The Innocents Abroad

Chapter 31

THE BURIED CITY OF POMPEII

They pronounce it Pom-pay-e. I always had an idea that you went down

into Pompeii with torches, by the way of damp, dark stairways, just as

you do in silver mines, and traversed gloomy tunnels with lava overhead

and something on either hand like dilapidated prisons gouged out of the

solid earth, that faintly resembled houses. But you do nothing the kind.

Fully one-half of the buried city, perhaps, is completely exhumed and

thrown open freely to the light of day; and there stand the long rows of

solidly-built brick houses (roofless) just as they stood eighteen hundred

years ago, hot with the flaming sun; and there lie their floors,

clean-swept, and not a bright fragment tarnished or waiting of the

labored mosaics that pictured them with the beasts, and birds, and

flowers which we copy in perishable carpets to-day; and here are the

Venuses, and Bacchuses, and Adonises, making love and getting drunk in

many-hued frescoes on the walls of saloon and bed-chamber; and there are

the narrow streets and narrower sidewalks, paved with flags of good hard

lava, the one deeply rutted with the chariot-wheels, and the other with

the passing feet of the Pompeiians of by-gone centuries; and there are

the bake-shops, the temples, the halls of justice, the baths, the

theatres--all clean-scraped and neat, and suggesting nothing of the

nature of a silver mine away down in the bowels of the earth. The

broken pillars lying about, the doorless doorways and the crumbled tops

of the wilderness of walls, were wonderfully suggestive of the "burnt

district" in one of our cities, and if there had been any charred

timbers, shattered windows, heaps of debris, and general blackness and

smokiness about the place, the resemblance would have been perfect. But

no--the sun shines as brightly down on old Pompeii to-day as it did when

Christ was born in Bethlehem, and its streets are cleaner a hundred

times than ever Pompeiian saw them in her prime. I know whereof I

speak--for in the great, chief thoroughfares (Merchant street and the

Street of Fortune) have I not seen with my own eyes how for two hundred

years at least the pavements were not repaired!--how ruts five and even

ten inches deep were worn into the thick flagstones by the

chariot-wheels of generations of swindled tax-payers? And do I not know

by these signs that Street Commissioners of Pompeii never attended to

their business, and that if they never mended the pavements they never

cleaned them? And, besides, is it not the inborn nature of Street

Commissioners to avoid their duty whenever they get a chance? I wish I

knew the name of the last one that held office in Pompeii so that I

could give him a blast. I speak with feeling on this subject, because I

caught my foot in one of those ruts, and the sadness that came over me

when I saw the first poor skeleton, with ashes and lava sticking to it,

was tempered by the reflection that may be that party was the Street

Commissioner.

No--Pompeii is no longer a buried city. It is a city of hundreds and

hundreds of roofless houses, and a tangled maze of streets where one

could easily get lost, without a guide, and have to sleep in some ghostly

palace that had known no living tenant since that awful November night of

eighteen centuries ago.

We passed through the gate which faces the Mediterranean, (called the

"Marine Gate,") and by the rusty, broken image of Minerva, still keeping

tireless watch and ward over the possessions it was powerless to save,

and went up a long street and stood in the broad court of the Forum of

Justice. The floor was level and clean, and up and down either side was

a noble colonnade of broken pillars, with their beautiful Ionic and

Corinthian columns scattered about them. At the upper end were the

vacant seats of the Judges, and behind them we descended into a dungeon

where the ashes and cinders had found two prisoners chained on that

memorable November night, and tortured them to death. How they must have

tugged at the pitiless fetters as the fierce fires surged around them!

Then we lounged through many and many a sumptuous private mansion which

we could not have entered without a formal invitation in incomprehensible

Latin, in the olden time, when the owners lived there--and we probably

wouldn't have got it. These people built their houses a good deal alike.

