Other shops have had their story written by the articles that they
contained when they were found. Thus, when there were discovered in a
suite of rooms opening on the Street of Herculaneum, certain levers one
of which ended in the foot of a pig, along with hammers, pincers, iron
rings, a wagon-spring, the felloe of a wheel, one could say without
being too bold that there had been the shop of a wagon-maker or
blacksmith. The forge occupied only one apartment, behind which opened
a bath-room and a store-room. Not far from there a pottery is indicated
by a very curious oven, the vault of which is formed of hollow tubes of
baked clay, inserted one within the other. Elsewhere was discovered the
shop of the barber who washed, brushed, shaved, clipped, combed and
perfumed the Pompeians living near the Forum. The benches of masonry are
still seen where the customers sat. As for the dealers in soap,
unguents, and essences, they must have been numerous; their products
supplied not only the toilet of the ladies, but the religious or funeral
ceremonies, and after having perfumed the living, they embalmed the
dead. Besides the shops in which the excavators have come suddenly upon
a stock of fatty and pasty substances, which, perhaps, were soaps, we
might mention one, on the pillar of which three paintings, now effaced,
represented a sacrificial attendant leading a bull to the altar, four
men bearing an enormous chest around which were suspended several vases;
then a body washed and anointed for embalming. Do you understand this
mournful-looking sign? The unguent dealer, as he was called, thus _made
up_ the body and publicly placarded it.
From the perfumery man to the chemist is but a step. The shop of the
latter tradesman was found--so it is believed, at all events in clearing
out a triple furnace with walled boilers. Two pharmacies or drug-stores,
one in the Street of Herculaneum, the other fronting the Chalcidicum,
have been more exactly designated not only by a sign on which there was
seen a serpent (one of the symbols of Æsculapius) eating a pineapple,
but by tablets, pills, jars, and vials containing dried-up liquids, and
a bronze medicine chest divided into compartments which must have
contained drugs. A groove for the spatula had been ingeniously
constructed in this curious little piece of furniture.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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