Chapter VII
THE GAY LIFE OF THE POMPEIAN LOUNGER. A MINIATURE LIKENESS OF THE ROMAN
BATHS.
WHEN Glaucus left Ione, he felt as if he trod upon air. In the interview
with which he had just been blessed, he had for the first time gathered from
her distinctly that his love was not unwelcome to, and would not be
unrewarded by, her. This hope filled him with a rapture for which earth and
heaven seemed too narrow to afford a vent. Unconscious of the sudden enemy
he had left behind, and forgetting not only his taunts but his very
existence, Glaucus passed through the gay streets, repeating to himself, in
the wantonness of joy, the music of the soft air to which Ione had listened
with such intentness; and now he entered the Street of Fortune, with its
raised footpath--its houses painted without, and the open doors admitting
the view of the glowing frescoes within. Each end of the street was adorned
with a triumphal arch: and as Glaucus now came before the Temple of Fortune,
the jutting portico of that beautiful fane (which is supposed to have been
built by one of the family of Cicero, perhaps by the orator himself)
imparted a dignified and venerable feature to a scene otherwise more
brilliant than lofty in its character. That temple was one of the most
graceful specimens of Roman architecture. It was raised on a somewhat lofty
podium; and between two flights of steps ascending to a platform stood the
altar of the goddess. From this platform another flight of broad stairs led
to the portico, from the height of whose fluted columns hung festoons of the
richest flowers. On either side the extremities of the temple were placed
statues of Grecian workmanship; and at a little distance from the temple
rose the triumphal arch crowned with an equestrian statue of Caligula, which
was flanked by trophies of bronze. In the space before the temple a lively
throng were assembled--some seated on benches and discussing the politics of
the empire, some conversing on the approaching spectacle of the
amphitheatre. One knot of young men were lauding a new beauty, another
discussing the merits of the last play; a third group, more stricken in age,
were speculating on the chance of the trade with Alexandria, and amidst
these were many merchants in the Eastern costume, whose loose and peculiar
robes, painted and gemmed slippers, and composed and serious countenances,
formed a striking contrast to the tunicked forms and animated gestures of
the Italians. For that impatient and lively people had, as now, a language
distinct from speech--a language of signs and motions, inexpressibly
significant and vivacious: their descendants retain it, and the learned
Jorio hath written a most entertaining work upon that species of
hieroglyphical gesticulation.
Sauntering through the crowd, Glaucus soon found himself amidst a group of
his merry and dissipated friends.
'Ah!' said Sallust, 'it is a lustrum since I saw you.'
'And how have you spent the lustrum? What new dishes have you discovered?'
'I have been scientific,' returned Sallust, 'and have made some experiments
in the feeding of lampreys: I confess I despair of bringing them to the
perfection which our Roman ancestors attained.'
'Miserable man! and why?'
'Because,' returned Sallust, with a sigh, 'it is no longer lawful to give
them a slave to eat. I am very often tempted to make away with a very fat
carptor (butler) whom I possess, and pop him slily into the reservoir. He
would give the fish a most oleaginous flavor! But slaves are not slaves
nowadays, and have no sympathy with their masters' interest--or Davus would
destroy himself to oblige me!'
'What news from Rome?' said Lepidus, as he languidly joined the group.
'The emperor has been giving a splendid supper to the senators,' answered
Sallust.
'He is a good creature,' quoth Lepidus; 'they say he never sends a man away
without granting his request.'
'Perhaps he would let me kill a slave for my reservoir?' returned Sallust,
eagerly.
'Not unlikely,' said Glaucus; 'for he who grants a favor to one Roman, must
always do it at the expense of another. Be sure, that for every smile Titus
has caused, a hundred eyes have wept.'
'Long live Titus!' cried Pansa, overhearing the emperor's name, as he swept
patronizingly through the crowd; 'he has promised my brother a quaestorship,
because he had run through his fortune.'
'And wishes now to enrich himself among the people, my Pansa,' said Glaucus.
'Exactly so,' said Pansa.
'That is putting the people to some use,' said Glaucus.
'To be sure, returned Pansa. 'Well, I must go and look after the
aerarium--it is a little out of repair'; and followed by a long train of
clients, distinguished from the rest of the throng by the togas they wore
(for togas, once the sign of freedom in a citizen, were now the badge of
servility to a patron), the aedile fidgeted fussily away.
'Poor Pansa!' said Lepidus: 'he never has time for pleasure. Thank Heaven I
am not an aedile!'
'Ah, Glaucus! how are you? gay as ever?' said Clodius, joining the group.
