Part I. Public Places and Buildings

Chapter VII. The Forum

The Forum is usually approached from the west side by the short, steep street leading from the Porta Marina. Entering, we find ourselves near the lower end of an oblong open space (Plate I), at the upper end of which, toward Vesuvius, stands a high platform of masonry with the ruins of a temple—the temple of Jupiter; the remains of a colonnade are seen on each of the other three sides. Including the colonnade the Forum measures approximately 497 feet in length by 156 in breadth; without it the dimensions are 467 and 126 feet. The north side, at the left of the temple, is enclosed by a wall in which there are two openings, one at the end of the colonnade, the other between this and the temple; at the right the wall bounding the open space has been replaced by a stately commemorative arch, while the end of the colonnade is closed by a wall with a passageway. Another arch, of much simpler construction, stands at the left of the temple, in line with the façade; it cuts off the area between the temple and the colonnade from the rest of the Forum. A third arch once stood in a corresponding position at the right.

The colonnade is nowhere intersected by a street passable for vehicles. Even the entrances on the north side form no exception. At the left you descend to the area by several steps, at the right by one only; yet here the exclusion of carts and wagons was made doubly sure by placing three upright stones in the passageway. Only pedestrians could enter the Forum, and they, too, could easily be shut out by means of gates in the entrances; the places where the gates swung can still be seen in the pavement, and one of them is shown in a painting (Fig. 16). No private houses opened on this area; it was wholly given up to the public life of the city and was surrounded by temples, markets, and buildings devoted to the civic administration.

The colonnade was not uniform in character upon all the three sides. As will be seen from our plan (Plan II), on the south side, and on the adjoining portion of the east side as far as Abbondanza Street, it was constructed with two rows of columns and had a double depth. On the east side, north of this street, the porticos in front of four successive buildings (K, L, M, N) took its place. For the greater part of its extent the colonnade was built in two stories, the lower of the Doric, the upper of the Ionic order. The upper gallery was made accessible by three stairways, at the southeast and southwest corners of the Forum and at the middle of the west side; on the east side it did not extend beyond Abbondanza Street.

The portico in front of the first of the four buildings referred to, that of Eumachia, contained a double series of columns, one above the other, corresponding in style and dimensions with those of the colonnade; but there was no upper floor running back from the intervening entablature. The arrangement in front of the fourth building, the Macellum, was similar; as the remains of the porticos in front of the two intervening buildings have wholly disappeared, it is impossible to determine their character.

The area of the Forum was paved with rectangular flags of whitish limestone. In front of the colonnade, the pavement of which was about twenty inches above that of the open space, a broad step or ledge projected, covering a gutter for rain water; the water found its way into the gutter through semicircular openings in the outer edge of the step.

Of the many statues that once adorned the Forum not one has been found. As may be seen from the pedestals still in place, they were of three kinds, and varied greatly in size.

First, statues of citizens who had rendered distinguished services were placed in front of the colonnade on the ledge over the gutter. Four pedestals that once supported statues of this sort may be seen on the west side.

Then equestrian statues of life size were set up in front of the ledge, these also in honor of dignitaries of the city (Fig. 17). On one of the pedestals the veneering of colored marble is still preserved, with an inscription showing that the person represented was Quintus Sallustius, "Duumvir, Quinquennial Duumvir, Patron of the Colony."

Finally, on the south side, the life size equestrian statues, which seem at the outset to have been arranged symmetrically, were almost all removed in order to make room for four much larger statues, the pedestals of which still remain (Fig. 53, p. 122). These must have represented emperors, or members of the imperial families. The pedestal in the middle, which is in the form of an arch almost square at the base, is much the oldest. Upon it was probably placed a colossal statue of Augustus. It is incredible that during the long and successful reign of the first emperor no statue in his honor should have been erected in Pompeii; and this is the most suitable place. The other three pedestals are similar in construction, and clearly belong together. The one at the right (2 on the plan) supported a colossal equestrian statue; that at the left (3) a colossal standing figure; on the third, further forward (4), was a smaller equestrian statue. Here stood, then, emperor, empress, and crown prince—Claudius, Agrippina, Nero.

A fifth pedestal, for an equestrian statue of the same size as that of Nero, is seen further to the north, in front of the temple of Jupiter (5). While unquestionably later than the time of Augustus, it must on the other hand be older than the pedestals of members of the Claudian family; for aside from himself, no one belonging to Nero's time can be taken into consideration, and after his death the Forum lay in ruins in consequence of the earthquake of the year 63. Who stood here, however, can scarcely be even conjectured. Not necessarily an emperor; the younger Drusus, for instance, Tiberius's son, or Germanicus might have been thus honored if they had in any way come into relation with the Pompeians. But if an emperor, it must have been Caligula; another place was provided for the statue of Tiberius.

In the south side of the arch at the northeast corner of the Forum are two niches. It is highly probable that statues of the two oldest sons of Germanicus, Nero and Drusus, were placed in them; a fragment of an inscription referring to the former was found near by. These became presumptive heirs to the throne after the death of Tiberius's son Drusus, in 23 A.D.; but both afterwards fell victims to the morbid suspicions of the emperor and the plots of Sejanus, Nero in 29 A.D., Drusus four years later.

On the top of the arch an equestrian statue of Tiberius probably stood. That such a statue was placed here seems clear from analogy. North of this arch was another, almost in line with it, at the end of Mercury Street where it opens into Nola Street; and here the excavators found fragments of a bronze equestrian statue which were put together and set up in the Naples Museum. Whether this statue represented Caligula or Nero has been a matter of dispute, but the former is really excluded from consideration by the short, heavy figure, which is better suited to Nero. There is no decided resemblance to Nero either; but it is quite possible that, although as crown prince he had been honored with a statue in the Forum, the Pompeians thought it best to erect for him as emperor a more imposing monument.

Before leaving the area we may raise the question whether it contained a speakers' platform, like the Rostra in the Roman Forum. If we have reference to a special structure, probably not; no trace of a separate tribunal has been discovered. The orator who wished to address the people, however, could mount the broad platform in front of the temple of Jupiter, on which once an altar stood; before him the audience could gather in the open, on the only side of the Forum free from the colonnade. This place well suited the convenience of both speaker and hearers. It is possible that we should also identify as a tribune the platform in a recess at the southeast corner (p. 120).

On even a cursory inspection the Forum is seen to lack unity in the details of its plan and in its architecture; the fact soon becomes apparent that it reached its final form only as the result of a long period of development. It will be worth while briefly to trace this development, and to note at least the more important changes which followed one another in the course of the centuries.

In the earliest times the Forum was merely an open square bounded by four streets.

The proof that this was the original form is in part based upon the orientation of the temple of Apollo. The sides of this temple have the same direction as the north and south streets in the northern part of the city, and must have been laid out parallel with a street that once ran between it and the Forum. The temple is, therefore, older than the colonnade of the Forum, which shows a marked deviation from the line of its axis; the divergence, as may be seen on our plan, was in part concealed by making a difference in the thickness of the pillars between the court of the temple and the Forum. It is obvious that the colonnade on the west side takes the place of an older street; the south side was probably defined by the prolongation of Abbondanza Street toward the southwest.

Near the southeast corner an inscription was found: V[ibius] Popidius Ep[idii] f[ilius] q[uaestor] porticus faciendas coeravit, 'Vibius Popidius, the son of Epidius, when quaestor caused this colonnade to be erected.' No clew to the date is given, but it must have been before the coming of the Roman colony, for after that time there was no office of quaestor in Pompeii. It must also have been before the Social War; in those years of tumult an extensive colonnade would not have been built, and when the national spirit was so vehemently asserting itself, we should expect to find inscriptions upon public works in the Oscan language, certainly not in Latin. But the use of Latin may very well date from the latter part of the period of alliance with Rome; we may then with much probability assign the inscription to the second half of the second century B.C.

Remains of the colonnade of Popidius are still to be seen on the south side, and on the adjoining part of the east side, extending just across Abbondanza Street; traces of it are found also on the west side, where it was afterward replaced by a new structure. On the east side north of Abbondanza Street no traces remain; the appearance of this part of the Forum was entirely changed when the four buildings (K, L, M, N) with their porticos were erected, but we can hardly doubt that the original colonnade extended here also. Our illustration (Fig. 14) shows the arrangement of the Doric columns in the lower story; of the Ionic columns above only scanty fragments have been recovered. The appearance of the whole may be suggested by our restoration (Fig. 13).

In style and construction this colonnade belongs to the Tufa Period (p. 40). While the forms are not those of the classical period, they nevertheless manifest Greek feeling. The low ratio in the proportions of the Doric columns, of which the height is equal to five diameters, well accords with their use as a support for an upper gallery; elsewhere in pre-Roman Pompeii more slender proportions are preferred, even for the Doric style. The shaft is well shaped, with a moderate swelling (entasis). Only the upper part is fluted; as the sharp edges of the flutings near the bottom might easily be marred, the divisions of the surface on the lower third of the shaft were left flat.

The architrave is relatively low, the result of an interesting peculiarity in the method of construction. Blocks of tufa long enough to span the intercolumniations were too weak to sustain the weight of the rest of the entablature. To meet this difficulty a line of thick planks was placed in old Italic fashion above the capitals of the columns, and on these were laid short tufa blocks. Thus in our illustration (Fig. 14), while the upper of the two bands of the architrave is seen to be of stone, the lower shows the modern timber supplied in the place of the ancient. That the planks were in reality no thicker than has been assumed in the reconstruction is proved beyond question by the later colonnade on the west side, which, although entirely of stone, corresponds throughout in its proportions with the older one; the architrave is equally narrow, and is likewise divided into two parts.

This explanation is curiously confirmed by an architectural painting on the garden wall of one of the finest houses of the Tufa Period, the house of the Faun. Here we find pilasters and entablature, except the architrave, painted white; but the architrave is painted in two bands, of which the lower is yellow, as if to represent wood. Nothing would have been easier than to leave the architrave, moulded in stucco, of one color as if it were all of one material; but special effort was made apparently to indicate the appearance of a lower division of timber. From this we may infer that in actual construction no pains was taken to conceal the lack of uniformity in structural materials by laying a coat of white or colored stucco over wood and stone alike; on the contrary, the difference was not only recognized in the decoration, but even accentuated, as the timber, whether retaining its original color or painted with a suitable tint, presented a marked contrast with the stone the surface of which was covered with white stucco. If the strip of timber in the architrave had been perceptibly thicker than that of stone above it, the effect would not have been good; as the earlier Greek polychrome decoration was now no longer in vogue, the stripe of color above the capitals made a pleasing variation from the prevailing whiteness of the structure.

The Basilica at the southwest corner and the temple of Jupiter both conform to the same variation from the direction of the early north and south street that we have noticed in the case of the colonnade of Popidius; they belong, therefore, to the same remodelling of the Forum. It is quite possible that the erection of the temple, by limiting the area of the Forum on the north side, caused its extension toward the south beyond the earlier boundary. Originally the temple was isolated, the north end of the Forum on either side being left open; later, but still in the time of the Republic, a high boundary wall with passageways was built on both sides of it. Later still the two arches were erected in a line with its façade; afterwards, in the time of Tiberius, the wall at the right of the temple was replaced by the commemorative arch (I), and the smaller arch near the façade at the right was removed in order that there might be an unimpeded view of the great arch from the area.

The colonnade of Popidius may have stood for more than a century; the necessity of making thoroughgoing repairs no doubt became urgent. In the meantime, however, the taste of the Pompeians had undergone a change, and instead of repairing the old colonnade they began to replace it by a new one, a part of which is shown in Fig. 15. Better material, the whitish limestone, was used, and the construction was more substantial; the blocks of the entablature were fitted together so as to form a flat arch. Though the new colonnade followed closely the proportions of the old, effective details, such as the fluting of the columns, and the triglyphs with the guttae underneath, were omitted. The refined sense of form characteristic of the earlier time was no longer manifest; all is coarse and inartistic, the swelling on the shafts of the columns, for example, being carried too high.

The new colonnade had a second story of the Ionic order, of the columns of which (though not of the entablature) considerable fragments have been found. The stylobate on which the columns rested was renewed in limestone, and about the same time the Forum was paved and the ledge over the gutter was laid with flags of the same material.

This second remodelling of the Forum commenced in the early years of the Empire, the pavement having been laid before the pedestal of the monument to Augustus was built. It was never carried to completion. On the west side the new colonnade was almost finished when the earthquake of the year 63 threw it nearly all down. At the time of the eruption only the columns at the south end of this side, which had safely passed through the earthquake, were still standing with their entablature; they are shown in Fig. 15. The area was then strewn with blocks, which the stonecutters were engaged in making ready for the rebuilding.

The Forum of Pompeii, as of other ancient cities, was first of all a market place. Early in the morning the country folk gathered here with the products of the farm; here all day long tradespeople of every sort exhibited their wares. In later times the pressure of business led to the erection of separate buildings around the Forum to relieve the congestion; such were the Macellum, used as a provision market; the Eumachia building, erected to accommodate the clothing trade; the Basilica and the market house west of the temple of Jupiter, devoted to other branches of trade. Yet in a literal sense the Forum always remained the business centre of the city.

It served, too, as the favorite promenade and lounging place, where men met to discuss matters of mutual interest, or to indulge in gossip. Here idlers loitered and plied busier men with questions regarding public affairs, makers and dealers came together to talk over and settle points of difference, and young people pursued their romantic adventures. He can best form an idea of this bustling, ceaseless, varied activity who knows what the piazza means in the life of a modern Italian city, and stops to consider how much has been taken from the life of the piazza by the cafés and similar places of resort; modern squares, moreover, are usually not provided, as were the ancient, with inviting colonnades, affording protection against both sun and rain.

The life of the Forum seemed so interesting to one of the citizens of Pompeii that he devoted to the portrayal of it a series of paintings on the walls of a room. The pictures are light and sketchy, but they give a vivid representation of ancient life in a small city. First, in front of the equestrian statues near the colonnade we see dealers of every kind and description. There sits a seller of copper vessels and iron utensils (Fig. 16), so lost in thought that a friend is calling his attention to a possible purchaser who is just coming up. Next come two shoemakers, one waiting on women, another on men; then two cloth dealers. Further on a man is selling portions of warm food from a kettle; then we see a woman with fruit and vegetables, and a man selling bread. Another dealer in utensils is engaged in eager bargaining, while his son, squatting on the ground, mends a pot.

The scenes now change. A man sitting with a writing tablet and stylus listens closely to the words of another who stands near by; he reminds us of the scribes who, under the portico of the theatre of San Carlo, at Naples, write letters for those that have been denied the privilege of an education.

Then come men wearing tunics, engaged in some transaction, in the course of which they seem to pass judgment on the contents of bottles which they hold in their hands; their business perhaps involves the testing of wine. Beyond these, some men are taking a walk; a woman is giving alms to a beggar; and two children play hide and seek around a column. The following scene is not easy to understand, but apparently has reference to some legal process; a woman leads a little girl with a small tablet before her breast into the presence of two seated men who wear the toga.

In the next scene (Fig. 17) four men are reading a notice posted on a long board, which is fastened to the pedestals of three equestrian statues. The sketchy character of the painting is especially obvious in the representations of the horses, which are nevertheless lifelike. It is also interesting to note that the heads of the men in these scenes are uncovered; in stormy weather pointed hoods (shown in a tavern scene, Fig. 234) were sometimes worn. The festoons suggest a trimming of the colonnade for some festal occasion.

The last scene is from school life. A pupil is to receive a flogging. He is mounted on the back of one of his schoolmates, while another holds him by the legs; a slave is about to lay on the lash, and the teacher stands near by with an air of composure. It would not be safe to infer from this, however, that there was a school in the Forum; the columns in this scene are different from those in the others and are further apart. Possibly a part of the small portico north of the court of the temple of Apollo was at one time let to a schoolmaster.

The most important religious festivals were celebrated in the Forum. Here naturally festal honors were paid to the highest of the gods—the whole area enclosed by the colonnade was the court of his temple; but we learn from an inscription, mentioned below, that celebrations were held here in honor of Apollo also, whose temple adjoined the Forum, and was at first even more closely connected with it than in later times.

Vitruvius informs us that in Greek towns the market place, agora, was laid out in the form of a square (a statement which is not confirmed by modern excavations), but that in the cities of Italy, on account of the gladiatorial combats, the Forum should have an oblong shape, the breadth being two thirds of the length. The purpose in giving a lengthened form to the Forum, as also to the Amphitheatre, was no doubt to secure, at the middle of the sides, a greater number of good seats, from which a spectacle could be witnessed. In the Pompeian Forum, as may be seen from the dimensions given at the beginning of this chapter, the breadth is less than one third of the length. However, there can be little doubt that gladiatorial exhibitions were frequently held there before the building of the Amphitheatre, which dates from the earlier years of the Roman colony. After this time the Forum was still used for games and contests of a less dangerous character. The epitaph of a certain A. Clodius Flaccus, which is now lost, but was copied by a scholar in the seventeenth century, tells us at length how in his first, and again in his second, duumvirate (he was duumvir for the third time in 3 B.C.), in connection with the festival of Apollo, he not only gave gladiatorial exhibitions in the Amphitheatre, but also provided bullfights and other spectacles, as well as musical entertainments and pantomimes, in the Forum.

Speaking of the Forum as a place for gladiatorial combats, Vitruvius adds that the spaces between the columns should be wide,—that the view of spectators might be as little as possible impeded,—and that the upper story of the colonnade should be arranged with reference to the collection of an admission fee. The latter suggestion is of special interest. As we know from other sources, at public games certain places were reserved for the officials and for the friends of him who gave the spectacle; others were free to the public, while for still others an admission fee was charged. If the exhibition was held in a market place, with lower and upper colonnades, the former would be open to the people; the latter in part reserved, in part accessible on payment of the price of admission.

It would be interesting to know whether on such occasions at Pompeii the gates of the Forum itself were shut, so that admission even to the free space could be regulated; perhaps they were in earlier times when, as at Rome, slaves were forbidden to witness the games. However, Cicero speaks of this time-honored regulation as in his day already a thing of the past; and so in Roman Pompeii the gates of the Forum may have remained open even on the days of the games. Their most important use was probably in connection with the voting.

The Forum had a part also in spectacles which were not presented there. We are safe in assuming that, at least in the earlier times, whenever a gladiatorial combat was given in the Amphitheatre, or a play in the Theatre, the city officials, including especially the official providing the entertainment, formed in procession with their retinue and proceeded in festal attire to the place of amusement. These processions could scarcely have formed anywhere else than in the Forum, and thence they must have started out.

The fact that the Forum was not accessible for vehicles suggests a significant point of difference between the festal processions of the colony and those of the capital. In the latter, vehicles had a prominent place. Thus at Rome the official who gave the games in the Circus entered the edifice with his retinue in chariots in the imposing circus parade, pompa circensis, and a similar usage prevailed in the case of other processions; priests, too, and priestesses were on many occasions allowed to ride. But even in Rome carriages were always considered a matter of luxury; and the municipal regulations promulgated by Caesar prohibited the use of vehicles, except those required for religious and civic processions, on the streets of the city from sunrise till the tenth hour, that is, till four o'clock in the afternoon.

In Pompeii, and without doubt also in other cities of Italy and the provinces, the closing of the Forum to vehicles made it necessary that religious and other processions should proceed on foot. We have no evidence of any exception to this rule. We ought perhaps to recognize in it one of those devices by means of which Rome maintained a position of dignified superiority over the provincial towns; to her processions was allowed an element of display which to theirs was denied. It was not permitted to name the two chief executive officers of a municipality consuls, though their functions, within limits, corresponded with those of the consuls at Rome; nor could the city council be called a senate, though the Roman writers did not hesitate to apply this term to corresponding bodies in states and cities outside of Rome's jurisdiction. For like reasons, it would seem that on public occasions officials and priests of a provincial town were not permitted, as were those in Rome, to ride. Was this humiliating restriction laid upon the Pompeians when the Roman colony came, or previously when the city was in name the ally of Rome, but in reality already subject? The evidence is almost conclusive for the latter alternative; for the colonnade of Popidius, which as we have seen was erected in the period of autonomy, left no entrance for vehicles, though in other ways it added greatly to the attractiveness and convenience of the Forum as a place for civic and religious celebrations.

No record of events has survived to help us form a picture of the Forum as the seat of deliberative and judicial functions, the centre of the city's political life; yet stirring scenes present themselves to the imagination as we recall the critical periods in the history of the city.

In the Forum, about 400 B.C., the valiant Samnite mountaineers, having taken the city by storm, assembled and established their civic organization; here, in later times, without doubt amid conflicts similar to those at Rome, the polity was put to the test and underwent transformation. Fierce enough the strifes may have been during the Samnite wars, and again in the time of Hannibal,—after the battle of Cannae,—when the aristocrats who favored Rome contended with the national party for the mastery. Here, on the platform in front of the temple of Jupiter, the leaders of the national party stood in 90 B.C., and with flaming words roused the people to revolt, to join the movement which, starting in Asculum, had spread like wildfire over Southern Italy.

Then ten years of bloody war,—siege, campaigns, surrender,—and again the scene changes. Roman soldiers stand thick in serried ranks upon the area. They are the veterans of Sulla. An officer bearing a civil commission, the nephew of the Dictator, appears before them. Standing in front of the temple of Jupiter, he makes a proclamation regarding the founding and administration of the colony. The citizens crowd back timidly into the colonnade. Many of the best of the Pompeians have fallen in battle; of the rest, a part at least will be dispossessed of house and home to make room for the intruders, whose arrogance they will be compelled submissively to endure.

This is the last tragic act in the Pompeian Forum. After this time, there will be disputes regarding the rights of the old residents and the colonists, public questions of many kinds will call for settlement; the elections will come each year, and the ardent southern temperament may assert itself in violent scenes. Yet all these disturbances will be only as the ripples on the surface; the depths will remain undisturbed. The life of Pompeii has become an integral part of the life of the Roman world.

Chapter VIII. General View of the Buildings About the Forum—The Temple of Jupiter

The Forum was to the ancient city what the atrium was to the early Italic house; it was used for every purpose for which a special place was not provided elsewhere. And as sleeping rooms, dining rooms, and storerooms were grouped about the atrium and opened into it, so around the Forum lay the edifices which served the requirements of the public life,—the most important temples, the municipal buildings, and market houses or exchanges for different branches of business.

Three temples adjoined the Forum at Pompeii. In addition, there was a sanctuary of the City Lares; and the temples of Venus Pompeiana and Fortuna Augusta were but a short distance away. These religious edifices are representative of the different periods in the history of the city.

In very early times the Oscans of Pompeii received from the Greeks who had settled on the coast the cult of Apollo, and built for the Hellenic god a large, fine temple (C, in Plan II) adjoining the Forum on the west side.

Several centuries later, the divinities of the Capitol—Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva—were enthroned in the temple that on the north side towered above the area (H).

On the east or right side followed, in Roman times, the edifices erected for the worship of the emperors. The oldest is the unroofed building, with a broad, open front, dedicated to the Lares of the City and to the Genius of Augustus (L). Further north, in the first block at the right beyond the Forum, is the temple of Fortuna Augusta, the goddess who guarded the fortunes of Augustus, erected in 3 B.C. A chapel for the worship of Claudius and his family was placed in the Macellum (K, 5); this seems to have sufficed also for the worship of Nero. After Nero's death and after the brief Civil War, a temple (M) was built close to the shrine of the Lares in honor of Vespasian, the restorer of peace, the new Augustus. This was the last temple erected in Pompeii; it was not entirely finished at the time of the eruption.

Three buildings at the south end of the Forum were used for city offices (P-R). They were much alike, each containing a single large hall. They were seemingly built in the early years of the Empire, and repaired after the earthquake of the year 63. There is also a structure at the southeast corner, south of Abbondanza Street, which we may identify as the voting place, the Comitium (O). At the northwest corner was apparently the city treasury, built in the latest years of Pompeii, perhaps on the site of an earlier structure of the same kind (F).

At a comparatively early period the area was found to be too small for the increasing volume of business; and the demand for roofed space made itself felt. In the second century B.C. the large and splendid Basilica (B), serving the double purpose of a court and an exchange, was built at the southwest corner.

Diagonally opposite, near the temple of Jupiter, a provision market, the Macellum (K), was constructed; this also at an early date. It was entirely rebuilt in the time of the Empire, perhaps in the reign of Claudius. Previous to this rebuilding, the priestess Eumachia had erected an exchange for the fullers on the same side of the Forum, further south (N).

On the west side, from pre-Roman times, stood a small colonnade in two stories, with its rear against the rear of the colonnade on the north side of the court of the temple of Apollo; only the first story, of the Doric order, has been preserved. Probably this structure and the small open space in front were at first used as a market; later, in the imperial period, shops (D') were built upon the open space, and the colonnade was made over into closed rooms, the purpose of which, except in the case of one, is unknown (6, 7, 7). In the last years of the city, a large market building (D) was erected between this small place and the Forum. It was connected both with the city treasury and with a latrina.

The temple of Jupiter dominates the Forum, and more than any other structure gives it character. As we have seen, its orientation accords with that of the colonnade of Popidius. It probably dates from the pre-Roman period, the columns being of tufa covered with white stucco. The earthquake of the year 63 left the temple in ruins, and at the time of the eruption the work of rebuilding had not yet commenced. In the meantime, it was used as a workshop for stonecutters. The journal of the excavations reports the finding here of the torso of a colossal statue out of which a smaller statue was being carved. A place for the worship of the divinities of the temple must temporarily have been provided elsewhere.

The temple stands on a podium 10 Roman feet high, and including the steps, 125 Roman feet long (Fig. 18). Very nearly a half of the whole length is given to the cella; of the other half, a little more than two thirds is occupied by the portico, leaving about a third (20 Roman feet) for the steps. The pediment was sustained by six Corinthian columns about 28 feet high. This arrangement—a deep portico in front of the cella—is Etruscan, though the canon of Vitruvius, that in Etruscan temples the depth of the portico should equal that of the cella, is violated. The high podium also, with steps in front, is characteristic of Etruscan, or at least of early Italic religious architecture. On the other hand, the architectural forms of the superstructure are Greek, and these in turn have had their influence upon the plan; the intercolumniations are not wide, as in the Tuscan style with its wooden architrave, but narrower, as in the Greek orders. Vitruvius speaks of temples such as this, in which Greek and Etruscan elements are united, at the end of his directions for the building of temples; they are a development of Roman architecture.

The arrangement of the steps is peculiar. Above is a series of long steps reaching nearly across the front (Fig. 19); below are two narrow flights near the sides, and between them is the projecting front of the podium, used as a tribune, which has already been mentioned (p. 48).

That an altar stood at the middle of this platform is proved by a relief with a representation of the north side of the Forum, found on the base of a chapel of the Lares in the house of the wealthy Pompeian, L. Caecilius Jucundus. At the left we see the arch near the façade and a strip of wall connecting it with the temple; next a corner of the platform with an equestrian statue; then a flight of steps, and the front of the platform with an altar at the middle; finally the other flight of steps and another equestrian statue in a position corresponding with that of the first. The columns shown in the relief do not agree in number or style with those of the façade of the temple, but such inaccuracies are common in ancient representations of buildings, and there can be no doubt that the temple of Jupiter is represented; the relief has, in fact, been used in making our restoration of the arch at the left (Fig. 13).

Both the portico and the cella no doubt had a coffered ceiling. Just in front of the doorway, which was fifteen Roman feet wide, are the large stones with holes for the pivots on which the massive double doors swung (indicated in Fig. 18); the doors here were not placed in the doorway, but in front of it, and were besides somewhat larger, so that the effect was rendered more imposing when they were shut.

The ornamentation of the cella was especially rich. A row of Ionic columns, about fifteen feet high, stood in front of each of the longer sides; the entablature above them probably served as a base for a similar row of Corinthian columns, the entablature of which in turn supported the ceiling. On the intermediate entablature, between the columns of the upper series, statues and votive offerings were doubtless placed. The floor about the sides was covered with white mosaic, of which scanty remains have been found; the marble pavement of the centre (inside of the dotted line, Fig. 18) has wholly disappeared.

