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whose house, notwithstanding the good will of the abbé Romanelli, has not yet been found a magnificent house, for which he ran into debt, where he received Octavius, and which, of all the one and twenty villas discovered for him by the eccentric abbé Chaupy, was one of the greatest favourites.

hardly to quit the earth; they inhabit the most frequented places, beside the highways, and seem less to die than to remove from one house to another. The most remarkable of these tombs are: the monument erected by Alleja Decimilla, priestess of Ceres, to her husband Marcus Allejus Lucius Libella, and to her son, on a piece of ground given by the people; that erected by Nevoleja Tyche to her husband Caius Munatius, herself, and their freedmen and women; she had sculptured thereon her own portrait, the bisellium, a seat of honour, which the decurions and the people had decreed to Munatius, a funeral ceremony and a vessel entering port, perhaps the emblem of the repose of the tomb after the storms of life; the cenotaph of C. Calventius Quietus, whose munificence procured him also the honour of the bisellium, reckoned the most elegant and best preserved of the sepulchral_monuments of antiquity; the tomb of Scaurus, curious for its stucco basso-relievos, repre

tests, in which the combatants have helmets with the visors down, and are protected with cuissarts and arm-pieces like the old knights, and for its explanatory inscriptions traced with a pencil.

The villa of Diomedes in the suburbs, the finest in Pompeii, shows the double life of the Romans, at once public and private. The public part is composed of the vestibule and the atrium, which comprehended nearly always in the same order the cavædium (court), the tablinum (audience chamber), the wings, the corridors (fauces). The private part contained the bed-rooms (cubicula), the dining-room (triclinium), the sittingrooms (aci), the picture gallery (pinacotheca), the library, the baths, the exedra or parlour, the xystum, or gal- | lery set out with flowers and shrubs; all these apartments were ranged round the peristyle. The public life is full of grandeur; most of the small rooms for pri-senting hunting scenes, gladiatorial convate use receive no light but through the door, have no fireplaces, and are far from being comfortable, notwithstanding the mosaics and brilliant paintings that decorate them. It is evident from the inconvenience of these rooms that the life of the Romans was chiefly out-of-doors and public, and that except at night and their principal meal, which was towards evening, they passed nearly all their time at the Forum, or under the porticos. The atrium even of the house was a kind of inner Forum in which they received their guests, dependants, friends, and where they continued to live in the open air. The home of the English, or the coin du feu of the French, was totally unknown to them, as to the Italians of the present day, who have no public life. The house of Diomedes had three stories, a rare thing; for most of the other houses had only two surmounted by a terrace ornamented with a kind of trellis. As in the East, the women's apartment was towards the garden.

The road of the Tombs (via Domitiana), with causeways, lined on each side with high mausoleums occupied by whole families and their dependants, is a real street. In polytheism the dead seem

1 The bisellium was a kind of bench covered with fringed cushions, on which one person only

The ramparts of Pompeii, discovered from 1812 to 1814, which may now be followed all round, show the extent and plan of the town; these ramparts, in great measure built of enormous blocks of stone, had dared the fortune of Sylla, who subdued Pompeii without attacking it.

The streets of Pompeii are narrow and crooked; but as chariots had then only a four feet way (as may be seen from the marks of the wheels), a greater width was not necessary. The ancients moreover imagined that narrow and winding streets were more salubrious, as the sun had less power in them.

The public house of Julius Polybius has a vast subterranean cave, the best cellar in Pompeii.

The house of the Vestals, brilliant with paintings and mosaics, has almost the form of a temple; the whimsical capitals of the columns are far from Greek purity.

The house of the dancing girls retains its gay air, in the variety, grace, and voluptuousness of its figures.

sat at the forum and in public shows, though there was room for two.

1

The house said to be Sallust's or Acteon's, is one of the most elegant and refined in the town; its atrium passes for the best preserved. An oven, like ours, seems quite new and fit for use. A shop communicated with Sallust's apartment: we see by this example and many others, that the richest patricians were not above retailing the wine, oil, and provisions of their own growth or the produce of their industry; a custom still subsisting in some Italian provinces, and practised by the thrifty Florentines. Shops were a lucrative property; Cicero knew how to make the best of his as well as the builder of a new passage. At Pompeii, near the amphitheatre, was found a written notice by which Julia Felix, daughter of Spurnius, a man of great possessions, offered to lease for five years a vast edifice containing a bath, a venereum (its usual concomitant), and nine hundred shops with their appurtenances. The luxury of our fashionable warehouses existed in these shops, which formed the front of the houses in most cases; they were floored with mosaic, and had their museum in the open air; an ox was painted on the shop of a butcher, and the group of vintagers represented on a wineshop, has been imitated by Poussin. The mysterious venereum, decorated with the great fresco of Acteon, must have appeared less scandalous with the religion, the poetry, and the manners of the Pompeians.

