Greek Gods- Rome- Middle Ages- England

DRINKING BOWL FROM POMPEII.

Besides the private houses, and the public buildings, many shops have been found in Pompeii. Most of these are just tiny little rooms in the front of the houses, and are entirely open toward the street. Usually we can tell what sort of a shop each is by the sign in front of it. Here is one with a wooden goat before it, and we know that it was a milk shop. Another has a large jar as a sign, and we know at once that it was a wine shop. The one with a snake before it was a drug store; and this one with a row of hams for a sign, we are told, was an eating house. Three bakeries have been discovered, and these give us a very good idea of how the bread of the Romans looked; for in the oven of one of them, eighty-three loaves were discovered, black and charred, but still keeping their original shape. L washing and dyeing shop, for the care of the woolen garments which were almost the only kind worn, has also been dis covered; and here the stone tubs may still be seen waiting for their contents, while on the walls are pictures of men standing in tubs and stamping with their feet, to show us how they were used in washing garments.

In one way the people of Pompeii were very much like some bad boys of our own day. They loved to scratch and write on the walls of the houses of the town, which, indeed, must have offered tempting chances to all by being so near to the sidewalk. So here, we find verses from the poets; and there, letters of the Greek alphabet, scratched by boys too small to reach high up on the walls. In many places advertisements are scratched in the plaster of the walls, and announcements of fights of gladiators, and performances in the theatre. Occasionally, too, we find pictures like the one shown on page 254, where a gladiator is seen coming down the steps of the amphitheatre, with a palm leaf of victory in his right hand. Such drawings and inscriptions are often found on the ancient buildings of Rome also. There, as at Pompeii, they must have been the work of the common people and the young boys, for the writers are usually very uncertain of their grammar and spelling.

DRAWING ON THE OUTER WALL OF A HOUSE IN POMPEII.

The old Roman life has been kept for us better in the city of Pompeii than anywhere else; for at Rome itself, the buildings and furniture and tools and ornaments of the people, did not remain unused and unchanged during the centuries. People continued to live in the greater city, through all the changes that the years brought with them; and they live there to this day. Only a few of the great monuments of the past, however, remain among them.

Do you wonder how the magnificent buildings of the older Rome, which were so solidly built of stone and marble, could have been so nearly destroyed, even in so long a stretch of time?

For many hundreds of years after the Roman empire of the West had come to an end, the people of the city knew little of the past, and cared still less about it. They used the old temples for churches, changing them to suit their purposes; and they tore down the finest buildings of the older city, in order to get stone for use in building new ones of their own. There is no doubt that, in this way, the Romans themselves have done more harm to the old city than all the armies that have ever captured Rome. If we could only learn the history and the former use of each of the marbles, stones and bricks, of which the palaces and churches of modern. Rome are built, our knowledge of the city of the Caesars would be almost complete.

In the fifteenth century the Church of St. Peter, the grandest in the world to-day, was begun at Rome, and rose slowly for more than two hundred years before it reached completion. The building of this church alone caused more destruction to the remains of ancient Rome than the ten centuries of ignorance that had gone before. Of the huge masses of marble of every color and size used in it, not an inch was dug from the quarries in modern times. They were all taken from the ancient buildings, many of which were leveled to the ground for the sake of one or two pieces only. At this time, also, the greatest sculptors that Italy has ever seen were flourishing; and they too found marbles ready to their hand in the fallen columns of the ancient temples. In this way, the materials of the most beautiful Christian chapel in the world, were taken from the tomb of the Emperor Hadrian.

If you ever go to Rome, and see the great arching dome of St. Peter's, and the other beautiful sights of the modern city, you must remember this. The new Rome which the eye sees contains the Rome of ancient times beneath its soil and in its greatest buildings, in something of the same way in which our language holds the old Latin words which have been worked over into a different form, and put to different uses in our speech. At first glance we see only that which is new, and we think that the old has completely perished; but, as we look closer and study into things, we find that all of the past is there also, if we only know how to find it.