Pompeii

by Mary Beard

  The paintings from the Estate of Julia Felix depict a lesson going on under the colonnade of the Forum. A man, dressed in a cloak, sporting a pointed beard, appears to be supervising three pupils who are studying tablets on their knees. Other pupils or the children’s minders watch what is going on from under the colonnade. What none seem to be observing is the nasty scene to the right. One boy has had his tunic lifted to reveal his bare buttocks (or has even been stripped down to a waistband – the painting itself is not clear). Suspended on the back of another, while his feet are held tight, he is being given a good lashing. It seems a peculiarly brutal form of punishment, even by the toughest standards of the recent past, and the awkward, helpless position of the boy only serves to accentuate the cruelty. Yet interestingly, this may well have been the normal style of schoolboy beating in the ancient world. A light-hearted poem by Herodas, a Greek poet of the third century BCE, describes a mother’s attempt to reform her no-good son, Kottalos, who has been neglecting his studies in favour of gambling. She arranges for the schoolmaster to give him a hiding – and the description of the other boys lifting the unfortunate Kottalos onto their shoulders is strikingly reminiscent of what we see here.

  29. Rough justice in the Pompeian classroom. One schoolboy miscreant gets a hiding, while the rest of the class get on with their work, keeping their eyes carefully on their tablets.

  The frieze, fragmentary and faded as it now is, offers all kinds of precious hints about how we might begin to repopulate the Pompeian cityscape: and not just with men in white togas (indeed there are rather few of those). It prompts us to imagine children at their lessons, beggars plying for cash, traders and hucksters of all kinds, or local officials at their business. Women are prominent too, out on the streets on their own, or with their children, haggling, chatting, buying, even distributing the occasional largesse to those less fortunate than themselves. But more than that, the paintings hint at the colour, clutter and bric-a-brac of urban life that tends to get forgotten when we stare at the now bare ruins: the bright clothing, the portable tables and braziers, the wicker baskets, the garlands and all those statues. One estimate has it that in early imperial Rome live human beings outnumbered statues by a factor of only two to one – which would make a total of some half a million statues in a human population of a million. There was nothing like that concentration of sculpture in Pompeii. But, nonetheless, life in the Forum here unfolds under the watchful eyes of men in bronze (or marble), emperors alive or dead, imperial princelings and local notables.

  The city that never sleeps

  In 6 BCE, the emperor Augustus was called upon to adjudicate a tricky case from the Greek city of Cnidus. A couple of residents, Eubulus and Tryphera, had been troubled night after night by a group of local thugs who ‘laid siege’ to their house. Finally, their patience at an end, they told one of their slaves to get rid of them by throwing the contents of a chamber pot on their heads. But things went from bad to worse: for the slave lost his grip on the pot, it fell and killed one of the assailants. The Cnidian authorities were minded to accuse Eubulus and Tryphera of unlawful killing, but the emperor came down on the side of the couple – long-suffering victims, as he saw it, of anti-social behaviour. His judgement was inscribed publicly in a nearby town: hence our knowledge of the affair.

  Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case (and some scholars have suspected that Eubulus and Tryphera might not have been quite as innocent as the emperor found them), it is one of the very few glimpses we get, leaving aside Juvenal’s poetic hyperbole about Rome itself, of how an ‘ordinary’ ancient town might have appeared at night: dark, unpoliced, slightly scary. How like that were the streets of Pompeii when the sun had gone down?

