Fig. 8.11 Pompeii, thermopolium or bar. (MPI)
Fig. 8.12 Naples, National Museum. Bronze bust of Caecilius Jucundus, from Pompeii.
(B. Maiuri, Il Museo Nazionale di Napoli, p. 71)
Fig. 8.13 Pompeii, House of D. Octavius Quartio, garden, reconstruction. (Spinazzola, op. cit., 1, p. 418)
Across the street from the laundry a painted shop front shows the operations of a felter’s establishment, where wool was matted together with a fixative, under repeated manipulation and pressure, until it acquired a consistent texture, like a piece of cloth. Felt was in demand for caps, cloaks, slippers, and blankets (the latter for both man and horse). The shop sign shows workmen at tables holding the carding comb and knives of their trade. In the middle of the picture other men, naked to the waist, are at work at shallow troughs impregnating the wool with the coagulant (Pliny the Elder says it was vinegar) which is being heated by a stove beneath the troughs. To the right, the proprietor—his name was Verecundus—proudly holds up a red-striped finished sample. To the left, Mercury, the patron of tradesmen, is painted emerging from a Tuscan temple with a money bag in his hand (“Hurrah for profit,” says a Pompeian graffito). Below is the proprietor’s wife at a table, in spirited conversation with a female customer who is trying on slippers. No literary discussion, primary or secondary, can match the vivid concreteness of this archaeological record.
The house (II.v.1–4) of Decimus Octavius Quartio (or Marcus Loreius Tiburtinus—authorities differ about the occupant’s name) belonged to a potter, to judge by a small kiln, with the potter’s stool and samples of his wares, found in a workroom. This is interesting enough, but more interesting still is this tradesman’s taste, as revealed by his house and garden. Hardly a corner of the house is left unfrescoed, and the paintings include two ambitious cycles; nine episodes from the saga of Hercules, and fourteen from the Iliad. (The House of the Cryptoporticus [I.vi.2–4] presents twenty-five Iliad episodes from an original 86, badly damaged when the last owner, an obvious Babbitt, turned the cryptoporticus into a wine cellar and made over the dining room for public use.) The potter was besides a connoisseur of gardens; his is the most charming that Pompeii can boast. His impluvium—for catching rainwater in the atrium (courtyard or patio)—is double-walled, for flower-boxes; behind the atrium is a formal flower bed, with walks around it on three sides; the chief feature of the sunken back garden ([Fig. 8.13]), nearly twice the area of the house itself, is a pair of long narrow fish pools, planned perpendicular to each other to form a T, and trellised ([Fig. 8.14]) so that vines could grow over them. The walls of the pools were painted blue to deepen the color of the water. At one end of the crossbar of the T is the pleasantest al fresco dining alcove imaginable. Statuettes embellish the alcove and the sides of the pool. There is a little shrine in the alcove; another, with a fountain, where the two pools meet; still another, with a fountain in front of it, two-thirds of the way along the upright of the T. Putholes in the garden wall show that there were shed roofs there to protect exotic plants and flowers. The plum trees, oaks, shrubs, arbors, and plants with which the garden was filled in orderly rows, with walks between, have been replanted, after identifying them from their roots found in the ashes. Forty-four amphorae were found buried to their necks in a row along one side of the garden. Perhaps they served as flower pots; it is equally possible that they were a wine store, for this potter’s house has no wine cellar. In a corner and under the arbors along the walks there were wooden seats and little marble tables, for rustic picnics in the pleached shade. The difference of levels, the fountains, shrines, statues, arbors, trees, and the painted colors, red, gray, green, yellow, and blue, all judiciously restored, make this age-old garden extraordinarily vivacious. Here archaeology has once more given the lie to the hackneyed stereotype of the lifelessness and colorlessness of classical antiquity, and has proved that in landscape-gardening, at any rate, there is something to be said for the bourgeois taste of Pompeian tradesmen. Some had a taste for music, too, to judge by some frescoes in the small but gracious House of Fabia (I.vi.15). One portrays the mistress of the house with sheet music in her hand. Another shows what appears to be a music lesson, our only example of the lyre being played four hands. Indeed archaeology, by revealing these middlebrows to us in three dimensions, their shops and artifacts, inns and bars, street signs and graffiti, loves licit and illicit, tools and equipment, their tastes and pleasures, has given us, especially in Pompeii, a truer picture of the average, ordinary ancient Italian man than Latin literature provides. For Latin literature, with some exceptions like Plautus’ plays, tends to be written by highbrows for highbrows. (Yet paradoxically, the best literary picture of an ancient Babbitt, Petronius’ Trimalchio, was drawn by a highbrow for highbrows.)
Fig. 8.14 Pompeii, House of D. Octavius Quartio, garden, with trellis and pool. (Spinazzola, op. cit., 1, p. 396)