The most difficult task in dealing with antiquity is to visualise the actual life as it was lived. In the life of the humbler citizens the remains of Pompeii lend more help than anything else to the desired sense of reality, but they are the remains of Pompeii, not of Rome. Nevertheless there are many points in which we may fairly argue from the little town to the larger, and it is customary to adopt this course. [Illustration: FIG. 76.--POMPEIAN COOK-SHOP.] We may, therefore, think of the common people among these ancients as very much alive in their frank curiosity, their broad humour, their love of shows, and their keen enthusiasm for the competitions, their interest in petty local elections, their advertising instincts, their insatiable fondness for scribbling on walls and pillars, whether in paint or with a "style," a sort of small stiletto with which they commonly wrote on tablets. The ancient world becomes very near when we read, side by side with the election notices, a line from Virgil or Ovid scrawled in a moment of idleness, or a piece of abuse of a neighbouring and rival town--such as "bad luck to the Nucerians"--or a pretty sentiment, such as "no one is a gentleman who has not been in love," or an advertisement to the effect that there are "To let, from July 1, shops with their upper floors, a flat for a gentleman, and a house: apply to Prinus, slave of So-and-So"; or "Found wandering, a mare with packsaddle, apply, etc."--the latter, by the way, painted on a tomb. [Illustration: FIG. 77.--IN A WINE-SHOP.] For places of social resort there were the baths, the colonnades, the semicircular public seats, the steps of public buildings, the shops, and the eating-houses and taverns. The middle classes, in the absence of the modern clubs, met to gossip at the barber's, the bookseller's, or the doctor's. Those of a humbler grade would often betake themselves to the establishments corresponding to the modern Italian _osterie_, where were to be obtained wine with hot or cold water and also cooked food. As they sat on their stools in these "greasy and smoky" haunts they might be compelled, says the satirist, to mix with "sailors, thieves, runaway slaves, and the executioner," but even men of higher standing were often not unwilling to seek low pleasures amid such surroundings, especially when, as was frequently the case, there was provision for secret dicing beyond the observation of the police. From literature, meanwhile, we may fill in their vivacious language, the courteous terms the people apply to each other, such as "you ass, pig, monkey, cuckoo, chump, blockhead, fungus," or, on the other side, "my honey, my heart, my dove, my life, my sparrowkin, my dainty cheese." But to go more fully into matters like these would carry us too far afield.