The Wonders of Pompeii

by Marc Monnier

Hence, the dwelling that I am about to enter was not that of Pansa, whose name is found thus suggested for the ædileship in many other places, but rather that of Paratus, who, in order to designate the candidate of his choice, wrote the name on his door-post.

Such is my opinion, but, as one runs the risk of muddling everything by changing names already accepted, I do not insist upon it. So let us enter the house of Pansa the ædile.

This dwelling is not the most ornate, but it is the most regular in Pompeii, and also the least complicated and the most simply complete. Thus, all the guides point it out as the model house, and perceiving that they are right in so doing, I will imitate them.

In what did a Pompeian's dwelling differ from a small stylish residence or villa of modern times? In a thousand and one points which we shall discover, step by step, but chiefly in this, that it was turned inwards, or, as it were, doubled upon itself; not that it was, as has been said, altogether a stranger to the street, and presented to the latter only a large painted wall, a sort of lofty screen. The upper stories of the Pompeian houses having nearly all crumbled, we are not in a position to affirm that they did not have windows opening on the public streets. I have already shown you mæniana or suspended balconies from which the pretty girls of the place could ogle the passers-by. But it is certain that the first floor, consisting of the finest and best occupied apartments, grouped its rooms around two interior courts and turned their backs to the street. Hence, these two courts opening one behind the other, the development of the front was but a small affair compared with the depth of the house.

These courts were called the atrium, and the peristyle. One might say that the atrium was the public and the peristyle the private part of the establishment; that the former belonged to the world and the second to the family. This arrangement nearly corresponded with the division of the Greek dwelling into andronitis and gynaikotis, the side for the men and the side for the women. Around the atrium were usually ranged—we must not be too rigorously precise in these distinctions—the rooms intended for the people of the house, and those who called upon them. Around the peristyle were the rooms reserved for the private occupancy of the family.

I commence with the atrium. It was reached from the street by a narrow alley (the prothyrum), opening, by a two-leaved door, upon the sidewalk. The doors have been burned, but we can picture them to ourselves according to the paintings, as being of oak, with narrow panels adorned with gilded nails, provided with a ring to open them by, and surmounted with a small window lighting up the alley. They opened inwards, and were secured by means of a bolt, which shot vertically downward into the threshold instead of reaching across.

I enter right foot foremost, according to the Roman custom (to enter with the left foot was a bad omen); and I first salute the inscription on the threshold (salve) which bids me welcome. The porter's lodge (cella ostiarii) was usually hollowed out in the entryway, and the slave in question was sometimes chained, a precaution which held him at his post, undoubtedly, but which hindered him from, pursuing robbers. Sometimes, there was only a dog on guard, in his place, or merely the representation of a dog in mosaic: there is one in excellent preservation at the Museum in Naples retaining the famous inscription (Cave canem)—"Beware of the dog!"

The atrium was not altogether a court, but rather a large hall covered with a roof, in the middle of which opened a large bay window. Thus the air and the light spread freely throughout the spacious room, and the rain fell from the sky or dripped down over the four sloping roofs into a marble basin, called impluvium, that conveyed it to the cistern, the mouth of which is still visible. The roofs usually rested on large cross-beams fixed in the walls. In such case, the atrium was Tuscan, in the old fashion. Sometimes, the roofs rested on columns planted at the four corners of the impluvium: then, the opening enlarged, and the atrium became a tetrastyle. Some authors mention still other kinds of atria—the Corinthian, which was richly decorated; the dipluviatum, where the roof, instead of sloping inward, sloped outward and threw off the rain-water into the street; the testudinatum, in which the roof looked like an immense tortoise-shell, etc. But these forms of roofs, especially the last mentioned, were rare, and the Tuscan atrium was almost everywhere predominant, as we find it on Pansa's house.

Place yourself at the end of the alley, with your back toward the street, and you command a view of this little court and its dependencies. It is needless to say that the roof has disappeared: the eruption consumed the beams, the tiles have been broken by falling, and not only the tiles but the antefixes, cut in palm-leaves or in lion's heads, which spouted the water into the impluvium. Nothing remains but the basin and the partition walls which marked the subdivisions of the ground-floor. One first discovers a room of considerable size at the end, between a smaller room and a corridor, and eight other side cabinets. Of these eight cabinets, the six that come first, three to the right and three to the left, were bedrooms, or cubicula. What first strikes the observer is their diminutive size. There was room only for the bed, which was frequently indicated by an elevation of the masonry, and on that mattresses or sheepskins were stretched. The bedsteads often were also of bronze or wood, quite like those of our time. These cubicula received the air and the light through the door, which the Pompeians probably left open in summer.