Chapter 7

This caldarium is a long room at the ends of which rises, on one side, something like the parapet of a well, and on the other a square basin. The middle of the room is the stove, properly speaking. The steam did not circulate in pipes, but exhaled from the wall itself and from the hollow ceiling in warm emanations. The adornments of the walls consisted of simple flutings. The square basin (_alveus_ or _baptisterium_) which served for the warm baths was of marble. It was ascended by three steps and descended on the inside by an interior bench upon which ten bathers could sit together. Finally, on the other side of the room, in a semi-circular niche, rose the well parapet of which I spoke; it was a _labrum_, constructed with the public funds. An inscription informs us that it cost seven hundred and fifty sestertii, that is to say, something over thirty dollars. Yet this _labrum_ is a large marble vessel seven feet in diameter. Marble has grown dearer since then.

On quitting the stove, or warm bath, the Pompeians wet their heads in that large wash-basin, where tepid water which must, at that moment, have seemed cold, leaped from a bronze pipe still visible. Others still more courageous plunged into the icy water of the frigidarium, and came out of it, they said, stronger and more supple in their limbs. I prefer believing them to imitating them.

Have you had enough of it? Would you leave the heating room? You belong to the slaves who are waiting for you, and will not let you go. You are streaming with perspiration, and the _tractator_, armed with a _strigilla_, or flesh brush, is there to rasp your body. You escape to the tepidarium; but it is there that the most cruel operations await you. You belong, as I remarked, to the slaves; one of them cuts your nails, another plucks out your stray hair, and a third still seeks to press your body and rasp the skin with his brush, a fourth prepares the most fearful frictions yet to ensue, while others deluge you with oils and essences, and grease you with perfumed unguents. You asked just now what was the use of the tepidarium; you now know, for you have been made acquainted with the Roman baths.

A word in reference to the unguents with which you have just been rubbed. They were of all kinds; you have seen the shops where they were sold. They were perfumed with myrrh, spikenard, and cinnamon; there was the Egyptian unguent for the feet and legs, the Phœnician for the cheeks and the breast, and the Sisymbrian for the two arms; the essence of marjoram for the eyebrows and the hair, and that of wild thyme for the nape of the neck and the knees. These unguents were very dear, but they kept up youth and health.

"How have you managed to preserve yourself so long and so well?" asked Augustus of Pollio.

"With wine inside, and oil outside," responded the old man.

As for the utensils of the baths (a collection of them is still preserved at the Naples museum on an iron ring), they consisted first of the strigilla, then of the little bottle or vial of oil, and a sort of stove called the _scaphium_. All these, along with the slippers, the apron, and the purse, composed the baggage that one took with him to the baths.

The most curious of these instruments was the strigilla or scraper, bent like a sickle and hollowed in a sort of channel. With this the slave _curried_ the bather's body. The poor people of that country who bathed in the time of the Romans--they have not kept up the custom--and who had no strigillarii at their service, rubbed themselves against the wall. One day the Emperor Hadrian seeing one of his veterans thus engaged, gave him money and slaves to strigillate him. A few days afterward, the Emperor, going to the baths, saw a throng of paupers who, whenever they caught sight of him, began to rub vigorously against the wall. He merely said: "Rub yourselves against each other!"

There were other apartments adjoining those that I have designated, and very similar to them, only simpler and not so well furnished. These modest baths served for the slaves, think some, and for the women, according to others. The latter opinion I think, lacks gallantry. In front of this edifice, at the principal entrance of the baths, opened a tennis-court, surrounded with columns and flanked by a crypt and a saloon. Many inscriptions covered the walls, among others the announcement of a show with a hunt, awnings, and sprinklings of perfumed water. It was there that the Pompeians assembled to hear the news concerning the public shows and the rumors of the day. There they could read the dispatches from Rome. This is no anachronism, good reader, for newspapers were known to the ancients--see Leclerc's book--and they were called the _diurnes_ or _daily doings_ of the Roman people; diurnals and journals are two words belonging to the same family. Those ancient newspapers were as good in their way as our own. They told about actors who were hissed; about funeral ceremonies; of a rain of milk and blood that fell during the consulate of M. Acilius and C. Porcius; of a sea-serpent--but no, the sea-serpent is modern. Odd facts like the following could be read in them. This took place twenty eight years after Jesus Christ, and must have come to the Pompeians assembled in the baths: "When Titus Sabinus was condemned, with his slaves, for having been the friend of Germanicus, the dog of the former could not be got away from the spot, but accompanied the prisoner to the place of execution, uttering the most doleful howls in the presence of a crowd of people. Some one threw him a piece of bread and he carried it to his master's lips, and when the corpse was tossed into the Tiber, the dog dashed after it, and strove to keep it on the surface, so that people came from all directions to admire the animal's devotion."

