The Wonders of Pompeii

by Marc Monnier

This relatively spacious habitation had still a third depth (allow me the expression) behind the peristyle. This was the xysta or garden, divided off into beds, and the divisions of which, when it was found, could still be seen, marked in the ashes. Some antiquaries make it out that the xysta of Pansa was merely a kitchen garden. Between the xysta and the peristyle was the pergula, a two-storied covered gallery, a shelter against the sun and the rain. The occupants in their flight left behind them a handsome bronze candlestick.

Such was the ground-floor of a rich Pompeian dwelling. As for the upper stories, we can say nothing about them. Fire and time have completely destroyed them. They were probably very light structures; the lower walls could not have supported others. Most of the partitions must have been of wood. We know from books that the women, slaves, and lodgers perched in these pigeon-houses, which, destitute, as they were, of the space reserved for the wide courts and the large lower halls, must have been sufficiently narrow and unpleasant. Other more opulent houses had some rooms that were lacking in the house of Pansa: these were, first, bathrooms, then a spherister for tennis, a pinacothek or gallery of paintings, a sacellum or family chapel, and what more I know not. The diminutiveness of these small rooms admitted of their being infinitely multiplied.

I have not said all. The house of Pansa formed an island (insula) all surrounded with streets, upon three of which opened shops that I have yet to visit. At first, on the left angle, a bakery, less complete than the public ovens to which I conducted you in the second chapter preceding this one. There were found ornaments singularly irreconcilable with each other; inscriptions, thoroughly Pagan in their character, which recalled Epicurus, and a Latin cross in relief, very sharply marked upon a wall. This Christian symbol allows fancy to spread her wings, and Bulwer, the romance-writer, has largely profited by it.

A shop in the front, the second to the left of the entrance door, communicated with the house. The proprietor, then, was a merchant, or, at least, he sold the products of his vineyards and orchards on his own premises, as many gentlemen vine-growers of Florence still do. A slave called the dispensator was the manager of this business.

Some of these shops opening on a side-street, composed small rooms altogether independent of the house, and probably occupied by inquilini,[D] or lodgers, a class of people despised among the ancients, who highly esteemed the homestead idea. A Roman who did not live under his own roof would cut as poor a figure as a Parisian who did not occupy his own furnished rooms, or a Neapolitan compelled to go afoot. Hence, the petty townsmen clubbed together to build or buy a house, which they owned in common, preferring the inconveniences of a divided proprietorship to those of a mere temporary occupancy. But they have greatly changed their notions in that country, for now they move every year.

I have done no more here than merely to sketch the plan of the house. Would you refurnish it? Then, rifle the Naples museum, which has despoiled it. You will find enough of bedsteads, in the collection of bronzes there, for the cubicula; enough of carved benches, tables, stands, and precious vases for the œcus, the exedra, and the wings, and enough of lamps to hang up; enough of candelabra to place in the saloons. Stretch carpets over the costly mosaic pavements and even over the simple opus signinum (a mixture of lime and crushed brick) which covered the floor of the unpretending chambers with a solid incrustation. Above all, replace the ceilings and the roofs, and then the doors and draperies; in fine, revive upon all these walls—the humblest as well as the most splendid—the bright and vivid pictures now effaced. What light, and what a gay impression! How all these clear, bold colors gleam out in the sunshine, which descends in floods from an open sky into the peristyle and the atrium! But that is not all: you must conjure up the dead. Arise, then, and obey our call, O young Pompeians of the first century! I summon Pansa, Paratus, their wives, their children, their slaves; the ostiarius, who kept the door; the atriensis, who controlled the atrium; the scoparius, armed with his birch-broom; the cubicularii, who were the bedroom servants; the pedagogue, my colleague, who was a slave like the rest, although he was absolute master of the library, where he alone, perhaps, understood the secrets of the papyri it contained. I hasten to the kitchen: I want to see it as it was in the ancient day,—the carnarium, provided with pegs and nails for the fresh provisions, is suspended to the ceiling; the cooking ranges are garnished with chased stew-pans and coppers, and large bronze pails, with luxurious handles, are ranged along on the floor; the walls are covered with shining utensils, long-handled spoons bent in the shape of a swan's neck and head, skillets and frying-pans, the spit and its iron stand, gridirons, pastry-moulds (patty-pans?) fish-moulds (formella), and what is no less curious, the apalare and the trua, flat spoons pierced with holes either to fry eggs or to beat up liquids, and, in fine, the funnels, the sieves, the strainers, the colum vinarium, which they covered with snow and then poured their wine over it, so that the latter dropped freshened and cooled into the cups below,—all rare and precious relics preserved by Vesuvius, and showing in what odd corners elegance nestled, as Moliere would have said, among the Romans of the olden times.