The floors were laid in fanciful figures wrought in mosaics of

many-colored marbles. At the threshold your eyes fall upon a Latin

sentence of welcome, sometimes, or a picture of a dog, with the legend

"Beware of the Dog," and sometimes a picture of a bear or a faun with no

inscription at all. Then you enter a sort of vestibule, where they used

to keep the hat-rack, I suppose; next a room with a large marble basin

in the midst and the pipes of a fountain; on either side are bedrooms;

beyond the fountain is a reception-room, then a little garden,

dining-room, and so forth and so on. The floors were all mosaic, the

walls were stuccoed, or frescoed, or ornamented with bas-reliefs, and

here and there were statues, large and small, and little fish-pools, and

cascades of sparkling water that sprang from secret places in the

colonnade of handsome pillars that surrounded the court, and kept the

flower-beds fresh and the air cool. Those Pompeiians were very

luxurious in their tastes and habits. The most exquisite bronzes we

have seen in Europe, came from the exhumed cities of Herculaneum and

Pompeii, and also the finest cameos and the most delicate engravings on

precious stones; their pictures, eighteen or nineteen centuries old, are

often much more pleasing than the celebrated rubbish of the old masters

of three centuries ago. They were well up in art. From the creation of

these works of the first, clear up to the eleventh century, art seems

hardly to have existed at all--at least no remnants of it are left--and

it was curious to see how far (in some things, at any rate,) these old

time pagans excelled the remote generations of masters that came after

them. The pride of the world in sculptures seem to be the Laocoon and

the Dying Gladiator, in Rome. They are as old as Pompeii, were dug from

the earth like Pompeii; but their exact age or who made them can only be

conjectured. But worn, and cracked, without a history, and with the

blemishing stains of numberless centuries upon them, they still mutely

mock at all efforts to rival their perfections.

It was a quaint and curious pastime, wandering through this old silent

city of the dead--lounging through utterly deserted streets where

thousands and thousands of human beings once bought and sold, and walked

and rode, and made the place resound with the noise and confusion of

traffic and pleasure. They were not lazy. They hurried in those days.

We had evidence of that. There was a temple on one corner, and it was a

shorter cut to go between the columns of that temple from one street to

the other than to go around--and behold that pathway had been worn deep

into the heavy flagstone floor of the building by generations of

time-saving feet! They would not go around when it was quicker to go

through. We do that way in our cities.

Every where, you see things that make you wonder how old these old houses

were before the night of destruction came--things, too, which bring back

those long dead inhabitants and place the living before your eyes. For

instance: The steps (two feet thick--lava blocks) that lead up out of the

school, and the same kind of steps that lead up into the dress circle of

the principal theatre, are almost worn through! For ages the boys

hurried out of that school, and for ages their parents hurried into that

theatre, and the nervous feet that have been dust and ashes for eighteen

centuries have left their record for us to read to-day. I imagined I

could see crowds of gentlemen and ladies thronging into the theatre, with

tickets for secured seats in their hands, and on the wall, I read the

imaginary placard, in infamous grammar, "POSITIVELY NO FREE LIST, EXCEPT

MEMBERS OF THE PRESS!" Hanging about the doorway (I fancied,) were

slouchy Pompeiian street-boys uttering slang and profanity, and keeping a

wary eye out for checks. I entered the theatre, and sat down in one of

the long rows of stone benches in the dress circle, and looked at the

place for the orchestra, and the ruined stage, and around at the wide

sweep of empty boxes, and thought to myself, "This house won't pay." I

tried to imagine the music in full blast, the leader of the orchestra

beating time, and the "versatile" So-and-So (who had "just returned from

a most successful tour in the provinces to play his last and farewell

engagement of positively six nights only, in Pompeii, previous to his

departure for Herculaneum,") charging around the stage and piling the

agony mountains high--but I could not do it with such a "house" as that;

those empty benches tied my fancy down to dull reality. I said, these

people that ought to be here have been dead, and still, and moldering to

dust for ages and ages, and will never care for the trifles and follies

of life any more for ever--"Owing to circumstances, etc., etc., there

will not be any performance to-night." Close down the curtain. Put out

the lights.

And so I turned away and went through shop after shop and store after

store, far down the long street of the merchants, and called for the

wares of Rome and the East, but the tradesmen were gone, the marts were

silent, and nothing was left but the broken jars all set in cement of

cinders and ashes: the wine and the oil that once had filled them were

gone with their owners.

In a bake-shop was a mill for grinding the grain, and the furnaces for

baking the bread: and they say that here, in the same furnaces, the

exhumers of Pompeii found nice, well baked loaves which the baker had not

found time to remove from the ovens the last time he left his shop,

because circumstances compelled him to leave in such a hurry.

