Part 10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI.

THE DWELLINGS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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