Pompeii (11 page)

The first is
filth
. Historians are divided about quite how dirty we should imagine the average Roman city to have been, largely because – as usual – the evidence we find in ancient writers cuts two ways. On the one hand, we have the complaints of the poet Juvenal, a Roman satirist who made a profession out of indignation and directed his bile towards, among other things, the condition of the streets of the capital itself. He offers a vivid rant on the dangers of a nighttime walk, between the high-rise apartments on either side:

There are various other nocturnal perils to be considered:

it’s a long way up to the rooftops, and a falling tile

can brain you. Think of all those cracked or leaky vessels

tossed out of windows – the way they smash, their weight,

the damage they do to the side-walk! You’ll be thought most improvident,

a catastrophe-happy fool, if you don’t make your will before

venturing out to dinner. Each upper casement

along your route at night may prove a death-trap:

so pray and hope (poor you!) that the local housewives

drop nothing worse on your head than a pailful of slops.

Even less savoury is the story told by the biographer Suetonius about an incident early in the career of the emperor Vespasian, who died just a few months before the eruption of Vesuvius. Vespasian, it was said, was sitting one day having his breakfast, when a stray dog ran into the house and dropped under the breakfast table a human hand which it had picked up from the nearby crossroads. This was not, for Suetonius, an indictment of the state of the neighbourhood, but an omen of Vespasian’s future rise to greatness (for the Latin for ‘hand’,
manus
, also meant ‘power’).

But for those who would resist the lurid picture of Roman streets as filled with stray dogs, excrement dumped out of flying chamber pots, and human body parts mixed into the detritus, there is other, conflicting, evidence that can be pressed into service. Just a few lines after his tale of the human hand, Suetonius tells of another incident in Vespasian’s early life. He was just thirty and had been elected to the office of aedile (
aedilis
), which had responsibility for the upkeep of the city of Rome, from public buildings and temples to brothels and streets. The story goes that Vespasian had sorely neglected the cleaning of the streets, and as punishment the emperor Caligula exacted appropriate punishment: he had him covered in mud, dressed in his official toga. Suetonius, unconvincingly, sees another omen here. But presage of power or not, it assumes some considerable interest on the part of the highest authorities in the cleanliness of the city.

We can also point to occasional hints from local communities in the Roman empire of ingenious improvisation in the daunting task of rubbish disposal. Some three centuries after the destruction of Pompeii, in Antioch (in Syria), we hear of a clever scheme by which the country people who had brought their produce into the city to sell at market were forced, on their return journey, to use their animals to carry building rubble out of the city. It didn’t work. The farmers objected to this imposition and their complaints reached the emperor.

Where the streets of Pompeii stood on this spectrum between dirt and cleanliness, we do not know. No archaeologist has ever systematically examined the material that was lying on the surface of the street when the pumice fell. And, although we assume that the aediles at Pompeii had some of the same functions as those officials at Rome, we have no idea whether street hygiene was top of their agenda, nor whether they would have had the will, let alone the necessary resources, to keep the town clean. There are reasons, as we shall see, for imagining that householders took some responsibility for the pavements bordering on their property. But my guess is that the roadways themselves were much messier than most wholesome modern reconstructions of Pompeii tend to suggest.

For this was not a community with regular municipal rubbish collections. Even if huge quantities of commercial or domestic waste were not dumped in the street (though, presumably, some of it was), the horses, asses and mules that were the main means of transport would have dropped plenty of their own refuse. And it is hard to believe that all those Pompeians who lived in a single room above their shop, with not always adequate lavatory facilities, never found it convenient simply to piss into the streets. Some proportion of the human faeces and urine produced in the city (6,500,000 kilos of it a year on a very crude estimate) presumably ended up in the public highway. It was certainly enough of a problem for the occasional warning notice to be posted up: ‘Shitter – make sure you keep it in till you’ve passed this spot’. Stepping down onto the road surface risked more than a twisted ankle; it most likely involved treading into a smelly mixture of animal dung (each horse producing up to 10 kilos a day), rotting vegetables and human excrement – which was, just to complete the picture, no doubt covered in flies.

Filth, however, cannot be the only answer to the question of those high walkways. If it were, we would be faced with the unlikely conclusion that the burghers of nearby Herculaneum (where we do not find stepping stones or particularly high pavements) were a cleaner and neater lot than their neighbours at Pompeii. In fact, anyone who has visited the city during a rainstorm will have seen an overriding reason for the Pompeian arrangement: that is
water
. When it pours with rain, the streets turn into torrents. For the city is built on land which slopes, in places quite steeply, from north-west to south-east (the Stabian Gate is 35 metres lower than the Vesuvius Gate); and unlike Herculaneum, it has few underground drains. It was the function of the streets to collect the rainwater and channel it out of the city through the walls, or towards such internal drains as there were, mostly around the Forum. Even when it was not raining, water – supplied, for the last hundred years or so of the city’s existence, by aqueduct – spewed into the roadways from the incessant street fountains, and as the overspill from houses and baths.

