With the World's Great Travellers, Volume 4

by Unknown

In many cases such cavities, after the skeletons contained in them had been carefully removed, were filled with liquid plaster, which produced an accurate and durable image of the imprinted form. The museum at Pompeii contains a collection of such images, which impress upon the beholder, more vividly, perhaps, than any other objects, the horror and consternation of those awful days when the rain of volcanic ashes turned noon to night and overwhelmed the doomed city. One of these figures is that of a girl with a ring on her finger; another, that of a woman enceinte; a third, a man whose features are singularly distinct and natural. A group of three includes father, mother, and daughter, found lying near one another. The figure of a female shows even the folds of her drapery and the arrangement of her hair. The attitudes are generally those which follow a short and fierce death-struggle. Some of the victims seem to have fallen upon their faces and died suddenly in their flight. Others, who were perhaps asphyxiated by vapors, have the calm attitude of sleep, as though death had been but a pleasant dream.

Near the Great Theatre an open court with a peristyle of seventy-four columns is surrounded by a series of detached cells. This is supposed to have been a barrack for confinement of the gladiators who were chosen for the contests of the arena. Sixty-three skeletons found here are believed to have been those of soldiers who remained on duty during the eruption. In one of the chambers, used as a prison, the skeletons of two presumable criminals were found, together with the stocks and irons with which they were bound for punishment. The story that the people were assembled, in great numbers, to witness some spectacular entertainment at the time the volcano began to belch upon them its rain of ashes is probably a myth. The theatre had been badly wrecked by the earthquake of 63, and its restoration was yet far from complete when the eruption broke forth. The streets of Pompeii are generally narrow, not over twenty-four—some of them not over fourteen—feet in width, and are paved with blocks of lava, with high stepping-stones at intervals, for the convenience of foot-passengers in rainy weather. At the street corners public fountains are placed, from which the water poured through the decorative head of a god, a mask, or some similar ornament. Trade signs are rare, but political announcements are frequently seen, conspicuously printed in red letters. Phallic emblems, boldly cut in stone and built into the walls, surprise and shock us by their frequency, notwithstanding their innocently meant purpose as a means of protection against witchcraft. The architecture of the temples and other public buildings is a clumsy mixture of the Greek and Roman style, the columns being invariably laid up in brick or travertine, and covered with stucco. The dwellings, built of the same materials, or of travertine, have very little exterior adornment. Yet at the time of its catastrophe Pompeii must have been a highly decorated town. Marble was but little used architecturally, but the stucco which took its place was admirably adapted to decorative painting, and this means of ornamentation was lavishly employed.

The lower halves of the columns are generally painted red, with harmonizing colors on the capitals. Interior walls are also laid with bright, gay coloring, usually red or yellow. But the most attractive and striking of the mural decorations are the paintings, the wonderful variety and delicacy of which are only surpassed by the more astonishing wonder of their preservation. The subjects of these pictures are generally drawn from poetry or mythology, as, for instance, Theseus abandoning Ariadne, Ulysses relating his adventures to Penelope, Cupid holding a mirror up to Venus, Apollo and the Muses, Polyphemus receiving Galatea’s letter from Cupid, Leda and the Swan, Diana surprised in her bath by Actæon, Achilles and Patroclus, and representations of Venus, Cupid, Bacchus, Silenus, Mercury, and the fauns in endless variety. A favorite subject was the beautiful youth Narcissus, son of the river-god Cephisus and the nymph Liriope. According to the Greek fable, this youth, seeing his image in a fountain, became enamoured of it, and, in punishment for his hardness of heart towards Echo and other nymphs, pined away and was changed to a flower. In consequence of its origin, this flower loves the borders of streams, and, bending on its fragile stem, seems to seek its own image in the waters, but soon fades and dies.