The house of Modestus, as it is called, belonged to a dealer in liquors. The sign is a passably poetical representation of Clysses refusing the perfidious beverage presented to him by Circe.

The baker's house is well disposed. The Oven and mills are curious. The two only comic Latin poets, Plautus and Terence, were condemned, when enslaved, to do the work of asses in turning the stone of these little mills resembling a coffee mill in form. Cato extolled the skilful millers of Pompeii. 3

The babitation of the edile Pansa is the largest and most regular in Pompeii.

1 See ante, book x. ch. IV.

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* See this bumorcus passage of a letter to Atticus, La which Cicero makes such a strange ostentation of philosophy: "Sed quod quæris, quid arcessterim Chrysippum, tabernæ mihi duæ corruerunt, requæque rimas agunt. Itaque non solum Inquiliui, sed mures etiam migraverunt. Hanc ceteri calaBilater vocant; ego ne incommodum quidem.

Pansa also let a great number of shops
Over this last is the cele-
and an oven.
brated inscription Hic habitat felicitas,
and its obscene emblem, a small basso-
relievo of stone painted red, an allusion,
according to some learned and antiqua-
rians, to abundant harvests, or perhaps
to the shape of the small bread of anti-
quity. This emblem was also used by
the ancients as an amulet to prevent
certain evils, and S. Arditi supposed that
the baker had employed it as a means of
securing his establishment.

The little house of the tragic poet, with its noted but inferior mosaic of a great black dog chained and the inscription cave canem (beware of the dog), is one of the prettiest private monuments of antiquity. Frescos of divers mythological or dramatic subjects, and of numerous figures of Genii, Victories, with arabesques and mosaics of better taste embellish it. In the library, a small room ornamented with views, landscapes, marine pieces, the papyri covered with Greek characters are also painted on the wall, a coarse factitious means of possessing books, which would not have been adopted by the two great tragic poets of France and Italy, Racine and Alfieri, the former when he so diligently annoted the Sophocles, Euripides, and other works left by his son to our royal library, as well as those given to the library of Toulouse by Lefranc de Pompignan; the second, when he so belaboured his copies of the Greek tragics and Aristophanes, now at the Laurentian. The fine mosaic in the floor of the receivingroom, composed of seven figures, called the Dramatical Concert, is a curious picture of a rehearsal and the stage scenes of antiquity.

The thermæ, of an elegant simplicity, would not hold more than twenty persons; it is probable that they were not the only ones in Pompeii. The ladies' side is the most ornamented. The first room was used for undressing; at the farther end is a little oval closet (frigidarium) which has a basin sunk in the ground (piscina)

O Socrates, et Socratici vivi! nunquam vobis gratiam referam. Dil immortales, quam mihl ista pro nihilo! Sed tamen ea ratio ædificandi initur, consiliario quidem et auctore Vestorio, ut hoc damnum quæstuosum sit." Lib. XIV, 9. Chrysippus was Cicero's architect; he had another called Cluatlus. Ibid., lib. xII, 48.

3 De re rust. cap. XXII.

on Italian imagination amalgamate well, | and have already produced more than one amiable model.

Farther on is the fine avenue leading to the old Champ de Mars created by the French, which was a suitable adjunct for a great and frequently agitated capital, but it has unfortunately been reduced, under the pretext of restoring the land to cultivation, as if that were scarce in such a country.

On this side is the hill of Santa Maria del Pianto, called also the Mount of Lautrec, because that general once encamped there. Historians state that our army perished from privations, excessive heat and the plague, without mentioning the exhalations of the soil, which perhaps contributed more to its destruction, if we may judge by a contemporary fact. The French soldier who occupied the throne of Naples, a brave compatriot of Lautrec, and greatly resembling him, after reviewing his troops on this side, was so charmed with the situation, that be determined to encamp

there at night with his soldiers; on the morrow he was very ill, and his men too, many of whom died. The grotto of Lautrec is still shown, where he was obscurely interred in 1528, until the duke of Sessa, having discovered his corpse, erected to him the noble mausoleum in the church of Santa Maria la Nova. '

Between the hills of Capo di Monte and Capo di Chino is a secluded valley, in which, on a rising ground and amidst pines, stands the picturesque convent of Santa Maria de' Monti, with its oriental dome. But the principal ornament of this vale is the wreck of the superb aqueduct reddened by time, and called from its colour Ponti rossi (red bridges), a work of Augustus, which carried the waters of the Lebeto to the port of Misenum, a distance of thirty-five miles from Naples; though shattered by earthquakes, crowded, overtopped, enveloped by vegetation, and its arcades are the resort of the goatherd and his flock, it still attests the power of the imperial people.

