Again, still other inscriptions were notifications to the public in reference to the cleanliness of the streets, and recalling in terms still more precise the "Commit no Nuisance" put up on the corners of some of our streets with similar intent. On more than one wall at Pompeii the figures of serpents, very well painted, sufficed to prevent any impropriety, for the serpent was a sacred symbol in ancient Rome—strange mingling of religion in the pettiest details of common life! Only a very few years ago, the Neapolitans still followed the example of their ancestors; they protected the outside walls of their dwellings with symbolical paintings, rudely tracing, not serpents, but crosses on them.
IV.
THE SUBURBS.
The Custom House.—The Fortifications and the Gates.—The Roman Highways.—The Cemetery of Pompeii.—Funerals: the Procession, the Funeral Pyre, the Day of the Dead.—The Tombs and their Inscriptions.—Perpetual Leases.—Burial of the Rich, of Animals, and of the Poor.—The Villas of Diomed and Cicero.
"Ce qu'on trouve aux abords d'une grande cite,
Ce sont des abattoirs, des murs, des cimitieres:
C'est ainsi qu'en entrant dans la societé
On trouve ses egouts."
Alfred de Musset would have depicted the suburban quarters of Pompeii exactly in these lines, had he added to his enumeration the wine-shops and the custom-house. The latter establishment was not omitted by the ancients, and could not be forgotten in our diminutive but highly commercial city. Thus, the place has been discovered where the collector awaited the passage of the vehicles that came in from the country and the neighboring villages. Absolutely nothing else remains to be seen in this spacious mosaic-paved hall. Scales, steelyards, and a quantity of stone or metal weights were found there, marked with inscriptions sometimes quite curious; such, for example, as the following: Eme et habbebis, with a b too many, a redundancy very frequent in the Naples dialect. This is equivalent, in English, to: Buy and you will have. One of the sets of scales bears an inscription stating that it had been verified or authorized at the Capitol under such consuls and such emperors—the hand of Rome!
Besides the custom-house, this approach to the city contained abundance of stables, coach-houses, taverns, bath-houses, low drinking-shops, and other disreputable concerns. Even the dwellings in the same quarter have a suspicious look. You follow a long street and you have before you the gate of Herculaneum and the walls.
These walls are visible; they still hold firm. Unquestionably, they could not resist our modern cannon, for if the ancients built better than we do, we destroy better than they did; this is one thing that must in justice be conceded to us. Nevertheless, we cannot but admire those masses of peperino, the points of which ascend obliquely and hold together without mortar. Originally as ancient as the city, these ramparts were destroyed to some extent by Sylla and repaired in opus incertum, that is to say, in small stones of every shape and of various dimensions, fitted to one another without order or regularity in the layers, as though they had been put in just as they came. The old structure dated probably from the time of Pompeian autonomy—the Oscans had a hand in them. The surrounding wall, at the foot of which there were no ditches, would have formed an oval line of nearly two miles had it not been interrupted, on the side of the mountains and the sea, between the ports of Stabiæ and of Herculaneum. These ramparts consisted of two walls—the scarp and counterscarp,—between which ran a terraced platform; the exterior wall, slightly sloping, was defended by embrasures between which the archer could place himself in safety, in an angle of the stonework, so soon as he had shot his arrow. The interior wall was also crested with battlements. The curvilinear rampart did not present projecting angles, the salients of which, Vitruvius tells us, could not resist the repeated blows of the siege machinery of those days. It was intersected by nine towers, of three vaulted stories each, at unequal distances, accordingly as the nature of the ground demanded greater or less means of defence, was pierced with loopholes and was not very solid. Vitruvius would have had them rounded and of cut stone; those of Pompeii are of quarried stone, and in small rough ashlars, stuck together with mortar. The third story of each tower reached to the platform of the rampart, with which it communicated by two doors.