The larger and finer dwellings of Pompeii have generally been named from their supposed possessors, or from the works of art found in them. The House of the Tragic Poet, so called from the representation of a poet reading found in its tablinium, was one of the most elegant in Pompeii. From the pavement of its vestibule was taken a celebrated mosaic, now in the museum at Naples, representing a chained dog barking, with the legend “cave canem”—“beware of the dog." The periphery of the columns of the peristyle is fluted, except the lower third of the shaft, which is smooth and painted red. The walls of the interior are decorated with paintings, among which are Venus and Cupid fishing, Diana with Orion, and a representation of Leda and Tyndarus, which is very beautiful and remarkably well preserved. This house, which figures in Bulwer’s “Last Days of Pompeii” as the home of Glaucus, was probably the dwelling of a goldsmith. One of the most palatial residences yet brought to light is the House of Pansa,—one hundred and twenty-four by three hundred and nineteen feet,—which finely illustrates, in its complete and well-preserved appointments, the plan of an aristocratic Pompeiian mansion of the imperial epoch. Entering from the street by a vestibule, in the floor of which the greeting, “Salve,” was wrought in beautiful mosaic, we reach a large interior court (atrium), which, owing to the absence of glass or exterior openings, was necessary for the admission of light and air to the surrounding chambers. A reservoir for rain-water (impluvium) occupies the centre of the atrium. Passing from the atrium through a large apartment called the tablinium, we enter, towards the rear, the strictly domestic part of the house, which occupies more than half the space within its walls, and is also provided with an interior court. The family apartments open into this court, and derive from it their light and ventilation. It encloses a garden surrounded by a peristyle, and hence takes the name of peristylium. The front part of the house, surrounding the atrium, was that in which the proprietor transacted his business and held intercourse with the external world; the rear part, surrounding the peristylium, was devoted to domestic use exclusively. The roof, sloping inward, and open over the interior courts, discharged the rain which fell upon it into the impluvium. The images of the household gods usually occupied a place in the vestibule. The House of Sallust, so named from an epigraph on its outside wall, appears from later discoveries to have been the property of A. Cossius Libanus. This house was finished in gay colors and embellished with mural paintings, one of which—a representation of Actæon surprising Diana at her bath—is singularly well preserved. Other subjects treated are the rape of Europa (badly defaced), and Helle in the sea extending her arm to Phryxus. Opposite to the Actæon is a dainty chamber, arbitrarily named the venereum, surrounded by polygonal columns painted red. The impluvium was adorned with a bronze group—now in the museum at Palermo—representing Hercules contending with a stag. Out of the mouth of the stag, in this group, the waters of the fountain gushed. Some of the bedrooms of this house were floored with African marble.

The House of Meleager takes its name from one of its mural decorations illustrating the story of Meleager and Atalanta. Other frescos adorn its walls, representing the judgment of Paris, Mercury presenting a purse to Ceres, and a young satyr frightening a bacchante with a serpent. Its peristylium, sixty by seventy-three feet, is the finest yet found in Pompeii. The columns of the peristylium are covered with yellow stucco and its chambers are floored with mosaic. A colonnade rises on three sides of the dining-room, and one of twenty-four columns, red below and white above, supports the portico. A garden to the left of the atrium and in front of the portico is adorned by a pretty fountain. An exquisite bronze statuette of a dancing faun, now in the Naples museum, gave its present title to the most beautiful and also one of the largest houses in Pompeii. The discovery of this house was first made in 1830, in the presence of a son of the poet Goethe. A small pedestal, on which the statuette of the faun stood, is still seen in the marble-lined impluvium. In the mosaic floor of one of the rooms near by three doves are represented drawing a string of pearls from a casket. Mosaics in the dining-room represented Acratus (companion of Bacchus) riding on a lion, a cat devouring a partridge, and a group of crustaceans and fishes. The salutation, “Have,” (welcome) is wrought with colored marble in the pavement of the vestibule before the main entrance. The walls are covered with stucco made of cement, in imitation of colored marble.

The atrium, thirty-five by thirty-eight feet, is finished in the Tuscan style, but the twenty-eight columns surrounding the peristylium are Ionic. In the rear of the mansion opens a garden, one hundred and five by one hundred and fifteen feet, enclosed with a peristyle of fifty-six Doric columns. Various articles in gold, silver, bronze, and terra-cotta were found in this house, and also some skeletons, one of which was that of a woman with a gold ring on her finger engraved with the name Cassia. But the most important discovery of all made in the House of the Faun was that of the magnificent mosaic of Alexander in the battle of Issus. “This work, which is almost the only ancient historical composition in existence, represents the battle at the moment when Alexander, whose helmet has fallen from his head, charges Darius with his cavalry and transfixes the general of the Persians, who has fallen from his wounded horse. The chariot of the Persian monarch is prepared for retreat, whilst in the foreground a Persian of rank, in order to insure the more speedy escape of the king, who is absorbed in thought at the sight of his expiring general, offers him his horse.”—Baedeker.

