Pompeii (15 page)

But the most arresting section of all depicts a scene from a Pompeian classroom (Ill. 29). One of the puzzles in the archaeology of the city has been how and where the children were educated. We have plenty of evidence of writing and literacy (even practice alphabets scratched onto walls at child height), but – despite all kinds of implausible and over-optimistic identifications – there is no trace of a school as such. That is because Roman schoolmasters did not regularly operate in purpose-built premises, but would sit down with their class in any convenient location where there was some space and shade. One such location in Pompeii was very likely the large open space or exercise ground (
palaestra
) near the Amphitheatre, For it was here, on a column of its colonnade, that a schoolmaster inscribed his gratitude for payment, and by implication his frustration at the still outstanding bills: ‘May those who have paid me their school fees get what they want from the gods’. Some archaeologists have even guessed that the list of names and sums of money scratched up on the same column was a list of the poor man’s receipts.

The paintings from the Estate of Julia Felix depict a lesson going on under the colonnade of the Forum. A man, dressed in a cloak, sporting a pointed beard, appears to be supervising three pupils who are studying tablets on their knees. Other pupils or the children’s minders watch what is going on from under the colonnade. What none seem to be observing is the nasty scene to the right. One boy has had his tunic lifted to reveal his bare buttocks (or has even been stripped down to a waistband – the painting itself is not clear). Suspended on the back of another, while his feet are held tight, he is being given a good lashing. It seems a peculiarly brutal form of punishment, even by the toughest standards of the recent past, and the awkward, helpless position of the boy only serves to accentuate the cruelty. Yet interestingly, this may well have been the normal style of schoolboy beating in the ancient world. A light-hearted poem by Herodas, a Greek poet of the third century BCE, describes a mother’s attempt to reform her no-good son, Kottalos, who has been neglecting his studies in favour of gambling. She arranges for the schoolmaster to give him a hiding – and the description of the other boys lifting the unfortunate Kottalos onto their shoulders is strikingly reminiscent of what we see here.

29. Rough justice in the Pompeian classroom. One schoolboy miscreant gets a hiding, while the rest of the class get on with their work, keeping their eyes carefully on their tablets.

The frieze, fragmentary and faded as it now is, offers all kinds of precious hints about how we might begin to repopulate the Pompeian cityscape: and not just with men in white togas (indeed there are rather few of those). It prompts us to imagine children at their lessons, beggars plying for cash, traders and hucksters of all kinds, or local officials at their business. Women are prominent too, out on the streets on their own, or with their children, haggling, chatting, buying, even distributing the occasional largesse to those less fortunate than themselves. But more than that, the paintings hint at the colour, clutter and bric-a-brac of urban life that tends to get forgotten when we stare at the now bare ruins: the bright clothing, the portable tables and braziers, the wicker baskets, the garlands and all those statues. One estimate has it that in early imperial Rome live human beings outnumbered statues by a factor of only two to one – which would make a total of some half a million statues in a human population of a million. There was nothing like that concentration of sculpture in Pompeii. But, nonetheless, life in the Forum here unfolds under the watchful eyes of men in bronze (or marble), emperors alive or dead, imperial princelings and local notables.

The city that never sleeps

In 6 BCE, the emperor Augustus was called upon to adjudicate a tricky case from the Greek city of Cnidus. A couple of residents, Eubulus and Tryphera, had been troubled night after night by a group of local thugs who ‘laid siege’ to their house. Finally, their patience at an end, they told one of their slaves to get rid of them by throwing the contents of a chamber pot on their heads. But things went from bad to worse: for the slave lost his grip on the pot, it fell and killed one of the assailants. The Cnidian authorities were minded to accuse Eubulus and Tryphera of unlawful killing, but the emperor came down on the side of the couple – long-suffering victims, as he saw it, of anti-social behaviour. His judgement was inscribed publicly in a nearby town: hence our knowledge of the affair.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case (and some scholars have suspected that Eubulus and Tryphera might not have been quite as innocent as the emperor found them), it is one of the very few glimpses we get, leaving aside Juvenal’s poetic hyperbole about Rome itself, of how an ‘ordinary’ ancient town might have appeared at night: dark, unpoliced, slightly scary. How like that were the streets of Pompeii when the sun had gone down?

One image of night-time Pompeii would see even the main streets as almost pitch black. Although Romans went to enormous trouble to bring light to their world in the hours of darkness (as the thousands of bronze and pottery oil lamps found in Pompeii demonstrate), the results were patchy at best. Most people had to live their lives by the rhythms of daylight, sunrise to sunset. The inns and bars kept serving into the evening hours, illuminated in part by lamps hanging over their open doorways, their fixings in some cases still visible. In fact, one electoral poster – a satiric piece of ‘anti-propaganda’ or not – offers the support of ‘the late drinkers’ to one particular candidate for public office: ‘All the late drinkers are canvassing for Marcus Cerrinius Vatia to be aedile’. But the big houses would have shut their doors and presented a solid, uninviting blank wall to the outside world, punctured only by the occasional tiny window. The shops and workshops would have closed too, secured with the shutters whose slots are still visible in their thresholds, as well as occasionally the impression of the wood itself. Without street lighting, and with uneven pavements, irregular stepping stones and a good deal of filth, pedestrians – equipped only with the light of a portable lantern, and whatever the moon provided – would have ventured about at their peril.