  One image of night-time Pompeii would see even the main streets as almost pitch black. Although Romans went to enormous trouble to bring light to their world in the hours of darkness (as the thousands of bronze and pottery oil lamps found in Pompeii demonstrate), the results were patchy at best. Most people had to live their lives by the rhythms of daylight, sunrise to sunset. The inns and bars kept serving into the evening hours, illuminated in part by lamps hanging over their open doorways, their fixings in some cases still visible. In fact, one electoral poster – a satiric piece of ‘anti-propaganda’ or not – offers the support of ‘the late drinkers’ to one particular candidate for public office: ‘All the late drinkers are canvassing for Marcus Cerrinius Vatia to be aedile’. But the big houses would have shut their doors and presented a solid, uninviting blank wall to the outside world, punctured only by the occasional tiny window. The shops and workshops would have closed too, secured with the shutters whose slots are still visible in their thresholds, as well as occasionally the impression of the wood itself. Without street lighting, and with uneven pavements, irregular stepping stones and a good deal of filth, pedestrians – equipped only with the light of a portable lantern, and whatever the moon provided – would have ventured about at their peril.

  30. Shut up shop? The wide openings of the shops could be closed by heavy wooden shutters. This plaster cast of a set of shutters on the Via dell’Abbondanza shows how the section on the right could operate as a small door to give access when the shop was shut.

  But there was life in the streets at night too, and a good deal more noise and hustle and bustle about the town than the gloomy darkness would suggest. In addition to the barking of the dogs and the braying of the donkeys, men might be at work. It is certain, for example, that on some occasions the signwriters putting up the advertisements for the next gladiatorial display in the Amphitheatre, or the electoral posters urging support for this or that candidate for local office, plied their trade by night. One such writer, Aemilius Celer, who posted an advertisement for thirty pairs of gladiators fighting over five days, carefully signed his work: ‘Aemilius Celer wrote this on his own by the light of the moon’. Such solitary activity was probably not the norm. One notice posted high up on a wall, urging support for Caius Julius Polybius in the forthcoming elections, includes a joke from the signwriter to his mate: ‘Lantern carrier, steady the ladder’. Why did they choose to work after dark? Perhaps because they were sometimes putting up notices without permission, where they should not have been (but not always – else why sign their names?). Perhaps it was more convenient to be painting when there were fewer people about to disturb the work, or rock the ladder.

  There may well have also been a good deal more traffic trundling down the streets than we would at first imagine. In the same document as the regulations for the upkeep of pavements in Rome were listed are also found the rules for the entry of wheeled traffic into the city of Rome. Although all kinds of exceptions are noted (carts used for building work on temples, to remove rubble from public demolition sites, or those used in connection with important rituals), the basic principle was that wheeled transport was excluded from the city from sunrise until the tenth hour of the day – that is, given that the hours of daylight were divided into twelve, until the late afternoon or early evening. The hours of darkness, in other words, were the time when you were most likely to find carts on the streets of the capital. Indeed, in addition to his complaints about falling objects and muggers, Juvenal has some sharp words about the noise of the night-time traffic.

  We cannot be certain if these regulations applied, in exactly these terms, to Pompeii; though it is a fair assumption that they did, more or less. Nor can we be certain how rigorously they would have been enforced. A law is one thing, having the will or the resources to police it, quite another. (And remember that a cart appeared in the Forum frieze in a scene that was clearly not intended to be nighttime ...) Nevertheless, there is a reasonable chance that a good proportion of the wheeled traffic whose management and control we have explored in this chapter would have been out in the street after dark. As well as the howling dogs, the carousing of the ‘late drinkers’, the whistling and joking of the signpainters at their jobs, we have to imagine the sounds of the rumbling carts, the jing
ling of the bells, the scraping of iron-clad wheels against the kerb or the stepping stones. Literally, a city that never slept – and was never quiet.

  CHAPTER THREE

  HOUSE AND HOME

  The House of the Tragic Poet

  In The Last Days of Pompeii, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s classic disaster novel first published in 1834, a pair of lovers, Glaucus and Ione, manage to escape from the doomed city. As the volcanic debris falls, they are led to safety by a blind slave girl who is used to navigating her way around Pompeii in darkness. Tragically – but conveniently for the plot, since she too is in love with Glaucus – the slave girl drowns herself, after stealing a single kiss from her beloved. Glaucus and Ione meanwhile relocate to Athens, where they live happily ever after, as Christian converts.

