Fig. 8.5 Pompeii, House of the Moralist, reconstruction.
(Spinazzola, op. cit., 2, p. 756)
Fig. 8.6 Pompeii, House of the Moralist, triclinium.
(Spinazzola, op. cit., 2, p. 752)
But Pompeii’s greatest contribution is to our knowledge, almost indecently intimate, of the private life of its inhabitants. This information comes primarily from the town houses and the suburban and rustic villas. The best guidebooks go into some detail on seventy-eight of these in Pompeii, and thirty-one in Herculaneum; hundreds more go unrecorded. In the face of this embarras de richesse, rigorous selection is necessary, and a description of a few houses and villas must suffice. To represent town houses I choose the “House of the Moralist” (Regio III, Insula iv, House 2–3), on the Via dell’ Abbondanza, a shopping street of average houses. (The aristocratic quarter was in Regio VI.) Excavations on this street by Vittorio Spinazzola between 1910 and 1923 were carried out according to a method new in Pompeii, which made the dead street come alive with extraordinary vividness. Spinazzola’s meticulousness preserved and reconstructed the traces of upper stories, with windows, balconies, and loggias; of gardens, with the discovered roots of their trees and plants replaced by modern ones of the same species. The colorful painted signs and notices on the house and shop fronts, instead of being detached as in the past and transferred to the museum in Naples, were left in situ, protected by glass and awnings, and the house interiors, with their furniture and wall-paintings, were kept intact. All this Spinazzola published in 1953 in a colossal book of 1110 folio pages, with over 1000 figures and ninety-six large plates. His account is the more important because the House of the Moralist, having been kept inviolate by volcanic ashes for so many centuries, was badly damaged by Allied bombs in 1943. (There were Germans quartered in the hotels near the excavation entrance.) The ground floor plan (Figs. [8.4] and [8.5]) of that house shows two dwellings thrown into one. The smaller, on the left, has typical features: its vestibule leading to an atrium or patio off which open a summer and a winter dining room and a light-well planted with flowers and shrubs. The winter dining-room is frescoed in glossy black; it has a vaulted, coffered ceiling, and a high window closed by a shutter planned to slide into the wall. The usual peristyle, or rectangular portico behind the atrium, is missing, its function supplied by the loggias on the upper floor and the large sunken garden behind the larger house. The garden was planned as a little grove sacred to Diana. Her statue was found in the middle of the garden, with a little bronze incense-burner in the shape of a ram still in place on its pedestal, and large trees planted around it. The pleasant summer dining room fills the garden’s southwest corner. In it the marble-topped table was found set for a meal or sacrifice ([Fig. 8.6]). In the corner was a brazier and a pitcher for hot water. Three couplets painted on the wall prescribed etiquette for the diners, and give the house its name: “Don’t put your dirty feet on our couch covers; if you bicker at table you’ll have to go home; be modest and don’t make eyes at another man’s wife.” There was a dumb-waiter to serve the pleasant loggias on the upper floor overlooking the garden. The pointed jars, amphorae, in the basement, suggest that the Moralist was a wine merchant. A stamp found there gives his name: Gaius Arrius Crescens. Election notices painted on the house front show that he and his family were up to their ears in local politics.
A sumptuous suburban dwelling is the sixty-room Villa of the Mysteries outside Pompeii’s Herculaneum gate, the noblest and grandest known of its kind. It was built on a seaward-facing slope, with a terrace and subterranean vaults. A careful analysis by its excavator, Amedeo Maiuri, of its building materials and décor shows six phases, of which the earliest, in squared blocks of local limestone, includes the rectangular block of rooms numbered 2–8 and 11–21 in the plan ([Fig. 8.7]), and is dated 200–150 B.C. At this stage the villa was surrounded on three sides by a pleasant open portico, and the curved exedra or belvedere (see the plan) did not yet exist. The next stage is marked by the use of handsome light gray tufa instead of limestone, includes the peristyle and small atrium (atriolum in the plan), and the modest bathing rooms (42–44) beyond. It dates from the time of Sulla. The next two periods are dated from the prevalent styles of wall-painting, to be discussed in the section on art below. They take the villa’s building history through the reign of Augustus. In the Julio-Claudian period—the date is again made precise by the style of painting—the villa became useful as well as ornamental: the rustic quarters 52–60 were added, and an upper floor overlooking the vestibule. The latter is more elegant than the rustic quarters, less so than the noble eastern rooms. The inference is that in this period the owner used the villa only occasionally, leaving the management of its business end to a resident factor who lived on the upper floor (see the reconstruction, [Fig. 8.8]) where he could keep his eye on the bailiff and the slave farm-hands. The portico (P 1–4) was now provided with a windowed wall between its columns, and the sunrooms (9–10) were created, with their splendid view, open to the southern sunshine, ideal for a winter siesta.
Fig. 8.7 Pompeii, Villa of the Mysteries.
(A. Maiuri, La Villa dei Misteri, p. 41)