BOOK THE FOURTEENTH.

ENVIRONS.-ROAD TO ROME.

CHAPTER I.

Vomero.-Camaldulites.-Lake d'Agnano.-Grotta

del Cane.- Solfatara.- Pozzuoli. Cathedral.

Temple of Serapis.--Port.--Amphitheatre.-Tombs.

-Cicero's Villa.-Lakes Lucrinus and Avernus.Temples of Venus, Mercury, Diana.-Nero's Baths. -Piscina Mirabile.-Cento Camerelle.-Cumæ.

Balæ.-Baull.-Agrippina's sepulchre-Coast of Misenum.-Grotta della Dragonaria.

The Vomero, over which the road to the Camaldulite convent passes, seems to be the crater of an ancient volcano in which arise several small hills covered with the strongest, most varied, and confused vegetation, presenting a singular and enchanting aspect. The convent has

"Lautrec," says Brantôme, "étoit brave, bardi, valllant, et excellent pour combattre en guerre et

one of the finest views in the world. commanding the gulfs of Naples and Pozzuoli, with their islands, the extinct craters of the Solfatara and Astrumi, the lake of Agnano, Cape Misenum, the castle of Baiæ and the boundless sea. There is no place more suitable for a 'contemplative life, and the monks, with their long beards, their gowns and hoods of white woollen, are themselves picturesque. It is true that they seem to have little suspicion of it, and the traveller, struck with what is poetical in their institution, is sometimes grievously disappointed on conversing with them. The church has a few good paintings, among them a Last Supper, by Stan

frapper comme sourd; mais pour gouverner un état il n'y étoit bou." See ante, ch. ix.

zioni. Part of the estates belonging to this convent were purchased, under the French administration, by S. Ricciardi, formerly minister of justice, a magistrate distinguished for his independence and great information, who has taken the title of Count de Camaldoli,and has converted the property into a very pleasant villa, which has been well sung by two good Italian poets of the present day.

The lake of Agnano has nothing curious now, except its wild and gloomy site; for the phenomenon of its water boiling without heat, a pretty just image of some kinds of enthusiasm, has ceased to exist.

Like every body else, I went to see the celebrated grotta del Cane: in travelling there are some things that must be seen, though little interesting. This grotto, much less curious than the neighbouring Vapour baths of San Germano, or the numerous and less spacious grottos of the same kind at Latera, in the Roman states, is not open as formerly; it is let to a peasant who keeps the key and is paid for showing it, being generally there with a dog intended for the experiment. The life of this poor animal is thus past in continual swoons, which, at least, are not pretended, an advantage they have over many in fashionable life.

antiquity. This was one of those brilliant companies of bathers, which so much confounded the vanity of the Roman orator on his return from Sicily, when, as he landed on the quay now called la Malva, he expected to receive the honours of his countrymen, who were ignorant of his questorship, or supposed it at Syracuse instead of Lilybeum. 3 Of all the splendour of Puteoli a few ruins alone remain.

The ancient temple consecrated to Augustus by the Roman knight Calpurnius, a monument of Roman opulence and degradation, of which only the inscription and some few columns still subsist, is the cathedral dedicated to Saint Proculus, the companion of Saint Januarius.

In the square, a fine pedestal of white marble, ornamented with fourteen figures representing towns of Asia Minor overthrown by an earthquake and rebuilt by Tiberius, seems to have supported a statue of the emperor, which remains buried under the buildings of the modern town. 4 Another statue of a senator, still on its pedestal, retains its inscription.

The port of Pozzuoli was one of the most magnificent in Italy, and its merchants, like those of London now, were reputed the richest in the world. The mole was repaired by Adrian and Antoninus Pius, but the epoch of its foundation is unknown; of its twenty-five arches, thirteen only are standing: the last, a prodigious construction, plunges

The Solfatara is a fine antique volcanic ruin. This plain of sulphur, white, hot, smoking, hollow, and sonorous, has an extraordinary aspect one is almost tempted to pierce its thin and fragile crust, to fathom the fiery abyss it covers. Among the fètes celebrated at Naples by the magnificence of Alfonso, on the arri-sixty palms beneath the sea. The bridge, val of the emperor Frederick III. in 1452, the most surprising was a hunt by torchlight in the enclosure of the Solfatara, where the arrangement of the lights in that natural circus, the number of animals, the music and the brilliant costumes of the hunters, seemed to realise the prodigies of magic.