In one house (the only building in Pompeii which no woman is now allowed

to enter,) were the small rooms and short beds of solid masonry, just as

they were in the old times, and on the walls were pictures which looked

almost as fresh as if they were painted yesterday, but which no pen could

have the hardihood to describe; and here and there were Latin

inscriptions--obscene scintillations of wit, scratched by hands that

possibly were uplifted to Heaven for succor in the midst of a driving

storm of fire before the night was done.

In one of the principal streets was a ponderous stone tank, and a

water-spout that supplied it, and where the tired, heated toilers from the

Campagna used to rest their right hands when they bent over to put their

lips to the spout, the thick stone was worn down to a broad groove an

inch or two deep. Think of the countless thousands of hands that had

pressed that spot in the ages that are gone, to so reduce a stone that

is as hard as iron!

They had a great public bulletin board in Pompeii--a place where

announcements for gladiatorial combats, elections, and such things, were

posted--not on perishable paper, but carved in enduring stone. One lady,

who, I take it, was rich and well brought up, advertised a dwelling or so

to rent, with baths and all the modern improvements, and several hundred

shops, stipulating that the dwellings should not be put to immoral

purposes. You can find out who lived in many a house in Pompeii by the

carved stone door-plates affixed to them: and in the same way you can

tell who they were that occupy the tombs. Every where around are things

that reveal to you something of the customs and history of this forgotten

people. But what would a volcano leave of an American city, if it once

rained its cinders on it? Hardly a sign or a symbol to tell its story.

In one of these long Pompeiian halls the skeleton of a man was found,

with ten pieces of gold in one hand and a large key in the other. He had

seized his money and started toward the door, but the fiery tempest

caught him at the very threshold, and he sank down and died. One more

minute of precious time would have saved him. I saw the skeletons of a

man, a woman, and two young girls. The woman had her hands spread wide

apart, as if in mortal terror, and I imagined I could still trace upon

her shapeless face something of the expression of wild despair that

distorted it when the heavens rained fire in these streets, so many ages

ago. The girls and the man lay with their faces upon their arms, as if

they had tried to shield them from the enveloping cinders. In one

apartment eighteen skeletons were found, all in sitting postures, and

blackened places on the walls still mark their shapes and show their

attitudes, like shadows. One of them, a woman, still wore upon her

skeleton throat a necklace, with her name engraved upon it--JULIE DI

DIOMEDE.

But perhaps the most poetical thing Pompeii has yielded to modern

research, was that grand figure of a Roman soldier, clad in complete

armor; who, true to his duty, true to his proud name of a soldier of

Rome, and full of the stern courage which had given to that name its

glory, stood to his post by the city gate, erect and unflinching, till

the hell that raged around him burned out the dauntless spirit it could

not conquer.

We never read of Pompeii but we think of that soldier; we can not write

of Pompeii without the natural impulse to grant to him the mention he so

well deserves. Let us remember that he was a soldier--not a policeman

--and so, praise him. Being a soldier, he staid,--because the warrior

instinct forbade him to fly. Had he been a policeman he would have

staid, also--because he would have been asleep.

There are not half a dozen flights of stairs in Pompeii, and no other

evidences that the houses were more than one story high. The people did

not live in the clouds, as do the Venetians, the Genoese and Neapolitans

of to-day.

We came out from under the solemn mysteries of this city of the Venerable

Past--this city which perished, with all its old ways and its quaint old

fashions about it, remote centuries ago, when the Disciples were

preaching the new religion, which is as old as the hills to us now--and

went dreaming among the trees that grow over acres and acres of its still

buried streets and squares, till a shrill whistle and the cry of "All

aboard--last train for Naples!" woke me up and reminded me that I

belonged in the nineteenth century, and was not a dusty mummy, caked with

ashes and cinders, eighteen hundred years old. The transition was

startling. The idea of a railroad train actually running to old dead

Pompeii, and whistling irreverently, and calling for passengers in the

most bustling and business-like way, was as strange a thing as one could

imagine, and as unpoetical and disagreeable as it was strange.

Compare the cheerful life and the sunshine of this day with the horrors

the younger Pliny saw here, the 9th of November, A.D. 79, when he was so

bravely striving to remove his mother out of reach of harm, while she

begged him, with all a mother's unselfishness, to leave her to perish and

save himself.