-columns; part of the Ionic capitals belonging to them have been found, but the capitals of the large columns have wholly disappeared.