A section of the wall decoration, in the second Pompeian style, is shown in Fig. 20. We notice here the characteristic elements—imitation of marble veneering, with large red central panels and a cornice above. The base with its simple dividing lines upon a black ground was painted over in the third style; originally it must have been more suggestive of real construction, with a narrow painted border along the upper edge.

Against the rear wall of the cella stands a large pedestal, three times as long as it is broad. It was originally divided by four pilasters—two at the corners and two on the front between them—into three parts. Later the pilasters and the entablature over them were removed, and the whole was covered with marble veneering. Inside were three small rooms, entered by separate doors from the cella. The pedestal was thus built for three images; three divinities were worshipped here, and in the little chambers underneath were perhaps kept the trappings with which on festal occasions the images were decked.

A head of Jupiter, of which we shall speak later, was found in the cella, as was also an inscription of the year 37 A.D., containing a dedication to Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the ruling deity of the Capitol at Rome. It is thus proved beyond question that the Capitoline Jupiter was worshipped here; and it will not be difficult to ascertain what other divinities shared with him the honors of the temple.

As the Roman colonies strove in all things to be Rome in miniature, each thought it necessary to have a Capitolium—a temple for the worship of the gods of the Roman Capitol, Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva; and this naturally became the most important temple in the city. That the worship of the three divinities was established at Pompeii is evident from the discovery of three images representing them, in the little temple conjecturally assigned to Zeus Milichius. These are poor images of terra cotta, and the temple itself was altogether unworthy to be a place of worship for the great gods that shaped the destinies of Rome. We are warranted in the conclusion that the temple of Zeus Milichius was used temporarily for the worship of the three divinities of the large temple till the latter could be rebuilt; and that Juno and Minerva stood on the great pedestal beside the king of the gods.

It seems strange that the Pompeians should have erected a temple to the gods of the Capitol in the pre-Roman period. It must be remembered, however, that the worship of the three divinities was by no means limited to Rome and her colonies. The Etruscans, as Servius informs us in his commentary on Virgil, thought that a city was not properly founded unless it contained sanctuaries of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. Vitruvius, also, in his directions for laying out a city, makes the general statement that the most prominent site should be set aside for the temples of the same divinities. If we consider further that the opposition of the Italians to Rome found expression only in the Social War, and that previously they had looked upon the attainment of Roman citizenship as the highest object of ambition, the gradual adoption of Roman customs at Pompeii and the erection of a temple to the Capitoline divinities are seen to be less remarkable. The building of such a temple was a natural expression of political aspirations; it was in complete harmony with the use of Latin in the inscription of Popidius (p. 50).

There is, however, another possibility that may be stated. The remodelling of the Forum was certainly commenced in the pre-Roman period; but it is not impossible that the work was interrupted by the breaking out of the Social War and that the colonists completed it, dedicating the temple to the gods of the Capitol. The use of several brick-shaped blocks of stone,—such blocks are not found in other buildings of the pre-Roman time,—the lack of any trace of the wall decoration of the first style, the form of the egg-and-dart moulding on the capitals of the Ionic columns in the cella, and the correspondence of certain dimensions with the Roman scale of measurements may be alleged in favor of this hypothesis. The evidence at present does not warrant a positive decision against it.

The fact that we have here a Capitolium may explain the special prominence of the altar in front, which might just as well have been placed in the area of the Forum at the foot of the steps. In Rome the Capitol lay upon a summit of a hill; perhaps the aim in this case was to place not only the temple but also the altar upon an elevation so that here, as there, the priest should go up to offer sacrifice.

The podium of the temple contains vaulted rooms which can be entered from the Forum through a narrow door on the east side. Their use is unknown. We are reminded of the temple of Saturn in the Forum at Rome, the podium of which served as a treasury, aerarium. The vaults, favissae, may have been used as a place of safe keeping for treasure, or for furniture of the temple, or for discarded votive offerings.

The beautiful head of Jupiter found in the cella deserves more than a passing mention. In order to appreciate its character we may view it in contrast with the Otricoli Zeus, with which it is closely related. In both heads we feel the lack of that majestic simplicity, that ineffable and godlike calm, which rested on the features of the Zeus of Phidias. Here man has much more obviously made God in his own image; the face shows less of the ideal, with more of human energy and passion.

It is not for us to decide whether the Otricoli mask is from the school of Praxiteles, or shows more of the influence of Lysippus; it is sufficient here to notice that the type was developed in the second half of the fourth century B.C., the century after Phidias. The similarity between these two examples of the type is apparent at first glance. The shape of the two heads is, in general, the same, and there is the same profusion of hair and beard, symbolic of power; but the differences in detail are striking.

In the Otricoli Zeus the peculiar shape of the forehead—prominent in the middle up to the roots of the hair and retreating at the sides—seems to suggest, not so much the power of a world-encompassing and lofty intellect, as absorption in great, unfathomable thoughts. In the lines of the massive face irresistible force of will is revealed, and the capability of fierce passion lurks beneath the projecting lower part of the forehead and uneven eyebrows, threatening like a thundercloud. But for the moment all is deep repose, and the lids seem partly closed over eyes that look downwards, as if not concerned with seeing. The sculptor has conceived of Zeus as the occult power of nature, alike the origin and law of all things, or as the personification of the heavens veiled by impenetrable mists.

Great force of will is seen also in the face of the Pompeian god; but it is will dominated by alert and all-embracing mind. The forehead expands in a broad arch; the eyes, wide open, look out with full vision under sharply cut brows. Here we have no secret brooding; a powerful yet clearly defined and comprehensible personality is stamped upon features carved in bold, free lines. And this personality is not lost in mystical self-contemplation; the god is following with closest attention the course of events in some far distant place, affairs that in the next moment may require his intervention; excitement and expectancy are seen in the raised upper lip. The ideal of this artist was the wise and powerful king, whose watchful and all-protecting eye sees to the furthest limits of his kingdom. Surely this variation of the Otricoli type must have been conceived in a monarchical period, the period when the Greek world was ruled by the successors of Alexander.

The Pompeian god is more a sovereign; the Zeus of Otricoli is more poetic, more divine.

Chapter IX. The Basilica

The Basilica, at the southwest corner of the Forum, was the most magnificent and architecturally the most interesting building at Pompeii. Its construction and decoration point to the pre-Roman time; and there is also an inscription scratched on the stucco of the wall, dating from almost the beginning of the Roman colony: C. Pumidius Dipilus heic fuit a. d. v. nonas Octobreis M. Lepid. Q. Catul. cos.,—'C. Pumidius Dipilus was here on the fifth day before the nones of October in the consulship of Marcus Lepidus and Quintus Catulus,' that is October 3, 78 B.C.

The purpose of the building is clearly indicated not only by its plan and the details of its arrangement but also by the word Bassilica scratched a number of times by idlers on the stucco of the outer wall at the right of the south entrance. This sure identification lends to the edifice a special significance; it is without doubt the oldest example that we have of an important architectural type whose origin is lost in obscurity, but of which the derivative forms may still be recognized in the architecture of to-day. What the temple developed by the Greeks was to pagan antiquity, that the basilica became to the Christian Church—a type dominating a system of religious architecture. Pagan worship was individual,—a narrow chamber sufficed for the image of the god and the requirements of religious service; but Christian worship was social, and its functions demanded a larger room, in which a congregation could be assembled. The religious architecture of the Church therefore broke with the religious architecture of pagan antiquity, and turned for its model to the basilica.

Our knowledge of the history of the basilica begins with the erection of the Basilica Porcia in Rome by Cato the Elder, in 184 B.C.; other basilicas followed, and in Caesar's day a number stood about the Forum. Regarding its development prior to the time of Cato only conjectures can be offered. The name basilica (basilike stoa, 'the royal hall') points to a Greek origin; we should naturally look for the prototype of the Roman as well as the Pompeian structure in the capitals of the Alexandrian period and in the Greek colonies of Italy. But no ruin, no reference in literature comes to our aid. The supposition that the King's Hall (basileios stoa) in Athens, the official residence of the King Archon, was the prototype of all basilicas, has little to support it; our information in regard to the form of this building is quite inadequate, and the name alone warrants no positive conclusion. It is more probable that both the name and the architectural type came from the 'royal hall' of one of the successors of Alexander.

A basilica was a spacious hall which served as an extension of a market place, and was itself in a certain sense a covered market. It was not limited to a specific purpose; in general, whatever took place on the market square might take place in the basilica, the roof of which afforded protection against the weather. It was chiefly devoted, however, to business transactions and to the administration of justice. The form is known partly from the remains of the basilicas in Rome—Basilica Julia, Basilica Ulpia, the Basilica of Constantine—and in Africa, but more fully from the treatise of Vitruvius and the description of a basilica which he himself erected at Fano.

According to these sources the plan of a typical basilica is essentially that of the building before us (Fig. 23). An oblong space is divided by columns into a broad central hall and a corridor which runs around the four sides. The height of the columns, in the typical basilica, is equal to the width of the corridor, which is covered by a flat roof; the inner edge of this roof is carried by the entablature above the columns. The main room is higher than the corridor. Above the entablature is a low wall on which there is a second row of columns; these carry the main roof and form a clerestory, the light being admitted through the intercolumniations.

The main hall and the corridor were devoted to trade; the dealers perhaps occupied the former, while in the latter the throng of purchasers and idlers moved freely about. The place set aside for the administration of justice, the tribunal, was ordinarily an apse projecting from the rear end. In our Basilica, however,—and in some others as well,—it was a small oblong elevated room back of the central hall, toward which it opened in its whole length.

This ideal plan would answer very well for that of the early Christian basilicas, excepting in one respect; instead of a corridor on all four sides they have only aisles parallel with the nave, an arrangement which had already been adopted in some basilicas designed for markets. The Christian basilicas would give us a still truer idea of the arrangement and lighting of the pagan prototype if in most cases a part of the numerous windows had not been walled up, thus producing a dimness in keeping with a religious but not a secular edifice.

In pagan structures the ideal plan was by no means strictly followed. Vitruvius himself at Fano, and the architects of other basilicas the remains of which have been discovered, did not hesitate to depart from it. So the Basilica at Pompeii, as we shall see, presents a modification of the general plan in an important particular, the admission of light; and this deviation was carried out with finer artistic feeling than was displayed by Vitruvius in his building.

Our Basilica is undoubtedly of later date than the Basilica Porcia, but the Pompeians, who at the time when it was built were pupils of the Greeks in matters of art, found their model not in Rome but in a Greek city, perhaps Naples.

Five entrances, separated by tufa pillars, lead from the colonnade of the Forum into the east end of the basilica. First comes a narrow entrance court (a), extending across the entire building and open to the sky. On the walls, as also on the outside of the building, are remains of a simple stucco decoration; below, a yellow base with a projecting red border along the upper edge; above, a plain white surface. At the left outside the entrance court is a cistern for rain water collected from the roof; the stairway close by (shown on the plan) had nothing to do with the Basilica, but was connected with the upper gallery of the colonnade about the Forum.

Mounting four steps of basalt we pass from the narrow court into the building. The five entrances here are separated by four columns. Those next to the two sides on the right and on the left were closed by a wall in which was a wide doorway; the three at the middle were left as open intercolumniations. The enclosed space before us measures 180⅓ English feet (200 Oscan feet) in length, 78¾ feet in breadth. Twenty-eight massive brick columns, 4 Oscan feet in diameter, separate the great central hall from the broad corridor running about it; only the lower part of the columns, built of small bricks evidently made specially for this purpose, is preserved (Fig. 24). Attached half-columns, with a diameter a little more than three fourths that of the others, project from the walls; the wall decoration, which imitates in stucco a veneering of colored marbles, is of the first style (p. 41). The columns of the entrance and those at the rear have the same diameter as the half-columns; part of the Ionic capitals belonging to them have been found, but the capitals of the large columns have wholly disappeared.

There are only scanty remains of the floor, which consisted of bits of brick and tile mixed with fine mortar and pounded down (opus Signinum); it extended in a single level over the whole enclosed space, and from this level our estimates of height are reckoned. On three sides of the main hall near the base of the columns under the floor is a square water channel, indicated on our plan; eight rectangular basins lie along its course, but the purpose of it is not clear. The tribunal projects from the rear wall, its floor being six Oscan feet above that of the rest of the building.

The large columns about the main hall, with a diameter of more than 3½ feet, must have been at least 32 or 33 feet high; the attached half-columns with the columns at the entrance and at the rear, including the Ionic capitals, were probably not more than 20 feet high. But assuming that the roof of the corridor was flat, the walls must have been as high as the entablature of the large columns, and so must have extended above the entablature of the half-columns; considerable portions of this upper division of the walls remain.

Along the walls on the ground are to be seen a number of capitals, fragments of shafts and bases belonging to a series of smaller columns with a diameter of 1.74 feet, all found in the course of the excavations. They are of tufa, coated with white stucco; they can belong only here, and by the study of their forms—columns, half-columns, and peculiarly shaped three-quarter-columns—the upper division of the walls can be restored with some degree of certainty. Not to go into technical details, in the upper part of the side walls a section of wall containing a window alternated with a short series of columns in which the columns, for the sake of greater solidity, were set twice as close as the half-columns in the lower division of the wall, the intercolumniations being left entirely open (Fig. 25); over the entrances at the front the wall was continuous but was divided into sections by half-columns corresponding with the columns below, a window being placed between every two half-columns in order to conceal the difference in width between the sections of wall at the front and those at the sides. The arrangement was similar at the rear, on either side of the tribunal, as may be seen from the section (Fig. 27).

With this restoration of the outer walls completed we are able to form a clear idea of the appearance of the main hall. Whether or not the rafters could be seen from below is uncertain, but the probability is that, as assumed in our restoration (Fig. 26), they were hidden by a coffered ceiling. The simple and beautiful interior abounded in fine spatial effects. The corridor and main room were almost as high as the main room was wide, that is between 35 and 40 feet. The light streaming in through the openings in the upper portion of the walls was evenly distributed throughout the hall; we may assume that when the sun became too hot on the south side it could be shut out by curtains.

In our Basilica, then, we notice a wide divergence from the ideal or normal plan. Instead of a clerestory above the main hall a proportionally greater height is given to the corridor. The normal height of a basilica corridor is represented by the lower division of the walls with the attached half-columns and their entablature; this, however, is here treated simply as a lower member, and upon it, rather than upon the entablature of the columns about the main hall, was placed an upper division of wall admitting light and air through intercolumniations and windows.

The tribunal at the rear is the most prominent and architecturally the most effective portion of the building. The base is treated in a bold, simple manner; upon it, at the front, stands a row of columns the lower portions of which show traces of latticework. The decoration of the walls, like that of the rest of the interior, imitates a veneering of colored marbles. The shape and comparatively narrow dimensions of the elevated room indicate that we have here a tribunal in the strict sense, a raised platform for the judge and his assistants; in the basilicas provided with apses the latter were large enough to make room both for the judicial body and for the litigants. Here the litigants stood on the floor in front of the tribunal, and when court was in session the general public must have been excluded from this part of the corridor. The arrangement in this respect was far from convenient, but seemingly convenience was sacrificed to aesthetic considerations; the builders wished to treat the projecting front of the tribunal as an ornament to the building.

Under the tribunal was a vaulted chamber half below the level of the ground; two round holes, indicated on the plan, opened into it from above. It could hardly have been designed as a place for the confinement of prisoners; escape would have been easy by means of two windows in the rear, especially when help was rendered from the outside. More likely it was used, in connection with the business of the court, as a storeroom, in which writing materials and the like, or even documents, might be kept; they could easily have been passed up through the holes when needed. The second story of the tribunal was not as completely open to the main hall as the first. Its front, the remains of which have for the most part been recovered, was divided off by half-columns corresponding in number and arrangement with the columns of the first story, but each half-column was flanked by narrow pilasters, while a parapet of moderate height occupied the intervening spaces. It was built apparently with a view to architectural effect rather than practical use (Fig. 27).

At the right and the left of the tribunal are places for stairways. Each of these contains a landing on the same level with the floor of the tribunal, from which it was cut off by a door; the steps connecting with these landings, being of wood, have disappeared. In both stair rooms, however, flights of stone steps lead down to the vaulted chamber below, so that this could not have been accessible if there were wooden steps on both sides connecting the tribunal with the floor of the Basilica. Probably on one side the wooden steps led from the tribunal down to the floor, but on the other ascended from the corresponding landing to the second story, thus leaving the stairway to the lower room unobstructed on that side. At some later time the door at the left between the tribunal and the landing was walled up, perhaps because the gallery was no longer used; if still in use it could to all appearances have been reached only by a ladder.

The two open rooms at the rear on either side of the tribunal agree in their decoration with the entrance court except that the base with its border is higher, and the white surface above is moulded in stucco so as to give the appearance of slabs of white marble. They were no higher than the first division of the wall; the windows seen in Fig. 27 above the broad entrances opened into the outer air. Perhaps they were used as waiting rooms for litigants.

Opposite the north entrance between two columns stood a curb like those over the mouths of cisterns; only the foundation stone with a circular opening is preserved. The remains of a lead pipe, which brought the water to it, show that it must have been connected with an aqueduct. At the further end of the main hall was an equestrian statue of which no trace has been found.

The arrangement of the roof is a problem of much difficulty. Without wearying the reader by presenting various possibilities, it will be sufficient for our purposes to suggest the explanation which, on the whole, has the most in its favor. As assumed in our restoration, the roof of the main hall was carried by the entablature of the twenty-eight large columns. Thus in general the arrangement corresponded fairly well with that of other basilicas except that, owing to the lack of a clerestory, the roof of the main hall was not much if any higher than that of the corridor. From the flat roof of the corridor, at least on the south side, the rain water flowed into the cistern near the front part of the building.

The five entrances opening from the Forum into the narrow court could be closed by latticed doors. Similar doors hung also on the wooden jambs of the north and south entrances. With such doors a complete safeguarding could not have been contemplated. Tradespeople using the Basilica must either have removed their wares at the close of business hours or have made the stalls sufficiently secure for protection. We can hardly doubt that ordinarily a night watchman was on duty about the building.

Chapter X. The Temple of Apollo

In some respects the study of the large temple on the west side of the Forum is especially satisfactory. The building had been completely restored after the earthquake of 63, and was in good order at the time of its destruction. Though ancient excavators removed many objects of value, including the statue of the divinity of the temple, much was left undisturbed, as the interesting series of statues in the court; in addition, a number of inscriptions have been recovered. On the whole, more complete information is at hand regarding this sanctuary than in reference to any other in Pompeii.

The identification of this as the temple of Apollo is certain. The accompanying illustration shows a corner of the floor laid over the greater part of the cella (3 on the plan); the parts along the inner walls were of white mosaic. This floor was composed of small, lozenge-shaped pieces of green and white marble and slate; of the two narrow stripes between the lozenge pattern and the bright mosaic fret along the border one is of slate, the other of red marble. In the slate stripe was an inscription. The letters were outlined by means of small holes filled with metal, every seven holes forming a vertical line, every four a horizontal. The inscription, which was in Oscan, stated that the quaestor O[ppius] Camp[anius], by order of the council and with money belonging to Apollo, had caused something to be made; what this was cannot be determined, as the important word is missing, but apparently it was the floor. In the cella, moreover, stands a block of tufa, having the shape of half an egg; this is the Omphalos, the familiar symbol of Apollo. In the court on the first pilaster at the right as you enter a tripod is painted, too large for mere decoration, and explicable only as a symbol of the god. Lastly, in the design of the stucco ornamentation with which the entablature of the peristyle was adorned after the earthquake, the principal figures are griffins. The griffin was sacred to Apollo, and though it was often used as a purely decorative theme, in this case a reference to the divinity of the temple is unmistakable (Fig. 31).

As previously stated (p. 49), the deviation of the axis of this building from that of the Forum is undoubtedly due to the fact that it followed the direction of a street which bordered it on the east side before the colonnade of Popidius was built; this is therefore an evidence of the antiquity of the temple. The style of architecture, however, is in no essential particular different from that of the colonnade and of other buildings of the Tufa Period, and gives no indication of great age. The most probable explanation is that the temple was rebuilt in the Tufa Period on the site of an earlier structure, the orientation of which was preserved. The difference in direction is concealed by the increasing thickness, from south to north, of the pillars between the Forum and the court of the temple. The spaces between the pillars were originally left open. Later, at what time it is impossible to determine, they were all walled up except the three opposite the side of the temple; since the temple was excavated these also have been closed. In comparison with the entrances from the Forum, at first ten in number, the one on the south side, opening on the street leading from the Porta Marina, must have been considered unimportant. Otherwise pains would have been taken to give to the colonnade on that side an even number of columns, so that the door of the temple should face an intercolumniation; as it is the number is uneven and the entrance to the court had to be put a little to one side that it might not open upon a column.

The court is of oblong shape. The continuous colonnade about the sides, the peristyle, was originally in two stories. At the rear of the peristyle on the north side stood the small colonnade of the Doric order already mentioned (p. 62); one of the rooms into which in later times this was divided (6) was connected with the court of the temple, and was probably occupied by the sacristan (aedituus).

The temple stood upon a high podium, in front of which is a broad flight of steps. The small cella was evidently intended for but one statue. The columns at the sides of the deep portico, which in other respects follows the Etruscan plan (p. 63), are continued in a colonnade which is carried completely around the cella.

In Plate II and Fig. 30 we give a view of the ruins as they are to-day; in Fig. 32 a view of the temple as it appeared before the earthquake of 63. The height and diameter of the Corinthian columns seen in the restoration can be calculated with approximate correctness; of the entablature and parts above nothing has been found except a large waterspout of terra cotta in the form of a lion's head.

The colonnade about the court was built of tufa, and coated with white stucco. It presents an odd mixture of styles, of which other examples also are found at Pompeii; a Doric entablature with triglyphs was placed upon Ionic columns having the four-sided capital known as Roman Ionic. Here, as in the earlier colonnade about the Forum, the stone blocks of the entablature were set upon beams; and in the blocks now in place we may see the sockets made to receive the ends of the joists of the second story floor. Evidently with the purpose of supporting this second story, which was probably of the Corinthian order, the Ionic columns below were made relatively short. No remains of an upper gallery, however, have been found; and it is quite possible that when the colonnade was restored, after the earthquake, the second story was omitted. The upper floor could be reached from the second story of the small colonnade north of the court, which was accessible by means of a stairway leading from the Forum.

When the restoration of the temple and its colonnade was undertaken, the feeling for the pure and simple forms of the Greek architecture was no longer present; the prevailing taste demanded gay and fantastic designs, with the use of brilliant colors. The Pompeians improved the opportunity afforded by the rebuilding to make the temple and its colonnade conform to the taste of the times.

First the projecting portions of the Ionic and Corinthian capitals were cut off; then shaft and capital alike were covered with a thick layer of stucco. New capitals were moulded in the stucco, of a shape in general resembling the Corinthian, and were painted in red, blue, and yellow; the lower part of the shaft, unfluted, was also painted yellow. The entablature, at least in the case of the colonnade, was in like manner covered with stucco and ornamented with reliefs in the same colors. All this gaudy stucco has now fallen off; and our illustration (Fig. 31) is taken from Mazois, who made the drawing soon after the court was excavated. The later capitals and stucco ornamentation of the temple itself had wholly disappeared before the excavations were made.

The wall decoration of both the temple and the colonnade was originally in the first style; a remnant of it may still be seen in the cella. After 63 it was modernized. The walls of the temple both within and without were done over in stucco, so as to resemble ashlar work of white marble; apparently it was the intention to give the appearance of real marble. The walls of the colonnade were painted in the latest Pompeian style, in bright colors, on a white ground. The decorative designs, to judge from the remains and from sketches, were not of special interest. There was a series of pictures representing scenes from the Trojan War,—the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, the embassy of the Greeks to Achilles, the battle between Achilles and Hector (the subject of this, however, is doubtful), the dragging of Hector's body about the walls of Troy, Priam making entreaty for the body of Hector, and the rape of the Palladium,—but they have long since perished and are known only from unsatisfactory drawings.

Long before this modernizing of the temple the west side of the court had undergone a complete transformation. The peculiar bend in the street at the northwest corner (shown in Plan II), the diagonal line with which the small colonnade north of the court ends, and the narrow, quite inaccessible space between the west wall of the court and the houses lying near it, cannot easily be explained as a part of an original plan, but must rather be the result of later changes. The north and south street which now ends abruptly at the northwest corner must originally have been continued through the west colonnade, the ends of which were left open; this colonnade was then a public thoroughfare, on which the windows of houses opened, and perhaps also doors.

We learn from an inscription that about the year 10 B.C. the city purchased from the residents whose property adjoined the colonnade, for the sum of 3000 sesterces (about $155), the right to build a wall in front of their windows; this explains how the narrow space between the wall on the north side of the court and the houses came to be cut off. The inscription reads: M. Holconius Rufus d[uum] v[ir] i[uri] d[icundo] tert[ium], C. Egnatius Postumus d. v. i. d. iter[um] ex d[ecurionum] d[ecreto] ius luminum opstruendorum 𐆘 ∞ ∞ ∞ redemerunt, parietemque privatum Col[oniae] Ven[eriae] Cor[neliae] usque ad tegulas faciundum coerarunt,—'Marcus Holconius Rufus, duumvir with judiciary authority for the third time, and Gaius Egnatius Postumus, duumvir with judiciary authority for the second time, in accordance with a decree of the city council purchased for 3000 sesterces the right to shut off light (from adjoining buildings) and caused to be constructed a wall belonging to the colony of Pompeii to the height of the tiles,' that is, as high as the roofs of the houses.

The wall referred to was no doubt that on the west side of the court of the temple; when it was built the ends of the colonnade on that side must have been closed, so that this ceased to be a thoroughfare. Marcus Holconius was duumvir for the fourth time in the year 3-2 B.C.; as an interval of at least five years must intervene between two duumvirates, his third duumvirate must have been not far from 10 B.C.

The pedestal in the cella, on which the statue of Apollo stood, still remains, but no trace of the statue itself has been found.

Near the foot of the steps in front is a large altar of travertine, having the same inscription on both sides: M. Porcius M. f., L. Sextilius L. f., Cn. Cornelius Cn. f., A. Cornelius A. f. IIII vir[i] d[e] d[ecurionum] s[ententia] f[aciundum] locar[unt],—'Marcus Porcius the son of Marcus, Lucius Sextilius the son of Lucius, Gnaeus Cornelius the son of Gnaeus, and Aulus Cornelius the son of Aulus, the Board of Four, in accordance with the vote of the city council let the contract (for building this altar).' The names of the four officials who erected the altar, the two duumvirs and two aediles (for the title see p. 12), appear without surnames; this points to a relatively early time, at the latest the age of Augustus.

At the left of the steps is an Ionic column with the inscription: L. Sepunius L. f. Sandilianus, M. Herennius A. f. Epidianus duovir[i] i[uri] d[icundo] d[e] s[ua] p[ecunia] f[aciundum] c[urarunt],—'Lucius Sepunius Sandilianus the son of Lucius, and Marcus Herennius Epidianus the son of Aulus, duumvirs with judiciary authority, caused (this) to be erected at their own expense.' Old sketches, made soon after the court was excavated, represent the column with a sundial on the top. The probability that a sundial belonging to the column was actually found is increased by the fact that these same men placed one on the circular bench in the Forum Triangulare. Here, in front of the temple of the Sun-god, such a dial would certainly have been in place. At the right of the steps are some blocks of lava containing holes, in which, undoubtedly, the supports of a votive offering were once set, but the holes give no clew to the size or character of the offering.

Other divinities besides Apollo were honored in this sanctuary, which in the earlier time was evidently the most important in the city; statues and altars for their worship were placed in the court. The pedestals of the statues still remain where they were originally placed, on the step in front of the stylobate of the colonnade; the statues themselves, with one exception, have been taken to Naples. There were in all six of them, grouped in three related pairs. In front of the third column at the left of the entrance, stood Venus, at the right was a hermaphrodite—both marble figures of about one half life size. They belong to the pre-Roman period and were originally of good workmanship, but even in antiquity they had been repeatedly restored and worked over. As a work of art, the hermaphrodite is the more important.