'Are you come to sacrifice to Fortune?' said Sallust.
'I sacrifice to her every night,' returned the gamester.
'I do not doubt it. No man has made more victims!'
'By Hercules, a biting speech!' cried Glaucus, laughing.
'The dog's letter is never out of your mouth, Sallust,' said Clodius,
angrily: 'you are always snarling.'
'I may well have the dog's letter in my mouth, since, whenever I play with
you, I have the dog's throw in my hand,' returned Sallust.
'Hist!' said Glaucus, taking a rose from a flower-girl, who stood beside.
'The rose is the token of silence,' replied Sallust, 'but I love only to see
it at the supper-table.'
'Talking of that, Diomed gives a grand feast next week,' said Sallust: 'are
you invited, Glaucus?'
'Yes, I received an invitation this morning.'
'And I, too,' said Sallust, drawing a square piece of papyrus from his
girdle: 'I see that he asks us an hour earlier than usual: an earnest of
something sumptuous.'
'Oh! he is rich as Croesus,' said Clodius; 'and his bill of fare is as long
as an epic.'
'Well, let us to the baths,' said Glaucus: 'this is the time when all the
world is there; and Fulvius, whom you admire so much, is going to read us
his last ode.'
The young men assented readily to the proposal, and they strolled to the
baths.
Although the public thermae, or baths, were instituted rather for the poorer
citizens than the wealthy (for the last had baths in their own houses), yet,
to the crowds of all ranks who resorted to them, it was a favorite place for
conversation, and for that indolent lounging so dear to a gay and
thoughtless people. The baths at Pompeii differed, of course, in plan and
construction from the vast and complicated thermae of Rome; and, indeed, it
seems that in each city of the empire there was always some slight
modification of arrangement in the general architecture of the public baths.
This mightily puzzles the learned--as if architects and fashion were not
capricious before the nineteenth century! Our party entered by the
principal porch in the Street of Fortune. At the wing of the portico sat
the keeper of the baths, with his two boxes before him, one for the money he
received, one for the tickets he dispensed. Round the walls of the portico
were seats crowded with persons of all ranks; while others, as the regimen
of the physicians prescribed, were walking briskly to and fro the portico,
stopping every now and then to gaze on the innumerable notices of shows,
games, sales, exhibitions, which were painted or inscribed upon the walls.
The general subject of conversation was, however, the spectacle announced in
the amphitheatre; and each new-comer was fastened upon by a group eager to
know if Pompeii had been so fortunate as to produce some monstrous criminal,
some happy case of sacrilege or of murder, which would allow the aediles to
provide a man for the jaws of the lion: all other more common exhibitions
seemed dull and tame, when compared with the possibility of this fortunate
occurrence.
'For my part,' said one jolly-looking man, who was a goldsmith, 'I think the
emperor, if he is as good as they say, might have sent us a Jew.'
'Why not take one of the new sect of Nazarenes?' said a philosopher. 'I am
not cruel: but an atheist, one who denies Jupiter himself, deserves no
mercy.'
'I care not how many gods a man likes to believe in,' said the goldsmith;
'but to deny all gods is something monstrous.'
'Yet I fancy,' said Glaucus, 'that these people are not absolutely atheists.
I am told that they believe in a God--nay, in a future state.'
'Quite a mistake, my dear Glaucus,' said the philosopher. 'I have conferred
with them--they laughed in my face when I talked of Pluto and Hades.'
'O ye gods!' exclaimed the goldsmith, in horror; 'are there any of these
wretches in Pompeii?'
'I know there are a few: but they meet so privately that it is impossible to
discover who they are.'
As Glaucus turned away, a sculptor, who was a great enthusiast in his art,
looked after him admiringly.
'Ah!' said he, 'if we could get him on the arena--there would be a model for
you! What limbs! what a head! he ought to have been a gladiator! A
subject--a subject--worthy of our art! Why don't they give him to the
lion?'
Meanwhile Fulvius, the Roman poet, whom his contemporaries declared
immortal, and who, but for this history, would never have been heard of in
our neglectful age, came eagerly up to Glaucus. 'Oh, my Athenian, my
Glaucus, you have come to hear my ode! That is indeed an honour; you, a
Greek--to whom the very language of common life is poetry. How I thank you.
It is but a trifle; but if I secure your approbation, perhaps I may get an
introduction to Titus. Oh, Glaucus! a poet without a patron is an amphora
without a label; the wine may be good, but nobody will laud it! And what
says Pythagoras?--"Frankincense to the gods, but praise to man." A patron,
then, is the poet's priest: he procures him the incense, and obtains him his
believers.'
