Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy

by Frank R. Stockton

A CLEARED STREET IN POMPEII.

Let us leave this rubbish, and go into a street that has already been cleared. The first thing you will observe is that it is very narrow. It is evidently not intended for a fashionable drive. But few of the streets are any wider than this one. The greatest width of a street in Pompeii is seven yards, and some are only two and a half yards, sidewalks and all. The middle of the street is paved with blocks of lava. The sidewalks are raised, and it is evident the owners of the houses were allowed to put any pavement they pleased in front of their dwellings. In one place you will see handsome stone flags the next pavement may be nothing but soil beaten down, while the next will be costly marble.

The upper stories of the houses are in ruins. It is probable, therefore, that they were built of wood, while the lower stories, being of stone, still remain. They had few windows on the street, as the Pompeiians preferred that these should look out on an inner square or court. To the right of the picture is a small monument, and in the left-hand corner is a fountain, or rather the stone slabs that once enclosed a fountain.

As we walk slowly up the solitary street, we think of the busy, restless feet that trod these very stones eighteen hundred years ago. Our minds go back to the year of our Lord 79, when there was high carnival in the little city of Pompeii, with its thirty thousand people, when the town was filled with strangers who had come to the great show; at the time of an election, when politicians were scheming and working to get themselves or their friends into power; when gayly dressed crowds thronged the streets on their way to the amphitheatre to see the gladiatorial fight; when there was feasting and revelry in every house; when merchants were exulting in the midst of thriving trade; when the pagan temples were hung with garlands and filled with gifts; when the slaves were at work in the mills, the kitchens, and the baths; when the gladiators were fighting the wild beasts of the arena—then it was that a swift destruction swept over the city and buried it in a silence that lasted for centuries.

Vesuvius, the volcano so near them, but which had been silent so many years that they had ceased to dread it, suddenly woke into activity, and threw out of its summit a torrent of burning lava and ashes, and in a few short hours buried the two cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii so completely that two centuries after no one could tell the precise place where they had stood, and men built houses and cultivated farms over the spot, never dreaming that cities lay beneath them.

THE ATRIUM IN THE HOUSE OF PANSA RESTORED.

But here we are at the house of Pansa. Let us go in. We do not wait for any invitation from the owner, for he left it nearly two thousand years ago, and his descendants, if he have any, are totally ignorant of their illustrious descent. First we enter a large hall called the Atrium. You can see from the magnificence of this apartment in what style the rich Pompeiians lived. The floor is paved in black and white mosaic, with a marble basin in the centre. The doors opening from this hall conduct us to smaller apartments, two reception rooms, a parlor, the library, and six diminutive bedrooms, only large enough to contain a bedstead, and with no window. It must have been the fashion to sleep with open doors, or the sleepers must inevitably have been suffocated.

At the end of the Atrium you see a large court with a fountain in the middle. This was called the Peristyle. Around it was a portico with columns. To the left were three bedchambers and the kitchen, and to the right three bedchambers and the dining-room. Behind the Peristyle was a grand saloon, and back of this the garden. The upper stories of this house have entirely disappeared. This is a spacious house, but there are some in the city more beautifully decorated, with paintings and mosaics.