EVENING POST. SATURDAY, JANUARY 2, 1932. A SEALED CITY

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 1, 2 January 1932, Page 10

EVENING POST. SATURDAY, JANUARY 2, 1932. A SEALED CITY

In respect of their common and simultaneous destruction by a great | disaster the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum are almost as closely, I though not so unpleasantly, associated in the popular mind as those' of Sodom' and Gomorrah. Yet the eruption of Mount Vesuvius which destroyed the Campanian cities in A.D. 79 discriminated very sharply in its treatment of the two cases, with the result that, while the life of Pompeii can be seen to-day with an intimacy of detail unrivalled by any ancient city, that of Herculaneum remains to a very large extent a sealed book. The discrimination thus observed by Nature was not imitated by all the early chroniclers. Cassius Dio, who is described as "a most important authority for the history of the last years of the Republic and the early Empire," but as not strong in the "critical historical faculty," gives us these interesting particulars of the "fearful and marvellous things that befell Campania in the first year of Titus's reign:—

. For it happened thus. Men, many and huge, surpassing all human stature, even, such as tne giants are painted, appeared now on. the''mountain, now ia the -surrounding, country and in the cities, by day and by night, wandering on the I earth and going to and fro in the air. I And thereafter came suddenly terrible droughts and mighty earthquakes, so that the whole plain seethed, and the peaks also leapt; and there were noises, some "beneath the earth like thunder, and some above the earth like, bellowings, and the sea roared with them, and the sky' sounded with them. . . So some fled from their houses into the streets, and others that were, .without fled in, and from the sea to the land, arid from thence to the sea,' inasmuch as they were panic-stricken and thought anything that was ' far . from, them safer than that which lay at hand. And while these things happened, at the same time untold store of ash was blown up, and fillei the whole sea and air, and did, much harm, as it befell in each case, to men and fields and boasts, and especially killed all fish and birds; and moreover it buried two whole cities, Herculaneum. and Pompeii, while their assembly was seated in a theatre.

Though this last statement was good enough to supply Lytton with a fitting climax to what perhaps still supplies many readers with their chief knowledge of "The Last Day of Pompeii," there is not a vestige of truth in it. No human remains have been found in Pompeii to justify it, and all the evidence accumulated there and the smaller amount,so far found in Herculaneum point conclusively, in the opposite direction. The essential difference between the two cases, was that Pompeii was gradually buried by the. steady rain of ashes which,the north-west wind brought from the mountain nearly six miles distant, while Herculaneum, which was a mile and a quarter nearer, was submerged in an, inundation cf mud from the slopes of the mountain. In Pompeii the loss of life must have been chiefly among those who, refusing to accept the notice served by the falling ashes as final, lingered on in houses or in cellars and had their retreat cut off. But there was no possibility of temporising with the rapidly advancing tide of mud which threatened Herculaneum. To hesitate was to be lost, and it may be that for this reason the more obviously imminent danger resulted in a smaller loss of life.

From the standpoints of property and of posterity the contrast between the two cases was for the same reason equally striking. Several days were allowed to the Pompeians for the re? moval of their valuables,. and those who returned after the eruption had ceased found the town buried in ashes to the depth, of not more than 20 feet, above which die upper storeys of the buildings projected. So well were these opportunities used that we are told that

tho large buildings about,the Forum wero almost completely ' stripped of their marble, '

In Herculaneum, on the other hand, all the beautiful marble seats of the theatre were found intact by the excavators of 1738. The whole town had been submerged in mud to the depth of 80ft —a depth which meant that even on the day after the catastrophe the treasures of the town would have been as inaccessible to its returning citizens as the bulk of them have remained to posterity more than eighteen centuries. Herculaneum had been hermetically sealed, and .sealed not merely against the ravages of that most destructive of all agents—man; but even against the gentler wear and tear of Nature. As Sir Charles Walston (formerly Waldstein) says in his "Herculaneum,",which though published "in 1908, is still noted by the "Encyclo-' paedia Britannica" as the latest authority on the subject,