'But all Pompeii is your patron, and every portico an altar in your praise.'
'Ah! the poor Pompeians are very civil--they love to honour merit. But they
are only the inhabitants of a petty town--spero meliora! Shall we within?'
'Certainly; we lose time till we hear your poem.'
At this instant there was a rush of some twenty persons from the baths into
the portico; and a slave stationed at the door of a small corridor now
admitted the poet, Glaucus, Clodius, and a troop of the bard's other
friends, into the passage.
'A poor place this, compared with the Roman thermae!' said Lepidus,
disdainfully.
'Yet is there some taste in the ceiling,' said Glaucus, who was in a mood to
be pleased with everything; pointing to the stars which studded the roof.
Lepidus shrugged his shoulders, but was too languid to reply.
They now entered a somewhat spacious chamber, which served for the purposes
of the apodyterium (that is, a place where the bathers prepared themselves
for their luxurious ablutions). The vaulted ceiling was raised from a
cornice, glowingly colored with motley and grotesque paintings; the ceiling
itself was paneled in white compartments bordered with rich crimson; the
unsullied and shining floor was paved with white mosaics, and along the
walls were ranged benches for the accommodation of the loiterers. This
chamber did not possess the numerous and spacious windows which Vitruvius
attributes to his more magnificent frigidarium. The Pompeians, as all the
southern Italians, were fond of banishing the light of their sultry skies,
and combined in their voluptuous associations the idea of luxury with
darkness. Two windows of glass alone admitted the soft and shaded ray; and
the compartment in which one of these casements was placed was adorned with
a large relief of the destruction of the Titans.
In this apartment Fulvius seated himself with a magisterial air, and his
audience gathering round him, encouraged him to commence his recital.
The poet did not require much pressing. He drew forth from his vest a roll
of papyrus, and after hemming three times, as much to command silence as to
clear his voice, he began that wonderful ode, of which, to the great
mortification of the author of this history, no single verse can be
discovered.
By the plaudits he received, it was doubtless worthy of his fame; and
Glaucus was the only listener who did not find it excel the best odes of
Horace.
The poem concluded, those who took only the cold bath began to undress; they
suspended their garments on hooks fastened in the wall, and receiving,
according to their condition, either from their own slaves or those of the
thermae, loose robes in exchange, withdrew into that graceful circular
building which yet exists, to shame the unlaving posterity of the south.
The more luxurious departed by another door to the tepidarium, a place which
was heated to a voluptuous warmth, partly by a movable fireplace,
principally by a suspended pavement, beneath which was conducted the caloric
of the laconicum.
Here this portion of the intended bathers, after unrobing themselves,
remained for some time enjoying the artificial warmth of the luxurious air.
And this room, as befitted its important rank in the long process of
ablution, was more richly and elaborately decorated than the rest; the
arched roof was beautifully carved and painted; the windows above, of ground
glass, admitted but wandering and uncertain rays; below the massive cornices
were rows of figures in massive and bold relief; the walls glowed with
crimson, the pavement was skillfully tessellated in white mosaics. Here the
habituated bathers, men who bathed seven times a day, would remain in a
state of enervate and speechless lassitude, either before or (mostly) after
the water-bath; and many of these victims of the pursuit of health turned
their listless eyes on the newcomers, recognizing their friends with a nod,
but dreading the fatigue of conversation.
>From this place the party again diverged, according to their several
fancies, some to the sudatorium, which answered the purpose of our
vapor-baths, and thence to the warm-bath itself; those more accustomed to
exercise, and capable of dispensing with so cheap a purchase of fatigue,
resorted at once to the calidarium, or water-bath.
In order to complete this sketch, and give to the reader an adequate notion
of this, the main luxury of the ancients, we will accompany Lepidus, who
regularly underwent the whole process, save only the cold bath, which had
gone lately out of fashion. Being then gradually warmed in the tepidarium,
which has just been described, the delicate steps of the Pompeian elegant
were conducted to the sudatorium. Here let the reader depict to himself the
gradual process of the vapor-bath, accompanied by an exhalation of spicy
perfumes. After our bather had undergone this operation, he was seized by
his slaves, who always awaited him at the baths, and the dews of heat were
removed by a kind of scraper, which (by the way) a modern traveler has
gravely declared to be used only to remove the dirt, not one particle of
which could ever settle on the polished skin of the practised bather.
