The Wonders of Pompeii

by Marc Monnier

Not far from the apothecary lived the doctor, who was an apothecary himself and a surgeon besides, and it was in his place that were discovered the celebrated instruments of surgery which are at the museum, and which have raised such stormy debates between Dr. Purgon and Dr. Pancratius. The first, being a doctor, deemed himself competent to give an account of these instruments, whereat the second, being an antiquary, became greatly irritated, seeing that the faculty, in his opinion, has nothing to do with archæology. However that may be, the articles are at the museum, and everybody can look at them. There is a forceps, to pull teeth with, as some affirm; to catch and compress arteries, as others declare; there is a specillum of bronze, a probe rounded in the form of an S; there are lancets, pincers, spatulas, hooks, a trident, needles of all kinds, incision knives, cauteries, cupping-glasses—I don't know what not—fully three hundred different articles, at all events. This rich collection proves that the ancients were quite skilful in surgery and had invented many instruments thought to be modern. This is all that it is worth our while to know. For more ample information, examine the volume entitled Memoires de l'Academie d'Herculaneum.

Other shops (that of the color merchant, that of the goldsmith, the sculptor's atelier, etc.) have revealed to us some of the processes of the ancient artists. We know, for instance, that those of Pompeii employed mineral substances almost exclusively in the preparation of their colors; among them chalk, ochre, cinnabar, minium, etc. The vegetable kingdom furnished them nothing but lamp-black, and the animal kingdom their purple. The colors mixed with rosin have occasioned the belief that encaustic was the process used by the ancients in their mural paintings, an opinion keenly combatted by other hypotheses, themselves no less open to discussion; into this debate it is not our part to enter. However the case may be, the color dealer's family was fearfully decimated by the eruption, for fourteen skeletons were found in his shop.

As for the sculptor, he was very busy at the time of the catastrophe; quite a number of statues were found in his place blocked out or unfinished, and with them were instruments of his profession, such as scissors, punchers, files, etc. All of these are at the museum in Naples.

There were artists, then, in Pompeii, but above all, there were artisans. The fullers so often mentioned by the inscriptions must have been the most numerous; they formed a respectable corporation. Their factory has been discovered. It is a peristyle surrounded with rooms, some of which served for shops and others for dwellings. A painted inscription on the street side announces that the dyers (offectores) vote for Posthumus Proculus. These offectores were those who retinted woollen goods. Those who did the first dyeing were called the infectores. Infectores qui alienum colorem in lanam conficiunt, offectores qui proprio colori novum officiunt. In the workshop there were four large basins, one above the other; the water descended from the first to the next one and so on down to the last, there being a fifth sunken in the ground. Along the four basins ran a platform, at the end of which were ranged six or seven smaller basins, or vats, in which the stuffs were piled up and fulled. At the other extremity of the court, a small marble reservoir served, probably, as a washing vat for the workmen. But the most curious objects among the ruins were the paintings, now transferred to the museum at Naples, which adorned one of the pillars of the court. There a workman could be very distinctly seen dressing, with a sort of brush or card, a piece of white stuff edged with red, while another is coming toward him, bearing on his head one of those large osier cages or frames on which the girls of that region still spread their clothes to dry. These cages resemble the bell-shaped steel contrivances which our ladies pass under their skirts. Thus, in the Neapolitan dialect, both articles are called drying-horses (asciutta-panni). Upon the drying-horse of the Pompeian picture perches the bird of Minerva, the protectress of the fullers and the goddess of labor. To the left of the workmen, a young girl is handing some stuffs to a youthful, richly-dressed lady, probably a customer, seated near by. Another painting represents workmen dressing and fulling all sorts of tissues, with their hands and feet in tubs or vats exactly like the small basins which we saw in the court. A third painting shows the mistress of the house giving orders to her slaves; and the fourth represents a fulling press which might be deemed modern, so greatly does it resemble those still employed in our day. The importance of this edifice, now so stripped and dilapidated, confirms what writers have told us of the Pompeian fullers and their once-celebrated branch of trade.

However, most of the shops the use of which has not been precisely designated, were places where provisions of different kinds were kept and sold. The oil merchant in the street leading to the Odeon was especially noticeable among them all for the beauty of his counter, which was covered with a slab of cipollino and gray marble, encrusted, on the outside, with a round slab of porphyry between two rosettes. Eight earthenware vases still containing olives[C] and coagulated oil were found in the establishment of this stylish grocer.

The bathing concerns were also very numerous. They were the coffee-houses of the ancient day. Hot drinks were sold there, boiled and perfumed wine, and all sorts of mixtures, which must have been detestable, but for which the ancients seem to have had a special fancy. "A thousand and a thousand times more respectable than the wine-shops of our day, these bathing-houses of ages gone by, where men did not assemble to shamefully squander their means and their existence while gorging themselves with wine, but where they came together to amuse themselves in a decent manner, and to drink warm water without risk."... Le Sage, who wrote the foregoing sentence, was not accurately informed. The liquors sold at the Pompeian bathing-houses were very strong, and, in more than one place where the points of the amphorae rested, they have left yellow marks on the pavement. Vinegar has been detected in most of these drinks. In the tavern of Fortunata, the marble of the counter is still stained with the traces of the ancient goblets.

Bakeries were not lacking in Pompeii. The most complete one is in the Street of Herculaneum, where it fills a whole house, the inner court of which is occupied with four mills. Nothing could be more crude and elementary than those mills. Imagine two huge blocks of stone representing two cones, of which the upper one is overset upon the other, giving every mill the appearance of an hour-glass. The lower stone remained motionless, and the other revolved by means of an apparatus kept in motion by a man or a donkey. The grain was crushed between the two stones in the old patriarchal style. The poor ass condemned to do this work must have been a very patient animal; but what shall we say of the slaves often called in to fill his place? For those poor wretches it was usually a punishment, as their eyes were put out and then they were sent to the mill. This was the menace held over their heads when they misbehaved. For others it was a very simple piece of service which more than one man of mind performed—Plautus, they say, and Terence. To some again, it was, at a later period, a method of paying for their vices; when the millers lacked hands they established bathing-houses around their mills, and the passers-by who were caught in the trap had to work the machinery.

Let us hasten to add that the work of the mill which we visited was not performed by a Christian, as they would say at Naples, but by a mule, whose bones were found in a neighboring room, most likely a stable, the racks and troughs of which were elevated about two and a half feet above the floor. In a closet near by, the watering trough is still visible. Then again, religion, which everywhere entered into the ancient manners and customs of Italy, as it does into the new, reveals itself in the paintings of the pistrinum; we there see the sacrifices to Fornax, the patroness of ovens and the saint of kitchens.

But let us return to our mills. Mills driven by the wind were unknown to the ancients, and water-mills did not exist in Pompeii, owing to the lack of running water. Hence these mills put in motion by manual labor—the old system employed away back in the days of Homer. On the other hand, the institution of complete baking as a trade, with all its dependent processes, did not date so far back. The primitive Romans made their bread in their own houses. Rome was already nearly five hundred years old when the first bakers established stationary mills, to which the proprietors sent their grain, as they still do in the Neapolitan provinces; in return they got loaves of bread; that is to say, their material ground, kneaded, and baked. The Pompeian establishment that we visited was one of these complete bakeries.