Fig. 8.10 Pompeii, Villa of the Mysteries. Wine-press, reconstructed.
(Maiuri, op. cit., p. 101)
A more rustic villa, between Pompeii and Boscoreale to the north, shows what the establishment of a capital farmer of the first century A.D. was like. The owner’s quarters were modest. Business came first: most of the ground floor is taken up with stable, wine and oil presses, threshing floor, and slaves’ quarters. Slaves were a problem: one rustic villa has quarters for thirty and stocks for fourteen. The Boscoreale wine store had a 23,000 gallon capacity, and enough stone jars were found to hold 1,300 gallons of olive oil. The proprietor of this villa, however, was not without his fondness for aesthetic ostentation. In a wine vat here was found in 1895 a treasure of 108 embossed silver vessels and 1000 gold coins. They were bought by the banker Count Edward de Rothschild, much to Italian disgust, and presented to the Louvre. One pair of cups represents a series of skeletons, one garlanded, another with a heavy bag of money, a third with a roll of papyrus, a fourth with a lyre; the whole bears the legend, the tragic irony of which the proprietor of the villa was to discover: “Seize hold on life; tomorrow is uncertain.” Another treasure in silver, of 118 pieces, all now securely in the Naples museum, was discovered in 1930 in a nail-studded chest in the strong room under a town house (I.x.4) called the “House of the Menander” after a fresco of the dramatist on the walls.
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But it is not only the nabobs, their villas, and their treasures which Pompeii reveals to us. Ancient tradesmen, their lives, work, and tastes, about which literature tells us almost nothing, become more real for us here than anywhere else in the ancient world except Ostia. In the market facing the Forum the excavators found fruit in glass containers, and the skeletons of fish and sheep. There are inns for muleteers and carters by the city gates, and innumerable wine shops, the bar open to the street, its top pierced to hold cool amphorae of wine or covered bronze vessels for hot drinks ([Fig. 8.11]). Wine prices are scratched on walls, together with other graffiti of more or less extreme indecency, referring usually to the oldest of the professions. One says, “I am yours—for two asses” (the as was a small copper coin worth, at the time this graffito was scribbled, about two-and-a-half cents). Another, in large letters over a bench at the Porta Marina, advises loungers to READ THIS SIGN FIRST, and offers the charms of a Greek prostitute named Attiké at sixteen asses. This sort of thing prompted the more sober-sided Pompeians to write more than once on the walls (of the large theater, amphitheater, and basilica) the couplet, one of the most famous of the hundreds found at Pompeii:
“I wonder, wall, that you do not go smash,
Who have to bear the weight of all this trash!”
Other graffiti complain of unrequited love: “I’d like to bash Venus’ ribs in” (from the basilica), or “Here Vibius lay alone and longed for his beloved” (perhaps from an inn). Snatches from the love-poets, Ovid and (strangely) the tortured, neurotic Propertius, are frequent, and tags of Vergil remembered from schooldays. Graffiti keep a running account of daily purchases of cheese, bread, oil, and wine; or the number of eggs laid daily by the chickens. A reward is offered for the recovery of a stolen bronze pitcher. Income property is advertised for rent, or gentlemen’s upstairs flats (cenacula equestria). A metal worker, doing a brisk business in chamber pots, has scratched on his wall a memo of the days fairs are held in nearby towns. He made surveyors’ instruments as well: our only example of a surveyor’s plane table (groma) comes from his shop. In a bronze-bound chest in the house of a rich freedman banker, Lucius Caecilius Jucundus, were found his complete (and involved) accounts, on 153 wax tablets. His bronze bust, with its shrewd, ugly, kindly face, warts and all ([Fig. 8.12]), was also found in the house. It reveals the very type of the nouveaux riches, not in the least ashamed of being “in trade,” who came to be the ruling class in the last days of Pompeii.
The wealth of tradesmen can be judged by the quality of the decoration of their houses, in which they often plied their trade, for the ancient world’s slave economy did not foster the factory system. Thus in the house of the jeweler Pinarius Cerialis (III,iv,4), his showcase was found containing fine engraved cornelians, agates, and amethysts, some of the work unfinished, and also the tiny, delicate tools of his trade. In the House of the Surgeon (VI.1,9–10) surgical instruments were found, including probes, catheters, gynaecological forceps, pliers for pulling teeth, and little spoons, perhaps for extracting wax from the ears. These provide our best evidence for ancient surgical techniques.
Stephanus’ fullonica (laundry: I.vi.7) was found with the imprint of the fallen front door left clearly in the ashes. The padlock was on the outside, from which the inference is that this establishment served as laundry only; if it had been a dwelling, the lock would have been on the inside. A skeleton behind the door had with him a bag of 107 gold and silver coins. Since two-thirds of them had been minted years before, under the Republic, one assumes that this was not merely the day’s take, but a hoard; all the shop’s moveable capital. Built in at the back were the small vats where the dirty clothes were trodden, to get out the dirt and grease, and the larger ones for rinsing. The upper floor and courtyard were used for drying: in the courtyard wall were found the small putholes for the canes over which the wet clothes were hung. Near the entrance was the clothes press, in which a pressing board was worked down upon the folded clothes by means of a pair of large wooden screws.