An altar stands before the statue of Venus. In pre-Roman times this may have been the only shrine in the city at which worship was offered to Herentas; for by that name the goddess of love was known in the native speech. Venus as goddess of the Roman colony (Fig. 4), was represented in an altogether different guise, and had a special place of worship elsewhere (see pp. 124-).

Though the statues of Venus and of the hermaphrodite here form a pair, both artistically and in respect to arrangement, the latter belongs not to the cycle of Venus but to that of Bacchus; and in order to make this the more evident, the ears of a satyr were given to the figure. We may, perhaps, infer that the god of wine also was worshipped in this sanctuary. In the sacristan's room (6 on the plan) we find a painting in which Bacchus is represented as leaning upon Silenus who is playing the lyre, meanwhile allowing the panther to drink out of his cup. This seems strange enough in a temple of Apollo; still it cannot be considered conclusive evidence that Bacchus actually received worship here. Without doubt the Wine-god was honored in Pompeii, the region about which was rich in vines. He appears countless times in wall paintings, but no shrine dedicated to him has yet been found.

On the right side of the court, in front of the third column, was a statue of Apollo; on the left directly opposite stood Artemis, both life size figures in bronze. An altar stood before the statue of Artemis; the altar of Apollo was before the temple. Both statues were armed with the bow, and it is evident that they were not designed to stand facing each other, but side by side, or one behind the other; both may originally have belonged to a Niobe group. As works of art, they are not of high merit. We recognize a certain elegance and nicety of finish, but these qualities cannot compensate for superficiality in the treatment of the figure, want of expression in the faces, and lack of energy in the movement. We have no other evidence of the worship of Artemis in Pompeii.

Further on, in front of the fifth column on either side, was a marble herm. That on the right is still in place and is seen in Plate II. It is of fine workmanship, and clearly belongs to the pre-Roman period; it represents Hermes, or Mercury. The god appears as a youth standing with his mantle drawn over the back of his head; the face, with a placid, serious, mild expression, is inclined a little forward. In this form Mercury was honored as the presiding divinity of the palaestra, the god of gymnastic exercises; we shall find him in the same guise later in the court of the Stabian Baths (p. 200). How this type of Hermes came to be chosen for the place of honor in athletic courts is by no means clear; it was certainly designed originally to represent him as a god of death, the Psychopompus, conductor of souls to the Underworld. The worship of Mercury here as a god of gymnastic exercises would not be in harmony with the surroundings; we should rather believe that the Pompeians, having placed him in such close relation with Apollo, god of the death-dealing shaft, and the earth goddess, Maia, associated more serious ideas with his image.

The herm on the opposite side of the court probably represented Maia. No trace of it has been found; the female herm in the Naples Museum formerly assigned to this place is now known to have been brought from Rome. In Greek mythology, the mother of Hermes was Maia, the daughter of Atlas; and this relationship, by a common confusion, was transferred to the Italian Maia, who was originally goddess of the spring, and gave her name to the month of May. The assignment of the herm opposite Mercury to Maia is based upon a number of inscriptions which establish the existence of a cult of Mercury and Maia in Pompeii. From the same source we learn that with the worship of these two that of Augustus was intimately associated; there are few better illustrations of the development of emperor worship in the Early Empire.

These inscriptions were found in different places, none of them in their original location. They are dedications once attached to votive offerings, of which one was set up each year by a college of priests, consisting of slaves and freedmen, under the general direction of the city authorities. The official title of this college at first, certainly to 14 B.C., was Ministri Mercurii Maiae, 'Servants of Mercury and Maia'; the word minister indicates a low order of priesthood. The worship of the emperor was then added, and the priests were called 'Servants of Augustus, Mercury, and Maia.' Still later, at least as early as 2 B.C., the names of the two divinities were dropped, and the priests were designated simply as 'Servants of Augustus.'

The extant inscriptions of this series come down to the year 40 A.D. As an example, we give that of 2 B.C., in which the ministri Augusti first appear: N. Veius Phylax, N. Popidius Moschus, T. Mescinius Amphio, Primus Arrunti M. s., min. Aug., ex d. d. iussu M. Holconii Rufi IV, A. Clodi Flacci III d. v. i. d., P. Caeseti Postumi, N. Tintiri Rufi d. v. v. a. s. p. p. Imp. Caesare XIII, M. Plautio Silvano cos,—'Numerius Veius Phylax, Numerius Popidius Moschus, Titus Mescinius Amphio and Primus the slave of Marcus Arruntius, Servants of Augustus (set this up), in accordance with a decree of the city council, on the order of Marcus Holconius Rufus, duumvir with judiciary authority for the fourth time, Aulus Clodius Flaccus, duumvir for the third time, and of Publius Caesetius Postumus and Numerius Tintirius Rufus, duumvirs in charge of the streets, buildings, and public religious festivals (the official title of the aediles, p. 13) in the thirteenth consulship of the Emperor Caesar (Augustus), the other consul being Marcus Plautius Silvanus.'

It is not difficult to understand how the worship of Augustus came to have a place in this sanctuary. The divinities here honored stood in close relation to him. Apollo was his tutelary divinity, to whom he thought that he owed the victory at Actium, and in whose honor he built the magnificent temple on the Palatine. Venus, moreover, was revered as the ancestress of the Julian family; and finally Mercury was said to be incarnate in Augustus himself.

This last conception found expression in one of the finest of the odes of Horace, written in 28 B.C. Fearful portents, the poet says, are threatening Rome; Jupiter with flaming right hand has even struck his own temple on the Capitoline. To what god shall we turn for help—to Apollo, to Venus, or to Mars? or rather to thee, winged god, Maia's son, that even now doest walk the earth in the form of a youth, the avenger of Caesar:—

Sive mutata iuvenem figura

Ales in terris imitaris almae

Filius Maiae, patiens vocari

Caesaris ultor.

It is interesting to note that evidence of the worship of Augustus as Mercury has come to light also in Egypt. In an inscription from Denderah we find Helmîs Kaisar, 'beloved of Ptah and of Isis'; Helmîs Kaisar is apparently 'Hermes Caesar,' and in Egyptian inscriptions Augustus is elsewhere referred to as 'the beloved of Ptah and of Isis.'

Chapter XI. The Buildings at the Northwest Corner of the Forum, and the Table of Standard Measures

The large building at the northwest corner of the Forum (Fig. 33, 1, 2, 3) was erected after the earthquake of the year 63. We do not know whether at the time of the eruption it had yet been roofed; the inside at least was in an unfinished state.

This building is divided into three parts, one of which, that furthest north, at the corner, contains both lower and upper rooms. Below, at the level of the Forum, are two dark vaulted chambers, one at the rear of the other. The front chamber is dimly lighted by a slit in the ceiling and was entered from the Forum by a narrow door; there are traces of a strong iron grating in the doorway. It has been supposed, not without probability, that these were the vaults of the city treasury, the aerarium; if they had been built for prison cells, they would naturally have had separate entrances.

Above these chambers are two rooms which open not on the Forum, but on the street that runs past them on the north (1, 1). They resemble shops and would be classed as such without further question but for the fact that the level of the floor is nearly five feet above the sidewalk, so that they could have been reached only by means of steps. If the identification of the chambers below as the vaults of the city treasury is correct, these rooms must have been occupied by the treasury officials, who could here transact business with the public without admitting the latter to their offices.

The middle room (2) was a public closet, with a small anteroom. As the doors to and from the anteroom were not placed opposite each other, the interior was not visible from the street. The room was not entirely finished; nevertheless, we can see the water channel running along three sides, and above it the stones on which the woodwork was to be placed; the inlet pipe was in position, as well as the outlet for carrying the water off into a sewer at the rear.

The last of the three parts of the building (3) is by far the largest. It was a high and spacious hall, with numerous entrances from the Forum. It was divided into two rooms by two short sections of wall projecting from the sides, and was evidently a market house, perhaps for vegetables and farm products.

The rooms formed by enclosing the small colonnade at the rear of the court of Apollo have already been mentioned (p. 62). At the left of the stairway leading to the second story (shown in Plan II) is a small room which opens in its entire breadth upon the Forum (11). Close by is a recess (10), also open toward the Forum, in the side of the first of the thick pillars which separate the Forum from the court of the temple.

In this recess stood the table of standard measures, mensa ponderaria (Fig. 34), which is now in the Naples Museum, unfortunately not entire; a part of it has disappeared. The part remaining consists of a large slab of limestone (a little over 8 feet long and 1.8, or 2 Oscan feet, wide), in which are nine bowl-shaped cavities with holes at the bottom through which the contents could be drawn off; this slab rested on two stone supports, and similar supports above it carried another slab, which is now lost, with three cavities. The table thus contained twelve standards of capacity for liquid and dry measure, but only ten are shown in the illustration, as two are too far back.

It is evident that the table has come down from the pre-Roman period. The names of the measures were originally written in Oscan, beside the five largest cavities, and though the letters were later erased, they are still in part legible. Only one word, however, can be made out with certainty, beside the next to the smallest cavity; that is Kuiniks, plainly the same as the Greek Choinix. We naturally infer that in the pre-Roman time the Pompeians used Greek measures.

In the time of Augustus, about 20 B.C., the cavities were enlarged and made to conform to the Roman standard, but the new names were not put beside them. The inscription on the front of the larger slab has reference to these changes: 'Aulus Clodius Flaccus, the son of Aulus, and Numerius Arcaeus Arellianus Caledus, the son of Numerius, duumvirs with judiciary authority, in accordance with a decree of the city council, caused the measures to be made equal' to the Roman measures.

A similar adjustment of measures to the Roman standard is indicated by the use of the phrase metra exaequare on a table found at Minturnae. The adoption of a uniform standard was made a subject of imperial regulation by Augustus, who, by this means, sought to promote the unification of the Empire. Similar tables of measures have been found in various parts of the Roman world, as at Selinunto in Sicily, in the Greek islands, and at Bregenz on the Lake of Constance.

It is probable that an official charged with the oversight of the measures had his office in the small room next to the stairway (11).

Chapter XII. The Macellum

The large building at the northeast corner of the Forum was a provision market, of the sort called Macellum. The name Pantheon, once applied to it, is now abandoned, and there is no longer the slightest doubt regarding its purpose, which is indicated by its general plan, the remains found in the course of the excavations, and the paintings upon the walls.

Such markets, where provisions, especially of the finer and more expensive kinds, were sold and in which a cook also might be secured, without doubt existed in the Greek cities after the time of Alexander; from the Greeks, as in the case of the basilica, the Romans took both the name and the architectural type.

The first macellum in Rome was built in 179 B.C. in connection with the enlargement of a fish market. In later times, as we learn from inscriptions, others were constructed in Rome and in various cities of Italy and the provinces.

A macellum built by Nero is shown on one of the coins of this emperor. It agrees in essential points with our building, having stalls or shops of more than one story in height, and at the middle of the court a structure with a dome-like roof. The central structure, the tholus, is mentioned by Varro as an essential part of a macellum, but its use is known to us only from the remains found at Pompeii.

The plan of our building is simple. A court in the shape of a rectangle, slightly longer than it is broad, is surrounded by a deep colonnade on the four sides. In the middle twelve bases, arranged so as to form a dodecagon, supported an equal number of columns on which a roof rested; underneath was a rectangular basin in the pavement, from which a covered drain led toward the southeast corner. Under this roof the fish that had been sold were scaled, the scales being thrown into the basin, where they were found in great quantity. Behind the colonnade on the south side, and opening into it, was a row of market stalls or small shops (3 on the plan). Above these were upper rooms, in front of which was a wooden gallery, but there was no stairway, and apparently the shopkeeper who wished to use his second story had to provide himself with a ladder.

There were shops also on the north side, but they opened upon the street bounding the Macellum on the north; a southern exposure for the shop fronts seems to have been avoided on account of the damage that the heat in summer might cause to the stock. In the shops on this street—whether in those belonging to the building or those on the opposite side is not stated—the excavators found charred figs, chestnuts, plums, grapes, fruit in glass vessels, lentils, grain, loaves of bread, and cakes. A few shops behind the portico in front faced toward the Forum.

A large market room (4) opened on the colonnade at the southeast corner, the entrance being divided by two columns. Along three sides runs a counter for meat and fish, the surface of which slopes toward the middle of the room. That fish were sold on the left side is plain from the special arrangement made to carry off the water; the floor behind the counter here was raised and sloped toward the rear, where a gutter connecting with it, and passing across the room, led under the counter on the south side into the street.

In the little room or pen at the northeast corner of the colonnade (8) remains of skeletons of sheep were found. Such animals, then, were sold here alive; instead of buying the flesh of slaughtered animals, many purchasers no doubt preferred to obtain a victim which could be sacrificed as an offering to the household gods before it was used for food.

The paintings on the walls of the colonnade are among the best examples of the latest Pompeian style. Above the base are large black panels with a broad red border; between them, in the vertical spaces separating the border of one panel from that of the next, are light and fantastic architectural designs in yellow on a white ground, the parts designed to appear furthest from the eye being in green and red. In this way a rich development of architectural forms is united, in a consistent and effective decorative scheme, with large panels suitable for paintings.

Along the edges of the black panels run conventional plant designs; in the middle are paintings symmetrically arranged in a series in which a pair of floating figures alternates with a mythological scene enclosed in a painted frame. Among the mythological pictures are Ulysses before Penelope, who does not recognize him, Io guarded by Argus, and Medea plotting the murder of her children. The whole arrangement is in excellent taste, while the execution is careful and delicate.

The treatment of the upper part of the wall is especially worthy of note. Generally in walls of the fourth style the portion above the large panels is filled with airy architectural designs upon a white or at least a bright ground. In this instance the fantastic architectural forms in the spaces between the black panels are continued upwards to the ceiling, and in the midst of each group a standing figure is painted on a blue ground—a girl with utensils for sacrifice, a satyr playing the flute; but the spaces above the panels are completely filled with representations of the things exposed for sale. Unfortunately only a few of these pictures remain. One contains birds, some alive, some killed and dressed; in another, different kinds of fish are seen; and a third presents a variety of vessels in which wine and other liquids could be kept. This departure from the usual style of decoration, strikingly suggestive, can be explained only as having a direct reference to the purpose of the building.

KEY TO PLAN III

• A. Portico at the Entrance of the Forum Triangulare.
• B. Forum Triangulare.
• 1, 1. Colonnade.
• 2. Promenade.
• 3. Doric temple.
• 4. Semicircular bench, with sundial.
• 5. Sepulchral enclosure.
• 6. Altars.
• 7. Well house.
• 8. Pedestal of the statue of Marcellus.
• C. Open-air Gymnasium—Palaestra.
• 1. Colonnade.
• 2. Pedestal with steps behind it.
• 3, 3. Dressing rooms.
• D. Tank for Saffron Water.
• E. Large Theatre.
• 1. Dressing room.
• 2. Stage.
• 3. Orchestra.
• 4. Ima cavea.
• 5. Media cavea.
• 6. Summa cavea, over a corridor.
• 7, 7. Tribunals.
• F. Small Theatre.
• 1. Dressing room.
• 2. Stage.
• 3, 3. Tribunalia.
• G. Theatre Colonnade, used as Barracks for Gladiators.
• 1. Passage leading from Stabian Street.
• 2. Entrance.
• 3. Doorkeeper's room.
• 4. Passage to the Large Theatre, walled up.
• 5. Stairway leading down from the Forum Triangulare.
• 6. Athletes' waiting room—Exedra.
• 7. Room with remains of weapons and cloth.
• 8. Guard room.
• 9. Stairs leading to overseer's rooms.
• 10. Kitchen.
• 11. Mess room.
• H. Temple of Zeus Milichius.
• 1. Colonnade.
• 2. Altar.
• 3. Cella.
• 4. Sacristan's room.
• I. Temple of Isis.
• 1. Colonnade.
• 2. Cella.
• 3. Shrine of Harpocrates.
• 4. Purgatorium.
• 5. Hall of initiation.
• 6. Hall of the Mysteries.
• 7. Priest's residence.
• K. City Wall.
• L. Foundations of Steps.

Chapter XX. General View of the Public Buildings Near the Stabian Gate—The Forum Triangulare and the Doric Temple

The end of the old lava stream on which Pompeii lay runs off into two points; in the depression between them, as we have seen, was the Stabian Gate. On the edge of the spur at the left a temple of the Doric style was built in very early times. The descent here, toward the southwest, is so sharp and the height so great that it was not necessary to add a wall at the top as a means of defence.

The sides of the temple followed in general the direction of the edge of the cliff. Raised upon a high foundation, it not only dominated the plain below but was visible also from the greater part of the city; glistening in the sun, it became a landmark for mariners far out at sea, who from a distance could offer greetings to the gods there enshrined.

In the second century B.C. the northwest corner of the depression back of the Stabian Gate was selected as the site for a large theatre (E on Plan III); previously, we may suppose, temporary wooden structures had answered the purpose. This location was chosen, in accordance with the Greek custom, because the places for the greater part of the seats for the spectators could be easily cut in the natural slope, which here had the shape of half a shallow saucer; a superstructure was necessary only for the upper rows of seats. The architect, if not a Greek, was certainly of Greek training.

South of the theatre an extensive colonnade (G) was erected. It was intended as a shelter for theatre-goers, but was afterwards turned into barracks for gladiators.

With a similar purpose, a colonnade of the Doric order was built along two sides of the triangular level space about the Greek temple (1). In front of the north end, where the two arms of the colonnade meet, a high portico of the Ionic order was erected (A) facing the street, thus forming a monumental entrance to the Theatre. The southwest side of the area was left unobstructed, and the place, by reason of its shape, is called the Forum Triangulare, 'Three-cornered Forum.'

In connection with the building of the Theatre land had been expropriated and cleared as far north as the first east and west street. Here, near the entrance of the Forum Triangulare, a Palaestra for gymnastic exercises (C) was built, with funds left for public purposes by a benevolent citizen. Later, probably not before the time of the Roman colony, a temple of Isis (I) was erected, adjoining the Theatre on the northeast.

Early in the Roman Period, not long after 80 B.C., a small roofed theatre (F) was constructed east of the stage of the Large Theatre and of the area at the rear.

Stabian Street north and south of the Small Theatre was lined with private houses. At the northeast corner of the block was a temple of Zeus Milichius (H), seemingly of early date, but entirely rebuilt about the time that the Small Theatre was erected.

Part of the columns and entablature belonging to the beautiful portico at the entrance of the Forum Triangulare have been set up again and are seen in our illustration (Fig. 60). The brackets projecting from the rear wall were probably designed for statuettes or vases. When the wall was rebuilt, after the earthquake of 63, a change was made in at least one particular. The small doorway at the middle, now at right angles with the wall, formerly passed obliquely through it, opening toward the end of the promenade which was laid out in front of the colonnade at the left. This promenade (2 on Plan III) was separated from the area of the Forum by a low wall; on sunny winter days it must have been the most frequented walk in the city.

Besides the small doorway, which was closed by a latticed gate hung from a wooden jamb, there was at the left a massive double door with strong bolts, inside of which was still a second door. It seems odd that one entrance should be so securely closed, while the fastenings of the other were so light. Ordinarily, the large doors must have been kept shut, while the small entrance was left open for everyday use; but when there was to be a play in the Theatre, and the magistrate who gave the entertainment proceeded from the Forum with a retinue in festal attire, then the great doors were swung back in honor of the occasion, and the opening of them formed part of an impressive ceremony.

The colonnade within contained ninety-five Doric columns. It was only one story in height, and the columns for this reason are more slender than those of the same order in the Forum. The entablature varies from the Doric type only in respect to the architrave, which consists of two bands. The continuation of the colonnade along the southwest side was prevented by the nearness of the temple to the edge of the cliff. Here the magnificent view over the plain to the mountains and across the Bay was unimpeded; for the enjoyment of it, two duumvirs in the early years of the Empire built near the west corner of the temple a semicircular stone seat, schola (4 on Plan III), like those found in connection with tombs. On the back they placed a sundial with the inscription: L. Sepunius L. f. Sandilianus, M. Herennius A. f. Epidianus duo vir[i] i. d. scol[am] et horol[ogium] d. s. p. f. c. (for de sua pecunia faciundum curarunt),—'Lucius Sepunius Sandilianus the son of Lucius, and Marcus Herennius Epidianus the son of Aulus, duumvirs with judiciary authority, caused the seat and the sundial to be made at their own expense.' The same duumvirs, as we have seen, set up a sundial in the court of the temple of Apollo.

At the foot of the middle column at the north end of the colonnade is a broad basin of Carrara marble resting on a finely proportioned, fluted standard; a jet of water fell into it from the end of a pipe which passed through the column above. A little further forward is a pedestal (8) veneered with marble on which is the inscription: M. Claudio C. f. Marcello patrono,—'To Marcus Claudius Marcellus, the son of Gaius, patron.' Here stood a statue of Marcellus, the nephew of Augustus, a portrait statue of whom we have already found in the imperial chapel of the Macellum. The reason why he was honored with more than one statue is clear from the inscription before us: he was patron of the colony.

The surface of the Forum Triangulare was considerably higher than the top of the city wall (K) south of the barracks of the Gladiators. It seems likely that a flight of steps led down to the wall between the barracks and the long colonnade, as seen in Weichardt's restoration (Plate III). This explanation accounts for the existence of certain remains of walls (L on the plan), the purpose of which is otherwise obscure.

Of the ancient Doric temple but little remains: only the foundation, which was high for a Greek temple, with a flight of steps in front; two stumps of columns and traces of a third; four capitals, and portions of the right wall of the cella. The plan of the cella, however, has been traced by means of excavations.

The foundation, unlike the podiums of the other temples at Pompeii, was built up in a series of broad, high steps. The number of the columns, eleven on the sides and seven in front, as in the temple of Zeus at Agrigentum, has been calculated from the distances between the stumps. Of those in front two were opposite the corners of the cella, where the edges of the flight of steps come to the stylobate (Fig. 62). Only a narrow space was needed between the walls of the cella and the surrounding columns, but in order to make the outward appearance more imposing the columns were set as far out as they would have been if a second series had been placed within, between them and the cella; according to the classification of Vitruvius the temple was a pseudodipteral. On account of the interval thus afforded between the entrance of the cella and the columns in front (a little over sixteen feet), it was thought proper to leave the number of columns uneven, so that one stood over against the middle of the doorway.

The temple was of mixed construction, part stone and part wood. The entablature must have been of stone, otherwise the intercolumniations would not have been so narrow. The space between the entablature and the cella, however, could only have been bridged by means of timbers. The stone used was the gray tufa, but the capitals were of the more durable Sarno limestone. The surface was coated with stucco, which in part at least was painted in bright colors. The projecting edge of the eaves trough, also covered with stucco, was painted red, yellow, and black, and ornamented with waterspouts in the shape of lions' heads alternating with rosettes.

The proportions of the columns (lower diameter 6.07 feet, upper diameter 3.12 feet) with their flaring capitals, and the narrow intercolumniations (Fig. 63), point to an early period; the archaic character of the capitals will be more fully appreciated if they are compared with those of the colonnade of the Forum Triangulare. In respect to age this temple ranks with the oldest of those at Selinunto; it must have been built in the sixth century B.C.

The cella, as our plan shows, was divided into two chambers. In the inner chamber (3) a large rectangular flag is embedded in the floor at one side so that a second (indicated on the plan by dotted lines) must have been near it; the supports of a stone table in front of the image of the divinity perhaps rested on them. On the long pedestal at the right of the cella stood a deer of terra cotta, above life size, of which some fragments have been found.

Directly in front of the temple, at the foot of the steps, we find a monument of an altogether unusual character. The respect with which it was regarded is evidenced by its location in the place ordinarily occupied by the principal altar. It consists of a small enclosure of peculiar shape, fenced in by an outer wall and a low inner wall. To judge from its form, it must have been a place of burial; we shall find a tomb later the plan of which is quite similar (Plan V, right side, 2), and it is said that human bones were found here. These walls are not earlier than the imperial period, but they must have taken the place of an older structure; for the altars were evidently put over near the east corner of the temple (6 on the plan), because the place which they would naturally have had was already occupied. For a time—how long it would be idle to conjecture—this was beyond doubt the most important temple of the city; the placing of the tomb in the most sacred spot in front of it suggests that the founder or founders of the city may have been buried here, and afterwards revered as heroes.

Instead of a single altar in front of the temple there are three, all made of blocks of tufa, two of them resting on a single foundation; the third is built on the ground without a foundation, and is of later date. One altar is larger than the other two, and its surface is divided into three parts.

Not far from the altars are the remains of a small round structure (7 on the plan, shown in Fig. 61) about twelve feet in diameter. The roof, supported by eight Doric columns, was over the mouth of a well, which had been driven down through the old lava bed till living water was found for cleaning the temple and for religious rites. According to the Oscan inscription on the architrave the well house was built by N. Trebius, chief administrative officer (meddix tuticus) of the city.

It is impossible to determine what divinities were worshipped here. The placing of two altars together, one being divided into three parts, and the addition of a third, seem to imply that three divinities received worship in common, and that besides these two other gods were honored in this sanctuary. The terra cotta deer furnishes a clew, but is not decisive evidence; deer were sacred to several divinities, among others to Apollo and Artemis. A marble torso of about half life size, found on the declivity south of the temple, has been identified with some degree of probability as belonging to a statue of Apollo. Perhaps originally Apollo and Artemis were honored here, and with them Leto; but in an Oscan inscription discovered in 1897 the temple seems to be designated as belonging to Minerva (p. 240), who was perhaps also worshipped with them.

At the time of the eruption the temple was in ruins. It may have been in this condition only since the earthquake of 63, or for a longer time. That the worship might not be abandoned a poor shrine was built among the ruins, smaller than the old cella and a little further to the right; a drum of a column, set up on the flag in the floor of the cella, served as a pedestal for the image of the divinity.

Chapter XXI. The Large Theatre

Performances upon the stage were first given in Rome in the year 364 B.C.; a pestilence was raging, and the Romans thought to appease the gods by a new kind of celebration in their honor. The performers were brought from Etruria, and the exercises were limited to dancing, with an accompaniment on the flute. There was as yet no Latin drama. The first regular play was presented more than a century later, in 240 B.C., and the playwright was not a Roman but a Greek from Tarentum, Livius Andronicus, who translated both tragedies and comedies from his native tongue. The next dramatist was a Campanian, Gnaeus Naevius. The building of a theatre was not yet thought of; a temporary wooden platform was erected for the actors, and the spectators spread themselves out on the green slope of a hillside facing it.

When the censor Cassius Longinus in 154 B.C. commenced the erection of a theatre on the Palatine hill near the temple of Cybele, at whose festivals plays were given, the ex-consul Scipio Nasica rose in the Senate and in a speech full of feeling warned the Romans not to countenance this foreign amusement, on the ground that it would sap the foundations of the national character. His words produced so deep an impression that the Senate not only voted to pull down the part of the building already erected, and to refuse permission for the erection of similar buildings in the future, but even prohibited altogether the renting of seats at theatrical representations; Romans who wished to see a play must remain standing during a performance, or sit on the ground. Naturally so stringent measures could not long remain in force. Nine years later Mummius, the destroyer of Corinth, presented dramas in connection with his triumph, and put up wooden seats for the spectators. The first stone theatre in Rome was built by Pompey, the rival of Caesar, in 55 B.C. In Pompeii, on the contrary, a permanent theatre had been erected at least a hundred years earlier.

The Oscan culture was so completely merged in that of Rome that our knowledge of it as an independent development is extremely slight; and no information has come down to us regarding the history of the native drama. From literary sources we know only of a crude form of popular comedy in which, as in the Italian Commedia dell' arte, there were stock characters distinguished by their masks,—Maccus a buffoon, Bucco a voracious, talkative lout, Pappus an old man who is always cheated, and Dossennus a knave. The scene of these exhibitions was always Atella, the Gotham of Campania, whence they were called Atellan farces.

The Theatre at Pompeii, however, is a proof that as early as the second century B.C., in at least one Campanian city, dramatic representations of a high order were given. Here, perhaps, as at Athens, they were associated with the worship of Dionysus; for the satyrs were companions of the Wine-god, and the head of a satyr, carved in tufa, still projects from the keystone of the arch at the outer end of one of the vaulted passages leading to the orchestra. Greek verse, and native verse modelled after the Greek, must have gained a hearing at Pompeii, and the works of Oscan poets—not a line of which has come down to us—must have stirred the hearts of the people long before Livius Andronicus, and Naevius, who brought inspiration from his Campanian home, produced their dramas at Rome.