"When once these works of man are below the covering dust, and vegetable and. animal life is buried with them, the organic matter, the biting acids of the earth, eat into the hard bronze to the very heart: of its beauteousl shaped rasp tho smoothly-modelled marble,' and, destroy its subtle grace of line. The dry sands of Egypt are kinder. Yet the sands of Egypt had not to nurse Hellenic Beauty and Truth, but as rare and exotic intruders into its ancient life. But our Herculaneurn. died young and in full vigour, and its embalmed body was hidden away beyond the hands of all rapacious men, excepting those who long lovingly to restore it to tho pristino beauty of its early life. | Here .Vesuvius, as it were, arrested

Time, arrested the ■ hand of man bent on ravage or raised in internecine warfare. Thus were the towns of Campania prosorved for posterity by the very agencies which of old caused their destruction. Among these cities, again, Herculaneum holds a unique position, and has preserved what neither Neapolis, Cumae, Stabiae, nor ever Pompeii can ever yield. For the entombment of Herculaneum was both sudden, complete, and secure, and this was not the case with the other Campanian cities nor with Pompeii.

So liberally had Nature compensated for her original act of destruction that the volcanic flood which she poured over the treasures of Herculaneum did not melt the glass or burn the wood or calcine the marble or tarnish the bronze or obliterate all the manuscripts.

The numerous .bronzes to be seen in the Museum of Napies, Sir Charles Waiston_ writes, have the- most delicate "patima" preserved with a freshness sometimes approaching tho quality of their original production. . . . And, above all, rolls of manuscripts, .though carbonised or discoloured, are not damaged beyond, the possibility of their 'restoration to a state in which they can be read.

In a single villa in Herculaneum the excavations of the eighteenth century had revealed

greater treasure in, original ancient bronzes and more ancient manuscripts than the excavations of Athens or Rome, Olympia or Delphi, Alexandria or Pergamon. •

If the literary quality of- substantially the whole of what was legible of these 800 MSS. was almost worthless there was reasonable ground for hoping that the owner of the next library discovered might have had a better taste, and a theatre ticket bearing the name of Aeschylus conveyed a tantalising suggestion of the possibilities. But it must be confessed that these hopes receive no encouragement from the results of the excavations which were set in hand by Signor Mussolini with characteristic energy and enthusiasm in May, 1927. For more than four years little was heard' of the progress of what had been regarded as

the:most desperate and heroic undertaking ever planned in tho field of practical archaeology.

But „an authoritative survey is provided by Professor Maiuri, who is, we believe, in charge of the work, in an article which appeared in "The Times" and is summarised in its weekly edition of the 12th November. The excavations are of course pro.ceedirig "methodically and in no spasmodic and fragmentary manner," but the difficulties arq obviously tremendous, and h^ has no brilliant results to record. " . ;

Two "islands" [or blocks] have, he says, been uncovered almost entirely along the most southerly sector of the city. During the past few months -work has been proceeding steadily on two other "islands" in the central quarter and is now nearing the line of the Decumanus Major," and also that of the main artery of the ancient city in other words, the line of that quarter containing the forum and the public buildings. A portion of the baths which were reserved for women has already been excavated, and work on the baths for men is to bo begun forthwith.

"The external aspect of the city is thus,"- as Professor Maiuri says, beginning to reveal its true character," and he supplies some details, such, for instance, as the excellent preservation of the woodwork, which confirm the general testimony of Sir Charles Walston. But we hear of no villa to rival the "Villa of the Papyri," no bronzes with their patima' almost as fresh as when they left the master's hand, no manuscripts even as good asv those of Philodemus,- the "obscure, verbose, and unauthoritative Epicurean of the days of Cicero," whose works so little deserved /their -almost miraculous preservation., But the last lyrics of bappho and. the lost plays of Aeschylus or Sophocles may be lurking in the next street, and whatever is there Professor Maiuri may, he relied upon to find.