DOMESTIC UTENSILS.[ToC]
The immense number and variety of statues, lamps, urns, articles of domestic use, in metal or earthenware, etc., discovered at Herculaneum and Pompeii, have rendered the Museum at Naples an inexhaustible treasury of information relative to the private life of the ancients. To give an adequate description of the richness and variety of its contents would far exceed the whole extent of this work, much more the small space which it can have; but that space can not be better occupied than in describing some few articles which possess an interest from the ingenuity of their construction, the beauty of their workmanship, or their power to illustrate ancient usages or ancient authors.
Writing implements are among the most important of the latter class, on account of the constant mention of them, as well as of the influence which the comparative ease or difficulty of producing copies of writing is always found to exert over society. On this head there is no want of information. The implements used are frequently mentioned, especially in familiar writings, as the letters of Cicero, and their forms have been tolerably ascertained from various fragments of ancient paintings.
It is hardly necessary to state that for manuscripts of any length, and such as were meant to be preserved, parchment or vellum, and a vegetable tissue manufactured from the rush papyrus, were in use. The stalk of this plant consists of a number of thin concentric coats, which, being carefully detached, were pasted crossways one over the other, like the warp and woof in woven manufactures, so that the fibres ran longitudinally in each direction, and opposed in each an equal resistance to violence. The surface was then polished with a shell, or some hard smooth substance. The ink used was a simple black liquid, containing no mordant to give it durability, so that the writing was easily effaced by the application of a sponge. The length of the Greek papyri is said to vary from eight to twelve inches; the Latin often reach sixteen; the writing is in columns, placed at right angles to the length of the roll.
To each of them is appended a sort of ticket, which served as a title. Hence the end of the roll, or volume, was called frons, a term of frequent recurrence in Ovid and Martial, and not always rightly understood. Hence, also, when we meet with the expression, gemina frons, we must understand that the volume had a ticket at each end. These books were also composed of two tables or pages, and served for memoranda, letters, and other writings, not intended to be preserved. They were composed of leaves of wood or metal coated over with wax, upon which the ancients wrote with a stylus, or iron pen, or point rather, for it was a solid sharp-pointed instrument, some 6 to 8 inches in length, like a lady's stiletto upon a large scale. In the middle of each leaf there appears to have been a button, called umbilicus, intended to prevent the pages touching when closed, and obliterating the letters traced on the yielding wax.
The tablets here represented would be called twofold, as consisting only of two leaves; in the following cut may be seen another sort, consisting of several leaves, united at the back with hinges or rings. In Latin they were called tabulæ, or tabellæ, and the epithets, duplices, triplices, quintuplices, served to mark the number of the leaves.