That the intellectual as well as the physical needs of the population were catered to is deduced from the existence of two stone theaters, one open to the sky, with a capacity of 5,000; one roofed, a _théatre intime_, for about 800. Both antedate the earliest stone theater in Rome. But the Pompeians did not push the intellectual life to extremes. The portico behind the large theater was remodelled in Nero’s reign to make a barracks for gladiators, complete with armory and lock-up, where three of them were found asphyxiated in the stocks. The amphitheater has seats for 20,000. Legends scrawled on its walls, and on house-walls all over town, testify to the gladiators’ popularity with their fans: gladiatorial records are registered (twenty-four fights, twenty-four victories; the losers most often are murdered and forgotten), and one champion is recorded as _SVSPIRIVM PVELLARVM_, the one the girls sigh for. [Illustration: FIG. 8.4 Pompeii, House of the Moralist. (Spinazzola, _op. cit._, 2, p. 728)] [Illustration: FIG. 8.5 Pompeii, House of the Moralist, reconstruction. (Spinazzola, _op. cit._, 2, p. 756)] [Illustration: FIG. 8.6 Pompeii, House of the Moralist, triclinium. (Spinazzola, _op. cit._, 2, p. 752)] But Pompeii’s greatest contribution is to our knowledge, almost indecently intimate, of the private life of its inhabitants. This information comes primarily from the town houses and the suburban and rustic villas. The best guidebooks go into some detail on seventy-eight of these in Pompeii, and thirty-one in Herculaneum; hundreds more go unrecorded. In the face of this _embarras de richesse_, rigorous selection is necessary, and a description of a few houses and villas must suffice. To represent town houses I choose the “House of the Moralist” (_Regio_ III, _Insula_ iv, House 2–3), on the Via dell’ Abbondanza, a shopping street of average houses. (The aristocratic quarter was in _Regio_ VI.) Excavations on this street by Vittorio Spinazzola between 1910 and 1923 were carried out according to a method new in Pompeii, which made the dead street come alive with extraordinary vividness. Spinazzola’s meticulousness preserved and reconstructed the traces of upper stories, with windows, balconies, and loggias; of gardens, with the discovered roots of their trees and plants replaced by modern ones of the same species. The colorful painted signs and notices on the house and shop fronts, instead of being detached as in the past and transferred to the museum in Naples, were left _in situ_, protected by glass and awnings, and the house interiors, with their furniture and wall-paintings, were kept intact. All this Spinazzola published in 1953 in a colossal book of 1110 folio pages, with over 1000 figures and ninety-six large plates. His account is the more important because the House of the Moralist, having been kept inviolate by volcanic ashes for so many centuries, was badly damaged by Allied bombs in 1943. (There were Germans quartered in the