Pompeii was three miles in circumference, and was a sea-port town, though it is now a full mile from the sea. This is known, because the steps which used to lead down from the quay, for the convenience of passengers going into boats, are still remaining, and so are some large metal rings which were intended for cables to be fastened to.
There are several inscriptions in both cities commemorating the great injuries done by an earthquake which happened in the reign of the Emperor Nero, sixteen years before they were destroyed. There are also great cracks to be seen in some of the walls, testifying of the same event. This was one of the efforts of the volcanic power to get free before Vesuvius became the safety-valve.
It is very evident that there was ample warning of the catastrophe before it happened, and that most of the people had time to escape, for the number of skeletons found has been but small. In the barracks, there were the skeletons of two soldiers chained in the stocks. There were seventeen persons found in the cellar of a house just out of the town, who seem to have fled there for safety, and the deluge of mud then seems to have flowed in upon them, for their bones were found in hardened mud. One of the number was a woman, with an infant in her arms, and the impression of her form in the mud, was wonderfully perfect, though there was nothing left of her but the bones. She seems to have been the mistress of the house, and a person of consequence, since she had a chain of gold about her neck, and rich rings on her fingers.
In these instances, (and there are related several others similar,) the destruction of the persons seems to be accounted for by the peculiar circumstances in which they were placed. The soldiers, poor fellows, would, doubtless, have gone off with their companions, if they had not been in the stocks; and the family of seventeen might have escaped if they had fled into the open country, instead of into their cellar.
The warning does not however seem to have been very long before the sad event, perhaps only about an hour. There have recently been found three skeletons, which seem to have belonged to a father, mother, and daughter, (the latter of whom was decorated with pearl-rings and ear-rings,) who were in the act of rushing out of their house. And in one of the squares of the city, a traveller saw "a new altar of white marble, exquisitely beautiful, and apparently just out of the hands of the sculptor, which had been erected there; an enclosure was building all round; the mortar, just dashed against the side of the wall, was but half spread out; you saw the long sliding stroke of the trowel about to return and obliterate its own track—but it never did return: the hand of the workman was suddenly arrested, and, after the lapse of 1800 years, the whole looks so fresh and new, that you would almost say the mason was only gone to his dinner, and about to come back immediately to smooth the roughness."
It is not unlikely that in the early part of the eruption, the ashes and cinders which the volcano threw out, fell in showers on the cities, and that the walls were shaken by the subterranean movements, so that most of the inhabitants thought themselves less in danger in the open fields, like the people of Misenum, who went into the fields with pillows tied on their heads, as described by Pliny the younger, in the passage I quoted just now. Some few others, less afraid of their houses tumbling down about their ears, than of the bombs and cinders, betook themselves to their cellars, and such places as they thought safest.
I shall now tell you a little of what has been discovered relating to the ancient state of the City.
Its walls were about three miles in circumference; the streets were generally narrow, and paved with great flags of lava, which are furrowed by very deep ruts made by the wheels of the carriages that once passed busily along them. When the great hardness of the paving material is considered, this circumstance is very remarkable, and shows that the flags must have been laid down for a very long period, for the like is not to be seen in the streets of the most ancient City in Europe.
