Pompeii was one of the minor towns of Italy, hardly noticed in Latin literature except for its fish sauces, its cabbage, and its burial. Founded by Oscans perhaps as early as Rome, peopled by Greek immigrants, captured by Sulla and turned into a Roman colony, it was partly destroyed by an earthquake in A.D. 63 and was being rebuilt when Vesuvius destroyed it again. On August 24, A.D. 79, the volcano exploded and hurled dust and rock high into the air amid clouds of smoke and flashes of flame. A heavy rainfall turned the erupted matter into a torrent of mud and stone, which in six hours covered Pompeii and Herculaneum to a depth of eight or ten feet. All that day and the next the earth shook and buildings fell. Audiences were buried in the ruins of theaters,14 hundreds were choked by dust or fumes, and tidal waves shut off escape by sea. The elder Pliny was at that time commanding the western fleet at Misenum, near Puteoli. Moved by appeals for help and by curiosity to observe the phenomenon at closer range, he boarded a small vessel, landed on the southern shore of the gulf, and rescued several persons; but as the party ran from the advancing hail and smoke, the old scientist was overcome, fell in his tracks, and died.15 The next morning his wife and his nephew joined the desperate crowd that fled down the coast, while from Naples to Sorrento the continuing eruption blackened the day into night. Many refugees, separated in the darkness from their husbands, wives, or children, made the terror worse with their laments and shrieks. Some prayed to divers gods for help; some cried out that all gods were dead and that the long-predicted end of the world had come.16 When, on the third day, the sky cleared at last, lava and mud had covered everything of Pompeii but the rooftops, and Herculaneum had completely disappeared.
Of approximately 20,000 population in Pompeii, probably some 2000 lost their lives. Several of the dead were preserved by a volcanic embalmment: the rain and pumice stone that fell upon them made a cement that hardened as it dried; and the filling of these impromptu molds has made some gruesome plaster casts. A few of the survivors dug into the ruins to recover valuables; thereafter the site was abandoned and was slowly covered by the detritus of time. In 1709 an Austrian general sank a shaft at Herculaneum, but the tufa layer was so thick (in some places sixty-five feet) that excavations had to proceed by slow and costly tunneling. The exhuming of Pompeii began in 1749 and has gone on at intervals since. Today most of the ancient town has been uncovered and has revealed so many houses, objects, and inscriptions that in some ways we know ancient Pompeii better than ancient Rome.
The center of its life, as in every Italian city, was the forum. Once, doubtless, it had been the gathering point for farmers and their produce on market days; games were held there, and dramas were performed. There the citizens had raised shrines to their gods; at one end to Jupiter, at the other to Apollo, and near by to Venus Pompeiana, the patron goddess of the town. But they were not a religious people; they were too busy with industry and politics, games and venery, to have much time for worship; and even in worship they honored the phallus as the crown of their Dionysian ritual.17 When economic and state affairs swelled in volume and dignity, great buildings rose around the forum for administration, negotiation, and exchange.
We may judge from modern Italian towns how the adjoining streets throbbed with the hawking of peddlers, the disputes of buyers and sellers, the noise of crafts by day and revelry by night. In the ruins of the shops excavators found some of the charred and petrified nuts, loaves, and fruits that so narrowly escaped a purchaser. Farther down the streets were the taverns, gambling houses, and brothels, each zealous to be all in one.
We might not have guessed the keenness of Pompeii’s life had not its people scratched their sentiments upon public walls. Three thousand such graffiti have been copied there, and presumably there were thousands more. Sometimes the authors merely inscribed their names or obscene audacities, as men still love to do; sometimes they gave hopeful instructions to enemies, as Samius Cornelio, suspendere—“Samius to Cornelius: go hang yourself.” Many of the inscriptions are love messages, often in verse: Romula notes that she “tarried here with Stephylus”; and a devoted youth writes, Victoria vale, et ubique es, suaviter sternutas—“Good-by, Victoria, and wherever you are may you sneeze pleasantly.”18
Quite as numerous as these messages are the carved or painted announcements of public events or private offerings. Landlords advertised vacancies, losers described missing articles; guilds and other groups declared themselves for promising candidates in the municipal campaigns. So “the fishermen have named Popidius Rufus for aedile”; “the lumbermen and the charcoal sellers ask you to elect Marcellinus.”19 Some graffiti announced gladiatorial games, others proclaimed the valor of famous gladiators like Celadus, suspirium puellarum, “the maidens’ sigh,” or breathed devotion to a favorite actor—“Actius, darling of the people, come back soon!”20 Pompeii lived to be amused. It had three public baths, a palaestra, a small theater seating 2500, a larger one accommodating 5000, and an amphitheater where 20,000 persons could enjoy by proxy the agony of death. One inscription reads: “Thirty pairs of gladiators furnished by the duumvir . . . will fight at Pompeii on November 24, 25, and 26. There will be a hunt [venatio]. Hurrah for Maius! Bravo, Paris!” Maius was duumvir or city magistrate; Paris was the leading gladiator.
The remains of the domestic interiors suggest a life of solid comfort and varied art. Windows were exceptional, central heating was rare; bathrooms appear in the richer homes, and a few houses had an outdoor pool in a peristyled garden. Floors were of cement or stone, sometimes of mosaic. One frank moneymaker had the words Salve lucrum—“Hail, gain!” lettered in his floor; another inscribed his with Lucrum gandium—“Gain is joy.”21 Little has been found of the ancient furniture; nearly all was of wood, and perished; but a few tables, couches, chairs, and lamps of marble or bronze have survived. In the museums at Pompeii and Naples may be seen the miscellanea of domestic life: pens, inkstands, scales, kitchen utensils, toilet articles, and musical instruments.
The art recovered from Pompeii or near it suggests that not only the aristocrats of the villas, but the merchants of the city enjoyed the cultural accessories of life. A private library unearthed at Herculaneum had 1756 volumes or rolls. We must not repeat what we have said of the Boscoreale cups, or the rich vistas and graceful women painted upon the walls of Pompeian homes. Many dwellings had excellent sculptures, and the forum contained 150 statues. In the Temple of Jupiter a head of the god was found which Pheidias himself might have carved—strength and justice framed in the curls of abounding hair and beard. In the Temple of Apollo was a statue of Diana, equipped with a hole in the back of the head through which a hidden ministrant might utter oracles. In one Herculanean villa enough first-class bronzes were found to fill a famous room at the Naples Museum. Presumably the masterpieces in this collection—the Resting Mercury, the Narcissus or Dionysus, the Drunken Satyr, and the Dancing Faun—were of Greek origin or workmanship; they reveal the skillful technique, and the shameless joy in the healthy body, characteristic of Praxitelean art. One of them, however, a bravely realistic bust in bronze, shows the bald head and sharp but not unkindly face of L. Caecilius Iucundus, a Pompeian auctioneer whose accounts, inscribed upon 154 wax tablets, were found in his house at Pompeii. Supremely human in its mixture of coarseness and intelligence, wisdom and warts, this work of a contemporary—perhaps Italian—sculptor is a welcome foil to the unwrinkled gods and goddesses who surround it in the Naples Museum, and who confess by their smooth and placid features that they never lived.