Not far from the altars are the remains of a small round structure (7 on the plan, shown in [Fig. 61]) about twelve feet in diameter. The roof, supported by eight Doric columns, was over the mouth of a well, which had been driven down through the old lava bed till living water was found for cleaning the temple and for religious rites. According to the Oscan inscription on the architrave the well house was built by N. Trebius, chief administrative officer (meddix tuticus) of the city.
It is impossible to determine what divinities were worshipped here. The placing of two altars together, one being divided into three parts, and the addition of a third, seem to imply that three divinities received worship in common, and that besides these two other gods were honored in this sanctuary. The terra cotta deer furnishes a clew, but is not decisive evidence; deer were sacred to several divinities, among others to Apollo and Artemis. A marble torso of about half life size, found on the declivity south of the temple, has been identified with some degree of probability as belonging to a statue of Apollo. Perhaps originally Apollo and Artemis were honored here, and with them Leto; but in an Oscan inscription discovered in 1897 the temple seems to be designated as belonging to Minerva [(p. 240]), who was perhaps also worshipped with them.
At the time of the eruption the temple was in ruins. It may have been in this condition only since the earthquake of 63, or for a longer time. That the worship might not be abandoned a poor shrine was built among the ruins, smaller than the old cella and a little further to the right; a drum of a column, set up on the flag in the floor of the cella, served as a pedestal for the image of the divinity.
CHAPTER XXI
THE LARGE THEATRE
Performances upon the stage were first given in Rome in the year 364 B.C.; a pestilence was raging, and the Romans thought to appease the gods by a new kind of celebration in their honor. The performers were brought from Etruria, and the exercises were limited to dancing, with an accompaniment on the flute. There was as yet no Latin drama. The first regular play was presented more than a century later, in 240 B.C., and the playwright was not a Roman but a Greek from Tarentum, Livius Andronicus, who translated both tragedies and comedies from his native tongue. The next dramatist was a Campanian, Gnaeus Naevius. The building of a theatre was not yet thought of; a temporary wooden platform was erected for the actors, and the spectators spread themselves out on the green slope of a hillside facing it.
When the censor Cassius Longinus in 154 B.C. commenced the erection of a theatre on the Palatine hill near the temple of Cybele, at whose festivals plays were given, the ex-consul Scipio Nasica rose in the Senate and in a speech full of feeling warned the Romans not to countenance this foreign amusement, on the ground that it would sap the foundations of the national character. His words produced so deep an impression that the Senate not only voted to pull down the part of the building already erected, and to refuse permission for the erection of similar buildings in the future, but even prohibited altogether the renting of seats at theatrical representations; Romans who wished to see a play must remain standing during a performance, or sit on the ground. Naturally so stringent measures could not long remain in force. Nine years later Mummius, the destroyer of Corinth, presented dramas in connection with his triumph, and put up wooden seats for the spectators. The first stone theatre in Rome was built by Pompey, the rival of Caesar, in 55 B.C. In Pompeii, on the contrary, a permanent theatre had been erected at least a hundred years earlier.
The Oscan culture was so completely merged in that of Rome that our knowledge of it as an independent development is extremely slight; and no information has come down to us regarding the history of the native drama. From literary sources we know only of a crude form of popular comedy in which, as in the Italian Commedia dell' arte, there were stock characters distinguished by their masks,—Maccus a buffoon, Bucco a voracious, talkative lout, Pappus an old man who is always cheated, and Dossennus a knave. The scene of these exhibitions was always Atella, the Gotham of Campania, whence they were called Atellan farces.
The Theatre at Pompeii, however, is a proof that as early as the second century B.C., in at least one Campanian city, dramatic representations of a high order were given. Here, perhaps, as at Athens, they were associated with the worship of Dionysus; for the satyrs were companions of the Wine-god, and the head of a satyr, carved in tufa, still projects from the keystone of the arch at the outer end of one of the vaulted passages leading to the orchestra. Greek verse, and native verse modelled after the Greek, must have gained a hearing at Pompeii, and the works of Oscan poets—not a line of which has come down to us—must have stirred the hearts of the people long before Livius Andronicus, and Naevius, who brought inspiration from his Campanian home, produced their dramas at Rome.
In describing the Theatre it will be best to take up in order the three main divisions common to Greek and Roman buildings of this class: the cavea, the large outer part shaped somewhat like half a funnel, containing seats for spectators; the orchestra, the small semicircular portion enclosed by the cavea, with an entrance, parodos, on either side; and the stage, facing the orchestra and the cavea. The accompanying illustrations give a plan ([Fig. 64]), and a view of the ruins in their present condition ([Fig. 65]); the exterior as seen from the south is shown in [Fig. 61].
The cavea afforded seats for about five thousand persons. The greater part of it, from the orchestra to the vaulted corridor under the summa cavea ([Fig. 64], 6), lies on the slope of the hill; the floor of the corridor is on a level with the Forum Triangulare.