The Wonders of Pompeii | Page 8

popina of Diomed. It is a tavern of our own day, which has assumed an antique title to please travellers. You may there drink Falernian wine manufactured by Scala, the Neapolitan chemist, and, should you ask for some jentaculum in the Roman style--aliquid scitamentorum, glandionidum suillam taridum, pernonidem, sinciput aut omenta porcina, _aut aliquid ad eum modum_--they will serve you a beefsteak and potatoes. Your strength refreshed, you will scale the sloping hillock of ashes and rubbish that conceals the ruins from your view; you will pay your two francs at the office and you will pass the gate-keeper's turnstile, astonished, as it is, to find itself in such a place. These formalities once concluded you have nothing more that is modern to go through unless it be the companionship of a guide in military uniform who escorts you, in reality to watch, you (especially if you belong to the country of Lord Elgin), but not to mulct you in the least. Placards in all the known languages forbid you to offer him so much as an obolus. You make your _entr��e_, in a word, into the antique life, and you are as free as a Pompeian.
The first thing one sees is an arcade and such a niche as might serve for an image of the Madonna; but be reassured, for the niche contains a Minerva. It is no longer the superstition of our own time that strikes our gaze. Under the arcade open extensive store-houses that probably served as a place of deposit for merchandise. You then enter an ascending paved street, pass by the temple of Venus and the Basilica, and arrive at the Forum. There, one should pause.
At first glance, the observer distinguishes nothing but a long square space closed at the further extremity by a regular-shaped mound rising between two arcades; lateral alleys extend lengthwise on the right and the left between shafts of columns and dilapidated architectural work. Here and there some compound masses of stone-work indicate altars or the pedestals of statues no longer seen. Vesuvius, still threatening, smokes away at the extremity of the picture.
[Illustration: Plan of Vesuvius.]
Look more closely and you will perceive that the fluted columns are of Caserta stone, of tufa, or of brick, coated with stucco and raised two steps above the level of the square. Under the lower step runs the kennel. These columns sustained a gallery upon which one mounted by narrow and abrupt steps that time has spared. This upper gallery must have been covered. The women walked in it. A second story of columns, most likely interrupted in front of the monuments, rested upon the other one. Mazois has reconstructed this colonnade in two superior orders--Doric below and Ionic above--with exquisite elegance. The pavement of the square, on which you may still walk, was of travertine. Thus we see the Forum rising again, as it were, in our presence.
Let us glance at the ruins that surround it. That mound at the other end was the foundation of a temple, the diminutive size of which strikes the newcomer at first sight. Every one is not aware that the temple, far from being a place of assemblage for devout multitudes, was, with the ancients, in reality, but a larger niche inclosing the statue of the deity to be worshipped. The consecrated building received only a small number of the elect after they had been befittingly purified, and the crowd remained outside. It was not the palace, but the mere cell of the god. This cell (_cella_) was, at first, the whole temple, and was just large enough to hold the statue and the altar. By degrees it came to be ornamented with a front portico, then with a rear portico, and then with side colonnades, thus attaining by embellishment after embellishment the rich elegance of the Madeleine at Paris. But the proportions of our cathedrals were never adopted by the ancients. Thus, Christianity rarely appropriates the Greek or Roman temples for its worship. It has preferred the vast basilicas, the royal name of which assumes a religious meaning.
The Romans built their temples in this wise: The augur--that is to say, the priest who read the future in the flight of birds--traced in the sky with his short staff a spacious square, which he then marked on the soil. Stakes were at once fixed along the four lines, and draperies were hung between the stakes. In the midst of this space, the area or inclosure of the temple, the augur marked out a cross--the augural cross, indicating the four cardinal points; the transverse lines fixed the limits of the _cella_; the point where the two branches met was the place for the door, and the first stone was deposited on the threshold. Numerous lighted lamps illuminated these ceremonies,