In describing the Theatre it will be best to take up in order the three main divisions common to Greek and Roman buildings of this class: the cavea, the large outer part shaped somewhat like half a funnel, containing seats for spectators; the orchestra, the small semicircular portion enclosed by the cavea, with an entrance, parodos, on either side; and the stage, facing the orchestra and the cavea. The accompanying illustrations give a plan (Fig. 64), and a view of the ruins in their present condition (Fig. 65); the exterior as seen from the south is shown in Fig. 61.

The cavea afforded seats for about five thousand persons. The greater part of it, from the orchestra to the vaulted corridor under the summa cavea (Fig. 64, 6), lies on the slope of the hill; the floor of the corridor is on a level with the Forum Triangulare.

The seats are arranged in three semicircular sections. The lowest, ima cavea (4), next to the orchestra, contains four broad ledges on which, as well as in the orchestra itself, the members of the city council, the decurions, could place their chairs, the 'seats of double width.'

The middle section, media cavea (5), was much deeper, extending from the ima cavea to the vaulted corridor. It contained twenty rows of marble seats arranged like steps, of which only a small portion is preserved. On a part of one of these, individual places, a little less than 16 inches wide, are marked off by vertical lines in front, and numbered; they probably belonged to some corporation which found it necessary, in order to avoid confusion, to assign places to its members by number. In Rome the fourteen rows nearest the bottom were reserved for the knights. Whether a similar arrangement prevailed in the municipalities and the colonies is not known, but if so the number reserved here must have been smaller.

The upper section, summa cavea (6), supported by the vault over the corridor, was too narrow to have contained more than four rows of seats.

The ima cavea was entered from the orchestra. The media cavea could be entered on the lower side from the passage (diazoma, praecinctio) between it and the ima cavea, which at the ends was connected by short flights of steps with the parodoi leading outside; on the upper side six doors opened into the media cavea from the corridor, from which flights of steps descended dividing the seats into five wedgelike blocks, cunei, with a small oblong block in addition on either side near the end of the stage.

The corridor was accessible by four doors, one from the Forum Triangulare, another from the open space between this and the rounded exterior of the Theatre, a third at the end of an alley east of the temple of Isis, and a fourth opening from a steep passage leading up from Stabian Street. The summa cavea, which for convenience we may call the gallery, was entered by several doors (the exact number is uncertain) from a narrow vaulted passage along the outside. This passage, however, did not extend the whole length of the gallery, but stopped where the outer wall of the Theatre joined that of the Forum Triangulare. Here a stairway led to it; there was a second stairway at the rear of the Palaestra, and a third leading from the alley east of the temple of Isis; the three are shown on Plan III. At the edge of the Forum Triangulare, a narrow stairway, built in the thick wall, led directly to the gallery (Fig. 64).

The outer wall back of the gallery rose to a considerable height above the last row of seats. On the inside near the top were projecting blocks of basalt (seen in Fig. 65), containing round holes in which strong wooden masts were set; from these the great awning, velum, was stretched over the cavea and orchestra to the roof of the stage, protecting the spectators from the sun. This sort of covering for the theatre was a Campanian invention, and here, where the cavea opened toward the south, was especially necessary. In the Coliseum, and the well preserved theatre at Orange, the arrangements for fastening the masts are on the outside of the wall. The upper part of the wall of our Theatre has been rebuilt in modern times, and it has been doubted whether the blocks of basalt and the pieces of cornice above with corresponding incisions are ancient; the latter surely are not modern, and their slightly wedged shape shows that from the beginning they must have been on the inside of the wall.

Near the front of the orchestra at the right and the left were small rectangular platforms; one is shown in Fig. 65. They were supported by the vaults over the entrances (7, 7), and were reached by small stairways near the ends of the stage. They were called tribunals, and here, as in Rome, were no doubt reserved for the seats of those to whom special honor was paid. One was set aside for the use of the magistrate who gave the play; in Rome the vestal virgins, in accordance with a decree of Augustus, occupied the other, and in Pompeii their place was very likely taken by the city priestesses.

The shape of the orchestra is that of a semicircle enlarged in the direction of tangents at right angles with the diameter; a complete circle could be inscribed in the space. It was probably never used for a chorus, but was occupied by the seats of prominent spectators, particularly the city officials and their friends. It was entered by means of the vaulted passages under the tribunals.

The steps leading from the orchestra upon the stage (Fig. 65) can be explained only on the supposition that even in the Roman period, to which the steps in their present form belong, actors who took the part of persons arriving from distant places came upon the stage through the orchestra. In the niches in front of the stage, as we learn from a wall painting, sat those charged with the maintenance of order in the Theatre, two perhaps in the rectangular niches, or one in the semicircular niche in the middle.

The stage is long and narrow, measuring 120 by 24 Oscan feet; the floor is a little more than three feet above the level of the orchestra. The rear wall, as in ancient theatres generally, was built to represent the front of a palace, entered by three doors, and adorned with columns and niches for statues. In each of the short sections of wall at the ends of the stage is a broad doorway, extending across almost the entire space. The long narrow room behind the stage, used as a dressing room (postscaenium), was entered by a door at the rear, which was reached by an inclined approach. No trace of the roof of the stage remains, but from the better preserved theatres at Orange, in the south of France, and at Aspendus, in Asia Minor, we infer that it sloped back toward the rear wall. The floor was of wood.

The room underneath the stage was divided into several parts. Between the front wall and that just back of it (seen in Fig. 65) was the place for the curtain, which, as in Roman theatres, was let down at the beginning of the play, and raised at the end. The space between the parallel walls must have been covered, leaving only a narrow slit for the curtain; otherwise it would not have been easy to go upon the stage from the steps in the orchestra.

Underneath the place for the curtain is a low passage, in the vaulted roof of which are two rows of holes, a little more than a foot square, cut in blocks of basalt, and evidently designed to hold upright timbers. This passage has in recent years been entirely cleared. In the floor, directly under the openings in the vaulted roof and corresponding with them, were square holes. In those nearer the front of the stage were remains of timbers and of square pieces of iron fitted to the ends of these, a larger and a smaller piece for each hole. It seems likely that, as Mazois suggested, hollow upright beams were set in the holes, and in them smaller hollow beams were placed, in which were still smaller poles or iron rods; by the sliding of these up and down, the long horizontal pole on which the curtain was hung could be raised or lowered. The use of the inner row of holes has not been satisfactorily explained.

The room under the right of the stage is so low, about three feet, that it could not have been available for any purpose, but that at the left is higher, and was used for theatrical machinery, the scanty remains of which arouse our curiosity without satisfying it. In the floor are set two oblong blocks of limestone, about four feet in length. Each has in its upper surface a round hole, between two and three inches deep, with an iron socket, in which there are still remains of an iron cap once fitted to the lower end of a vertical wooden shaft that turned in it; the upper end of the shaft—assuming that the blocks are in their original position—must have revolved in a socket fixed in one of the joists of the stage floor. There is besides on the upper surface of each block a rectangular depression, and on either side a shallow incision; the purpose is altogether obscure. A third stone, similar to these two, is set in the north wall of the same room, and opposite it was fitted another; here, then, a horizontal shaft turned; there was a similar pair of stones at the left end of the place for the curtain. These arrangements suggest the crane-like machine by which floating figures were brought upon the stage, as Medea in the play of Euripides riding in a chariot drawn by dragons, and the familiar deus ex machina; such machinery, according to Pollux (Onomast. IV. 128), was placed on the left side of the stage.

When plays were presented, the front of the palace at the back of the stage was concealed by painted scenery. As several pieces might be produced one after the other, it was necessary to arrange for the shifting of scenes. This was accomplished by drawing one set of decorations off to the sides, thus bringing the next set into view (scaena ductilis); the ends were changed by turning the periactoi, huge three-sided prisms, each side of which was suited to a different scene (scaena versilis). In spite of the clumsiness of the arrangements, as contrasted with those of the best modern theatres, the mounting of plays was artistic and impressive, and compares favorably with that of Shakespeare's time.

The only allusions to matters connected with theatrical representations at Pompeii are in inscriptions relating to actors, as Sorex (p. 176). A number of graffiti scratched on walls in various parts of the city mention an Actius Anicetus, whose name is given in full in an inscription found at Puteoli, C. Ummidius Actius Anicetus. He seems to have been a very popular actor of pantomime, at the head of a troupe. One of the inscriptions reads: Acti, a[mor] populi, cito redi,—'Actius, darling of the people, come back quickly!'

The theatre in antiquity was by no means reserved for scenic representations alone. It was a convenient place for bringing the people together, and was used for public gatherings of the most varied character. In the theatre at Tarentum the memorable assembly met which heaped insults upon the Roman ambassadors and precipitated war with Rome. At Pergamos King Mithridates was to be crowned in the theatre by a descending Victory, but by some mishap the wreath fell to the floor, an omen of evil. When the Ephesians, stirred up by Demetrius the silversmith, wished to take measures against Paul and his companions, "They rushed with one accord into the theatre." On such occasions we may suppose that the front of the palace at the rear of the stage served as a background without other decoration. This use of the theatre for general purposes was a Greek rather than a Roman custom, but the theatre itself in Italy was an importation from Greece; and we may suppose that the theatre at Pompeii was on more than one occasion the scene of notable demonstrations.

Our Theatre, as is evident from the character of the construction, in its original form belonged to the Tufa Period, but was rebuilt in Roman times. Some particulars in regard to the rebuilding are given in an inscription: M. M. Holconii Rufus et Celer cryptam, tribunalia, theatrum,—'Marcus Holconius Rufus and Marcus Holconius Celer (built) the crypt, the tribunals, and the part designed for spectators,' that is, the vaulted corridor under the gallery, the platforms over the entrances to the orchestra, and the cavea.

The two Holconii lived in the time of Augustus. The elder, Rufus, was duumvir for the fourth term in 3-2 B.C. The work on the Theatre was probably done about that time; for soon afterwards, before his fifth duumvirate, a statue in his honor was erected in the Theatre, as we learn from an inscription. Later, in 13-14 A.D., the younger Holconius also, when he had been chosen quinquennial duumvir, was honored with a statue. The masonry of the corridor and of the exterior arches supporting it, as well as of the tribunals, well agrees with that in vogue in the Augustan Age; we find brick-shaped blocks of tufa and reticulate work. The marble seats in the cavea may be assigned to the same period; in the original structure the benches must have been of tufa. About the same time the present wall at the back of the stage was built, in the place of an older and much simpler façade, but not by the Holconii; if this also had been rebuilt by them, it would have been mentioned in the inscription.

Possibly the tribunals were an addition due to the Holconii. The corridor under the gallery, however, must have been built in the place of an earlier corridor, for the piers on the outside rest on foundations similar in character to the oldest parts of the building. As these piers served no other purpose than to sustain the passage opening into the section of seats above the corridor, this must have formed a part of the original plan.

The statues of both the Holconii probably stood in niches in the wall at the back of the stage. Holconius Rufus was further honored with a monument of some sort in the cavea. The lowest seat of the media cavea had at the middle, directly opposite the stage, a double width for a distance of about five feet, gained by removing a portion of the next seat above. Here was an inscription in bronze letters: M. Holconio M. f. Rufo, II. v. i. d. quinquiens, iter[um] quinq[uennali], trib[uno] mil[itum] a p[opulo], flamini Aug[usti], patr[ono] colo[niae], d[ecurionum] d[ecreto],—'[Dedicated] in accordance with a decree of the city council to Marcus Holconius Rufus the son of Marcus, five times duumvir with judiciary authority, twice quinquennial duumvir, military tribune by the choice of the people, priest of Augustus, and patron of the colony.' The object placed here was of bronze, and was made secure by fastenings set in twelve holes; what it was is altogether uncertain. The ancients had the custom of conferring lasting honor upon a deserving man after death by placing in the theatre a seat inscribed with his name. We should be glad to believe that a 'seat of double width,' bisellium, the use of which was allowed to members of the city council, was placed here, but the arrangement of the twelve holes is difficult to reconcile with this explanation.

The architect employed by the Holconii, a freedman, was not honored with a statue, but his name was transmitted to posterity in an inscription placed in the outer wall near the east entrance to the orchestra: M. Artorius M. l[ibertus] Primus, architectus,—'Marcus Artorius Primus, freedman of Marcus, architect.'

The plan of the Theatre could not have been taken from a Roman model; it conforms, as we should have expected, to the Greek type. In the Roman theatre the orchestra was in the form of a semicircle, of which the diameter was represented by the stage. In Greek theatres, on the contrary, the stage according to Vitruvius was laid out on one side of a square inscribed in the circle of the orchestra; the orchestra, as shown by existing remains, in most cases was either a complete circle or was so extended by tangents at the sides that a circle could be inscribed in it. The latter is the case in our Theatre, of which the orchestra has essentially the same form as that of the theatre of Dionysus at Athens.

The stage falls under the limit of height,—five feet,—allowed by Vitruvius for the stage of the Roman theatre, not to mention the height of ten to twelve feet specified for that of the Greek type. The reason assigned for the moderate elevation of the Roman stage is that the orchestra was occupied by the seats of senators, whose view would be obstructed if more than a moderate elevation should be given to the front of the stage. The orchestra of our Theatre was apparently from the beginning intended for the use of spectators, not for a chorus.

The conclusions reached by Dr. William Doerpfeld in regard to the stage of the Greek theatre, if borne out by the facts, would necessitate a complete abandonment of previous views on the subject. His theory, in brief, is, that not only the chorus but also the actors went through their parts not on the stage but in the orchestra, which had the form of a circle, and that what we are accustomed to consider the front wall of the stage was rather the rear wall of the platform in the orchestra on which the actors and chorus stood, this wall being laid out on a tangent of the circle and having a height of twelve feet, as we may understand from Vitruvius and from the remains of the theatre at Epidaurus.

The main reasons advanced in support of this theory are that the platform currently regarded as the stage, which according to Vitruvius and the existing remains was hardly more than ten feet wide, must have been too narrow to allow free movement on the part of the actors, and that the height above the orchestra was too great to admit of the close relation between the actors and the chorus, of which there is abundant evidence in the extant dramas. According to Dr. Doerpfeld, the stage came into existence in Italy first, and in the Roman period, when there was no longer any chorus; a platform five feet high was built for the actors, extending to the middle of the orchestra, so that this now took the form of a semicircle and could be used for the seats of spectators.

To undertake the examination of Dr. Doerpfeld's theory in detail would not be pertinent here; yet we cannot bring our description of the Theatre at Pompeii to a close without inquiring whether this structure, which is perhaps a century older than the oldest Roman theatre, shows any trace of the arrangement which the theory assumes. Unfortunately, the evidence is not conclusive for either a negative or an affirmative answer. Just as this second edition goes to press a joint investigation of the whole matter has been undertaken by the author and Dr. Doerpfeld, whose work is being facilitated by excavations. It is yet too early to anticipate the conclusions to which the evidence thus gained will lead; we may hazard a tentative statement in regard to only one or two points.

It now appears probable that the present stage was not constructed at the same time with the other parts of the Theatre, but that it is a later addition. There is no trace of an earlier stage, and there is nothing to indicate that this was built against the part of the structure designed for the spectators. We might assume that this earlier stage was placed at a slight distance from the other parts of the building, and that the entrances of the orchestra, the parodoi, lay between, were it not for the fact that the outer doorways of the present parodoi—notably that on the west side with the head of a satyr on the keystone—unquestionably belong to the original structure; and we should not be warranted in assuming two entrances to the orchestra on each side. At the same time it is evident that the construction of the tribunalia must have involved a rebuilding of this part of the Theatre, and it is possible that originally passages led from the outer doors of the present parodoi, not to the orchestra, but to the ranges of seats. In that case, assuming that the stage was slightly removed from the rest of the structure, we may freely grant that the acting may have gone on in front of it rather than upon it, and that this may have been a Greek theatre according to Dr. Doerpfeld's view. But we are here dealing only with possibilities; it is to be hoped that further investigation will bring to light data for a final solution of the problem.

In the open space between the Theatre, the Forum Triangulare, and the Palaestra there is a deep reservoir for water (D), square on the outside and round within. It was evidently used for the sprinklings, sparsiones, with saffron-colored water, by which on summer days the heat of the Theatre was mollified. That such sprinklings were in vogue in Pompeii is known from announcements of gladiatorial combats, painted on walls, in which they are advertised together with an awning as part of the attraction,—sparsiones, vela erunt.

Chapter XXII. The Small Theatre

The names of the builders of the Small Theatre are known from an inscription which is found in duplicate in different parts of the building: C. Quinctius C. f. Valg[us], M. Porcius M. f. duovir[i] dec[urionum] decr[eto] theatrum tectum fac[iundum] locar[unt] eidemq[ue] prob[arunt],—'Gaius Quinctius Valgus the son of Gaius and Marcus Porcius the son of Marcus, duumvirs, in accordance with a decree of the city council let the contract for building the covered theatre, and approved the work.' Later the same officials, when, after the customary interval, they had been elected quinquennial duumvirs, built the Amphitheatre 'at their own expense' (p. 212).

When two magistrates set up an inscription in duplicate, ordinarily the name of one appears first in one copy, while that of the second is put first in the other. In all four inscriptions, however, two at the Small Theatre and two at the Amphitheatre, Valgus has the first place. The reason in the case of the Amphitheatre is not far to seek: Valgus was the man of means, who furnished the money for the building, but allowed his colleague and friend to share in the honor. We may also believe that, while the Small Theatre was erected 'in accordance with a decree of the city council,' and hence presumably at public expense, a part of the funds was contributed by Valgus, who on this account received honor above his less opulent colleague.

The son-in-law of this Valgus, Publius Servilius Rullus, has been undeservedly immortalized by a speech of Cicero in opposition to a bill brought forward by him in regard to the division of the public lands. From the same oration we learn that Valgus, a man without scruples, had taken advantage of the reign of terror instituted by Sulla to acquire vast wealth, particularly in the way of landed property. Among his estates was one in the country of the Hirpini, near the city of Aeclanum (south of Beneventum), which made him its patron and for which, as shown by an inscription, he repaired the walls destroyed in the Civil War. He was undoubtedly one of the leading men in the colony founded by Sulla at Pompeii, and very likely sought by large public benefactions to cast his former life into oblivion. The Small Theatre must have been built in the early years of the Roman colony, not long after 80 B.C.

A covered auditorium in the immediate vicinity of a large unroofed theatre was not uncommon. About the time of the destruction of Pompeii the poet Statius, praising the magnificence of his native city Naples, speaks of 'twin theatres in a single structure, one open and one roofed,'—geminam molem nudi tectique theatri. Our only clew to the special use of such a building, however, is derived from the one erected at Athens by Herodes Atticus, in the reign of Hadrian. This was called an Odeum, that is, according to the derivation of the word, a room for singing; musical entertainments were held there, especially, we may assume, those musical contests which had so important a place in ancient festivals. The purpose of the roof was doubtless to add to the acoustic effect.

The plan of the Large Theatre has been discussed at so great length that a few words will suffice in relation to that of the smaller structure (Fig. 66). That it might be possible to cover the enclosed space with a roof, the upper rows of seats were reduced in length, and the whole building—cavea, orchestra, and stage—was brought into an oblong shape; only the orchestra and the lower rows of seats in the cavea form a complete semicircle. The pyramidal roof was supported by a wall on all four sides; in the upper part of the wall, between the roof and the highest row of seats, there were probably windows.

The seating capacity of the building was about fifteen hundred. The lowest section of the cavea, as in the Large Theatre, consisted of four low, broad ledges on which the chairs of the decurions could be placed. Above these is a parapet, behind which is a passage accessible at either end by semicircular steps. The broad range of seats above was divided into five wedge-shaped blocks by flights of steps; only two of these, however, extended as far as the passage running along the upper side, which could be reached from the alley at the rear of the building by means of stairways connecting with outside doors.

The seats were of masonry capped with slabs of tufa about seven inches thick. They had depressions in the side and in the top, as may be seen in the accompanying section (Fig. 68). They were thus made somewhat more comfortable, the person in front being less subject to disturbance from the feet of one sitting on the next seat behind; a saving of room was also effected—an important consideration in the construction of a small auditorium.

The tribunals (3, 3) differed from those in the Large Theatre in that they were shut off entirely from the seats of the cavea by a sharply inclined wall, and were entered only from the stage, by means of narrow stairways; in this way the exclusive character of the seats was made still more prominent. Besides the platform itself, measuring only about 11 by 9 feet, three seats above each tribunal were set off with it by the same division wall and were available for the occupants.

The sloping wall between the tribunal and the cavea on each side ends with a kneeling Atlas (Fig. 69); large vases probably stood on the two brackets supported by these figures. The end of the parapet on either side is embellished with a lion's foot of tufa (Fig. 70). These rather coarse sculptures illustrate the character of the art that was brought to Pompeii by the Roman colony. The workmanship is by no means fine, yet the muscles of the figures are well rendered, and the effect is pleasing.

The pavement of the orchestra (seen in Fig. 67) consists of small flags of colored marble. An inscription in bronze letters informs us that it was laid by the duumvir Marcus Oculatius Verus pro ludis, that is instead of the games which he would otherwise have been expected to provide.

At the ends of the stage, as in the case of the Large Theatre, there were two broad entrances. The wall at the rear, which was veneered with marble, had the customary three doors, and in addition two small doors, one near each end. The long dressing room behind the stage had likewise two broad entrances at the ends, besides four at the rear. Apparently the two narrow doors near the ends of the wall at the rear of the stage, and the two doors corresponding with them at the back of the dressing room, were for the use of those who had seats on the tribunals; they could thus enter and leave their places even when the large side doors of both stage and dressing room had been shut—as undoubtedly happened immediately after the procession (pompa) had passed across the stage.

Chapter XXIII. The Theatre Colonnade, Used as Barracks for Gladiators

'Behind the stage,' says Vitruvius (V. ix.), speaking of the arrangements of the theatre, 'colonnades should be built, that shelter may be afforded to spectators in case of rain and a place provided for making preparations for the stage.'

This maxim of ancient architects was applied at Pompeii in a generous way; in connection with the theatres there was an extensive system of colonnades. To understand their use it will be necessary first to view them as they were in the earlier time, and then to take account of later changes.

In the Oscan Period, and afterwards to the end of the Republic, when a performance in the Large Theatre was interrupted by a shower, the spectators in the upper seats could take refuge under the colonnade of the Forum Triangulare; those below found shelter under the rectangular colonnade at the rear, which was obviously built for the purpose, and may be called, by way of distinction, the Theatre Colonnade (Fig. 71). It contained seventy-four Doric columns, and enclosed a large open area. The main entrance (2) was near the northeast corner. The entrance hall on the side of the colonnade was supported by three Ionic columns. It was connected at the north end with a short colonnade on the east side of the area back of the stage of the Theatre; this led to the large door at the east end of the stage and the corresponding parodos of the orchestra; the wall at 4 on our plan is a later addition. The Theatre Colonnade must have been used also as a promenade on days when there was no performance; it was connected by a broad passage (1) with Stabian Street.

This colonnade seems too far away to have served as a place for making preparations for the stage; another was erected for that purpose. At the northwest corner a broad stairway leads down from the Forum Triangulare (5; cf. Fig. 65); from the foot a small and inconvenient flight of steps leads into the area at the rear of the stage. In a line with the stairway is a series of small rooms opening toward the south. These do not belong to the original structure. In their place there was once a colonnade, which faced the north and connected the large stairway with the short colonnade, the remains of which are still to be seen on the east side of the area; the back of it was at the same time the back of the north division of the Theatre Colonnade. There was thus a covered passage extending from the foot of the stairway along two sides of the area to the east entrance of the stage and of the orchestra, which would answer very well to the second part of Vitruvius's dictum; but it had also another important use.

The portico of the Forum Triangulare, as we have seen, was at the same time the monumental entrance of the Theatre, and the large doorway at the left was used only for the ceremonious admission of the city officials, who with their retinue formed a procession in the Forum and wended their way hither in festal attire in order to open the performance—a formality that may be compared with the parade with which the Roman games were opened at Rome.

The route of such a procession, after entering the Forum Triangulare, is now clear. It passed along under the colonnade adjoining the Theatre, beyond the entrances to the upper portion of the cavea; turned and descended the broad stairway (5), proceeded under the colonnade along the south and east sides of the area behind the stage, and finally came upon the stage through the wide doorway at the east end. It was indeed possible to pass beyond the stage entrance and proceed through the parodos directly to the seats of the orchestra and the lowest section of the cavea; but it is more in accordance with the fondness of the ancients for display to suppose that the procession moved across the stage, receiving as it passed the plaudits of the great audience, and emerged from the entrance opposite that by which it came in, disbanding in the court, whence the members could go to their respective seats. We need not here raise the question whether the procession passed upon the stage behind the triangular side screens (periactoi), or whether these were set in place only after it had already passed.

When the colonnade on the south side of the court had been replaced by rooms, and the Theatre Colonnade itself had been transformed into barracks, this route of the processions was blocked. They could still pass down the street in front of the temple of Isis, turn into Stabian Street, and reach the stage through the passage at the rear of the Small Theatre; but it does not seem probable that they followed this course, for the reason that there are three large stepping stones in the street before one comes to the entrance of the passage; these would have proved a serious obstruction, and would undoubtedly have been removed had the processions gone this way.

We may rather believe that before the usual route was closed the processions themselves had been given up. They were still in vogue, however, when the Small Theatre was built; otherwise the purpose of the wide entrances at the ends of the stage and of the room back of it is not clear. Moreover the sidewalk in front of the Small Theatre, on Stabian Street, is of an altogether unusual width, and was apparently covered by a portico. We infer that the procession to this theatre entered at the west end of the stage, and passed out at the east end; since it could not disperse on the street, it would turn where the sidewalk was broadest, go back through the room at the rear of the stage into the court, and there disband.

The discontinuance of the processions must then be assigned to the period between the building of the Small Theatre and the changing over of the Theatre Colonnade into barracks, which, to judge from the masonry and the remains of the decoration, did not take place before the time of Nero. The processions were abandoned either in the troubled period of the Civil Wars, or in the early years of the Empire; if in the latter period, their discontinuance may have been due to legislation connected with the reorganization of the Empire under Augustus, or to the overshadowing of them by more imposing ceremonies introduced in connection with the religious festivals.

Our information in regard to the later use of the Theatre Colonnade is indeed meagre; not a single inscription bearing upon it has been found. Yet when we take into account the changes that were made in it, and the objects found there, the supposition that it was turned into barracks for gladiators in the time of the Early Empire, and so used till the destruction of the city, is seen to harmonize with almost all the facts.

First, rooms were built on all sides behind the colonnade; on the north side they took the place of the south arm of the colonnade in the area back of the stage. They were in two series, one above the other; the upper rooms were entered from a low wooden gallery accessible by three stairways. They could not have been intended for shops; they were too small, measuring on the average hardly more than twelve feet square, and the doors were too narrow. There were no doors opening from one room into the other. Both lower and upper rooms, we may conclude, were used for men's quarters.

In the middle of the south side a large room was left, with the front open toward the area, an exedra (6). On the east side was a still larger room the front of which is divided off by pillars; other rooms open from it, and among them is one (10) with several hearths, evidently intended for a mess kitchen, if the hearths are ancient; they may be modern. Over these rooms was a second story, reached by a broad stairway (9).

The immediate connection of the colonnade with the area behind the stage was now cut off by a wall (4); there was left only a small door in the corner, which could be readily fastened. The entrance from the passage leading to Stabian Street (2) was provided with doors and placed under the control of a guard, for whom a special room was built at one side (3). There was a third entrance, narrow and easily closed, at the northwest corner, where a flight of steps connected the foot of the broad stairway (5) with the landing of the stairs leading to the wooden gallery.