  The appeal of The Last Days, one of the best-selling books of the nineteenth century, was partly its colourful romance: the volcano was only one of the lovers’ problems – in the days leading up to the eruption they faced any number of impediments, from a malevolent Egyptian priest to wrongful imprisonment. It was partly too its moral message, pointing up the depravity of the pagan world, from which Glaucus and Ione escaped. But a significant part of its appeal was also the vivid, and carefully researched, archaeological backdrop, from Amphitheatre to baths, Forum to private houses. Bulwer-Lytton had drawn heavily on Sir William Gell’s Pompeiana, the first comprehensive guide to Pompeii in English, and had even dedicated the novel to Gell.

  The house of the hero Glaucus himself was based on the House of the Tragic Poet, a small but exquisitely decorated property uncovered in 1824 (Fig. 6). This quickly became famous as an ideal vision of Pompeian domestic life and was described in great detail in Pompeiana. A few years later – partly, no doubt, thanks to the extra celebrity bestowed on it by The Last Days – it even provided the model for the ‘Pompeian Court’ at the Crystal Palace, that vast entertainment venue, combining commercial showcase with museum, which opened just outside London, at Sydenham, in 1854. It was a strange afterlife for a house that had been overwhelmed by Vesuvius almost two millennia earlier. The House of the Tragic Poet was more or less faithfully reconstructed within the Palace, and at first intended – appropriately enough, given its domestic image – to act as a tearoom for visitors. In the event plans changed, and the only visitor ever officially to sit down to tea there was Queen Victoria. In France it had a more socially exclusive nineteenth-century imitator. The interior design of the mansion in the rue Montaigne in Paris, where Prince Napoléon and his aristocratic friends enjoyed dressing up in togas and pretending to be Romans, was also based on the House of the Tragic Poet.

  Figure 6. The House of the Tragic Poet. Visitors entered this house between two shops (a), down a narrow passageway to the atrium (b), with its porter’s cubby-hole (d). Beyond the tablinum (c) with its mosaic of actors preparing (Plate 17), was the garden (g). Opening onto it was a triclinium (f ) and kitchen (e).

  The original remains of this house are to be found in the north-west corner of Pompeii, between the Herculaneum Gate and the Forum – directly across the street from one of the main sets of public baths, and a near neighbour, just two small blocks away, of the vast House of the Faun. Named, when it was excavated, after one of its wall paintings – then believed to depict a tragic poet reciting his work to a group of listeners (now re-identified as the mythical scene in which Admetus and Alcestis listen to the reading of an oracle) – the house was built in its present form towards the end of the first century BCE. The surviving decoration, including a striking series of wall paintings which featured scenes from Greek myth and literature, is somewhat later, the result of a makeover in the decade or so before the eruption. A few years after they were discovered, most of the figured scenes were cut out and taken to the museum in Naples, creating unattractive scars on the walls of the house. What was left in place – the surrounding patterns and the general wall colouring – is now dreadfully faded, despite the fact that it was roofed over in the 1930s to protect it from the elements. The impact is obviously much less breathtaking than when it was first discovered. That said, we can still fairly confidently reconstruct its ancient appearance and organisation, as well as glimpse something of the tremendous impression it made on visitors in the nineteenth century.

  31. A reconstruction of the outside of the House of the Tragic Poet. With one of the shops shut, and only a few windows on the upper storey, the appearance is rather forbidding. The overhanging balcony at the side was a more common feature of Pompeian architecture than we would now imagine; made of wood, few have survived.