30. Shut up shop? The wide openings of the shops could be closed by heavy wooden shutters. This plaster cast of a set of shutters on the Via dell’Abbondanza shows how the section on the right could operate as a small door to give access when the shop was shut.

But there was life in the streets at night too, and a good deal more noise and hustle and bustle about the town than the gloomy darkness would suggest. In addition to the barking of the dogs and the braying of the donkeys, men might be at work. It is certain, for example, that on some occasions the signwriters putting up the advertisements for the next gladiatorial display in the Amphitheatre, or the electoral posters urging support for this or that candidate for local office, plied their trade by night. One such writer, Aemilius Celer, who posted an advertisement for thirty pairs of gladiators fighting over five days, carefully signed his work: ‘Aemilius Celer wrote this on his own by the light of the moon’. Such solitary activity was probably not the norm. One notice posted high up on a wall, urging support for Caius Julius Polybius in the forthcoming elections, includes a joke from the signwriter to his mate: ‘Lantern carrier, steady the ladder’. Why did they choose to work after dark? Perhaps because they were sometimes putting up notices without permission, where they should not have been (but not always – else why sign their names?). Perhaps it was more convenient to be painting when there were fewer people about to disturb the work, or rock the ladder.

There may well have also been a good deal more traffic trundling down the streets than we would at first imagine. In the same document as the regulations for the upkeep of pavements in Rome were listed are also found the rules for the entry of wheeled traffic into the city of Rome. Although all kinds of exceptions are noted (carts used for building work on temples, to remove rubble from public demolition sites, or those used in connection with important rituals), the basic principle was that wheeled transport was excluded from the city from sunrise until the tenth hour of the day – that is, given that the hours of daylight were divided into twelve, until the late afternoon or early evening. The hours of darkness, in other words, were the time when you were most likely to find carts on the streets of the capital. Indeed, in addition to his complaints about falling objects and muggers, Juvenal has some sharp words about the noise of the night-time traffic.

We cannot be certain if these regulations applied, in exactly these terms, to Pompeii; though it is a fair assumption that they did, more or less. Nor can we be certain how rigorously they would have been enforced. A law is one thing, having the will or the resources to police it, quite another. (And remember that a cart appeared in the Forum frieze in a scene that was clearly not intended to be nighttime ...) Nevertheless, there is a reasonable chance that a good proportion of the wheeled traffic whose management and control we have explored in this chapter would have been out in the street after dark. As well as the howling dogs, the carousing of the ‘late drinkers’, the whistling and joking of the signpainters at their jobs, we have to imagine the sounds of the rumbling carts, the jingling of the bells, the scraping of iron-clad wheels against the kerb or the stepping stones. Literally, a city that never slept – and was never quiet.

CHAPTER THREE

HOUSE AND HOME

The House of the Tragic Poet

In
The Last Days of Pompeii
, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s classic disaster novel first published in 1834, a pair of lovers, Glaucus and Ione, manage to escape from the doomed city. As the volcanic debris falls, they are led to safety by a blind slave girl who is used to navigating her way around Pompeii in darkness. Tragically – but conveniently for the plot, since she too is in love with Glaucus – the slave girl drowns herself, after stealing a single kiss from her beloved. Glaucus and Ione meanwhile relocate to Athens, where they live happily ever after, as Christian converts.

The appeal of
The Last Days
, one of the best-selling books of the nineteenth century, was partly its colourful romance: the volcano was only one of the lovers’ problems – in the days leading up to the eruption they faced any number of impediments, from a malevolent Egyptian priest to wrongful imprisonment. It was partly too its moral message, pointing up the depravity of the pagan world, from which Glaucus and Ione escaped. But a significant part of its appeal was also the vivid, and carefully researched, archaeological backdrop, from Amphitheatre to baths, Forum to private houses. Bulwer-Lytton had drawn heavily on Sir William Gell’s
Pompeiana
, the first comprehensive guide to Pompeii in English, and had even dedicated the novel to Gell.

The house of the hero Glaucus himself was based on the House of the Tragic Poet, a small but exquisitely decorated property uncovered in 1824 (Fig. 6). This quickly became famous as an ideal vision of Pompeian domestic life and was described in great detail in
Pompeiana
. A few years later – partly, no doubt, thanks to the extra celebrity bestowed on it by
The Last Days
– it even provided the model for the ‘Pompeian Court’ at the Crystal Palace, that vast entertainment venue, combining commercial showcase with museum, which opened just outside London, at Sydenham, in 1854. It was a strange afterlife for a house that had been overwhelmed by Vesuvius almost two millennia earlier. The House of the Tragic Poet was more or less faithfully reconstructed within the Palace, and at first intended – appropriately enough, given its domestic image – to act as a tearoom for visitors. In the event plans changed, and the only visitor ever officially to sit down to tea there was Queen Victoria. In France it had a more socially exclusive nineteenth-century imitator. The interior design of the mansion in the rue Montaigne in Paris, where Prince Napoléon and his aristocratic friends enjoyed dressing up in togas and pretending to be Romans, was also based on the House of the Tragic Poet.