Thus a complete transformation was effected. The promenade for theatre-goers had become barracks, with a great number of cell-like rooms, a mess kitchen, and narrow, guarded entrances. Soldiers, however, could not have been kept here; in the period to which the rebuilding belongs, garrisons were not stationed in the cities of Italy except the Capital. On the other hand, gladiatorial combats in Pompeii were so frequent, and on so large a scale, that a special building for the housing and guarding of gladiators would seem to have been a necessity; such a building would naturally have been erected by the city and placed at the disposal of those who gave the games. As early as the time of Augustus, Aulus Clodius Flaccus brought forward forty pairs of gladiators in a single day, and on various occasions afterwards as many as thirty pairs were engaged. How well the colonnade was now suited for gladiators' quarters may be seen from a glance at the plan. The area would serve as a practice court, the exedra on the south side (6), protected from the sun, as the station for the trainers and lounging room for men awaiting their turn; the mess room would be the large apartment adjoining the kitchen (11), while the quarters of the chief trainer, lanista, and his assistants, would be in the second story, reached by the broad stairway (9).

The small rooms were poorly decorated, in the fourth style. There were better paintings only in the exedra. On the rear wall of this room was the oft repeated group of Mars and Venus; on the side walls, gladiatorial weapons were represented, piled up in heaps, after the manner of trophies, about eight feet high. The reference to the purpose of the building, as in the case of the paintings in the Macellum, is obvious. The columns about the area were originally white; after the rebuilding the unfluted lower part was painted red, the upper part yellow. Four columns, however, two at the middle of the east side, and the two opposite them on the west side, were painted blue, probably to serve as bounds in marking off the area for athletic exercises.

The objects found in the barracks are recorded in the journal of the excavations. They indicate that at the time of the eruption the rooms were occupied. Everything of value was removed from those on the north side by the survivors, but the south half was apparently left undisturbed, and has yielded a rich harvest.

In ten rooms the excavators found a great quantity of weapons of the kinds used by gladiators, including fifteen helmets, a shield, greaves (Fig. 72), several broad belts trimmed with metal, and a couple of armlets; there were more than a hundred scales of horn belonging to a coat of mail, and a half dozen shoulder protectors, galeri, which the net fighter, retiarius, who carried no shield and was armed only with a net and a trident, wore on his left shoulder. The weapons were mostly for defence, but remains of a few offensive weapons were found, as the head of a lance, a sword, and a couple of daggers. In the same room with the daggers and the sword (perhaps 7) were the remains of two wooden chests containing cloth with gold thread; this may have been used in gladiators' costumes.

The helmets are characteristic (Fig. 73). They are furnished with a visor, and part of them have a broad rim, richly ornamented with reliefs; their shape corresponds exactly with that of the helmets seen in paintings and reliefs representing gladiatorial combats. The shield, which is round and only about sixteen inches in diameter, would have been quite useless in military service. In a room under the stairs the skeleton of a horse was found, with remains of trappings richly mounted with bronze; one class of gladiators, the equites, fought on horseback.

One of the small rooms on the west side (8) was used as a guard room. Here were the stocks, the remains of which are shown in Fig. 74; they were fastened to a board. At one end of the under piece was a lock, by which the bar passed through the rings could be made secure. The men confined had the choice of lying down or sitting in an uncomfortable position. The four persons whose skeletons were found in this room, however, were not in the stocks at the time of the eruption. That such means of discipline should be employed in controlling gladiators is entirely consistent with ancient methods.

Besides these finds, there were others not so easily explained. In the two rooms in which the spearhead and the other offensive weapons were found, there were eighteen skeletons, among them that of a woman richly adorned with gold jewelry; she had a necklace with emeralds, earrings, and two armbands, besides rings and other ornaments, and in a casket a cameo, the elaborate setting of which is in part preserved. In a room near the southwest corner the bones of a new-born infant were found in an earthen jar. A number of weights also were discovered, and vessels of terra cotta and glass; in three rooms there were more than six dozen small saucers. Were the barracks wholly given up to gladiators at the time of the eruption, or were some other persons allowed to have quarters here, perhaps some of those whose houses had been destroyed by the earthquake of 63 and had not been rebuilt? A certain conclusion cannot be reached.

Chapter XXIV. The Palaestra

The oblong court north of the Large Theatre, between the entrance of the Forum Triangulare and the temple of Isis, is the Palaestra. Originally, the enclosed area was entirely surrounded by a colonnade, with ten columns on the sides and five at each end; but at a comparatively late period, probably after the earthquake of 63, the columns at the east end were removed and the space thus gained was added to the temple of Isis.

A number of the columns on the other three sides are still standing. They are Doric but of slender proportions, the height, 10½ feet, being equal to eight diameters, while the intercolumniations measure about nine feet. It is doubtful whether the columns carried a complete entablature; more likely the roof rested directly on a wooden architrave.

The building clearly dates from the pre-Roman period. The columns are of tufa coated with stucco, the dimensions of the colonnade (90 by 36 Oscan feet) reduce to the early standard of measurement; and an Oscan inscription was found here which says that the building was erected by the Quaestor Vibius Vinicius, with money which Vibius Adiranus had left by will to the Pompeian youth. The translation of the word vereiiai, 'to the youth,' otherwise doubtful, is confirmed by various facts which indicate that the building was intended as a small palaestra or open-air gymnasium for boys.

While the Palaestra had its original length, the entrance, which is now nearer the east end, was at the middle of the north side. Opposite it, near the colonnade on the south side, is a pedestal of tufa, before which stands a small table of the same stone (Fig. 76). The pedestal is reached by narrow steps. Here stood a statue of the patron divinity of the Palaestra. When an athletic contest was held, the wreath intended for the victor was laid on the stone table before the god; after the award had been made, the successful contestant took up the wreath and dedicated it to the divinity by mounting the steps and placing it on the head of the statue. It is evident from the height of the steps that the contestants were boys, not men.

On the pedestal was undoubtedly a statue of Hermes, but not of the type which we have already met with in the court of the temple of Apollo (p. 88), and shall find later in the palaestra of the Stabian Baths (p. 200); a base of this sort can hardly have been intended for a herm. No trace of the missing statue has been discovered.

Another statue stood at the foot of one of the columns on the south side. It is a copy of the doryphorus of Polyclitus, and is now in the Naples Museum (Fig. 77). Though it has been restored, there seems no good reason to believe that the restoration is incorrect, and that the figure is really a Hermes, having originally carried on the left shoulder a herald's staff with entwined snakes, caduceus, instead of a spear. For the adornment of a place devoted to athletic exercises nothing could have been more appropriate than a copy of the doryphorus as an ideal of youthful strength, of harmonious physical development; and the Elder Pliny bears witness (N. H. XXXIV. v. 18), that it was customary to set up such statues in a palaestra. This figure had no pedestal; it stood on the ground, a man among men.

At the west end of the court were dressing rooms where the boys, before exercising, could anoint themselves and afterwards could remove the oil and dirt with the strigil; such a dressing room in connection with a bath was called a destrictarium. Water was brought into the court by a lead pipe, which passed through one of the columns at the right of the entrance and threw a jet either into a basin standing below or into the gutter in front of the colonnade.

It would be of interest to know what athletic exercises were practised in the Palaestra; but apart from the pedestal with its steps and table no characteristic remains were found here. The exercises in the Roman period undoubtedly differed somewhat from those practised at the time when the building was erected, when the Greek system was everywhere in vogue.

Chapter XXV. The Temple of Isis

The loftiest and purest religious conceptions of the ancient Egyptians were embodied in the myth of Isis and Osiris, which in the third millennium B.C. had already become the basis of a firmly established cult. These conceptions approached the monotheistic idea of an omnipresent god, and with them was associated a belief in a blessed immortality. Isis was the goddess of heaven, and Osiris was the Sun-god, her brother and husband, who is slain at evening by his brother Set,—the Greek Typhon,—ruler of darkness. Their child Horus, also called Harpocrates, born after the father's death, is the fresh sun of the new day, the successor and avenger of his father, the conqueror of Set; he becomes a new Osiris, while the father, ever blessed, rules in the realm of the dead, the kingdom of the West. Man, the followers of Isis taught, is an incarnation of deity, whose destiny is also his. He is himself an Osiris, and will enter upon a better state of existence beyond the grave if a favorable judgment is passed upon him in the trial given to the dead.

The worship of Isis, associated with Mysteries from an early period, was reorganized by the first Ptolemy with the help of Manetho, an Egyptian priest, and Timotheus, a Greek skilled in the Eleusinian Mysteries. The purpose of the king was to unite his Egyptian and Greek subjects in one faith, and the effort was more successful than might have been anticipated. In its new Alexandrian form the worship of Isis and Osiris, or Serapis, as the latter divinity was now called, spread, not only over all Egypt, but also over the other countries in the East into which Greek culture had penetrated, and soon made its way to Italy and the West.

Various causes contributed to the rapid extension of the cult. It had the charm of something foreign and full of mystery. Its doctrine, supported by the prestige of immemorial antiquity, successfully opposed the mutually destructive opinions of the philosophers, while at the same time its conception of deity was by no means inconsistent with philosophic thought; and it brought to the initiated that expectation of a future life to which the Eleusinian Mysteries owed their attractive power. The ascetic side of the worship, too, with its fastings and abstinence from the pleasures of sense, that the soul might lose itself in the mystical contemplation of deity, had a fascination for natures that were religiously susceptible; and the celebration of the Mysteries, the representation of the myth of Isis in pantomime with a musical accompaniment, appealed powerfully to the imagination. The cult also possessed elements that brought it nearer to the needs of the multitude. The activities of the Egyptian divinities were not confined to the other world; their help might be sought in the concerns of this life. Thus the chief priest could say to Apuleius that Isis summoned her elect to consecrate themselves to her service only when the term of life allotted to them had really expired, and that she lengthened their tale of years, so that all of life remaining was a direct gift from the hands of the goddess. The priests of Isis were looked upon as experts in astrology, the interpretation of dreams, and the conjuring of spirits.

A college of the Servants of Isis, Pastophori, was founded in Rome in the time of Sulla, about 80 B.C. In vain the authorities tried to drive out the worship of the Egyptian gods. Three times their temple, in the midst of the city, was destroyed by order of the consuls, in 58, 50, and 48 B.C. But after Caesar's death, in 44 B.C., the triumvirs built a temple in honor of Isis and Osiris; and a few decades later, perhaps in the reign of Caligula, their festival was recognized in the public Calendar. In Campania the Alexandrian cult gained a foothold earlier than in Rome. An inscription of the year 105 B.C., found at Puteoli, proves that a temple of Serapis was then standing in that enterprising city, which had close commercial relations with Egypt and the East. Soon after this date the earlier temple of Isis at Pompeii must have been built.

The entrance to the court of the temple (Fig. 78) is from the north. Above the door is an inscription which informs us that after an earthquake (that of the year 63) Numerius Popidius Celsinus, at his own expense, rebuilt the temple of Isis from the foundation, and that in recognition of his generosity, though he was only six years of age, the members of the city council, the decurions, admitted him without cost to their rank: N[umerius] Popidius N[umerii] f[ilius] Celsinus aedem Isidis terrae motu conlapsam a fundamento p[ecunia] s[ua] restituit; hunc decuriones ob liberalitatem, cum esset annorum sexs, ordini suo gratis adlegerunt. The temple evidently belonged to the city; and the places for statues in the court, as the inscriptions show, were assigned by vote of the city council.

Other inscriptions give information in regard to the family of the child Celsinus. His father was Numerius Popidius Ampliatus, his mother Corelia Celsa; a brother bore the same name as the father. The real rebuilders were of course the parents; by associating their munificence with the name of their son, they opened the way for him to the city offices, for which the father, a freedman, was not eligible. Ampliatus perpetuated his own name by setting up a statue of Bacchus in a niche in the outside of the rear wall of the temple (at c on the plan), with the inscription: N. Popidius Ampliatus pater p. s., 'Numerius Popidius Ampliatus the father (set up this statue) at his own expense.' The names of the two sons appear with that of their mother in the mosaic floor of the large room (6) behind the colonnade at the rear.

Though the rebuilding of Celsinus was 'from the foundation,' remains of the old temple were utilized, as shafts of columns and Corinthian capitals coated with white stucco; and the plan of the new building was very nearly the same as that of the old. The stylobate of the colonnade belongs to the earlier structure, but the columns originally stood nearer together, eight instead of seven at the ends, and ten on the sides.

The architectural forms and the workmanship of these remains point to a time just after the founding of the Roman colony; nevertheless the dimensions of the colonnade, approximately fifty by sixty Oscan feet, reduce to the pre-Roman standard of measurement, and the building may have been commenced earlier. In later times the increasing number of the worshippers of Isis made necessary an enlargement of the sanctuary. The two rooms at the west end (5 and 6) were added at the expense of the Palaestra, probably at the time of the rebuilding.

In the middle of the court, which is surrounded by the colonnade, is the temple, consisting of an oblong cella (2), the east side of which is treated as a front, with a portico borne by six columns (1). A pit for the refuse of sacrifices, enclosed by a wall (b) stands in the corner of the court near the entrance from the street; in the opposite corner there is a larger enclosure having the appearance of a small temple (4). Near this are two altars; a third altar stood close to the temple, and there are five others, somewhat smaller, between the columns. On the south side, between the colonnade and the Theatre, is a small area of irregular shape, east of which is a dwelling containing five rooms (7, 8, 9).

The accompanying illustrations show the temple as it is to-day (Fig. 79) and as it was before the eruption (Fig. 80). It has architecturally nothing suggestive of the Egyptian style. Yet the plan presents a marked deviation from ordinary types, as if the builders, erecting an edifice for the worship of foreign gods, strove with set purpose to produce a bizarre effect; at the right and the left of the front of the cella is a large niche, projecting beyond the sides of the portico, and inorganically connected with the main part of the temple by a pilaster. In the ornamentation of this temple, as in that of the temple of Apollo, the simple and chaste forms of the Greek architecture were replaced by gaudy stucco ornaments more in harmony with the prevailing taste.

Besides the broad flight of steps in front, a narrow stairway at the left of the temple led to a side door opening into the cella. A base of masonry about six feet high extends across the rear of the cella, on which were two pedestals of tufa, about sixteen inches square, for the statues of Isis and Osiris. In the two large niches outside other divinities stood, perhaps Anubis and Harpocrates. The latter was apparently worshipped also at the shrine in the wall on the east side of the court (3), facing the doorway of the cella. A painting from this shrine, now in the Naples Museum, represents a statue of Harpocrates of the familiar type—a boy with his finger in his mouth holding a cornucopia, with a lotus blossom resting on his forehead; before him stands a priest in a long white robe, holding a candlestick in each hand, while in the background is a temple surrounded by a colonnade, evidently intended for a free representation of the temple before us. In front of the shrine were the charred remains of a wooden bench.

No statue was found in the cella or in the two niches in front. We may suppose that the images of the four divinities, being of relatively small size, were carried off by the priests at the time of the eruption; had they been removed afterwards, the excavators would have taken also the other objects in the cella used in the services of the temple. Among these were two skulls, probably made use of in the ceremonies attending initiation into the Mysteries, and a marble hand, about four inches long, but whether a right or a left hand, the journal of the excavations does not say. A left hand was carried in the procession in honor of Isis, described by Apuleius; as the weaker of the two, and so less ready to do evil, it symbolized the even justice (aequitas) with which the deity governs the world. There were also two wooden caskets, one of which contained a diminutive gold cup, measuring less than an inch across the top, a glass vessel a trifle over an inch and a half in height, and a statuette of a god about half as high; in the other were two bronze candlesticks about ten inches high, the use of which may be inferred from the painting described above, and a bronze lamp with places for two wicks.

The walls of the colonnade were painted in bright colors on a deep red ground. The lower part of the columns was red, but above they were white; the temple also was white, the purpose obviously being to give the appearance of marble. Nevertheless the same decorative framework appears both in the white stucco of the temple and the painted decoration of the colonnade: a division of the body of the wall into large panels, with a continuous garland of conventional plant forms above. In the colonnade there was a yellow base, treated as a projecting architectural member; above it large red panels alternated with light, fantastic architectural designs in yellow on a red ground. The frieze was black, with garlands in strong contrast—green, blue, and yellow—enlivened with all sorts of animal forms. In the middle of each of the large panels was a priest of Isis; in the lower part of the intervening architectural designs were marine pictures,—galleys maneuvering, and seafights. Similar pictures are found in other buildings, as the Macellum, but marine views were especially appropriate here, because Isis was a patron divinity of seamen. Apuleius gives an interesting description of the spring festival, by which the navigation of the opening season was committed to her guardian care.

Opposite the entrance of the temple the colonnade presents an interesting peculiarity of construction, which is found also in other buildings at Pompeii, as the Stabian Baths. The place of the three middle columns on that side is taken by two large pillars, higher than the rest of the colonnade, each of which is backed by an attached half-column. This arrangement made the approach to the temple more imposing, and also furnished an appropriate setting for the shrine of Harpocrates against the wall.

The principal altar, on which sacrifice was offered to the divinities worshipped in the temple, is that near the foot of the steps in front (e). The officiating priest stood on a block of stone at the side of it, with the temple at his right; on this altar were found ashes and fragments of calcined bones. The two smaller altars near by were probably consecrated to the gods whose images were placed in the exterior niches.

Two rectangular pits were used as receptacles for the refuse of sacrifices. One was quite small, and no trace of it can now be found; it was near the large altar, and contained remains of burnt figs, pine kernels and cones, nuts, and dates, with fragments of two statuettes representing divinities. The wall about the other (b), when excavated, was built up at each end in the form of a gable, and evidently once supported a wooden roof; in this pit also were charred remains of fruits. What divinities were worshipped at the altars between the columns, it is impossible to determine. The small base standing against the corner column near the entrance (seen in Fig. 79) was probably a pedestal, not an altar.

At the left of the steps leading up to the temple, and facing the large altar, is a small pillar of masonry fifteen inches square and nearly two and a half feet high. A similar pillar, which formerly stood at the right, had thin slabs of stone on three sides. One of these, that on the front of the pillar (now in the Naples Museum), was covered with hieroglyphics. It is a memorial tablet, which Hat, 'the writer of the divine word,' hierogrammateus, set up in honor of his parents and grandparents; it contains symbolic representations in three divisions, one above the other. In the upper division Hat, his brother and colleague Meran, their father and grandfather, are praying to Osiris, 'Lord of the Kingdom of the Dead'; below, Hat is bringing to his parents and grandparents offerings for the dead, while in the lower division Meran and two sisters unite with him in prayer to Osiris. The tablet could hardly have been designed for a temple, but still, by reason of its contents, it was considered appropriate for this place. It was doubtless intended that a similar tablet should be affixed to the pillar at the left, but perhaps none happened to be available; statuettes of divinities were probably placed on the pillars.

The presence of a statue of Bacchus in the niche in the rear wall of the cella is easily explained; this divinity was identified with Osiris. Two ears are moulded in the stucco beside the niche, symbolic of the listening of the god to the prayers of his worshippers.

Against the west wall of the colonnade, near the corners, were two pedestals, with statues of female divinities about one half life size. At the right was Isis, in archaic Greek costume, with the inscription: L. Caecilius Phoebus posuit l[oco] d[ato] d[ecurionum] d[ecreto], 'Set up by Lucius Caecilius Phoebus, in a place granted by a decree of the city council'; the name indicates that the donor was a freedman. The other statue, at the left, represents Venus drying her hair after the bath; it is of a common type and possesses small value as a work of art, yet is of interest because of the well preserved painting and gilding. Venus, as many other goddesses, was identified with Isis.

In the same corner with the statue of Venus, against the south wall, stood the herm of Gaius Norbanus Sorex, a marble pillar with a bronze head. According to the inscription, he was an actor who played the second part (secundarum, sc. partium), and was also magister of the suburb Pagus Augustus Felix. He was probably a generous supporter of the temple. A duplicate of the herm is found in the Eumachia building, to which also he may have made a contribution. The low social standing of the various benefactors of the temple is noteworthy; it indicates in what circles the worship of the Egyptian divinities found its adherents. As yet this was by no means an aristocratic cult, although it became such later, especially after the time of Hadrian.

While the Greek and Roman gods were honored chiefly at their festivals, the Egyptian divinities demanded worship every day, indeed several times a day. The early service, the 'opening of the temple,' is described by Apuleius, who was probably admitted to the college of the Servants of Isis in Rome in the time of the Antonines, and wrote about 160 A.D. Before daybreak the priest went into the temple by the side entrance and threw back the great doors, which were fastened on the inside. White linen curtains were hung across the doorway, shielding the interior from view. Now the street gate of the court was opened; the thronging multitude of the devout streamed in and took their places in front of the temple. The curtains were drawn aside and the image of the goddess was presented to the gaze of her worshippers, who greeted her with prayers and shaking of the sistrum, a musical rattle, the use of which was characteristic of the worship of the Egyptian gods. For a time they remained sitting, engaged in prayer and in the contemplation of the divinity; an hour after daybreak the service was closed with an invocation to the newly risen sun. This description throws light on the purpose of the bench in front of the shrine of Harpocrates.

The second service was held at two o'clock in the afternoon, but we do not possess exact information in regard to it. It is, perhaps, depicted in a fresco painting from Herculaneum (Fig. 81), the subject of which is a solemn act in the worship of Isis, the adoration of the holy water. In the portico of the temple, above the steps, two priests and a priestess are standing. The priest in the middle holds in front of him, in the folds of his robe, a vessel containing the holy water, which was supposed to be from the Nile; his two associates are shaking the sistrum. There is an altar at the foot of the steps; a priest is fanning the fire into flame. On the right and the left of the altar are the worshippers, with other priests, part of whom are shaking the sistrum, while a fluteplayer sits in the foreground at the right.

Another painting, the counterpart of that just described, seems to portray the celebration of a festival; the surroundings correspond fairly well with those of our temple. The doors are thrown back; a dark-visaged man, wearing a wreath, is dancing in the doorway. Behind him, within the temple, are the musicians, among whom can be distinguished a girl striking the cymbals and a woman with a tambourine. About the steps are priests and other worshippers, shaking the sistrum and offering prayer; in front stands a burning altar. An important festival of Isis occurred in November. It commenced with an impassioned lamentation over the death of Osiris and the search for his body. On the third day, November 12, the finding of the body by Isis was celebrated with great rejoicing. So, perhaps, in this painting the dance is a manifestation of the joy with which the festival ended, the whole picture being a scene from the observance of the Egyptian Easter.

In such celebrations use would be made of the small brazier of bronze found in the court in front of our temple, on which incense could be burned. The ablutions, which played so important a part in Egyptian rites, were performed in the rear of the court, where stood a cylindrical leaden vessel, adorned with Egyptian figures in relief; a jet fell into it from a lead pipe connected with the city aqueduct.

The small building at the southeast corner of the court, which is known as the Purgatorium, was open to the sky. It was made to look like a roofed structure by the addition of gables at the ends. On the inside, at the rear, a flight of steps leads down toward the right to a vaulted underground chamber, about five feet wide and six and a half feet long. The inner part of the chamber, divided off by a low wall, was evidently intended for a tank. In one of the corners in the front part is a low base, on which a jar could be set while it was being filled. Here the holy Nile water—more or less genuine—was kept for use in the sacred rites.

The purpose of the tank is suggested by certain of the stucco reliefs on the outside of the enclosing wall. In the gable, above the entrance, is a vase, standing out from a blue ground, with a kneeling figure on either side. The frieze contains Egyptian priests and priestesses, also on a blue ground, with their faces turned toward the vessel (Fig. 82). The figures are all worshipping the sacred water in the vase.

Of the other figures in relief, only the two goddesses in the panels at the sides of the entrance have an Egyptian character. Under each of them was a small altar of tufa, attached to the wall; the figure at the left (Fig. 82) is plainly Isis.

The side walls are decorated with reliefs in Greco-Roman style. They are divided into a large middle panel, containing two figures, and two side panels, each with a Cupid. In the middle panel, on the right side, Mars and Venus are represented; in that at the left, Perseus rescuing Andromeda (Fig. 83).

The dwelling back of the colonnade, on the south side, consists of a kitchen (8), a dining room (7), a sleeping apartment (9), and two small rooms at the rear, under the stairway leading to the highest seats of the Large Theatre. The ritual of the Egyptian gods was so exacting, and the services of worship were so numerous, that it was necessary for one or more priests to reside within the precincts of the temple. These rooms were the habitation of a priest.

One of the rooms on the west side (6) is oblong in shape, with five broad, arched entrances opening from the colonnade. The walls were richly decorated in the last Pompeian style. There were seven large paintings, five of which were landscapes with shrines, part being Egyptian landscapes; the other two represent Io watched by Argus, with Hermes coming to rescue her, and Io in Egypt, received by Isis. Against the rear wall was a pedestal, on which probably stood the female figure, above life size, the remains of which were found in one of the entrances. Only the head, the hands, and the front parts of the feet were of marble; the rest was of wood, no doubt concealed by drapery. The priests seemingly had started to carry the statue with them when they fled, but abandoned the attempt at the doorway. In the same room a marble table, a sistrum, two pots of terra cotta, three small glass bottles, and a glass cup were found. We may safely conclude that here the common meals were served, of which, as we learn from Apuleius, the devotees of the cult partook. And when, in connection with the great festivals, the Mysteries were celebrated with a presentation of the myth of Isis and Osiris in pantomime, this large room was well adapted for the sacred exhibitions.

The adjoining room, at the southwest corner of the colonnade (5), is irregular in shape and of an entirely different character. It seems to have been regarded as a sacred place, and to have been used for secret ceremonies. It was entered from the colonnade by a narrow door, which could be securely fastened. Large, sketchy pictures of gods were painted on the walls on a white ground,—Isis, Osiris, Typhon,—with sacred animals and symbols relating to the myth which to us are unintelligible. The excavators found here the remains of four wooden statues with marble heads, hands, and feet, one of a male figure, the other three female; there were besides a statuette of an Egyptian god made of green stone, on which were hieroglyphics; a statuette of white clay, covered with a green glaze; a sphinx of terra cotta, fragments of terra cotta statuettes of Egyptian figures, different kinds of vessels of clay, glass, and lead, and a bronze knife, evidently intended for use in sacrifices. At the left near the entrance is a small reservoir, reached by three steps. On the north side is a niche that apparently formed part of a small shrine.

A kind of alcove opens off from the southeast corner of this room, the entrance to which could be closed by a curtain. From this a few steps and a door led into a storeroom, in which were found about three dozen vessels of various shapes, an iron tripod, and no less than fifty-eight earthen lamps. The lamps were in part provided with iron rings, so that they could be suspended; there were also iron rods, which the excavators supposed to be lamp holders. A rear door connected the storeroom with the small area of irregular shape between the Palaestra and the Theatre.

These arrangements suggest the celebration of secret rites by night; we may well believe that novices were here initiated into the order of the Servants of Isis. Obscure hints in regard to the ceremonies connected with the consecration to the service of the goddess are thrown out by Apuleius. 'The initiation,' said the priest to him, 'is conducted under the image of a voluntary death, with the renewing of life as a gift from the deity.' Of his own experience he says merely: 'I came to the borders of death, I trod the threshold of Proserpina, then came back through all the stages to life. In the middle of the night I saw the sun shine brightly; I entered into the immediate presence of the gods above and the gods below, and worshipped them face to face.'

Renunciation of past life, and a second birth to a new and purified existence, were the main ideas underlying the ceremonies, which as presented here must have been far less splendid and impressive than in Rome, where they were witnessed by Apuleius.

Chapter XXVI. The Temple of Zeus Milichius

The small temple near the northeast corner of the block containing the theatres is entered from Stabian Street. The court (Fig. 84, 2), like that of the temple of Vespasian, has a colonnade across the front; only the foundation and a Doric capital of lava are preserved.

At the end of the colonnade on the right is the room of the sacristan (4). The large altar (Fig. 251) stands close to the foot of the steps leading up to the temple. It is built of blocks of tufa, with a frieze of triglyphs and panels like those found on walls in the first style of decoration.

The steps extend across the front of the temple, the unusual elevation of which is explained by the inequality of the ground. Of the six columns in the tetrastyle portico no remains have been found, but three capitals of pilasters are preserved, two belonging to those at the corners of the cella, and one, considerably smaller, to a doorpost; they are of tufa, and were once covered with white stucco.

