Page:Three Years in Europe.djvu/389

Rh shops and fruit shops and other establishments to which the people must have crowded daily from the baths. One of the most important quarters however of Pompeii is that near the northern gate, called the gate of Herculaneum. The street outside the gate is called the street of tombs on account of the number of monuments with which it is bordered. In this street is the villa of Diomede one of the largest habitations in Pompeii. Near this villa is another called Cecero's Villa. Inside the Herculaneum gate are the house of the vestal virgins, the house of courtesans, and that of the Poet Sallust, one of the most elegant in the city. There are bakeries, laundries, stablings, fuller's establishments and all other establishments such as are met with in the busy towns.

The most careless observer walking through these streets and houses of an ancient world cannot fail being struck with the difference between ancient and modern methods of living. The splendour and beauty and magnificence of all ancient public places, be they forums, temples or baths, contrast with the utter insignificance and, one would think, the positive discomforts of private houses. The ideas of comfort and even of sanitary laws were very crude in ancient times all over the world. The largest and finest houses in Pompeii would scarcely equal the size of a rich man's house in an ordinary modern town, while in most of the houses the rooms are so small as to be almost unhabitable. It is curious that among a highly civilized European nation like the Romans, windows in private houses did not exist at all,