We are nowhere informed that the Roman journals were subjected to government stamp and security for good behavior, but they were no more free than those of France. Here is an anecdote reported by Dion on that subject:

"It is well known," he says, "that an artist restored a large portico at Rome which was threatening to fall, first by strengthening its foundations at all points, so that it could not be displaced. He then lined the walls with sheep's fleeces and thick mattresses, and, after having attached ropes to the entire edifice, he succeeded, by dint of manual force and the use of capstans, in giving it its former position. But Tiberius, through jealousy, would not allow the name of this artist to appear in the newspapers."

Now that you have been told a little concerning the ways of the Roman people, you may quit the Thermæ, but not without easting a glance at the heating apparatus visible in a small adjacent court. This you approach by a long corridor, from the _apodytera_. There you find the _hypocaust_, a spacious round fireplace which transmitted warm air through lower conduits to the stove, and heated the two boilers built into the masonry and supplied from a reservoir. From this reservoir the water fell cold into the first boiler, which sent it lukewarm into the second, and the latter, being closer to the fire, gave it forth at a boiling temperature. A conduit carried the hot water of the second boiler to the square basin of the calidarium and another conveyed the tepid water of the first boiler to the large receptacle of the labrum. In the fire-place was found a quantity of rosin which the Pompeians used in kindling their fires. Such were the Thermæ of a small Roman city.

VI.

THE DWELLINGS.

PARATUS AND PANSA.--THE ATRIUM AND THE PERISTYLE.--THE DWELLING REFURBISHED AND REPEOPLED.--THE SLAVES, THE KITCHEN, AND THE TABLE.--THE MORNING OCCUPATIONS OF A POMPEIAN.--THE TOILET OF A POMPEIAN LADY.--A CITIZEN SUPPER: THE COURSES, THE GUESTS.--THE HOMES OF THE POOR, AND THE PALACES OF ROME.

In order, now, to study the _home_ of antique times, we have but to cross the street of the baths obliquely. We thus reach the dwelling of the ædile Pansa. He, at least, is the proprietor designated by general opinion, which, according to my ideas, is wrong in this particular. An inscription painted on the door-post has given rise to this error. The inscription runs thus: _Pansam ædilem Paratus rogat_. This the early antiquarians translated: _Paratus invokes Pansa the ædile_. The early antiquaries erred. They should have rendered it: _Paratus demands Pansa for ædile_. It was not an invocation but an electoral nomination. We have already deciphered many like inscriptions. Universal suffrage put itself forward among the ancients as it does with us.

Hence, the dwelling that I am about to enter was not that of Pansa, whose name is found thus suggested for the ædileship in many other places, but rather that of Paratus, who, in order to designate the candidate of his choice, wrote the name on his door-post.

Such is my opinion, but, as one runs the risk of muddling everything by changing names already accepted, I do not insist upon it. So let us enter the house of Pansa the ædile.

This dwelling is not the most ornate, but it is the most regular in Pompeii, and also the least complicated and the most simply complete. Thus, all the guides point it out as the model house, and perceiving that they are right in so doing, I will imitate them.

In what did a Pompeian's dwelling differ from a small stylish residence or villa of modern times? In a thousand and one points which we shall discover, step by step, but chiefly in this, that it was turned inwards, or, as it were, doubled upon itself; not that it was, as has been said, altogether a stranger to the street, and presented to the latter only a large painted wall, a sort of lofty screen. The upper stories of the Pompeian houses having nearly all crumbled, we are not in a position to affirm that they did not have windows opening on the public streets. I have already shown you _mæniana_ or suspended balconies from which the pretty girls of the place could ogle the passers-by. But it is certain that the first floor, consisting of the finest and best occupied apartments, grouped its rooms around two interior courts and turned their backs to the street. Hence, these two courts opening one behind the other, the development of the front was but a small affair compared with the depth of the house.

These courts were called the _atrium_, and the peristyle. One might say that the atrium was the public and the peristyle the private part of the establishment; that the former belonged to the world and the second to the family. This arrangement nearly corresponded with the division of the Greek dwelling into _andronitis_ and _gynaikotis_, the side for the men and the side for the women. Around the atrium were usually ranged--we must not be too rigorously precise in these distinctions--the rooms intended for the people of the house, and those who called upon them. Around the peristyle were the rooms reserved for the private occupancy of the family.