The excellent proportions and fine workmanship of the capitals point to the period of the first style of decoration; there was formerly a remnant of that style on the north wall of the cella, copied before 1837. Nevertheless the quasi-reticulate masonry of the cella, closely resembling that of the Small Theatre, dates from the early years of the Roman colony. In this period the temple in its present form was built, perhaps with the help of native Pompeian masons.

Attached to the rear wall of the cella was an oblong pedestal on which were placed two statues, representing Jupiter and Juno, together with a bust of Minerva, all of terra cotta and of poor workmanship. The suggestion at once presents itself that this was the Capitolium, erected by the Roman colonists soon after they settled in Pompeii. It is incredible, however, that colonists who had the means to erect monumental buildings, such as the Amphitheatre and the Small Theatre, should have housed the great gods of the Capitol in so modest a temple, in so inconspicuous a spot, and should not have provided more costly images.

All the evidence is in favor of the explanation, already proposed (p. 66), that after the earthquake the worship of the gods of the Capitol was transferred hither temporarily from the temple in the Forum, until that should be rebuilt.

What divinity thus became the host of the Roman gods? It would be impossible to say but for the fortunate recovery of an Oscan inscription, which was set up in the passage of the Stabian Gate. This commemorates the work of two aediles, M. Sittius and N. Pontius, who improved the street leading out from the Stabian Gate 'as far as the Stabian Bridge, and the Via Pompeiana as far as the temple of Zeus Milichius; these streets, as well as the Via Jovia (and another, the name of which cannot be made out) they placed in perfect repair.'

It is natural to suppose that the Via Pompeiana, mentioned in immediate connection with the road leading to Stabiae, was the continuation of the latter within the city, or Stabian Street. This, then, led to the temple named in the inscription, and as there is no other temple on the street, the small sanctuary in which the images of the Capitoline divinities were placed was the temple of Zeus Milichius.

This building, however, is not old enough to have been mentioned in an Oscan inscription. It probably stands in the place of a much earlier edifice. The masonry of the wall on the south side of the court is different from that of the other walls, and older; as it shows no trace of a cross wall, it must always have stood at the side of an open space, such as that of the present court. To the earlier building the capitals belong, the style of which, as remarked above, is pre-Roman.

In view of this explanation, we should probably recognize in the head carved on the smallest of the pilaster capitals (Fig. 85) a representation of Zeus Milichius, a divinity honored in many parts of Greece, especially by the farmers; Zeus the Gracious, the patron of tillers of the soil. The serious, kindly face, bearded and with long locks, was more than a mere ornament; it was the god himself looking down upon the worshipper who entered his sanctuary. As a representation of Zeus it probably exemplifies an ancient type.

Chapter XXVII. The Baths at Pompeii.—The Stabian Baths

In comparison with the great bathing establishments of Rome, the baths at Pompeii are of moderate size. They have, however, a special interest, due in part to their excellent preservation, in part to the certainty with which the purpose of the various rooms can be determined; and their remains enable us to trace the development of the public bath in a single city during a period of almost two hundred years. From this source, moreover, most of our knowledge of the arrangements of the ancient bath is derived, without which the imposing but barren remains of Rome itself would be for the most part unintelligible. It is not easy for one living under present conditions to understand how important a place the baths occupied in the life of antiquity, particularly of the Romans under the Empire; they offered, within a single enclosure, opportunities for physical care and comfort and leisurely intercourse with others, not unlike those afforded in the cities of modern Europe by the club, the café, and the promenade.

Though the Roman baths differed greatly in size and in details of arrangement, the essential parts were everywhere the same. First there was a court, palaestra, surrounded by a colonnade. This was devoted to gymnastic exercises, and connected with it in most cases was an open-air swimming tank. The dressing room, apodyterium, was usually entered from the court through a passageway or anteroom. A basin for cold baths was sometimes placed in the dressing room; in large establishments a separate apartment was set aside for this purpose, the frigidarium. To avoid too sudden a change of temperature for the bathers, a room moderately heated, tepidarium, was placed between the dressing room and the caldarium, in which hot baths were given. At one end of the caldarium was a bath basin of masonry, alveus; at the other was ordinarily a semicircular niche, schola, in which stood the labrum, a large, shallow, circular vessel resting upon a support of masonry, and supplied with lukewarm water by a pipe leading from a tank back of the furnace. The more extensive establishments, as the Central Baths at Pompeii, contained also a round room, called Laconicum from its Spartan origin, for sweating baths in dry air. In describing baths it is more convenient to use the ancient names.

In earlier times the rooms were heated by means of braziers, and in one of the Pompeian baths the tepidarium was warmed in this way to the last. A more satisfactory method was devised near the beginning of the first century B.C. by Sergius Orata, a famous epicure, whose surname is said to have been given to him because of his fondness for golden trout (auratae). He was the first to plant artificial oyster beds in the Lucrine Lake, and the experiment was so successful that he derived a large income from them; we may assume that he turned an honest penny also by his invention of the 'hanging baths,' balneae pensiles, with which his name has ever since been associated. These were built with a hollow space under the floor, the space being secured by making the floor of tiles, two feet square, supported at the corners by small brick pillars (Fig. 88); into this space hot air was introduced from the furnace, and as the floor became warm, the temperature of the room above was evenly modified.

This improved method of heating was not long restricted to the floors. As early as the Republican period, the hollow space was extended to the walls by means of small quadrangular flues and by the use of nipple tiles, tegulae mammatae, large rectangular tiles with conical projections, about two inches high, at each corner; these were laid on their edges, with the projections pressed against the wall, thus leaving an air space on the inside.

In bathing establishments designed for both men and women, the two caldariums were placed near together. There was a single furnace, hypocausis, where the water for the baths was warmed; from this also hot air was conveyed through broad flues under the floors of both caldariums, thence circulating through the walls. Through similar flues underneath, the warm air, already considerably cooled, was conveyed from the hollow spaces of the caldariums into those of the tepidariums. In order to maintain a draft strong enough to draw the hot air from the furnace under the floors, the air spaces of the walls had vents above, remains of which may still be seen in some baths. These vents were no doubt sufficient to keep up the draft after the rooms had once been heated; but in order to warm them at the outset a draft fire was needed,—that is, a small fire under the floor at some point a considerable distance from the furnace and near the vents, through which it would cause the escape of warm air, and so start a hot current from the furnace. The place of the draft fire has been found under two rooms of the Pompeian baths; and a similar arrangement has been noted in the case of Roman baths excavated in Germany.

The use of the baths varied according to individual taste and medical advice. In general, however, bathers availed themselves of one of three methods.

The most common form of the bath was that taken after exercise in the palaestra,—ball playing was a favorite means of exercise,—use being made of all the rooms. The bather undressed in the apodyterium, or perhaps in the tepidarium, where he was rubbed with unguents; then he took a sweat in the caldarium, following it with a warm bath. Returning to the apodyterium, he gave himself a cold bath either in this room or in the frigidarium; he then passed into the Laconicum, or, if there was no Laconicum, went back into the caldarium for a second sweat; lastly, before going out, he was thoroughly rubbed with unguents, as a safeguard against taking cold.

Some bathers omitted the warm bath. They passed through the tepidarium directly into the Laconicum or caldarium, where they had a sweat; they then took a cold bath, or had cold water poured over them, and were rubbed with unguents.

In the simplest form of the bath the main rooms were not used at all. The bathers heated themselves with exercise in the palaestra, then removed the dirt and oil with scrapers, strigiles, and bathed in the swimming tank.

Up to the present time three public baths have been excavated in Pompeii, two for both men and women, one for men only. Besides these there are two private establishments in the eighth Region (VIII. ii. 17 and 23), one perhaps for men, the other for women; and another, apparently for men, was discovered in the eighteenth century near the Amphitheatre and covered up again, being a part of the villa of Julia Felix. It is quite possible that two or three more bathing establishments yet await excavation; one at least, connected with a warm spring, is known to us from an inscription—that of M. Crassus Frugi. About a dozen houses also contain complete baths for private use.

The largest and oldest bathing establishment at Pompeii is that to which the name Stabian Baths has been given, from its location on Stabian Street. It was built in the second century B.C., but was remodelled in the early days of the Roman colony, and afterwards underwent extensive repairs. It is of irregular shape, and occupies a large part of a block, having streets on three sides; on the north side it is bounded by the house of Siricus. Opening upon two of the streets are shops, which have nothing to do with the baths and are not numbered on the plan (Fig. 86).

Entering from the south through the broad doorway at A, we find ourselves in the palaestra, C, which has a colonnade on three sides. On the west side the place of the colonnade is taken by a strip of smooth pavement with a raised margin; two heavy stone balls were found here, which were obviously used in a game resembling the modern ninepins; at the further end is the room for the players, K. Close to the bowling course, at the middle of the west side, is the swimming tank, F, with rooms (E, G) adjoining it at either end. At the corner near the further room, G, is a side entrance, L; J is the office of the director or superintendent in charge of the building.

On the east side of the court are the men's baths, rooms I-VIII; north of these are the women's baths, rooms 1-6, with the furnace room, IX, between them. In the northwest corner of the building were small rooms (e-e) intended for private baths. They had not been provided with the improved heating arrangements, and were not in use at the time of the catastrophe. The larger room adjoining (k) was a closet.

The anteroom of the men's baths (IV), opens at one end into the dressing room or apodyterium (VI), as seen in Plate V. It has a vaulted ceiling, richly decorated. A door at the left leads into the frigidarium (V), and another at the right into a servants' waiting room (I), which is accessible from the court. This room was formerly entered also from the street, through a passage (III), which was later closed; on one side of it is a bench of masonry for the slaves in attendance upon their masters. Similar benches are found in the waiting room at the other end of the apodyterium (X).

The apodyterium also was provided with benches of the same sort, as indicated on the plan; they are shown in Plate V. Along the walls at the sides, just under the edge of the vaulted ceiling, was a row of small niches, the use of which corresponded with that of the lockers in a modern gymnasium. These niches are about 5¾ feet above the floor, while those in the other dressing room (2) are a little less than five feet; from this difference in height it has been rightly inferred that the smaller and simpler division of the baths was set aside for women. The floor is paved with rectangular flags of gray marble, with blocks of basalt next to the walls. While the walls were left simply white, with a red base, the ceiling was elaborately decorated with stucco reliefs in the style prevalent shortly before the destruction of the city; there are vestiges of similar decoration in the tepidarium. In octagonal, hexagonal, and quadrangular panels are rosettes, Cupids, trophies, and bacchic figures. The lunettes are adorned with fantastic architectural designs, in which we see bacchic figures standing on pedestals, and Cupids riding on dolphins; the sides of the two arches supporting the ceiling (one of them is seen in Plate V) are decorated with female figures mounted on dolphins, which run out into arabesques. The frequent suggestion of water in these motives is in harmony with the purpose of the room.

Even more effective is the decoration of the small round frigidarium. Light is admitted, as in the Pantheon at Rome, through a round hole in the apex of the domed ceiling. At the edge of the circular bath basin, lined with white marble, was a narrow strip of marble floor, which is extended into the four semicircular niches. Wall and niches alike are painted to represent a beautiful garden, with a blue sky above (Fig. 87). The eye wanders among trees and shrubs, catching glimpses of birds overhead, of statues and vases here and there in the midst of the green foliage, and of jets of water falling into circular basins. The blue dome is studded with stars. The bather could scarcely feel the narrowness of a room, the decoration of which was so suggestive of expanse and open air. A jet of water fell into the basin from a small niche in the upper part of the wall; and the place of the overflow pipe may be easily recognized.

The tepidarium (VII) and caldarium (VIII) were heated by means of hollow floors and walls. The former is much the smaller, as we should have expected from its use as an intermediate room, in which the bathers would ordinarily not tarry so long as in the caldarium. The large bath basin at the east end (indicated on the plan) is unusual; it was seemingly a later addition, and was probably made to accommodate those who in the winter shrank from using the frigidarium, but wished nevertheless to take a moderately cold bath. Near the bottom of the wall back of this basin, a hole had been made so that underneath a fire could be kindled from the outside (in X), not in order to heat the basin, which could be supplied with warm water by means of a pipe, but to start the circulation of hot air from the furnace; at the top of the wall above were two vents opening from the warm air chamber. There was a place for another draft fire under the women's caldarium.

One of the fragments of stucco relief still remaining in the tepidarium presents the figure of a man reading from a roll of manuscript. It suggests the standing complaint of the ancients in regard to the trials of bathers, who could not escape the ever-present poet declaiming his latest production.

At one end of the caldarium we find the bath basin, alveus; at the other is the support of the labrum, which has disappeared. In the niche above the latter are two vents for the draft, and above the niche was a round window. This room, as most of the others, was dimly lighted. The little round window of the anteroom is shown in our plate. There were two similar windows in the lunette of the apodyterium, above the roof of the anteroom; they are not seen in our plate, having at one time been entirely covered up by the construction of a wall to support the roof. A similar window was very likely placed at the end of the tepidarium, over the roof of the frigidarium; and perhaps these were supplemented by holes in the crown of the arched ceilings, as in the women's apodyterium.

The women's baths are entered from the court through a long anteroom (6); the dressing room is connected also with the two side streets by means of corridors (1, 5). Originally there was no communication between the women's baths and the palaestra.

The apodyterium (2) is the best preserved room of the entire building, and also the most ancient. It shows almost no traces of the catastrophe. The vaulted ceiling is intact. The smooth, white stucco on the walls and the simple cornice at the base of the lunettes date from the time of the first builders. Now, as then, light is admitted only through two small openings in the crown of the vault and a window in the west lunette. To a modern visitor the interior seems gloomy. The pavement, of lozenge-shaped, reddish glazed tiles, belongs to the same early period. There is a strip of basaltic flags connecting the door of one of the corridors (1) with that of the tepidarium. This much travelled path seems to indicate that many ladies—particularly, we may assume, in the winter—went at once into the more comfortable tepidarium without stopping in the dressing room. Along the walls were benches, and above them niches, as in the men's apodyterium. In the time of the Empire the fronts of the niches, finely carved in tufa, were overlaid with a thick coating of stucco, the upper part being ornamented with designs in relief.

The women had no frigidarium. A large basin for cold baths was built at the west end of the dressing room, but this also is a later addition; before it was made, those who wished for cold baths must have contented themselves with portable bath tubs.

The tepidarium (3) and caldarium (4) are in a better state of preservation than those of the men's baths, which they so closely resemble in all their arrangements that a detailed description is unnecessary. In their present form they are not so ancient as the apodyterium, and the decoration is less elaborate than that of the corresponding rooms on the other side.

The labrum is intact, a round, shallow basin of white marble resting on a support of masonry; it has here no separate niche. The bath basin in the caldarium also retains its veneering of white marble, with an overflow pipe of bronze at the upper edge; it is about two feet deep. In such basins the bathers leaned against the sloping back, which for this reason was called a cushion (pulvinus) by Vitruvius. This alveus would accommodate eight bathers, that in the men's caldarium perhaps ten. Places were probably assigned in numerical order, each bather awaiting his turn. Those who did not wish to wait, or preferred to bathe by themselves, might use individual bath tubs of bronze. Remains of such a tub, as well as of bronze benches, were found in this room. Near the bottom of the alveus in front is an opening, through which the water could be let out; when it was emptied, the water ran over the white mosaic floor, which was thus cleaned.

In the time of the Early Empire it became the fashion to bathe with very warm water. 'People want to be parboiled,' Seneca exclaims. The construction of the alveus, however, was not well adapted to conserve the heat, and an ingenious contrivance was devised to remedy the difficulty, which may best be explained with the help of our illustration, showing the arrangement of the bath basin in room 4 (Fig. 88). A large hot air flue, D, led directly from the furnace to the hollow space, C, under the alveus, A. Above this flue was a long bronze heater, B, in the form of a half cylinder, with one end opening into the end of the alveus. As the bottom of the heater was six inches lower than that of the alveus, the cooler water from the basin would flow down into it and be heated again, a circulation being thus maintained.

A similar arrangement (called testudo alvei by Vitruvius) probably existed for the alveus in the caldarium on the other side; but that part of the men's baths has been destroyed. Only one other heater of this kind has been found,—and that much smaller,—in a villa near Boscoreale, recently excavated; but the semicircular opening made for the heater above the hot air flue may be seen in the Central Baths, in a private establishment at Pompeii, and generally in the remains of Roman baths.

In the furnace room (praefurnium, IX) between the two caldariums, stood three large cylindrical tanks. They have disappeared, but their outlines can still be seen in the masonry of the foundations, and are shown in our plan. The one furthest east was for hot water. It was directly over the fire, and connected with the bath basins of the two caldariums. The next, for lukewarm water, stood over a hollow space opening into the furnace. A lead pipe leading from it to the labrum of the women's caldarium is still to be seen; the water bubbled up in the middle of the labrum. The third and largest reservoir, for cold water, was placed on a foundation of solid masonry.

The more important alterations made in the baths during the two centuries that they were in use had to do with the arrangements for heating, and may briefly be considered here before we proceed to another part of the building. It will be best not to weary the reader with details, but to present a brief summary of conclusions, which will perhaps be found of interest, not only as casting light on the gradual development of these baths, but also as illustrating that adjustment of public buildings to the needs and tastes of successive generations, which was as characteristic of ancient as it is of modern life.

For the extensive changes made in the earlier part of the first century B.C. we have the evidence of an inscription, which had been cast aside and was found in one of the smaller rooms. It reads, C. Uulius C. f., P. Aninius C. f., II v. i. d., Laconicum et destrictarium faciund. et porticus et palaestr[am] reficiunda locarunt ex d[ecurionum] d[ecreto] ex ea pequnia quod eos e lege in ludos aut in monumento consumere oportuit faciun[da] coerarunt eidemque probaru[nt]. The form of the letters and the spelling point to the time of Sulla as the period in which the inscription was cut. The syntax is confused, but the meaning is clear: a Laconicum and destrictarium were built, the colonnade and palæstra repaired, by the duumvirs Gaius Ulius and Publius Aninius, in accordance with a vote of the city council; and they furnished the means for this work in fulfilment of their obligation, incurred by the acceptance of the duumviral office, to spend a certain sum upon either games or buildings.

The destrictarium—a room for removing dirt and oil with the strigil after gymnastic exercises—is easily identified (D), as are also the palaestra and colonnade; but in our survey of the baths, we have found no separate chamber to which the term Laconicum could properly be applied. In order to arrive at a solution of the difficulty, we must note the successive steps by which, as shown by an examination of the remains of the masonry, the heating arrangements were extended and improved.

At first, in the Baths as originally constructed, there were neither hollow walls nor hollow floors. The heating was done by means of braziers; and there were niches or lockers in the walls of the caldariums and tepidariums similar to those now found in the dressing rooms, but in double rows, the upper niches being larger, the lower smaller.

Later, a hollow floor was built in the men's caldarium. Later still, this room was provided with hollow walls, which were extended to the crown of the ceilings and the lunettes, the tepidarium being still heated with braziers.

Finally, a hollow floor and hollow walls were constructed at the same time in the men's tepidarium, but the hot air chamber was not carried up into the ceiling or the lunettes.

A similar transformation was gradually accomplished in the women's apartments; but owing, it would seem, to a desire for greater warmth in the tepidarium, the hot air chamber here, as in the caldarium, was extended to the lunettes and the ceiling.

Since the method of heating by means of hollow floors only came into vogue about 100 B.C., and since the duumvirate of Ulius and Aninius must have occurred soon after 80 B.C., we are probably safe in supposing that they built the hollow floors of the two caldariums, and that the new heating arrangement was loosely called a Laconicum. At least a partial warrant for this interpretation is found in a passage of Dion Cassius (LIII. xxvii. 1), in which he says that Agrippa built the 'Spartan sweating bath,' τὸ πυριατήριον τὸ Λακωνικόν. Agrippa, however, built, not a Laconicum in the narrow sense, but a complete bathing establishment, and Dion, doubtless following some earlier writer, uses the word as generally applicable to a system of warm baths. In default of a better explanation, we must accept a meaning equally loose for our inscription.

It is not possible to date, even approximately, the other changes by which the baths were conformed to the increasing desire for warmth and comfort; but the decoration of the greater part of the building, with its complicated designs and stucco reliefs, was clearly applied to the walls not many decades before the destruction of the city.

The unroofed swimming tank, F, was separated from the court by a barrier of masonry about two feet high, which was extended also in front of the rooms at the ends, E and G. On either side was a step, both the steps and the barrier being veneered with white marble. The tank was supplied by a pipe entering from the northeast; the overflow pipe, at the southeast corner, is indicated on the plan.

The rooms E and G, opening both on the swimming tank and on the court with high arched doorways, were roofed shallow basins where the athletes could give themselves a preliminary cleaning before going into the tank. The walls are veneered with marble to a height of 6½ feet; above are painted plants, birds, statues, and nymphs, one of whom holds a shell to catch a jet of water; over these the blue sky. Here, as in the frigidarium, the artist strove to convey the impression of being in the open air, in a beautiful garden, adorned with sculptures. A jet of water spurted from the rear wall just above the marble dado; above it is a large oblong niche, apparently for a statue.

After a time the basin in G was filled up, and covered with a mosaic floor of the same height as the threshold; when one cleaning room was found to be adequate, that was retained which had a separate dressing room, D. On the white walls of the dressing room are traces of the wooden wardrobes that once stood against them. In this room, the destrictarium, the athletes disrobed, and rubbed themselves with oil before engaging in gymnastic exercises, and to it they returned from the palaestra, in order to scrape themselves (se destringere); then they washed themselves in the next room, E, and finally plunged into the tank.

The room of the official in charge of the baths, J, had windows opening on the court and into the bowlers' room, K. A large bronze brazier was found here, presented, according to an inscription on it, by Marcus Nigidius Vaccula, who, as a symbol of his name, had the figure of a cow (vacca) stamped in relief on the brazier. We find a similar brazier, together with benches, in the tepidarium of the baths near the Forum, which had no other means of heating; we naturally infer that the furniture here was intended for one of the tepidariums, and used there before the improved method of heating was introduced. A Nasennius Nigidius Vaccula, who died before 54 A.D., is known to us from the receipts of Caecilius Jucundus. If he was the donor, and made the gift when he was a young man, the change of the system of heating in the tepidarium may have been made as early as 20 A.D.

The colonnade was originally uniform on all the three sides. The Doric columns were of tufa, coated with fine white stucco. They were of slender proportions, the height being a trifle over nine feet, with a diameter of only sixteen inches. They were edged, not fluted, and doubtless carried an entablature with triglyphs, of which no trace remains. In the time of the Empire, apparently before the earthquake of 63, the colonnade was remodelled in accordance with the prevailing taste. The columns received a thick coating of stucco, with flutings indicated by incised lines; the lower third of the shaft was painted red, the upper portion being left white. Over the capitals, moulded in stucco, was an entablature resting on thick planks, and ornamented with light-colored stucco reliefs. The general effect may be seen from our illustration (Fig. 89).

In this reconstruction the sameness of the earlier colonnade was varied with pleasing irregularities. Thus in front of the main entrance (A), and in a corresponding position on the opposite side of the court, the place of four columns was taken by two broad pillars flanked by half-columns, and carrying a roof more than five feet higher than that of the rest of the colonnade. A similar arrangement has already been noted in the colonnade of the temple of Isis (p. 174).

The wall decoration of the court has been particularly well preserved on the outer wall of D and E (Fig. 90; cf. Pl. XIII). The surface is diversified by fantastic architectural designs in two stories, made up of slender columns with their entablatures, open doorways with steps leading up to them, and glimpses of interiors. In the panels thus outlined, figures of all kinds stand out in white relief on a bright red or blue ground. Above the arched doorway Jupiter sits, resting his right hand on his sceptre; near by, on a pillar, is the eagle. Further to the left a satyr offers Hercules a drinking horn. Another relief, not so well preserved, has a motive suggestive of the purpose of the building—Hylas at the spring seized by the nymphs. With this we may associate two designs having reference to the exercises of the palaestra: a boxer, at the left of the doorway of E, and at the right a man scraping himself with a strigil. On the outer wall of G is Daedalus, making wings for himself and Icarus.

Under the colonnade at the rear, a herm stands close to the wall, having the features of a youth with a garment drawn over his head and covering the upper part of the body. For the explanation of it we are indebted to Pausanias. 'In the gymnasium at Phigalia, in Arcadia,' says this writer, 'is an image of Hermes. It has the appearance of a man wrapped in a cloak, and terminates below in a square pillar in the place of feet.' This is Hermes, the god of the Palaestra, here, as in Phigalia, in a guise suggestive of his function of Psychopompus, the conductor of departed souls. We have already met with an example of the same type in the court of the temple of Apollo.

A sundial stood on the roof of the frigidarium and men's caldarium, supported by a foundation of masonry still visible. It bore an Oscan inscription, from which we learn that it was set up by the Quaestor Maras Atinius, in accordance with a decree of the council, the money for the expenditure being derived from fines. The fines were very likely collected here, by the official in charge of the building. Sundials were erected also in the other baths at Pompeii. They were a necessity, for all such establishments were conducted on a schedule of hours. Hadrian ordered that the baths in Rome should be open from the eighth hour, that is, after two o'clock in the afternoon; and a regulation in regard to the time of opening, if not of closing, was probably in force at Pompeii.

A motley and tumultuous life once filled the barren court, the rooms now ruined and deserted. The scene is well pictured by Seneca (Ep. 56): 'Quiet is by no means so necessary for study as men commonly believe,' the philosopher gravely argues. 'I am living near a bath: sounds are heard on all sides. Just imagine for yourself every conceivable kind of noise that can offend the ear. The men of more sturdy muscle go through their exercises, and swing their hands heavily weighted with lead: I hear their groans when they strain themselves, or the whistling of labored breath when they breathe out after having held in. If one is rather lazy, and merely has himself rubbed with unguents, I hear the blows of the hand slapping his shoulders, the sound varying according as the massagist strikes with flat or hollow palm. If a ballplayer begins to play and to count his throws, it's all up for the time being. Meanwhile there is a sudden brawl, or a thief is caught, or there is some one in the bath who loves to hear the sound of his own voice; and the bathers plunge into the swimming tank with loud splashing. These noises, however, are not without some semblance of excuse; but the hair plucker from time to time raises his thin, shrill voice in order to attract attention, and is only still himself when he is forcing cries of pain from some one else, from whose armpits he plucks the hairs. And above the din you hear the shouts of those who are selling cakes, sausages, and sweetmeats, besides all the hawkers of stuff from the cookshops, each with a different and characteristic cry.'

Such were the distractions of a Roman bath.

Chapter XXVIII. The Baths Near the Forum

The bathing establishment in the block north of the Forum is smaller and simpler in its arrangements than that described in the last chapter, but the parts are essentially the same. Here also we find a court, with a colonnade on three sides; a system of baths for men, comprising a dressing room (I) with a small round frigidarium (II) opening off from it, a tepidarium (III), and a caldarium (IV); a similar system for women, the place of the frigidarium being taken by a tank for cold baths (2) in the dressing room; and a long narrow furnace room between the two baths (V). On three sides of the establishment are shops, in connection with which are several inns.

These baths were built shortly after 80 B.C., about the time that Ulius and Aninius repaired the Stabian Baths; the characteristic masonry, with quasi-reticulate facing, is similar to that of the Small Theatre and the Amphitheatre. The names of the builders are known from an inscription found in duplicate: L. Caesius C. f. d[uum] v[ir] i[uri] d[icundo], C. Occius M. f., L. Niraemius A. f. II v[iri] d[e] d[ecurionum] s[ententia] ex peq[unia] publ[ica] fac[iundum] curar[unt] prob[arunt] q[ue]. Thus we see that the contract for the building was let and the work approved by Lucius Caesius, duumvir with judiciary authority,—his colleague had probably died since election and the vacancy had not yet been filled,—and the two aediles, Occius and Niraemius, who are here styled 'duumvirs,' for reasons already explained (p. 12); the cost was defrayed by an appropriation from the public treasury. Though these Baths are of later construction than the Stabian Baths, they seem more ancient because fewer changes were made in them.

