Afoot we entered Pompeii by the restored Marine Gate. Our first step
within the walls was at the Museum, a comparatively modern building, but
containing a fairly complete assortment of the relics that from time
to time have been disinterred in various quarters of the city. Here
are wall cabinets filled with tools, ornaments, utensils, jewelry,
furniture--all the small things that fulfilled everyday functions in
the first century of the Christian era. Here is a kit of surgical
implements, and some of the implements might well belong to a modern
hospital. There are foodstuffs--grains and fruits; wines and oil; loaves
of bread baked in 79 A. D. and left in the abandoned ovens; and a
cheese that is still in a fair state of preservation. It had been buried
seventeen hundred years when they found it; and if only it had been
permitted to remain buried a few years longer it would have been
sufficiently ripe to satisfy a Bavarian, I think.
Grimmer exhibits are displayed in cases stretched along the center
of the main hall--models of dead bodies discovered in the ruins and
perfectly restored by pouring a bronze composition into the molds that
were left in the hardened pumice after the flesh of these victims had
turned to dust and their bones had crumbled to powder. Huddled together
are the forms of a mother and a babe; and you see how, with her last
conscious thought, the mother tried to cover her baby's face from the
killing rain of dust and blistering ashes. And there is the shape of a
man who wrapped his face in a veil to keep out the fumes, and died
so. The veil is there, reproduced with a fidelity no sculptor could
duplicate, and through its folds you may behold the agony that made his
jaw to sag and his eyes to pop from their sockets.
Nearby is a dog, which in its last spasms of pain and fright curled up
worm fashion, and buried its nose in its forepaws and kicked out with
its crooked hind legs. Plainly dogs do not change their emotional
natures with the passage of years. A dog died in Pompeii in 79 A. D.
after exactly the same fashion that a dog might die to-day in the pound
at Pittsburgh.
From here we went on into the city proper; and it was a whole city, set
off by itself and not surrounded by those jarring modern incongruities
that spoil the ruins of Rome for the person who wishes to give his fancy
a slack rein. It is all here, looking much as it must have looked when
Nero and Caligula reigned, and much as it will still look hundreds of
years hence, for the Government owns it now and guards it and protects
it from the hammer of the vandal and the greed of the casual collector.
Here it is--all of it; the tragic theater and the comic theater; the
basilica; the greater forum and the lesser one; the market place; the
amphitheater for the games; the training school for the gladiators; the
temples; the baths; the villas of the rich; the huts of the poor; the
cubicles of the slaves; shops; offices; workrooms; brothels.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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