Such are some of the principal mansions of Pompeii and the objects found in them. All of the most precious works of art which were or could be detached, including many exquisite little mural frescos, have been removed and deposited in the museum at Naples. The ruins and the museum explain each other, and taken together furnish the most complete and vivid illustration of ancient life in the world. No books, no pictures, can tell us so clearly and comprehensively how the people of that day and country lived as the remains of this buried city. Its dwellings, shops, streets, prisons, temples, theatres, and tombs disclose with amazing fulness and accuracy the pursuits, habits, follies, vices, and even the thoughts of its inhabitants, just as they were living and moving when caught, overwhelmed, and forever stilled in the full tide of their existence. Well-curbs worn by the sliding rope, stepping-stones hollowed by the march of eager multitudes, pavements scarred by the stamp of horses’ hoofs, advertisements painted on public walls, shops and magazines containing the symbols and utensils of trade, fountains where the crystal torrent might have hushed but an hour ago its rippling voice, temples whose altars bear yet the marks of sacrificial fires, frescos whose color and outline are bright and delicate in spite of calamity and time, mosaic floors smooth and shining as if polished only yesterday by the dance of dainty feet,—these and a thousand more traces of the life of that ancient time help the imagination to re-people and restore the ruined city as it was in the day of its pride and splendor.

An inspection of the ruins of Pompeii deepens upon the mind its impressions of the sublimity and terror of Vesuvius. Physically speaking, the volcano is but a monstrous heap of ashes, stones, and scoriæ, hollow, or partially so, in the centre, and streaked with black, solidified lava-currents on the outside. From the crater, whirling volumes of steam and smoke constantly issue, each rotary gush representing an interior explosion, usually heard only on the summit. In the varying states of the atmosphere this monstrous volume of vapor rises in columnar form for thousands of feet, and is then borne far to seaward, or landward, by the upper currents of the air; or it falls in a dense, sulphurous, shapeless cloud, which envelops and conceals the upper part of the mountain. In the latter condition of things I made my first ascent; in the former my second. On the first occasion we went up from Portici and down to Pompeii; on the second, the route was reversed.

From Pompeii the summit may be made—on horseback as far as the foot of the cone—in about three hours. The railway on the Portici side ascends to the outside rim of the crater, within which, separated by fissured slabs of lava, which a yard below the surface yet glow with living fire, the main chimney or flue of the volcano rises some hundreds of feet higher. On the eastern side, below the rim, a lava stream of considerable magnitude had burst forth at the time of my visit, and was issuing with a fierce hissing sound. Its course could be traced down the slopes of the mountain for the distance of a mile. Its movement, at first quite rapid, was soon checked by the cooling effect of the atmosphere. The operations of the crater at this time were extremely interesting. Near the base of the finial cone a small secondary volcanic funnel had recently been formed, which sometimes almost silenced with its screeching and blubber the thunderous rumbling within the main chimney. Neither of the active craters could be approached with safety, but they made no objections to being looked at, and so, dismissing my guide, I remained about two hours on the summit, watching their antics. Sometimes the smaller crater, or safety-valve, as it seemed to be, would work itself up to a perfect frenzy of hysterical hissing and shrieking, as though all the misery of a hundred colicky locomotives were venting itself in one prolonged scream. During such spells the red liquid lava would bubble over the rim for a time, like the boiling of an overfilled pot; then suddenly some explosive interior force would throw it into the air in a sheaf of beautiful red spray, rising and descending in graceful parabolas all around the cone. After this performance, the little fellow would subside and keep tolerably quiet for ten minutes or so, when it would be seized with another paroxysm.

The larger crater, though also intermittent, was more progressive and less fidgety in its action. Its behavior had the dignified air of regular business, while the safety-valve demeaned itself more as a transient upstart, impatient of attracting popular attention. The masses of steam and smoke issuing from the main orifice were somewhat irregular, both in quantity and velocity, their increase in both respects being always accompanied by louder and more rapid interior explosions. At the moments of greatest activity showers of stones and lumps of red lava were hurled into the air to heights varying from three hundred to one thousand feet, and, descending, rolled rattling and smoking down the yellow, sulphurous sides of the cone. The spectacle was terrifically sublime at times, particularly when the safety-valve chimed in with its screaming accompaniment, and flung aloft its jet-d’eau-like pyrotechnics. The missiles projected from the main crater soared at an angle of about fifty degrees, and almost uniformly in the same direction, so that they fell on territory of which the spectator, looking on from the opposite point of the compass, was quite willing to accord monopoly of possession, with a liberal margin for unadjusted boundary.