The court here was not a palaestra; it was small for gymnastic exercises, and was not provided with a swimming tank and dressing rooms. The open space was occupied by a garden.

The colonnade on the north and west sides of the court had slender columns standing far apart, with a low and simple entablature; on the east side the columns were replaced by pillars carrying low arches, which served as a support for a gallery affording a pleasant view of the garden. This gallery was accessible from the upper rooms of several inns along the street leading north from the Forum, whose guests no doubt found diversion in watching what was going on below—an advantage that may have been taken into account by the city officials in fixing the rent. There are benches on the north side of the court, and at the middle a deep recess, or exedra (b), making a pleasant retreat for quiet conversation. The entrance from the frequented street at the left (A) is so arranged that passers-by could not look in; near the entrance from the street on the opposite side (A') is a closet (c). The decoration of the court was extremely simple. Columns and walls were unpainted; on the lower parts, stucco with bits of brick in it; above, white plaster.

From the court a corridor (a) led into the men's apodyterium, which could be entered also on the north side from the Strada delle Terme. This room contained benches, as shown on the plan; but there were no niches, as in the dressing rooms of the Stabian Baths, and wooden shelves or lockers may have been used instead. The small dark chamber at the north end (f) may have been used as a storeroom for unguents, such as the Greeks called elaeothesium. It seems to have been thought necessary here to connect the dressing room with the furnace room (V) by a separate passage.

Light was admitted to the dressing room through a window in the lunette at the south end, closed by a pane of glass half an inch thick, set in a bronze frame that turned on two pivots. On either side of the window are huge Tritons in stucco relief, with vases on their shoulders, surrounded by dolphins; underneath is a mask of Oceanus, and in the same wall is a niche for a lamp, similar to that seen in Fig. 92, blackened by the soot.

The frigidarium is well preserved. In all its arrangements it is almost an exact counterpart of the one in the Stabian Baths, but the scheme of decoration, suggestive of a garden, is less realistically carried out, the ground being yellow; and the round window at the apex of the domed ceiling has a rectangular extension toward the south in order to admit as much sunlight as possible.

The tepidarium, as will be seen from our illustration (Fig. 92), is in the condition of the tepidariums of the Stabian Baths before the improved arrangements for heating were introduced. There were no warm air chambers in the walls or the floor. At one end we see the remains of the large bronze brazier and benches (the iron grating is modern) presented by Vaccula, to which reference has already been made (p. 197). The feet of the benches are modelled to represent hoofs, each with a cow's head above.

There are niches in the walls, as formerly in the tepidariums of the Stabian Baths, but several of them for some reason have been walled up. Wild-visaged, muscular Atlantes stand out in bold projection on the front of the partitions between the niches, sustaining a cornice upon their uplifted hands. The window, seen in the illustration above the lamp niche, was closed, as that in the dressing room, by a pane of glass in a bronze frame.

The decoration of the ceiling, unfortunately only in part preserved, is well designed. Along the lower edge are arabesques, interwoven in a scroll pattern, in white stucco on a white background. Above these are panels of different sizes, in which raised white ornaments and figures appear on a white, blue, or violet ground; among the motives are Cupid leaning on his bow, Apollo riding on a griffin, Ganymede with the eagle, and Cupids on sea horses.

The caldarium is well preserved; only a part of the vaulted ceiling has been destroyed. The hollow space for hot air in the floor and walls is indicated in our section (Fig. 93). Here we see at the right, the bath basin, lined with white marble, with its sloping back affording a comfortable support for the bathers; at the other end is the apsidal niche (schola) with the labrum. The direction of Vitruvius, that the labrum should be placed under a window in such a way that the shadows of those standing around should not fall on it, is here literally observed. There were three other small windows at the same end of the room, and a niche for a lamp.

We learn from an inscription on the labrum, in bronze letters, that it was made under the direction of Gnaeus Melissaeus Aper and Marcus Staius Rufus, who were duumvirs in 3-4 A.D., at a cost of 5250 sesterces, not far from $270. This room seems to have received its final form before the new method of heating the water in the alveus came into vogue; there is no trace of a bronze heater, such as that found in connection with the bath basin of the women's caldarium at the Stabian Baths. The simple decoration is in marked contrast with the usual ornamentation of the later styles. Above a low marble base are yellow walls divided by dark red pilasters, shown in Fig. 93. These support a projecting flat cornice of dark red, whose surface is richly ornamented with stucco reliefs. The ceiling is moulded in flutings running up to the crown of the vault; only in the ceiling of the schola do we find raised figures.

The rooms of the women's baths are small, their arrangement being determined in part by the irregular shape of the corner of the building in which they are placed; but the system of heating is more complete than in the men's baths, for both the tepidarium (3) and the caldarium (4) were provided with hollow floors and hot air spaces in the walls extending to the lunettes and the ceiling. The vaulted ceilings of both of these rooms, as well as of the apodyterium, are preserved; but the caldarium has lost its hollow floor and walls, together with the bath basin, which was placed in a large niche at the right as one entered; only the base of the labrum remains. The condition of this room may be due to the earthquake of the year 63, the necessary repairs not having been made before the eruption. There was no connection between the women's baths and the court at the rear (D), which had a separate entrance from the street. At the women's entrance there was a narrow waiting room for attendants, separated from the street by a thin wall and protected by a roof.

The furnace room could be entered at one end from the street. The three cylindrical tanks for hot, lukewarm, and cold water were arranged as in the Stabian Baths. Beyond the tanks is a cistern (g), which was supplied in part by rain water from the roof, in part by a feed pipe connected with the water system of the city. The raised walk (h) on the right side of the furnace room is continued to the small court (D) in the corner of which is a stairway leading to the flat roof of the men's caldarium. From this point of vantage, the view over the landscape and the sea must have been beautiful in antiquity, as it is to-day.

A sundial doubtless stood on the larger of the two pillars in the court (d), which is about seventeen feet high and nearly five feet thick at the base; on the smaller pillar was perhaps a statue or other ornamental object of the sort frequently seen in wall paintings.

Chapter XXIX. The Central Baths

Seneca in an entertaining letter (Ep. 86) gives an account of a visit about 60 A.D. to the villa at Liternum in which the Elder Scipio had lived in the years immediately preceding his death, in 183 B.C. The philosopher was particularly struck with the bath, the simplicity of which he contrasts forcibly with the luxurious appointments of his own time. We cannot follow him through the extended disquisition—he speaks of various refinements of luxury of which we find no traces at Pompeii; but he mentions as the most striking difference the lack of light in the old bath, with its small apertures more like chinks than windows, while in his day the baths were provided with large windows protected by glass, and people 'wanted to be parboiled in full daylight,' besides having the enjoyment meanwhile of a beautiful view. Some such feeling as this we have in turning from the two older baths at Pompeii—one of pre-Roman origin, the other dating from the time of Sulla—to the Central Baths, which were in process of construction at the time of the eruption, and had been designed in accordance with the prevailing mode of life.

This extensive establishment, at the corner of Stabian and Nola streets, occupied the whole of a block; but a large part of the frontage on the two streets mentioned was utilized for shops. Notwithstanding the size of the building, it had only a single series of apartments, which were laid out on a correspondingly large scale. It was doubtless built for men, although the use of it at certain hours by women may possibly have been contemplated, in case the women's baths at the two other establishments should be overcrowded.

Entrances from three streets lead to the ample palaestra, from which the remains of the houses demolished to make room for it had not yet been entirely removed. On the northeast side is the excavation for a large swimming tank (h), and for a water channel leading to the closet (e). In order to have water at hand for building purposes, the masons had built a low wall around an old impluvium on the south side (shown on the plan, Fig. 94) into which a feed pipe ran. For a short distance on the north side the stylobate had been made ready for the building of the colonnade; elsewhere only the preliminary work had been done. The rooms at the southeast corner (f, g) were no doubt intended for dressing rooms for the palaestra and the plunge bath.

Two small rooms (b, c) open upon the north entrance of the palaestra; one of them, perhaps, was to be a ticket office, for the adjustment of matters relating to admission, the other a cloak room, in which the capsarius would guard the valuables of the bathers.

Two doors admit the visitor from the palaestra to the series of bath rooms, one of them opening from the north end of the colonnade. The first room (i, l) was designed to answer the purpose of a store, with four booths (k, m, n, o) opening into it for the sale of edibles and bathers' conveniences.

The apodyterium (p), tepidarium (q), and caldarium (s) had each three large windows opening on the palaestra; two of those belonging to the tepidarium are seen in Fig. 95. None of the rooms were finished, though a hollow floor and hollow walls had been built in the tepidarium, caldarium, and Laconicum. The bath basins yet lacked their marble linings, and the two furnaces (at x and y) had not been built.

Five smaller windows on the southeast side of the caldarium looked out on a narrow garden, about which the workmen had commenced to build a wall to cut off the sight of the firemen passing to and fro between the two furnaces. The caldarium was so placed as to receive the greatest possible amount of sunlight, particularly in the afternoon hours, when it would be used; this was in accordance with a recommendation of Vitruvius, who says that the windows of baths ought, whenever possible, to face the southwest, otherwise the south.

The contrast is indeed marked between the numerous large windows here, with their attractive outlook, and the small apertures, high in the walls and ceiling, through which light was admitted in the older baths.

In the Central Baths there was no frigidarium; but a large basin for cold baths, nearly five feet deep, was placed in the dressing room opposite the windows. Supply pipes were so laid that jets would spring into the basin from three small niches, one in each wall; the overflow was conducted by pipes under the floor to a catch basin (w), and thence to the street.

The tepidarium (q)—here, as usual, relatively small—is connected with the apodyterium by two doors, and similarly with the caldarium. The latter room has a bath basin at each end, thus affording accommodations for twenty-six or twenty-eight bathers at once; at the middle of the southeast side was a smaller basin that took the place of the labrum. The hot air flues leading from the furnaces under the bath basins were already built, and above them openings were left for semi-cylindrical heaters like that in the women's caldarium of the Stabian Baths.

The round sweating room, Laconicum, was made more ample by means of four semicircular niches, and lighted by three small round windows just above the cornice of the domed ceiling. There was probably another round opening at the apex, designed for a bronze shutter, which could be opened or closed from below by means of a chain, so as to regulate the temperature. Doors led into the Laconicum from both the tepidarium and the caldarium.

The oblong court between the bath rooms and the street on the northeast side was apparently to be laid out as a garden. At the north end the workmen had begun to build pillars for a short colonnade. A large square foundation for a sundial stands near the opposite corner.

Chapter XXX. The Amphitheatre

In the southeast corner of the city, at a distance from the other excavations, lies the Amphitheatre, the scene of gladiatorial combats. The Pompeians called it 'the show,' spectacula, as in the inscription, preserved in two copies, that gives us the names of the builders: C. Quinctius C. f. Valgus, M. Porcius M. f[ilius] duo vir[i] quinq[uennales] coloniai honoris caussa spectacula de sua peq[unia] fac[iunda] coer[arunt] et coloneis locum in perpetuom deder[unt]. According to this, the Amphitheatre was built by the same men, Valgus and Porcius, who are already known to us as the builders of the Small Theatre (p. 153); and they presented it to the city in recognition of the honor conferred upon them by their reëlection as duumvirs. The Amphitheatre may thus have been finished half a decade later than the Theatre, but in any case it belongs to the earliest years of the Roman colony,—as might be inferred, in default of other evidence, from the archaic spelling of the inscription, and the character of the masonry, which is like that of the Small Theatre and the baths north of the Forum (p. 41).

The colonists, however, did not receive from Rome their impulse to erect such a building. The passion for gladiatorial combats was developed in Campania earlier, and manifested itself more strongly, than in Latium. Strabo's statement that gladiators were brought forward at Campanian banquets, in larger or smaller numbers according to the rank of the guests, has reference to the period before the Second Punic War; but it was considered a noteworthy event in Rome when, in 264 B.C., gladiators engaged in combat in the Forum Boarium in celebration of funeral rites, as also when, on a similar occasion in 216 B.C., twenty-two pairs fought in the Forum. Buildings were erected for gladiatorial shows in Campanian towns earlier than at the Capital. As late as the year 46 B.C. the spectators who witnessed the games given by Julius Caesar sat on wooden seats supported by temporary staging; and the first stone amphitheatre in Rome was built by Statilius Taurus in 29 B.C., almost half a century after the quinquennial duumvirate of Valgus and Porcius. The Amphitheatre at Pompeii is the oldest known to us from either literary or monumental sources.

In comparison with later and more imposing structures, our Amphitheatre seems indeed unpretentious. Its exterior elevation is relatively low (Fig. 96); as our section shows (Fig. 99), the arena and the lower ranges of seats are in a great hollow excavated for the purpose below the level of the ground. The dimensions (length 460 feet, breadth 345) are small when compared with those of the Coliseum (615 and 510 feet, respectively) or even the amphitheatres at Capua or Pozzuoli; and the lack of artistic form is noteworthy.

The exhibitions held here must also have been on a modest scale. There were no underground chambers, below the arena, with devices by means of which wild beasts could be lifted up into view and the sand suddenly covered with new combatants. The limited means of this small city were not adequate to make provision for the elaborate equipment and costly decoration found in the amphitheatres of larger towns.

The arena, a view of which is given in Plate VI, is surrounded by a wall about 6½ feet high. This wall was covered with frescoes which, still fresh at the time of excavation, are now known to us only from copies in the Naples Museum. They consisted of alternate broad and narrow panels, the latter containing each a herm between two columns, while the larger spaces presented alternately a conventional pattern and a scene connected with the games. One of the scenes gives an interesting glimpse of the preparations for the combat (Fig. 97). In the middle we see the overseer marking out with a long staff the ring within which the combatants must fight. At the right a gladiator stands, partly armed; two attendants are bringing him a helmet and a sword. A hornblower, also partly armed, stands at the left; and behind him two companions, squatting on the ground, make ready his helmet and shield. At either end of the scene, in the background, is an image of a Winged Victory with a wreath and palm.

The limestone coping of the wall about the arena shows traces of iron in the joints between the blocks, apparently remains of a grating designed to protect the spectators from attacks by the infuriated wild beasts. The traces are not visible all the way around, but this may be accounted for on the supposition that repairs were in progress at the time of the eruption.

Two broad corridors (3, 3A) connect the ends of the arena with the outside of the building. The one at the north end, toward Vesuvius, follows a straight line; the other bends sharply to the right in order to avoid the city wall, which bounds the structure on the south and east sides. By these corridors the gladiators entered the arena, first in festal array, passing in stately procession across the sand from one entrance to the other, then coming forth in pairs as they were summoned to mortal combat.

At the middle of the west side there is a third passage, narrow and low (e); this is the grewsome corridor through which the bodies of the dead were dragged by means of hooks, its entrance being the Porta Libitinensis, 'Death Gate.' Near the inner end of each of the three corridors is a small, dark chamber (f) the purpose of which is unknown. It has been suggested that wild animals may have been confined here, but larger and more easily accessible rooms would have been required for this purpose. They may have been storerooms for appliances of various kinds required for the exhibitions.

The seats, of which there are thirty-five rows, have the same form as those in the Small Theatre, and are of the same material, gray tufa. They are arranged in three divisions,—the lowest, ima cavea, having five rows; the middle division, media cavea, twelve; and the highest, summa cavea, eighteen (Figs. 98, ). In the middle section of the ima cavea on each side the place of the seats is taken by four low, broad ledges, set aside for members of the city council, who could place upon them the seats of honor, bisellia, to the use of which they were entitled. At the middle of the east side the second ledge is interrupted for a distance of ten feet (the break is shown in Plate VI), a double width being thus given to the lowest. This place was designed for seats of special honor, and was, no doubt, reserved for the official who provided the games, and his associates. On the same side the ledges are extended into the next section on the south, the continuity of the seats being interrupted by a low barrier. This supplementary section was, perhaps, intended for certain freedmen, as the Augustales (p. 100), who had the right to use bisellia, but who nevertheless could not become members of the city council, and were not ranked on a social equality with the occupants of the middle section.

The seats of the ima cavea and media cavea were reached through a vaulted passage (4), which, in accordance with ancient usage, we may call a crypt. It ran under the first seats of the second range, and stairs led from it to both divisions. It might be entered either from the two broad corridors leading to the arena, or directly from the west side by means of two separate passages (c, d, on the plan). It is, however, interrupted at the middle on each side of the Amphitheatre. On the west side the prolongation of the crypt would have interfered with the use of the corridor leading to the Death Gate; but as no such reason existed for blocking the east branch, it is probable that the designers of the Amphitheatre interrupted both branches of the crypt in order to force the spectators who had seats in the lower and middle divisions of the south half of the structure to enter and leave by the somewhat inconvenient south entrances, which are situated in an angle of the city wall. Had the crypt been carried completely around, the crowd would always have pressed into the building through the north entrances, which opened toward the city, thus causing confusion, if not danger, on occasions of special interest.

In the corridor leading from the north entrance, as may be seen on the plan, a row of stones with square holes in them were placed in the pavement near the left wall. In these stakes could be set and connected by ropes, thus making a narrow passageway along the side. The purpose of the arrangement is not difficult to understand. Through the north corridor the gladiators entered and left the building, and the wild beasts were brought in; so provision had to be made to give them a passage separate from that used by the spectators. Before the commencement of an exhibition the whole entrance was accessible to the populace, which eagerly crowded forward to secure seats in good season. When they had for the most part found their places, the barrier was set up, and only a narrow alley was left along the east wall for belated spectators who wished to pass into the crypt on that side; the rest of the passage was reserved for the gladiators, and the spectators whose seats were reached from the opposite branches of the crypt were obliged to use the side entrance (c).

The middle division was separated from the summa cavea (8) by a low parapet with a narrow passage (praecinctio, b) on the upper side. The seats of the summa cavea could be reached in two ways, by passing through the crypt and up the long flights of stairs that led through the middle division to the top (best seen in Fig. 99), or by mounting the stairs on the outside of the building to the terrace (10), which has the same level as the highest rows of seats; it is also of the same height as the city wall, with which it is merged on the south and east sides. The terrace was no doubt the principal means of access; ample provision was made for the crowd by building two large double stairways (11), with smaller single flights at the corners where the terrace joined the city wall (12).

Between the terrace and the seats of the summa cavea was an elevated gallery, divided up into small boxes, about four feet square; under the row of boxes were vaulted vomitoria, making the seats of the summa cavea accessible from the terrace. A passage ran along the outside of the boxes, with steps leading from the terrace; only every third box was connected with this passage, however, the other two of the group being entered from a narrow ramp along the front (Fig. 100).

The Amphitheatre had a seating capacity of about twenty thousand persons. We have no information in regard to the distribution of seats, but it may safely be assumed, from the arrangements known to have existed elsewhere, that the lowest division was reserved for the city officials with their friends and other prominent people; that an admission fee was charged for the seats of the middle division; and that the seats of the upper division were free. The gallery was doubtless set aside for women, who were permitted by a regulation promulgated in the reign of Augustus to have a place only in the upper portion of the Amphitheatre.

Besides the inscription giving the names of the builders (p. 212) there are several others of interest in connection with the building. Four of them, cut in large letters in the travertine coping of the wall about the arena, commemorate the construction of seats. One reads: L. Saginius II vir i. d. pr[o] lu[dis] lu[minibus] ex d[ecurionum] d[ecreto] cun[eum],—'Lucius Saginius, duumvir with judiciary authority, in accordance with a resolution of the city council (constructed) a section of seats in the place of the games and illumination,' that otherwise he would have been required to provide. Another of the series is even more abbreviated, but the meaning is clear: MAG · PAG · AUG · F · S · PRO · LUD · EX · D · D, that is, Magistri Pagi Augusti Felicis Suburbani pro ludis ex decurionum decreto,—'The officials of the suburb Pagus Augustus Felix by authority of a resolution of the city council (constructed a section of seats) in the place of providing games.'

From an inscription in the Stabian Baths, to which reference has already been made (p. 195), it is clear that some freedom of choice was permitted to the city officials regarding the disposition of the sum which they were required to contribute for public purposes in recognition of the honor conferred upon them by their election. The Amphitheatre was not provided with seats at the beginning, and one wedge-shaped section (cuneus) after another was added until the divisions were complete; meanwhile the spectators made themselves as comfortable as they could on the sloping ground. As the organization of the Pagus Augustus Felix did not take place till 7 B.C., the construction of the seats could not at that time have been completed; but they were all finished before the overwhelming of the city.

The north entrance to the arena was adorned with two portrait statues of Gaius Cuspius Pansa, father and son, placed in niches in the walls facing each other. The statues have disappeared, but the inscriptions underneath are still in place. What services the Pansas had rendered in connection with the Amphitheatre to merit this distinction, we do not know; but the father, as the inscription indicates, was 'prefect in accordance with the law of Petronius' (p. 14); that is, he was appointed by the city council to exercise the functions of the two duumvirs when no valid election occurred. Bulwer Lytton, by a natural error, makes Pansa a commissioner to secure the execution of an altogether different Lex Petronia, which forbade the giving of slaves to wild beasts unless judicial sentence had been previously passed upon them.

The attraction of the gladiatorial exhibitions, together with the ample seating capacity of the building, stimulated attendance from neighboring cities, and on one occasion unfortunate results followed. In the year 59 A.D. a Roman senator, Livineius Regulus, who had been expelled from the Senate, and had apparently taken up his residence at Pompeii, gave an exhibition that attracted a great concourse. Among those who came to witness the combats were many inhabitants of Nuceria. The people of the two towns may not have been on the best of terms previously; whatever the cause, the Pompeians and Nucerians commenced with mutual bantering and recriminations, then resorted to stone-throwing, and finally engaged in a free fight with weapons.

The Nucerians, as can easily be understood, fared the worse, having many killed and wounded. They carried the matter to Rome, lodging a complaint with Nero; the emperor referred the case to the Senate, which decreed that Regulus and the leaders of the disturbance should be sent into exile, that the Pompeians should not be permitted to hold any gladiatorial exhibitions for the space of ten years, and that the illegal societies at Pompeii—in regard to which, unfortunately, we have no further information—should be dissolved. From the receipts of Caecilius Jucundus we learn, further, that the duumvirs of the year 59 were removed from office, and that with the new duumvirs, elected in their places, a magistrate with extraordinary powers, praefectus iuri dicundo, was associated—measures that indicate how serious the disturbance of public order must have been.

Reminiscences of this bloody fray are found in several inscriptions scratched on walls; and a lively idea of it is given by a wall painting found in 1869 in a house near the theatres, now in the Naples Museum (Fig. 101). The picture is of special interest as throwing light on the surroundings of the Amphitheatre and some of its arrangements. The open space with the trees in the foreground, among which are various booths, remind one of a park; at the right is a single house. It is clear from the painting that the women's boxes, in the gallery, were arched in front; and we see how the great awning, velum, was stretched over the south end to protect the audience from the sun. It was carried by the two towers of the city wall (one of them is indicated on the plan, 13) and by masts that stood in the passage behind the women's boxes, where several of the perforated stones in which they were set may still be seen.

That the sports of the Amphitheatre had at all times the keenest interest for the Pompeians is evident, not only from the number of notices having to do with the games, which we see painted in red on walls along the streets or on tombs by the roadside, but also from the countless graffiti in both houses and public places having reference to combats and favorite gladiators. The limits of space do not permit us to describe the gladiatorial exhibitions as they took place at Pompeii and other Roman cities; but the inscriptions bring so near to us the scenes and excitement of those days that it seems worth while to quote and interpret a few typical examples.

On a tomb near the Nuceria Gate, excavated in 1886, is the following notice, painted in red letters: Glad[iatorum] par[ia] XX Q. Monni Rufi pug[nabunt] Nola K[alendis] Mais, VI. V. Nonas Maias, et venatio erit,—'Twenty pairs of gladiators, furnished by Quintus Monnius Rufus, will fight at Nola May 1, 2, and 3, and there will be a hunt.' The forms of the letters and the numerous ligatures point to a comparatively early period, perhaps antedating the reign of Augustus. The 'hunt,' venatio, was an exhibition of wild beasts, which sometimes were pitted against one another, sometimes fought with men. Another tomb close by bears a notice of a gladiatorial combat to take place at Nuceria.

A still larger number of gladiators is announced in this notice: Cn. Allei Nigidi Mai quinq[uennalis] gl[adiatorum] par[ia] XXX et eor[um] supp[ositicii] pugn[abunt] Pompeis VIII VII VI K[alendas] Dec[embres]. Ven[atio] erit. Maio quin[quennali] feliciter. Paris va[le],—'Thirty pairs of gladiators furnished by Cn. Alleius Nigidius Maius, quinquennial duumvir, together with their substitutes, will fight at Pompeii November 24, 25, 26. There will be a hunt. Hurrah for Maius the quinquennial! Bravo, Paris!' The substitutes were to take the place of the killed or wounded, that the sport might not suffer interruption. Nigidius Maius appears to have been a rich Pompeian of the time of Claudius. In another painted inscription, he advertises a considerable property for rent (p. 489). His daughter, as we know from an inscription belonging to a statue erected in her honor, was a priestess of Venus and Ceres. Paris was probably a popular gladiator.

Other officials besides duumvirs provided exhibitions. Thus an aedile: A. Suetti Certi aedilis familia gladiatoria pugnab[it] Pompeis pr[idie] K[alendas] Iunias; venatio et vela erunt,—'The gladiatorial troop of the aedile Aulus Suettius Certus will fight at Pompeii May 31; there will be a hunt, and awnings will be provided.'

The following notice can be dated, approximately: D. Lucreti Satri Valentis flaminis Neronis Caesaris Aug[usti] fili perpetui gladiatorum paria XX, et D. Lucreti Valentis fili glad[iatorum] paria X pug[nabunt] Pompeis VI V IV III pr[idie] Idus Apr[iles]. Venatio legitima et vela erunt. Scr[ipsit] Aemilius Celer sing[ulus] ad luna[m],—'Twenty pairs of gladiators furnished by Decimus Lucretius Satrius Valens, permanent priest of Nero, son of the emperor, and ten pairs of gladiators furnished by Decimus Lucretius Valens his son, will fight at Pompeii April 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12. There will be a big hunt, and awnings. Aemilius Celer wrote this, all alone by the light of the moon.' The reference to Nero as the son of the emperor, shows that the inscription was written after he was adopted by Claudius, in 50 A.D., and before Claudius's death, in 54. Celer was an enterprising painter of notices, whose name appears elsewhere in a similar connection.

Besides the general announcement of a gladiatorial exhibition, a detailed programme, libellus, was prepared in advance, of which copies were sold. No such copy has come down to us, but the character of the contents of a programme may be inferred from the order of events which a Pompeian with waste time on his hands scratched on a wall; the memorandum covers two exhibitions, which came near together in the early part of May, the result of each combat being carefully noted. Unfortunately the letters have now become almost illegible; but we give the superscription and three of the nine pairs of combatants mentioned in the second programme, which is the better preserved of the two, adding in a separate column the full forms of the abbreviated words; the figures indicate the number of combats in which the different gladiators had taken part:—

MUNUS · N ... IV · III Munus N ... IV. III.

PRID · IDUS · IDI[BUS] · MAI[S] pridie Idus, Idibus Mais

T M Threx, Myrmillo

v. Pugnax · Ner · III vicit. Pugnax, Neronianus, III

p. Murranus · Ner · III periit. Murranus, Neronianus, III

O T Hoplomachus, Threx

v. Cycnus · Iul · VIIII vicit. Cycnus, Iulianus, VIIII

m. Atticus · Iul · XIV missus est. Atticus, Iulianus, XIV

ESS Essedarii

m. P · Ostorius · LI missus est. Publius Ostorius, LI.

v. Scylax · Iul · XXVI vicit. Scylax, Iulianus, XXVI

The name of the official who gave the exhibition (munus) is obliterated. The contests extended over four days, May 12-15.

In the first pair of gladiators Pugnax, equipped with Thracian weapons—a small, round shield and short, curved sword or dagger—was matched with the Myrmillo Murranus, who bore arms of the Gallic fashion, with the image of a fish on his helmet. Both were Neroniani; that is, from the training school for gladiators founded by Nero, apparently at Capua. Pugnax and Murranus had both been through three contests previously. The name of a gladiator entering a combat for the first time was not followed by a number, but by the letter T, standing for tiro, 'novice.' At the left we see the record added to the programme by the writer in order to give the result of the combat. Pugnax was the victor, Murranus was killed.