None but men entered this kitchen: they were the cook, or coquus, and his subaltern, the slave of the slave, focarius. The meal is ready, and now come other slaves assigned to the table,—the tricliniarches, or foreman of all the rest; the lectisterniator, who makes the beds; the praegustator, who tastes the viands beforehand to reassure his master; the structor, who arranges the dishes on the plateaux or trays; the scissor, who carves the meats; and the young pocillatro, or pincerna, who pours out the wine into the cups, sometimes dancing as he does so (as represented by Moliere) with the airs and graces of a woman or a spoiled child.

There is festivity to-day: Paratus sups with Pansa, or rather Pansa with Paratus, for I persist in thinking that we are in the house of the elector and not of the future ædile. If the master of the house be a real Roman, like Cicero, he rose early this morning and began the day with receiving visits. He is rich, and therefore has many friends, and has them of three kinds,—the salutatores, the ductores, and the assectatores. The first-named call upon him at his own house; the second accompany him to public meetings; and the third never leave him at all in public. He has, besides, a number of clients, whom he protects and whom he calls "my father" if they be old, and "my brother" if they be young. There are others who come humbly to offer him a little basket (sportula), which they carry away full of money or provisions. This morning Paratus has sent off his visitors expeditiously; then, as he is no doubt a pious man, he has gone through his devotions before the domestic altar, where his household gods are ranged. We know that he offered peculiar worship to Bacchus, for he had a little bronze statue of that god, with silver eyes; it was, I think, at the entrance of his garden, in a kettle, wrapped up with other precious articles, Paratus tried to save this treasure on the day of the eruption, but he had to abandon it in order to save himself. But to continue my narration of the day as this Pompeian spent it. His devotions over, he took a turn to the Forum, the Exchange, the Basilica, where he supported the candidature of Pansa. From there, unquestionably, he did not omit going to the Thermæ, a measure of health; and, now, at length, he has just returned to his home. During his absence, his slaves have cleansed the marbles, washed the stucco, covered the pavements with sawdust, and, if it be in winter, have lit fuel oil large bronze braziers in the open air and borne them into the saloons, for there are no chimneys anywhere. The expected guest at length arrives—salutations to Pansa, the future ædile! Meanwhile Sabina, the wife of Paratus, has not remained inactive. She has passed the whole morning at her toilet, for the toilet of a Sabina, Pompeian or Roman, is an affair of state,—see Boettger's book. As she awoke she snapped her fingers to summon her slaves, and the poor girls have hastened to accomplish this prodigious piece of work. First, the applier of cosmetics has effaced the wrinkles from the brows of her mistress, and, then, with her saliva, has prepared her rouge; then, with a needle, she has painted her mistress' eyelashes and eyebrows, forming two well-arched and tufted lines of jetty hue, which unite at the root of the nose. This operation completed, she has washed Sabina's teeth with rosin from Scio, or more simply, with pulverized pumice-stone, and, finally, has overspread her entire countenance with the white powder of lead which was much used by the Romans at that early day.