A VISIT TO POMPEII

Evening Star, Issue 22805, 13 November 1937, Page 3

A VISIT TO POMPEII

[Written by N. F. H. M'Leod, for the “Evening Star.' - )] Our Orient .liner .berthed at Naples at about 9 o’clock on a cold February morning. As I was dressing I saw grey walls through the porthole, and knew that I gazed on my first castle. From the deck wo had a better look at it, and let me warn, those who have yet to see an ancient castle that the greatest of them seem insignificant to eyes accustomed to tall modern buildings. In this one may be seen the skeleton of a victim murdered in its dungeons. “A cruel age,” murmured someone. Yet only a chain away lay six deadly submarines dear to Signor Mussolini—a very nasty kind of submarine dungeon —and a troop ship due to leave for Abyssinia next day. At 10 o’clock the bus arrived to take us to Pompeii. We bad all obtained tickets for the trip, and the bus gradually filled up. The driver and two guides talked volubly in Italian. Then the driver climbed into his seat and the guides collected the tickets. Much argument ensued, and as they repeatedly counted the passengers and the tickets wo gathered that passengers and tickets did not tally, which left each of us feeling that suspicion might fall upon ns. As one guide was a bass and the other a tenor, it was very like an operatic duet, and the mystery was still unsolved when wo at last departed. And so through the streets of tall buildings of faded lemon, pink, and blue we proceeded towards Pompeii. All the houses have iron balconies and wooden shutters. Seldom did w© see a motor car. and few of the women wear hats. Tho horses, we noticed, are driven with bibless bridles—not very mettlesome animals surely, but perhaps the low standard of living affects them, too. Beyond the city the road is all the way through market gardens. Cultivation is intense. There are no fences, and the small flat-roofed dwellings look squalidly poor, with goats and children playing by the doors and a string of ragged washing on the line. Water lay on the fields, and very poor-looking people, mostly women, were hoeing in the plots. The clouds parted, and wo saw Vesuvius, a cape of snow on its vast black shoulders and the inevitable plume of smoke streaming on the wind. Did Vesuvius inspire the uniforms of Mussolini’s alpine soldiers, I wonder, with their picturesque capes and feathered hats? .. At last wo reached Pompeii, which we did not recognise at first behind tho handsome modern gate-house through which it is entered. A covered roadway leads up to the city, and on its right is a museum of relics. The ash which buried the city after the eruption was consolidated by water into a plaster that covered all objects. Skeletons were thus_ preserved in a hollow space conforming to the shape of the bodies. By pouring plaster of paris into the cavities exact replicas or people and animals have been made. We saw several of these, all in attitudes of intense agony,, due to suffocation. Besides these were chariots, gongs, jars, jewels, every kind of domestic appurtenance, and bread, burnt black in the deserted ovens. Pompeii stands on rising -ground less than a mile from Vesuvius, which dominates it from every angle. It was strange to wander through that city of the dead, a group of chattering Australasians, smiling at the quaint English of the guides, who refer everything to Bulwer Lytton’s “East Days of Pompeii.’ If a tragedy for its own inhabitants, what a fortunate chance for posterity has been this preservation of the habitations of Homan civilisation of the first century of the Christian era, for the city was destroyed in a.d 79 after a century of Roman occupation. By the Middle Ages the site was forgotten, to be rediscovered in 1594 through the building of an aqueduct. Systematic excavations began in 1763, and have continued to the present day. It seems in many ways like a toy city, so narrow are the streets, so low and small the buildings. The very chariots are like the carts our schoolboys play with, and it is odd to think of full-sized horses drawing them. Plainly visible in every street are the deep grooves worn in the pavements by the chariot wheels. What a clatter they must have made, too.

How quaintly modern are the wine shops, which look exactly like modern marble bars, for the round cavities used to contain the jars of wine could just as easily accommodate drums of ice cream. It would be cool on the hottest day in those windowless, thickwalled houses, with their balconies and loggias almost meeting overhead. Then the elaborate public baths were built underground, a paradise of coolness in summer and of snug warmth in winter. The house of the Vetu, with its painted walls and fountained courtyard, is one of the show places. Flowers bloom in the little garden, with its peristylium, and the paintings on the wall are still bright. One of the pictures is “ for men only’,” and the women of the party are warned away while the guide unlocks the concealing shutter. On the streets are many paintings too obscene for the modern public eye, and always covered with canvases.

The temples reveal three styles of Greek architecture—the Doric, lonic, and Corinthian—but have the Roman •peculiarity of being raised on platforms. Replicas of some of the statues have been restored to the temples, and that of Diana has a tube from, the mouth through the hollow arm. Thus spake the oracle.

The largest theatre, with seats cut into a hillside facing Vesuvius, would seat 5,000. Adjoining it were the barracks for the gladiators, in which three chained skeletons were found by the excavators. At the top of the hill is a promenade tunnel, where the elite strolled in coolness between the acts.

The life of a Pompeiian Roman was cast in pleasant places, and planned for comfort, luxury, and pleasure. The modern Italians, according to our tenor guide, are learning the advantages of colonisation. “JTor the Romans,” he explained, “ didia likia to makia colonies—like the Britisha, and likia the Italians in Abyssinia.”