Pozzuoli, with its languishing population, is the only inhabited point on this coast, which was once covered with brilliant villas, sumptuous edifices, and called by Cicero Puteolana et Cumana regna. Then all Rome crowded to the waters of Puteoli, the Spa or Baden of

La villa di Camaldoll at Vomero, pollmetro del car. A. M. Ricci, 1827. La villa di Camaldoll, stanze, Naples, 1833, by Signors Maria Giuseppa Guacci. * Epist. ad All. lib. xiv. 18.

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a stupid work of Caligula's, in imitation of the Via Appia, which served for his triumphal passage from Pozzuoli to Baiæ, rested on this superb mole.

Its fine barracks and tower are the old palace of the viceroy, Pedro of Toledo, who was instrumental in repeopling Pozzuoli, when nearly deserted after the dreadful earthquake of 1538; he restored its lost waters, and executed other useful works. The temple of Jupiter Serapis, a magnificent wreck of Roman grandeur, shows the splendour of the art in Adrian's reign. The roof was of white marble, and some parts of it are still in

3 See the amusing relation of this scene, pro Plancio, XXVI.

4 H is said to be now at the Studj.

existence; the beautiful columns and the pavement are under water. This mixture of water and ruins is tolerably picturesque, but very unhealthy, and a great obstacle to archeological research. The shells incrusted on some of the still erect columns of cipoline marble, prove that the sea has risen twenty-two palms (of ten English inches each) above its present height; it would thus have submerged the whole town and surrounding country, beyond the entrance of the gulf of Posilipo; which is little likely, and men of science have differently explained the phenomenon. The architect Niccolini, president of the Borbonica society of Naples, charged in 1828 with the draining of this little marsh, gives a reasonable explanation of the trace of water at that height: be supposes that during the earthquake of 1538, which filled up part of lake Lucrine, engulphed the great village of Tripergola, and produced in three days the hill of Montenuovo, a part of the water was driven out of the lake and remained some time on the site of the temple of Scrapis. This mystical and popular religion, which, after being banished from Rome several times, was near usurping the honours of the Capitol even in Cicero's days, a real pantheism, was the last of the antique religions that resisted christianity.

The amphitheatre called the Coliseum, though ruined by earthquakes and choked with luxuriant and picturesque vegetation, has not totally lost its ancient form; it would hold forty thousand persons. Augustus attended the games celebrated in his honour there. The Labyrinth, a vast subterranean edifice, was probably the reservoir for the water of the naumachia given in the theatre.

To the north of Pozzuoli, on the superb Campanian road, are some antique tombs in good preservation, extending more than two miles. They were shown to me by wretches so miserable that one

might take them for spectres, inhabitants of the tombs, who were shortly to return into them.

The villa of Cicero, built on the plan of the Academy of Athens, which he praised in his letters, and called by the

It appears that Montenuovo is now gradually sinking; it would be curious to observe and minute this variation.

name of Academia, was then by the seaside; and the Roman orator could angle from his terrace while meditating bis Academics. Adrian, who died at Baiæ, was buried in this house, and his successor, the pious Antoninus, determined to convert his tomb into a temple. The lakes Lucrine and Avernus, which Augustus connected with the sea, were convulsed by the earthquake of 1538, which greatly changed the mythological and Virgilian aspect of these places; they still, however, retain their ancient names, but have fallen far beneath their fabulous destination; the Elysian Fields are now a good vineyard, and the Avarus Acheron, under the unmelodious name of Fusaro, is used for soaking hemp, and supplies excellent oysters. The Avernus, the Styx, the Acheron, likewise existed in Egypt and Greece: it seems that the ancients transported their poetical machinery with them, as well as their institutions and laws.

To the west of lake Lucrine and the south of Avernus was Cicero's other villa called the Cumean, in which he began his Republic; a villa differing from the one he possessed at Pozzuoli, and both so charming that he knew not which to prefer.”

The pretended grotto of the Sibyl is not a very agreeable place to visit; it is necessary to procure torches, and to des cend on the back of a guide into a long, dark, and muddy cavern. The use of these caves seems uncertain, though they are found in most great edifices of antiquity, and local examination does not throw much light on the subject. Perhaps these galleries of Roman architecture, ornamented with basso-relievos blackened by the torches of ciceroni, were used as places of retirement and baths in the great beats.

The ruins of the three edifices called the temples of Venus Genitrix, Mercury, and Diana Lucifera, may be more reasonably supposed to belong to some

cence and voluptuousness of the Romans had covered these shores. The baths of Nero are more likely to be authentic. These baths have inspired M. Casimit Delavigne with some of his finest verses:

Epist. ad Att., lib. xiv. 43.

i

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