I commence with the atrium. It was reached from the street by a narrow alley (the _prothyrum_), opening, by a two-leaved door, upon the sidewalk. The doors have been burned, but we can picture them to ourselves according to the paintings, as being of oak, with narrow panels adorned with gilded nails, provided with a ring to open them by, and surmounted with a small window lighting up the alley. They opened inwards, and were secured by means of a bolt, which shot vertically downward into the threshold instead of reaching across.

I enter right foot foremost, according to the Roman custom (to enter with the left foot was a bad omen); and I first salute the inscription on the threshold (_salve_) which bids me welcome. The porter's lodge (_cella ostiarii_) was usually hollowed out in the entryway, and the slave in question was sometimes chained, a precaution which held him at his post, undoubtedly, but which hindered him from, pursuing robbers. Sometimes, there was only a dog on guard, in his place, or merely the representation of a dog in mosaic: there is one in excellent preservation at the Museum in Naples retaining the famous inscription (_Cave canem_)--"Beware of the dog!"

The atrium was not altogether a court, but rather a large hall covered with a roof, in the middle of which opened a large bay window. Thus the air and the light spread freely throughout the spacious room, and the rain fell from the sky or dripped down over the four sloping roofs into a marble basin, called _impluvium_, that conveyed it to the cistern, the mouth of which is still visible. The roofs usually rested on large cross-beams fixed in the walls. In such case, the atrium was Tuscan, in the old fashion. Sometimes, the roofs rested on columns planted at the four corners of the impluvium: then, the opening enlarged, and the atrium became a tetrastyle. Some authors mention still other kinds of _atria_--the Corinthian, which was richly decorated; the _dipluviatum_, where the roof, instead of sloping inward, sloped outward and threw off the rain-water into the street; the _testudinatum_, in which the roof looked like an immense tortoise-shell, etc. But these forms of roofs, especially the last mentioned, were rare, and the Tuscan atrium was almost everywhere predominant, as we find it on Pansa's house.

Place yourself at the end of the alley, with your back toward the street, and you command a view of this little court and its dependencies. It is needless to say that the roof has disappeared: the eruption consumed the beams, the tiles have been broken by falling, and not only the tiles but the antefixes, cut in palm-leaves or in lion's heads, which spouted the water into the impluvium. Nothing remains but the basin and the partition walls which marked the subdivisions of the ground-floor. One first discovers a room of considerable size at the end, between a smaller room and a corridor, and eight other side cabinets. Of these eight cabinets, the six that come first, three to the right and three to the left, were bedrooms, or _cubicula_. What first strikes the observer is their diminutive size. There was room only for the bed, which was frequently indicated by an elevation of the masonry, and on that mattresses or sheepskins were stretched. The bedsteads often were also of bronze or wood, quite like those of our time. These cubicula received the air and the light through the door, which the Pompeians probably left open in summer.

Next to the cubicula came laterally the _alae_, the wings, in which Pansa (if not Paratus) received his visitors in the morning--friends, clients, parasites. These rooms must have been rich, paved, as they were, with lozenges of marble and surrounded with seats or divans. The large room at the end was the _tablinum_, which separated, or rather connected, the two courts and ascended by two steps to the peristyle. In this tablinum, which was a show-room or parlor, were kept the archives of the family, and the _imagines majorum_, or images of ancestors, which were wax figures extolled in grand inscriptions, stood there in rows. You have observed that they were conducted with great pomp in the funeral processions. The Romans did not despise these exhibitions of vanity. They clung all the more tenaciously to their ancestry as they became more and more separated from them by the lapse of ages and the decay of old manners and customs.

To the left of the tablinum opened the library, where were found some volumes, unfortunately almost destroyed; and off to the right of the tablinum ran the fauces, a narrow corridor leading to the peristyle.

Thus, a show-room, two reception rooms, a library, six bedchambers for slaves or for guests, and all these ranged around a hall lighted from above, paved in white mosaic with black edging between and adorned with a marble basin,--such is the atrium of Pansa.

I am now going to pass beyond into the fauces. An apartment opens upon this corridor and serves as a pendant to the library; it is a bedroom, as a recess left in the thickness of the wall for the bedstead indicates. A step more and I reach the peristyle.

The peristyle is a real court or a garden surrounded with columns forming a portico. In the house of Pansa, the sixteen columns, although originally Doric, had been repaired in the Corinthian style by means of a replastering of stucco. In some houses they were connected by balustrades or walls breast high, on which flowers in either vases or boxes of marble were placed, and in one Pompeian house there was a frame set with glass panes. In the midst of the court was hollowed out a spacious basin (_piscina_), sometimes replaced by a parterre from which the water leaped gaily. In the peristyle of Pansa's house is still seen, in an intercolumniation, the mouth of a cistern. We are now in the richest and most favored part of the establishment.

