But it is not only the nabobs, their villas, and their treasures which Pompeii reveals to us. Ancient tradesmen, their lives, work, and tastes, about which literature tells us almost nothing, become more real for us here than anywhere else in the ancient world except Ostia. In the market facing the Forum the excavators found fruit in glass containers, and the skeletons of fish and sheep. There are inns for muleteers and carters by the city gates, and innumerable wine shops, the bar open to the street, its top pierced to hold cool amphorae of wine or covered bronze vessels for hot drinks (Fig. 8.11). Wine prices are scratched on walls, together with other _graffiti_ of more or less extreme indecency, referring usually to the oldest of the professions. One says, “I am yours--for two _asses_” (the _as_ was a small copper coin worth, at the time this _graffito_ was scribbled, about two-and-a-half cents). Another, in large letters over a bench at the Porta Marina, advises loungers to READ THIS SIGN FIRST, and offers the charms of a Greek prostitute named Attiké at sixteen _asses_. This sort of thing prompted the more sober-sided Pompeians to write more than once on the walls (of the large theater, amphitheater, and basilica) the couplet, one of the most famous of the hundreds found at Pompeii: “_I wonder, wall, that you do not go smash, Who have to bear the weight of all this trash!_” Other _graffiti_ complain of unrequited love: “I’d like to bash Venus’ ribs in” (from the basilica), or “Here Vibius lay alone and longed for his beloved” (perhaps from an inn). Snatches from the love-poets, Ovid and (strangely) the tortured, neurotic Propertius, are frequent, and tags of Vergil remembered from schooldays. _Graffiti_ keep a running account of daily purchases of cheese, bread, oil, and wine; or the number of eggs laid daily by the chickens. A reward is offered for the recovery of a stolen bronze pitcher. Income property is advertised for rent, or gentlemen’s upstairs flats (_cenacula equestria_). A metal worker, doing a brisk business in chamber pots, has scratched on his wall a memo of the days fairs are held in nearby towns. He made surveyors’ instruments as well: our only example of a surveyor’s plane table (_groma_) comes from his shop. In a bronze-bound chest in the house of a rich freedman banker, Lucius Caecilius Jucundus, were found his complete (and involved) accounts, on 153 wax tablets. His bronze bust, with its shrewd, ugly, kindly face, warts and all (Fig. 8.12), was also found in the house. It reveals the very type of the _nouveaux riches_, not in the least ashamed of being “in trade,” who came to be the ruling class in the last days of Pompeii.