WHAT HERCULANEUM OFFERS TO ARCHAEOLOGY.

Evening Post, Volume LXIX, Issue 118, 20 May 1905, Page 15

WHAT HERCULANEUM OFFERS TO ARCHAEOLOGY.

*h • The city ,of .IJorcuilaneum contained many splendid villas, and herein it differed from, Pompeii. Pompeii was a commonplace provincial town devoted exclusively to commerce ; it was not the i resort of wealthy and cultured Romans. It wns cssentialjy illiterate. Nb manuscript can bo pro,ved to have been found there. It is truo a wax tablet with writing has been found ; yet this contains receipts of unctions. Herculaneum, on the other hand, was the favourite resort of wealthy Itoiuans, who built benutiful villas there, 1 as in our times people from modern Borne settle for the summer *at Sorrento and- Castellamarq. We havo reasqiv ' to bojieve that the Balbi, Agrippina, Servilia, tho mother of Brutus- and mistress of Crosor, Piso, and rtiany others hud their villas ( at Heroulanoum. ■ Not all these prominent Romans were specialists, and their Uoubqs mus.t havo contained libraries with the standard works of classical " literature. Wo may thus hope to find' all the missing masterpieces of Greek and Roman literature; the ■ poems of -Sappho, the whole works of Menandcr, the missing tragedies of /Bschylua n«d* Sophocjes and Eurjpides, the' lost bppks of Livy, and per--haps notes bearing upon tho earliest periods and, tW origin of Christianity." The prospect is $o Vast and momentoijs that wo qan hardly aJlpw ourselves to dwell upon it.— Prftfessor Clinrlea Wftldstein, in Harper's Magazine.