Page:The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter (1922), vol. 2.djvu/183

 to these channels there were cisterns (or castella, as they were called). From these reservoirs the water was distributed to the public through routes more or less circuitous and left the cisterns through pipes, the diameter of which was reckoned in either twelfths or sixteenths of a Roman foot. At the exits of the pipes were placed stones or stone figures, the water taking exit from these figures either by the mouth, private parts or elsewhere, and falling either to the ground or into some stone receptacle such as a basket. Various names were given these statuettes: Marsyæ, Satyri, Atlantes, Hermæ, Chirones, Silani, Tullii.”

No one who has been through the Secret Museum at Naples will find much difficulty in recalling a few of these heavily endowed examples to mind, and our author, in choosing Marsye, adds a touch of sarcastic realism, for statues of Marysas were often set up in free cities, symbolical, as it were, of freedom. In such a setting as the present, they would be the very acme of propriety.

“The figures,” says Gonzala de Salas, “formerly placed at fountains, and from which water took exit either from the mouth or from some other part, took their forms from the several species of Satyrs. The learned Wouweren has commented long and learnedly upon this passage, and his emendation ‘veretriculis’ Rh