At the end opens the _œcus_, the most spacious hall, surrounded, in the houses of the opulent Romans, with columns and galleries, decorated with precious marbles developing into a basilica. But in the house of Pansa do not look for such splendors. Its œcus was but a large chamber between the peristyle and a garden.

To the right of the œcus, at the end of the court, is half hidden a smaller and less obtrusive apartment, probably an _exedra_. On the right wing of the peristyle, on the last range, recedes the triclinium. The word signifies triple bed; three beds in fine, ranged in horse-shoe order, occupied this apartment, which served as a dining-room. It is well known that the ancients took their meals in a reclining attitude and resting on their elbows. This Carthaginian custom, imported by the Punic wars, had become established everywhere, even at Pompeii. The ancients said "make the beds," instead of "lay the table."

To the right of the peristyle on the first range, glides a corridor receding toward a private door that opens on a small side street. This was the _posticum_, by which the master of the house evaded the importunate visitors who filled the atrium. This method of escaping bores was called _postico fallere clientem_. It was a device that must have been familiar to rich persons who were beset every morning by a throng of petitioners and hangers-on.

The left side of the peristyle was occupied by three bedchambers, and by the kitchen, which was hidden at the end, to the left of the œcus. This kitchen, like most of the others, has its fireplaces and ovens still standing. They contained ashes and even coal when they were discovered, not to mention the cooking utensils in terra cotta and in bronze. Upon the walls were painted two enormous serpents, sacred reptiles which protected the altar of Fornax, the culinary divinity. Other paintings (a hare, a pig, a wild boar's head, fish, etc.) ornamented this room adjoining which was, in the olden time among the Pompeians, as to-day among the Neapolitans, the most ignoble retreat in the dwelling. A cabinet close by served for a pantry, and there were found in it a large table and jars of oil ranged along on a bench.

Thus a large portico with columns, surrounding a court adorned with a marble basin (_piscina_); around the portico on the right, three bedchambers or _cubicula_; on the right, a rear door (_posticum_) and an eating room (_triclinium_); at the end, the grand saloon (_œcus_), between an exedra and kitchen--such was the peristyle of Pansa.

This relatively spacious habitation had still a third depth (allow me the expression) behind the peristyle. This was the _xysta_ or garden, divided off into beds, and the divisions of which, when it was found, could still be seen, marked in the ashes. Some antiquaries make it out that the xysta of Pansa was merely a kitchen garden. Between the xysta and the peristyle was the _pergula_, a two-storied covered gallery, a shelter against the sun and the rain. The occupants in their flight left behind them a handsome bronze candlestick.

Such was the ground-floor of a rich Pompeian dwelling. As for the upper stories, we can say nothing about them. Fire and time have completely destroyed them. They were probably very light structures; the lower walls could not have supported others. Most of the partitions must have been of wood. We know from books that the women, slaves, and lodgers perched in these pigeon-houses, which, destitute, as they were, of the space reserved for the wide courts and the large lower halls, must have been sufficiently narrow and unpleasant. Other more opulent houses had some rooms that were lacking in the house of Pansa: these were, first, bathrooms, then a _spherister_ for tennis, a _pinacothek_ or gallery of paintings, a _sacellum_ or family chapel, and what more I know not. The diminutiveness of these small rooms admitted of their being infinitely multiplied.

I have not said all. The house of Pansa formed an island (_insula_) all surrounded with streets, upon three of which opened shops that I have yet to visit. At first, on the left angle, a bakery, less complete than the public ovens to which I conducted you in the second chapter preceding this one. There were found ornaments singularly irreconcilable with each other; inscriptions, thoroughly Pagan in their character, which recalled Epicurus, and a Latin cross in relief, very sharply marked upon a wall. This Christian symbol allows fancy to spread her wings, and Bulwer, the romance-writer, has largely profited by it.

A shop in the front, the second to the left of the entrance door, communicated with the house. The proprietor, then, was a merchant, or, at least, he sold the products of his vineyards and orchards on his own premises, as many gentlemen vine-growers of Florence still do. A slave called the _dispensator_ was the manager of this business.

Some of these shops opening on a side-street, composed small rooms altogether independent of the house, and probably occupied by _inquilini_,[D] or lodgers, a class of people despised among the ancients, who highly esteemed the homestead idea. A Roman who did not live under his own roof would cut as poor a figure as a Parisian who did not occupy his own furnished rooms, or a Neapolitan compelled to go afoot. Hence, the petty townsmen clubbed together to build or buy a house, which they owned in common, preferring the inconveniences of a divided proprietorship to those of a mere temporary occupancy. But they have greatly changed their notions in that country, for now they move every year.