“If we could only make up one complete tile!” he sighed.
We were in the temporary museum where the latest “finds” of the Forum are kept. The man at the next table was putting together a really beautiful vessel of dark-blue glass. It might have been the Myrrhene goblet of Petronius!
“The tiles are so ugly, so monotonous—why should you care? I could understand, now, if a piece of that enchanting blue glass were missing!” I said.
“The cup is only a cup,—beautiful if you will,—but what does it teach us? nothing new. If we could find a whole tile, now, it would fix the date of a building we are in doubt about.”
Scientific methods, you see; even in Rome we cannot escape them! Then we went and looked at the spot where the Jewish citizens of Rome piously burned the body of Julius Cæsar, and at what remains of the house where Cæsar lived, a corner of the dining-room, with the white mosaic pavement, and a piece of wall painted with a decoration of fruit, flowers, green trees, and a pointed bamboo trellis, in the same style as the Villa Livia, built by the widow of Augustus, who, perhaps, had admired Aunt Calpurnia’s dining-room, and when her time came to build imitated it!
In the house of the Vestal Virgins we saw some fine pavements lately uncovered. Vesta is by far the most interesting of the Roman divinities. Is there a shrine to her at Radcliffe? There should be; we owe Rome the “higher education,” as we owe her the law we live by, the army we conquer by. Close to the Temple of Vesta we saw the place where earthquakes were foretold by the simplest contrivance. On a white marble platform finely adjusted weights were placed so as to oscillate with the first, otherwise imperceptible, tremors of the earth; in this way the knowing ones were enabled to foretell the earthquakes to the populace. Not far from here is the point where lightning once struck, making a hole ever after held sacred. It was turned into a sacred well, wherein jewels, cups, and other precious offerings were thrown by the devout or the superstitious. Both these shrines are very near the Temple of Vesta. Was it by chance that the fanes of the three things primitive man fears most, fire, earthquake, and lightning, should be so near together? The capo thinks not.
“Now come and see the Republican well I have just found,” he said, leading the way to a deep pit in the form of an amphora, with smooth rounded sides lined with cement.
“Notice the work they did in the days of the Republic; it is far better than the work of the Empire. See this cement, as perfect as the day it was laid.”
“What did you find in this well?” we asked.
“Come and see. Here are a great number of styluses—the Roman pens used for writing on wax tablets” (do you suppose some poor devil of a literary man threw them in in a moment of despair?) “and the entire contents of a Republican butcher’s shop. See, there is the great cleaver, these are the knives—even the wooden handles are intact. These round stones are the weights, here is the thigh bone of the last ox slaughtered before the shop came to grief, and here—take it carefully, it is of terra-cotta—is the butcher’s lamp. Do you make out the design? It is in the shape of an inflated oxhide.”