Thence, somewhat cooled, he passed into the water-bath, over which fresh
perfumes were profusely scattered, and on emerging from the opposite part of
the room, a cooling shower played over his head and form. Then wrapping
himself in a light robe, he returned once more to the tepidarium, where he
found Glaucus, who had not encountered the sudatorium; and now, the main
delight and extravagance of the bath commenced. Their slaves anointed the
bathers from vials of gold, of alabaster, or of crystal, studded with
profusest gems, and containing the rarest unguents gathered from all
quarters of the world. The number of these smegmata used by the wealthy
would fill a modern volume--especially if the volume were printed by a
fashionable publisher; Amaracinum, Megalium, Nardum--omne quod exit in
um--while soft music played in an adjacent chamber, and such as used the
bath in moderation, refreshed and restored by the grateful ceremony,
conversed with all the zest and freshness of rejuvenated life.
'Blessed be he who invented baths!' said Glaucus, stretching himself along
one of those bronze seats (then covered with soft cushions) which the
visitor to Pompeii sees at this day in that same tepidarium. 'Whether he
were Hercules or Bacchus, he deserved deification.'
'But tell me,' said a corpulent citizen, who was groaning and wheezing under
the operation of being rubbed down, 'tell me, O Glaucus!--evil chance to thy
hands, O slave! why so rough?--tell me--ugh--ugh!--are the baths at Rome
really so magnificent?' Glaucus turned, and recognized Diomed, though not
without some difficulty, so red and so inflamed were the good man's cheeks
by the sudatory and the scraping he had so lately undergone. 'I fancy they
must be a great deal finer than these. Eh?' Suppressing a smile, Glaucus
replied:
'Imagine all Pompeii converted into baths, and you will then form a notion
of the size of the imperial thermae of Rome. But a notion of the size only.
Imagine every entertainment for mind and body--enumerate all the gymnastic
games our fathers invented--repeat all the books Italy and Greece have
produced--suppose places for all these games, admirers for all these
works--add to this, baths of the vastest size, the most complicated
construction--intersperse the whole with gardens, with theatres, with
porticoes, with schools--suppose, in one word, a city of the gods, composed
but of palaces and public edifices, and you may form some faint idea of the
glories of the great baths of Rome.'
'By Hercules!' said Diomed, opening his eyes, 'why, it would take a man's
whole life to bathe!'
'At Rome, it often does so,' replied Glaucus, gravely. 'There are many who
live only at the baths. They repair there the first hour in which the doors
are opened, and remain till that in which the doors are closed. They seem
as if they knew nothing of the rest of Rome, as if they despised all other
existence.'
'By Pollux! you amaze me.'
'Even those who bathe only thrice a day contrive to consume their lives in
this occupation. They take their exercise in the tennis-court or the
porticoes, to prepare them for the first bath; they lounge into the theatre,
to refresh themselves after it. They take their prandium under the trees,
and think over their second bath. By the time it is prepared, the prandium
is digested. From the second bath they stroll into one of the peristyles,
to hear some new poet recite: or into the library, to sleep over an old one.
Then comes the supper, which they still consider but a part of the bath: and
then a third time they bathe again, as the best place to converse with their
friends.'
'Per Hercle! but we have their imitators at Pompeii.'
'Yes, and without their excuse. The magnificent voluptuaries of the Roman
baths are happy: they see nothing but gorgeousness and splendor; they visit
not the squalid parts of the city; they know not that there is poverty in
the world. All Nature smiles for them, and her only frown is the last one
which sends them to bathe in Cocytus. Believe me, they are your only true
philosophers.'
While Glaucus was thus conversing, Lepidus, with closed eyes and scarce
perceptible breath, was undergoing all the mystic operations, not one of
which he ever suffered his attendants to omit. After the perfumes and the
unguents, they scattered over him the luxurious powder which prevented any
further accession of heat: and this being rubbed away by the smooth surface
of the pumice, he began to indue, not the garments he had put off, but those
more festive ones termed 'the synthesis', with which the Romans marked their
respect for the coming ceremony of supper, if rather, from its hour (three
o'clock in our measurement of time), it might not be more fitly denominated
dinner. This done, he at length opened his eyes and gave signs of returning
life.
At the same time, too, Sallust betokened by a long yawn the evidence of
existence.
'It is supper time,' said the epicure; 'you, Glaucus and Lepidus, come and
sup with me.'
'Recollect you are all three engaged to my house next week,' cried Diomed,
who was mightily proud of the acquaintance of men of fashion.
'Ah, ah! we recollect,' said Sallust; 'the seat of memory, my Diomed, is
certainly in the stomach.'
Passing now once again into the cooler air, and so into the street, our
gallants of that day concluded the ceremony of a Pompeian bath.
