he knowledge of modern
Italian life to guide us to a certain extent; we have seen the swarms of
citizens who to-day fill the main piazzas of the towns, especially those
of the provincial type, where the morning market is held and the chief
cafes and shops are situated. But if the general use of the piazza is
characteristic of the modern second-class Italian city, this concentration
of life was far more marked in the ancient Roman town, wherein the Forum
must have appeared as the very heart of the whole body social and politic.
Roman city life indeed displayed two strongly antagonistic phases:--the
utmost privacy in the home, the most public exhibition in the Forum, where
every trade and form of business were carried on in the open air, and
whither pursuit of gain, or pleasure, or religious duty led all the
citizens to direct their steps. For, as we have already shown, almost all
the public life of the place was concentrated within this space and its
surroundings; temples, markets, shops, law courts, municipal offices, all
abutted on the Forum; it was not merely the chief, but the only place that
drew together the daily crowd, bent alike on business or amusement. No
chariots were permitted to cross the area sacred to the claims of
money-making, of gossip, and of worship; so that we must picture to
ourselves a great mass of people undisturbed by the passing of vehicles,
or by the shouts and whip-crackings of the noisy charioteers--was ever such
a thing as a quiet Italian coachman, ancient or modern, we digress to
wonder! All was orderly and decorous when compared with the quarrelling,
screaming groups of citizens that block the congested streets of modern
Naples. Happily for us various paintings of the Forum of Pompeii have been
discovered, and these are naturally of immense value in helping us to a
proper understanding of the habits and methods of the people, and of the
general appearance of the Forum itself during its busiest hours. The
costumes of men, women and children; the articles of clothing and of food
ready for sale; the little knots of loiterers or gossips; the citizens
intent on reading the municipal notices that are herein portrayed, all
combine to present us with an authentic picture of Pompeian and therefore
of Roman civic life. "There is nothing new under the sun," grumbled the
Preacher many centuries before the city under Vesuvius had reached its
zenith of civilization, and it must be confessed that the gene