The streets, in other words, doubled as water channels, as well as refuse dumps. One thing that can be said in favour of this arrangement is that the occasional downpour, and the rush of water that it caused, must have helped flush away all that decaying rubbish.

Boulevards and back alleys

Most ancient Pompeians, like most modern visitors, would have spent a lot of time on their city’s streets. This was not simply a consequence of the warm weather or some laid-back ‘Mediterranean lifestyle’. Many of the inhabitants of ancient Pompeii had little choice but to live outdoors. They had nowhere else to go. True, the super-rich families had plenty of space in their large houses and palaces: quiet retiring rooms, shady gardens, showy dining rooms, even private bath suites. Others who were not in that league lived comfortably enough in houses of half a dozen rooms. Further down the scale of wealth, many of the town’s inhabitants lived in a single small room above their shop, bar or workshop, with no ‘mains’ water supply, and often no means of heating or cooking – except perhaps for a small brazier (which must have doubled as a serious fire hazard). Compact quarters for a single occupant, this kind of apartment would have been little more than a cramped dormitory for a family of three or four. For almost all their basic needs they would have gone outside: for water to the street fountains, for a meal – beyond bread, fruit and cheese, and whatever simple concoction could be brewed up on the brazier – to one of the many bars and cafés which opened directly onto the pavements (Plate 4). Pompeii offers a striking reversal of our own social norms. For us, it is the rich who visit restaurants, the poor who cook economically at home. At Pompeii, it was the poor who ate out.

20. The ubiquity of the phallus. Here a phallus is carved into the paving stones of the street. But does it really point, as some claim, to the nearest brothel?

The streets of Pompeii came, as you would expect, in many shapes and sizes. Some of the back lanes were not even paved at all, but remained dirt trails or unprepossessing alleyways between blocks of housing; and earlier in the town’s history many more would have been muddy or dusty tracks, rather than solid, carefully engineered highways. Some of them, particularly the main routes across the town, were comparatively wide, others could not take a single cart. That said, all the streets were narrow in our terms, most less than three metres across. To judge from the size of the cart found in the House of the Menander – or, more strictly, the iron wheel trims and fittings found, combined with impressions of the wood in the volcanic debris – only a few roads would have been wide enough to let two vehicles pass each other. And, when the buildings were standing to their full height, often with upper storeys, even the wider streets would have felt much more cramped and confined than they do now.

They were also much brighter, gaudier and more ‘in your face’. Crude paintings marked out local religious shrines, often where streets intersected. Phalluses decorated the walls, moulded on terracotta plaques or, in one case, carved into the street surface itself. (Modern explanations for this range feebly from ‘an expression of good luck’ to ‘protection against the evil eye’; the line spun by the tourist guides that the phallus on the street is a directional sign to the local brothel is certainly wrong.) Many of the houses were originally richly coloured – in reds, yellows and blues – and provided a convenient surface for electoral slogans (often one on top of another), ‘For Rent’ notices, advertisements for gladiatorial games, or just the scribbles of Pompeii’s graffiti artists. ‘I am amazed that you haven’t fallen down, O wall / Loaded as you are with all this scrawl’, as one popular piece of Pompeian doggerel ran – scratched up in at least three places in the town, and so adding to the phenomenon it deplored.

21. The woolworkers’ trade. On the left a man is busy combing the wool at a low table. In the centre, four men are engaged in the messy business of making felt from a mixture of wool and animal hair, held together with a sticky binder. (This gave the Romans their equivalent of a ‘water-proof’.) On the far right, past another comber, the finished product is displayed by a man named in small letters underneath Verecundus. The large letters above are part of an electoral poster.

Shops and bars often used their street façades for painted signs, advertising their business, blazoning their name (rather like an English pub sign) and normally parading some usefully protective deities. The pictures of Romulus and Aeneas that we saw in the last chapter enlivened the outside of a fullery. Just a couple of blocks away, what we assume to have been an establishment of cloth-makers and cloth-sellers made an even bigger splash (
assume
, because the building has not been excavated further back than the frontage, so we cannot be certain what went on inside). On one side of the doorway Venus, the city’s patron goddess, rode in a chariot pulled by elephants; on the other Mercury, the divine protector of commerce, stood in his temple grasping a fat bag of coins. Under Venus was a scene of workers busy combing the wool and making felt (with the boss himself, presumably, showing off a finished product on the right); under Mercury, the lady of the house, or perhaps an employee, is busy selling her wares (which appear now to be largely shoes).

Sadly, one of the most striking examples of this type of painting – and one which captured the imagination of nineteenth-century visitors – has now disappeared completely, a victim of the elements. Decorating the front wall of a bar, near the town gate leading to the sea, was a large picture of an elephant with a pygmy or two – and a painted sign saying ‘Sittius restored the Elephant’. Sittius was probably the last landlord, and he had restored either the painting or maybe the whole place (‘The Elephant Bar’). If so, he had a good name for a barman, so good one suspects that it may have been a ‘trade-name’. For the best English translation of ‘Sittius’ would be ‘Mr Thirsty’.