In the second pair Cycnus, in heavy armor, was pitted against Atticus, who had the Thracian arms. Both were from the training school founded by Julius Caesar, probably at Capua, and hence are called Iuliani. Cycnus won, but the audience had compassion on Atticus, and his life was spared. The same term was applied to a defeated gladiator permitted to leave the arena as to a soldier having an honorable discharge—missus, 'let go.'

The third pair fought in chariots, being dressed in British costume. Scylax was from the Julian school. Such establishments let out gladiators to those who gave exhibitions, and obtained in this way a considerable income. But Publius Ostorius, as his name implies, was a freeman; presumably he was a gladiator, who, having served a full term, had secured his freedom, and was now fighting on his own account. Though beaten, he was permitted to live, perhaps on account of his creditable record; he had engaged in fifty-one combats.

The combatants from the schools of Caesar and Nero were especially popular, and were generally victorious; but gladiators belonging to other proprietors are mentioned, as in the inscriptions of a house on Nola Street, which will be mentioned again presently. Here we find gladiators who were evidently freemen named with others who were slaves of different masters. In only one of these inscriptions, however, do we find the name of an owner that is known to us: Essed[arius] Auriolus Sisen[nae]. The chariot fighter Auriolus belonged to a Sisenna, seemingly either the Sisenna Statilius Taurus, who was consul in 16 A.D., or his son of the same name. As we have seen, it was a Statilius Taurus who built the first permanent amphitheatre in Rome, in 29 B.C. The control of this building remained in the hands of the family. In the columbarium in which the ashes of their slaves and freedmen were placed, we find inscriptions of a 'guard of the amphitheatre,' and of a 'doorkeeper'—custos de amphitheatro, ostiarius ab amphitheatro. It is highly probable that the family—the first in Rome after the imperial house—possessed a training school, and derived an income from furnishing gladiators to those who gave exhibitions.

In view of these facts, we must suppose that the 'troop' (familia gladiatoria) of Suettius Certus, for example, was simply a band of gladiators brought together for a particular engagement, not a permanent organization. The giver of an exhibition would make a contract for the gladiators that he might need. At the close of the combats the dead would be counted, the surviving freemen paid off and dismissed, and the surviving slaves returned to their masters, 'the troop' thus going out of existence.

Occasionally the individual who provided the combats would erect a monument to the fallen, by way of perpetuating the memory of his munificence. A familiar example is the memorial set up by Gaius Salvius Capito at Venosa, of which the inscription is extant. The names are given of the gladiators who were killed, together with the number of their previous combats and victories. They were slaves of different masters, only one of them, Optatus, being owned by Capito himself. Optatus was a tiro, who fell thus in his first contest. Possibly his master had obliged him, on account of some misdemeanor, to enter the arena with little previous training.

Besides the classes of inscriptions of which examples have been presented, all sorts of scratches upon the plastered walls bear witness to the general enthusiasm for gladiatorial sports. Sometimes there is simply the name of a gladiator, with his school and the number of combats, as Auctus, Iul[ianus], XXXXX; sometimes we find a rough outline of a figure with a boastful legend, as Hermaïscus invictus hac, 'Here's the unconquered Hermaïscus.'

There are also memoranda in regard to particular combats, illustrated by rude sketches. Thus on a wall in the house of the Centenary we find a drawing of a gladiator in flight, pursued by another, with the note: Officiosus fugit VIII Idus Nov[embres] Druso Caesare M. Iunio Silano cos.,—'Officiosus fled on November 6, in the year 15 A.D.' A similar sketch has been found in another house, with these words written beside the fleeing gladiator, Q. P[e]tronius O[c]ta[v]us XXXIII, m[issus]; beside the pursuer, Severus lib[ertus], XXXXXV, v[icit]. Severus was thus a gladiator who had been a slave, and had gained his freedom: he had fought fifty-five combats. Petronius Octavus may have been a freeman, who had fought on his own account from the beginning. In taverns a painting of a gladiator with an inscription like the record of a programme was a favorite subject of decoration.

Athletes in all ages have won the admiration of the gentler sex; and it would be surprising if among so many gladiatorial graffiti there were not some containing references to female admirers. In the peristyle of a house on Nola Street (V. v. 3) the names of about thirty gladiators are found; the kinds of weapons and the owners are designated, and the number of previous combats given, as in the programmes, while records of the results of the combats are entirely lacking. Terms of endearment are lavished upon two, Celadus, Threx, and Crescens, net fighter; Celadus is suspirium puellarum, 'maidens' sigh,' and puellarum decus, 'glory of girls'; while Crescens is puparum dominus, 'lord o' lassies,' and puparum medicus, 'the darlings' doctor.'

Another graffito informs us that at one time—before the year 63—a gladiator lived in this house: Samus / Ↄ / m[urmillo], idem eq[ues], hic hab[itat],—'Samus, who has fought once, and once conquered (Ↄ is for corona, 'crown'), Myrmillo, and at the same time fighter on horseback, lives here.' Other gladiators, no doubt, shared the dwelling with him; and the amatory graffiti may have been written by one and another miles gloriosus, referring to conquests outside the arena, or by companions in bitter scorn.

Chapter XXXI. Streets, Water System, and Wayside Shrines

The streets of Pompeii vary greatly in width. The widest is Mercury Street, the continuation of which near the Forum has a breadth of nearly 32 feet. Next come Abbondanza and Nola streets, the greatest width of which is about 28 feet; the other streets and thoroughfares vary from 10 to 20 feet. With unimportant exceptions, broad and narrow streets alike are paved with polygonal blocks of basalt, which in laying were fitted to one another with great care; on both sides are raised sidewalks, with basalt or tufa curbing. The sidewalks in some places are paved with small stones, elsewhere are laid with concrete, or left with a surface of beaten earth. As there is no uniformity, the sidewalk varying in front of adjoining houses, it is clear that the choice of materials was left to individual owners of abutting property. The limits of ownership are often designated by boundary stones, laid in the surface of the walk.

Broad ruts, worn by wheels, are seen in the pavement, shallower in places where the basalt flags, cut from the lowest stratum of the stream of lava, are particularly hard; deeper wherever there are blocks quarried nearer the surface. Only the principal streets were wide enough to allow wagons to meet and pass; elsewhere drivers must have waited at a corner for a coming team to go by. It seems likely that driving on the streets of the city was forbidden, wheeled vehicles being used only for traffic; people who wished to ride availed themselves of litters.

At various places along the thoroughfares, but particularly at the corners, large oblong stepping stones with rounded corners were set in the pavement at convenient distances for those wishing to cross, the surface being on a level with the sidewalk. The number varied according to the width of the pavement; in the broadest streets as many as five were used. They were arranged always in such a way as to leave places for the wagon wheels. It is not difficult to understand how Pompeian drivers guided their teams past them; draft animals were attached to the wagon by means of a yoke fastened to the end of the pole, and, as there were no tugs or whippletrees, they had a greater freedom of movement than is allowed to modern teams.

It is not to be supposed that so complete a system of paving existed from the beginning of the city. Some light is thrown on the period of its laying by two inscriptions,—one, EX · K · QUI, cut in the edge of the sidewalk west of Insula IX. iv.; the other, K · Q, in the pavement between the second and fourth Insulae of Region VII. Both are evidently dates, and in full would read ex Kalendis Quinctilibus, 'from the first day of July,' and Kalendis Quinctilibus, 'July 1.' Apparently they relate to the laying of the pavement; this was in place, even in the unimportant side street of Region VII, when the inscriptions were cut, and so must go back to the time before the name of the month Quinctilis was changed to Iulius, our July. Pompeii was paved, therefore, before 44 B.C.

The stepping stones were particularly useful when there was a heavy rain; for the water then flowed in torrents down the streets, as it does to-day in Catania, where the inhabitants have light bridges which they throw over the crossings after a storm. There were covered conduits to carry off the surface drainage of the Forum, one of which runs under the Strada delle Scuole to the south, the other under the Via Marina to the west. Elsewhere the water rushed down the streets till it came near the city walls, where it was collected and carried off by large storm sewers. These are still in successful operation, as are also the conduits at the Forum. One is at the west end of the Vico dei Soprastanti, another at the west end of Nola Street; and a third leads from Abbondanza Street, where it is crossed by Stabian Street, toward the south.

There were other sewers in the city, but they were of small dimensions and have not been fully investigated. They seem generally to have been under sidewalks. They were not designed to receive surface water, but the drainage of houses. They cannot have served this purpose fully, however, for most of the closets were connected, not with the sewers, but with cesspools.

After the lapse of more than eighteen centuries, the visitor at Pompeii will distinguish at a glance the business streets from those less frequented. The sides of the former are lined with shops; along the latter are blank walls, broken only by house doors, with now and then a small window high above the pavement. The greatest volume of business was transacted on the two main thoroughfares, Stabian and Nola streets; next in importance were Abbondanza Street, leading from the Forum toward the Sarno Gate, and the continuation of Augustales Street from the north end of the Forum toward the east. First in the list of quiet thoroughfares is the broad Mercury Street, along which were many homes of wealth; the north end of it is closed by the city wall.

There were many fountains along the streets of Pompeii, most of them at the corners. They were fed by pipes connecting with the water system of the city. The construction is simple. A deep basin was made by placing on their edges four large slabs of basalt, held together at the corners by iron clamps. Above one of the longer sides, usually near the middle, is a short, thick standard, of the same stone, pierced for the lead feed pipe, which threw a jet of water forward into the basin below; on the opposite side is a depression through which the superfluous water ran off into the street. Most of these standards are ornamented with reliefs, roughly carved but effective,—an eagle with a hare in its beak, a calf's head, a bust of Mercury, a head of Medusa, a drunken Silenus (Fig. 103), or some other suitable design, arranged so that the water would spurt from the mouth of the figure or from an amphora.

Occasionally we find a fountain of finer material. That of Concordia Augusta, of limestone, has already been mentioned (p. 117). In the neighborhood of the Porta Marina there is a fountain of white marble with a relief showing a cock that has tipped over a jar, from the mouth of which the water flowed. Both these more costly fountains were probably the gift of private individuals, one presented to the city by Eumachia, the other by the owner of the nearest house, at VII. xv. 1-2. All the fountains bear witness to long use by the depressions worn in the stone by the hands of those leaning forward to drink.

Water towers stand at the sides of the streets, small pillars of masonry preserved ordinarily to the height of 20 feet. Usually on one side there is a deep perpendicular groove (shown in Fig. 103) in which ran the pipe that carried the water to the top of the tower, where it was received by a small open reservoir, presumably of metal, and distributed through numerous small pipes leading to the fountains and to private houses. The sides of the towers are often covered with incrustations of lime deposited from the water, in which the impressions of the lead pipes are still to be seen; in the case of one tower, at the northeast corner of Insula VI. xiii, a number of the pipes have been preserved. A reservoir was placed also on the top of the commemorative arch at the lower end of Mercury Street, on which stood the bronze statue of Nero or Caligula (p. 48); the traces of the pipes leading from it are clearly seen on the surface of the arch. Similar water towers are in use now in Constantinople and Palermo, having been introduced into the latter city, it would seem, by the Saracens, who very likely took their water system from that of the Turkish capital.

In consequence of these arrangements, Pompeii was well supplied with water. There were flowing jets in all houses except the poorest, and in some the amount used must have been large. In the house of the Vettii there were no less than sixteen jets, in the house of the Silver Wedding, seven; and an equally generous distribution is found in many other of the more extensive private establishments. Large quantities of water were used also in the public baths. The water pipes were made of sheet lead folded together, a transverse section showing the shape of a pear. They were of all sizes, according to the pressure; the flow of water was regulated by means of stopcocks, much like those in use to-day.

Across the street from the Baths near the Forum, on the west, is a deep reservoir, of which we give the plan (Fig. 104). It is built partly below the level of the sidewalk, and measures about 50 feet in length and 13 in width, being covered by a vault. In the south end is a window (c), reached from one of the stairways; when the reservoir was filled to the bottom of the window, it contained not far from ninety-five thousand gallons. There were two outlets. One was at the level of the floor, closed by means of a bronze slide; the grooves in which the slide worked are preserved. This must have been used only when the reservoir was cleaned. The other outlet was placed about three feet above the floor, so that the water could be drawn off without disturbing the bottom. On the flat roof were rooms the arrangement of which cannot be determined.

Similar reservoirs are found in Constantinople, designed to furnish a supply of water in case of siege. Such may have been the purpose of our structure, which seems to have been built in the early years of the Roman colony. The residents, remembering the hardships of the siege of Sulla, may have thought it necessary to make provision against a similar strait in the future.

The source from which the city received its water supply has not been discovered. Evidently it did not draw upon the sources of the Sarno; the water channel constructed by Fontana (p. 25) runs through the city at a height of less than sixty feet above the level of the sea, while the ancient aqueduct that supplied Pompeii had so great a head that in the highest parts of the city, more than 130 feet above the sea, it forced the water to the top of the water towers, at least twenty feet more. Copious springs can never have existed on the sides of Vesuvius; water must have been brought to the city from the more distant mountains bounding the Campanian plain on the east.

We can hardly believe that the construction of a water channel for so great a distance lay within the resources of so small a town. We find, however, the remains of a great aqueduct which, starting near Avellino, a dozen miles east of Nola, skirted the base of Vesuvius on the north and extended westward, furnishing water not only to Naples but also to Puteoli, Baiae, and Misenum. This ancient structure drew from the same springs, and followed substantially the same route, as the new aqueduct which since 1885 has been bringing water to Naples. No inscription in regard to it has been found, and there is no reference to it in ancient books. The remains—of which the longest section, known as Ponti Rossi, 'Red Bridges,' may be seen near Naples—seem to indicate two styles of construction, extensive repairs having been made after the aqueduct had been partly destroyed; but up to the present time it has not been possible to determine the period to which they belong.

The water system of Pompeii goes back to the time before the founding of the Roman colony. This is evident, not only from the arrangements of the older baths, which contemplated a freer use of water than could well have been provided by cisterns, but also from the existence of three marble supports for fountain basins, which, as shown by their style of workmanship, the use of Oscan letters as mason's marks, and their location in pre-Roman buildings—the temple of Apollo, the Forum Triangulare, and the house of the Faun—belonged to the earlier period. If we may ascribe the building of the great aqueduct to the time of peace and prosperity in Campania between the Second Punic War and the Social War, and suppose that Pompeii, joining with other towns in its construction, was supplied by a branch from it, we have a simple and highly probable solution of the problem. Nothing in the character of the masonry requires us to assign the aqueduct to a later date.

The shrines along the streets, with few exceptions, were dedicated to the guardian deities presiding over thoroughfares, particularly the gods of street crossings, Lares Compitales. The worship of these divinities in Rome was reorganized by Augustus and placed in charge of the precinct wardens, vicorum magistri, who were to see that the worship of his guardian spirit, Genius, was associated with that of the Lares at each shrine. The arrangements at the Capital were naturally followed by the colonies and other cities under Roman rule.

At Pompeii the shrines of the street gods differ greatly in size and character. Sometimes there is a small altar against the side of a building, with two large serpents, personifications of the Genius of the place, painted on the wall near it; one of the serpents, with a conspicuous crest, represents a male, the other, a female.

Frequently the place of the altar is taken by a niche, in which the passer-by could deposit his offering. In our illustration (Fig. 105) we see an ancient street altar which was carefully preserved when the Central Baths were built, a niche being made over it in the new wall.

Sometimes a large altar is found, and the Lares, with their offerings, are painted on a wall above it. Such a shrine may be seen at the northwest corner of Stabian and Nola streets, between the fountain and the water tower (Fig. 103). Back of the altar is a wall terminating in a gable (the tiles are modern) on which was a painted altar with four worshippers clad in togas, and a fluteplayer, the inseparable accompaniment of a Roman sacrificial scene; at the sides were the two Lares, represented as youths, in loose tunics confined by a girdle, holding in one hand, high uplifted, a drinking horn (rhyton), from which a jet of wine flows into a small pail (situla) in the other hand. It is remarkable that we do not find in this or similar paintings at Pompeii, any figure representing the Genius of the emperor, while in private houses the Genius of the proprietor often has a place with the Lares, and sometimes the Genius of the emperor also; in theory at least, as already remarked (p. 104), the emperor stood to all men in the relation that the master of a house bore to the household.

There is also a small chapel for the worship of the street gods on the west side of Stabian Street, near Abbondanza Street. As may be seen from the accompanying plan (Fig. 106), at the left as you enter is a bench of masonry (1), at the rear a long altar (2). In the wall at the right is a niche for the bronze or terra cotta figures of the Lares and the Genius, while the surface of the altar is divided into two parts, for the separate worship of the same divinities. A similar chapel is situated on the west side of Mercury Street (VI. viii. 14). Here also we find a bench of masonry, with two niches above it; in the middle was a block of limestone which may have been used as an altar. At the rear is a door leading into a small back room. This chapel was formerly thought to be a barber shop.

It has been customary to assign to the street gods all of the shrines at the side of the street. Occasionally, however, other divinities were thus honored; and the only street altar found with an inscription is consecrated to a different deity. This altar is near Nola Street, on the east side of Insula IX. vii. On the wall above two cornucopias are painted the words Salutei sacrum, 'Sacred to Salus'; the goddess of health was worshipped here.

Near the upper end of the Forum, on the north side of Insula VII. vii, is another altar, above which is a stucco relief representing a sacrifice; at the sides of the relief are pilasters, and over it a gable, in which an eagle is seen. This indicates that the shrine was dedicated to Jupiter.

The largest of the street altars, of tufa, stands free in a vaulted niche on the north side of Insula VIII. ii, but no traces of painting are to be seen near it (Fig. 107).

Various divinities are painted on the outside of houses. The largest picture of this kind is at the corner of Abbondanza Street, on the east side of Insula VIII. iii. It contains figures of the twelve gods, distinguished by their attributes—Vesta, Diana, Apollo, Ceres, Minerva, Jupiter, Juno, Vulcan, Venus Pompeiana, Mars, Neptune, and Mercury. Underneath are the two serpents, facing each other, on either side of a painted altar; near the altar are other figures that cannot be plainly distinguished, probably of men offering sacrifice. This is not a shrine—there is no place for the offerings. The owner of the property (house of the Boar), desired to place his household under the protection of these gods, perhaps also to preserve the corner from defilement. We often find roughly sketched figures of single gods, to the guardian care of whom the master of a house wished to commit his interests—most frequently Mercury, the patron divinity of traders, and Bacchus; but also Jupiter, Minerva, and Hercules.

Sometimes merely a pair of serpents are painted on a wall, in order to give a religious association to the place, as a means of protection. In one case (east side of Insula VII. xi. 12) an explicit warning was painted on the plaster beside them: Otiosis locus hic non est; discede, morator,—'No place for loafers here; move along!'

Chapter XXXII. The Defences of the City

From the military point of view, Pompeii at the time of the eruption did not possess a system of defences. For many years previously the city wall had been kept in repair only as a convenience in matters of civil administration, and the gates had long since lost all appearance of preparedness to resist attack. The fortifications are not, however, without interest. They form a massive and conspicuous portion of the ruins, and as a survival from an earlier period they have recorded many evidences of the successive changes through which the city passed.

The relation of the wall to the configuration of the height on which Pompeii stood was pointed out in connection with our general survey of the city (p. 31). Along the southwest side, at the time of the eruption, it had almost completely disappeared. Here, where the slope was steepest and the city best defended by nature, the wall had been removed, and its place occupied by houses, at a comparatively early date, probably in the second century B.C.; enough fragments remain, however, to enable us to determine its location with certainty. Elsewhere the greater part of the wall is in a fair state of preservation. The towers did not belong to the original structure, and one of the gates in its present form is of still more recent origin.

The construction of the wall will be readily understood with the help of the accompanying illustrations.

First, two parallel stone walls were built, about 15 feet apart and 28 inches thick; both walls were strengthened on the side toward the city by numerous buttresses, the inner wall being further supported by massive abutments projecting into the space between (Fig. 108). This space was filled with earth.

When the desired height, 26 or 28 feet, was reached, a breastwork of parapets was constructed on the outer wall; the inner wall was carried up about 16 feet above the broad passageway on the top (Fig. 110) as a shield against the weapons of the enemy, preventing the missiles from going over into the town and causing them to fall where the garrison could easily pick them up to hurl back again. Rain water falling on the top flowed toward the outside, and was carried beyond the face of the masonry by stone waterspouts.

For additional strength there was heaped against the inner wall an embankment of earth, which still remains on the north side, between the tenth and twelfth towers. At the right of the Herculaneum Gate the place of the embankment and of the inner wall was taken by a massive stairway (E in Fig. 108) leading to the top. Originally, the stairs extended east about 270 feet, but afterwards they were demolished for the greater part of the distance, and houses were built close to the wall. There is a smaller stairway of the same kind east of the Stabian Gate (Fig. 111).

In the original structure both outer and inner walls were built of hewn blocks of tufa and limestone; but we find portions of the outer wall, and all the towers, of lava rubble, the surface of which was covered with stucco. The towers were already standing, as shown by inscriptions, at the time of the Social War. We are therefore safe in believing that in the period of peace following the Second Punic War the walls were not kept in repair, some parts of the outer wall being utilized as a quarry for building stone; that with the advent of the Social War they were hastily repaired on the north, east, and south sides, and strengthened by towers, but that no attempt was made to renew the fortifications on the steep southwest side, between the Herculaneum Gate and the Forum Triangulare, where the line of the old wall was covered with buildings.

When the towers were added—probably not long before 90 B.C.—they were not distributed evenly along the wall, but were placed where they seemed to be most needed. The western portion of the ridge between the Herculaneum and Capua Gates was particularly favorable for the approach of an enemy; hence three towers were built near together here, numbered 10, 11, and 12 on Plan I. Another part of the wall especially exposed was on the southeast side, where the height covered by the city slopes gradually down to the plain; and we find five towers within a comparatively short distance, two east of the Amphitheatre, the other three further south. On the north side, between the Capua and Sarno gates, the slope is steeper and two towers were thought to be sufficient.

That there were once two additional towers, besides the ten that have been enumerated, is evident from several Oscan inscriptions, painted in red letters on the street walls of houses. One of them, near the southwest corner of the house of the Faun, reads thus: 'This way leads between Towers 10 and 11, where Titus Fisanius is in command.' The street referred to runs between the tenth and twelfth Insulae of Region VI, direct to the city wall. Two others refer to a 'Tower 12' near the Herculaneum Gate, this part of the fortifications being in charge of Maras Adirius.

In a fourth inscription we read: 'This way leads between the houses of Maras Castricius and of Maras Spurnius, where Vibius Seximbrius is in command.' In 1897, a fifth inscription became visible on the north side of Insula VIII. v-vi, where it had been concealed by a coat of plaster: 'This way leads to the city building (and) to Minerva.' The street referred to is seemingly the blind alley which formerly ran through the insula (Plan I). If this is correct, the sanctuary of Minerva is the Doric temple in the Forum Triangulare; but the 'city building' cannot be identified.

The five inscriptions evidently date from the siege of Sulla; they were intended for the information of the soldiers, belonging to the army of the Allies, who were quartered in the city to assist in its defence. At this time there must have been twelve towers, that near the Herculaneum Gate being reckoned last in the enumeration, as in Plan I; but the location of the two that have disappeared has not been determined. Another suggestive reminder of the same siege is the name L · SVLA, scratched by a soldier in the stucco on the inside of Tower 10, near a loophole.

The towers, which measure approximately 31 by 25 feet, were built in two stories, with strong vaulted ceilings. The floor of the second story was on a level with the top of the wall, and over this story was a terrace with battlements, as shown in Fig. 110; the roof seen on the two towers in Fig. 101 was a later addition, made when the city walls were no longer needed as a means of defence. Stairways on the inside gave ready access to the lower part of the towers, which could be entered from the city by a door (Fig. 109) opening on the embankment. On the outside were loopholes. Below, at the right, was a sally port, placed thus in order that the soldiers when rushing forth might present their shields to the enemy, leaving the right hand free to use with offensive weapons; when returning to the wall they would, if possible, cut their way to the sally port in the next tower to the right, so as to avoid the danger of exposing their right sides to the enemy.

Four of the gates have been excavated, the Porta Marina and the Stabian, Nola and Herculaneum gates; two others, the Vesuvius and Sarno gates, have been partly exposed to view. The remaining two are still completely covered. All bear evidence of extensive repairs, and one of them, the Herculaneum Gate, was entirely rebuilt at a comparatively late period; with this exception, however, they seem to have assumed their present form in the Tufa Period. Three of them still retain traces of decoration of the first style on the inner parts. The different gateways enter the walls at various angles.

The Stabian Gate may be taken as typical. Entering from the outside, at A, one came through a vaulted passage, B, about twelve feet wide, to a broad middle passage, or vantage court, open to the sky, into which missiles and boiling pitch could be hurled from above upon the heads of an enemy attempting to force the gates; then followed a second vaulted passage, a little wider than the other, in which were hung the heavy double doors, opening outward. The projecting posts of the doors are preserved, as are also the stones on which they rested when they were swung back against the wall; the vaulting has been restored. The gateway was paved throughout, with a raised walk on the right side. On one side of the inner entrance is a well (a), the Gorgon's head upon the curb reminding one of the protectress of the gate; on the other, the flight of steps already mentioned (b) leads to the top of the wall. Just beyond the steps are the remains of a small building, perhaps the lodge of the gate keeper (c).

The patron divinity of city gates, Minerva, was probably honored with a small statue in the niche still to be seen in the wall of the vantage court. Two inscriptions commemorate the making of repairs on the thoroughfare passing under the gateway. One of them (at d) is the Oscan inscription recording the work of the aediles Sittius and Pontius, to which reference has already been made (p. 184). The other (at e) is in Latin, and of much later date. It informs us that the duumvirs L. Avianius Flaccus and Q. Spedius Firmus at their own expense paved the road 'from the milestone,' which must have been near the gate, 'to the station of the gig drivers (cisiarios), at the limits of the territory of the Pompeians.' The Roman gigs, cisia, were very light, and adapted for rapid travelling; they were drawn by horses or mules, and were kept for hire at stations along the highways. The site of the station between Pompeii and Stabiae is not known.

The Nola Gate, and the partially excavated Vesuvius and Sarno gates, follow the plan just described in all essential particulars. The inner keystone of the Nola Gate, facing the city, is ornamented with a helmeted head of Minerva, in high relief, which being of tufa has suffered from exposure to the weather. There was once an Oscan inscription near by, which stated that the chief executive officer of the city, Vibius Popidius, let the contract for building this gate, and accepted the structure from the contractor.

The front of the Porta Marina has the appearance of a tower projecting from the wall. The gateway consists simply of two vaulted entrances, of unequal width; one for vehicles, the other, at the left, for pedestrians. Both were closed by doors. In the niche at the right of the wider passage the lower part of a terra cotta statue of Minerva was found. There was no vantage court, no inner passage; but in the early years of the Roman colony the steep lower end of the Via Marina for a distance of 70 feet was covered with a vaulted roof, which still remains. Opening into this corridor on the right is a long narrow room, which formed a part of the foundations of the court of the temple of Venus Pompeiana, and is now used as a Museum.

This gate in its present form could hardly have been intended for defence; it was adapted rather for administrative purposes, and must have been built—probably in the place of an earlier structure—in a period when the possibility of war seemed remote. Such a time, as previously remarked, was the second century B.C., particularly the latter half, after the destruction of Carthage.

A still more peaceful aspect is presented by the Herculaneum Gate. The style of masonry—rubble work with opus mixtum at the corners—points to the end of the Republic, rather than to the Empire, as the period of construction. Here we find three vaulted passages, the middle one for vehicles, those on either side for pedestrians. The vaulting over the middle part of the gate has disappeared; but according to appearances a vantage court was left here, in the middle passage, if not in those at the sides; at the inner end of this court the gates were placed. The greater part of the structure served no purpose of utility; it was obviously designed as a monumental entrance to the city.