  The façade of the house onto the main street (Ill. 31) is dominated by a pair of shops, in a good position to attract customers from the public baths opposite (in fact there is a strategically placed set of stepping stones across the road at this point). What they sold we do not know. In the one to the left some precious pieces of jewellery were discovered, gold and pearl ear-rings, bracelets, necklaces and finger-rings. But there was not enough to prove, as some archaeologists have suggested, that it was a high-class jewellery outlet (these things might, after all, have been the contents of a jewellery box that was never rescued). There were few windows, and those that there were, small and on the upper storey, well above eye-level. But between the shops was the grand entrance to the house, more than three metres high, fitted (as we can tell from the pivot holes on either side of the threshold) with double doors. Just to the left of this some signpainters had been busy, painting on the door pier a notice of support for Marcus Holconius, who was standing for the office of aedile, and for Caius Gavinius. Presumably this had been done with the owner’s encouragement or, at least, permission; if not, it was extremely cheeky use of someone’s doorpost.

  32. At the front entrance of the House of the Tragic Poet, marked here by the round fixings for the door, was this mosaic of a guard dog, and underneath the words CAVE CANEM. The round hole below in the centre is a drainage hole – water conscious as the Pompeians always were.

  Here the doors themselves have not survived, but in other houses it has occasionally been possible to make a cast of them by the same technique as has been used for the bodies of the victims – filling with plaster the hole left by their decay. From these we get a stark, and more than slightly forbidding, impression of a great barrier of wood, with metal fittings and studded with bronze, dividing the house from the outside world. There can have been no practical necessity for portals of quite this size, strength and splendour. They were there to make a visual impact on visitors and passers-by: as much a symbolic boast, as a physical barrier.

  Not that the doors were always closed, of course. At night, they surely did shut off the house and its activities from the world of the street. In the daytime, they may often have been open, allowing a view into the interior. If that was not the case, then the point of one of the House of the Tragic Poet’s most iconic images would have been lost. For directly on the other side of the threshold, and just past the small drainage hole for overflow water that must sometimes have flowed down the front hall from inside the house, is a memorable image in mosaic of a dog, teeth bared and ready to pounce were he not chained up (Ill. 32). In case you missed the point, he is accompanied by the words CAVE CANEM (‘beware of the dog’). This would only have been visible if the front doors were ajar.

  There are other such warning signs in Pompeii, in paint as well as mosaic, not to mention the plaster cast of the real-life dog which died still tethered to his post. One is actually described by Petronius in his novel, the Satyrica, written during the reign of the emperor Nero. Much of the book has been lost or survives only in snatches, but the most famous and best-preserved section is set in a town somewhere near the Bay of Naples and features a dinner party given by an ex-slave called Trimalchio – a man of staggering riches, but of sometimes frankly grotesque taste. When the novel’s narrator and his friends arrive at Trimalchio’s front door, the first thing they see is a notice pinned right next to it: ‘No slave to leave the
premises without permission from the master. Penalty 100 lashes’ (a nice touch from one who had once been a slave himself ). Then they come across the porter, flamboyantly dressed in green with a cherry-red belt, who is keeping watch over the doorway while shelling peas into a silver bowl; and, hanging over the threshold, a magpie in a golden cage sings a greeting to the visitors. But the real shock comes next: ‘I almost fell flat on my back and broke a leg,’ explains the narrator, ‘because on the left as we went in, not far from the porter’s cubby-hole, was a huge dog, tethered by a chain ... painted on the wall. And written above him in capital letters it said CAVE CANEM, BEWARE OF THE DOG.’ Just for a minute, he has taken the picture of the dog for the real thing – only the first of many occasions at Trimalchio’s dinner party when the guests will not quite know whether to believe their eyes.

  It would be dangerous to take Petronius’ fantastic novel too literally as a guide to daily life in ancient Pompeii. But it does offer a hint here of how we might reconstruct the scene at the entrance of the House of the Tragic Poet. The door was very likely open for much of the daytime. But the security would not have been left to the mosaic guard dog, however fearsome or lifelike it might have been, or even to the actual dog signalled by the image (like the one which Trimalchio later brings into his dinner party, with predictably disruptive results). Almost certainly a porter, albeit more modestly dressed than Trimalchio’s, would have kept an eye on who was coming and going. In fact a small room just inside the house, under the stairs, with a rough floor, has been tentatively identified as the porter’s cubby-hole.