Page:Three Years in Europe.djvu/391

Rh lived, the rooms which their women occupied, the shops where they purchased their food, the wine stalls where they gathered in crowds. The very sins of this ancient people are laid open to modern eyes. Close to temples or market places are brothels with four or five or six small chambers designed for so many women. The chambers are so small as to be simply loathsome to the lowest pleasure-seekers of modern days, but were in keeping with the size of houses in the olden times. The very beds are there, beds of masonry which were probably covered with mattresses, while the walls are disfigured by paintings, the most obscene that human imagination can invent. It is curious that these indelicate paintings are not confined simply to houses of ill fame, but are also found in many private houses. Domestic articles like lamps or vessels were often very indelicate in their designs, and a large collection of such things is kept in a separate room in the the Naples museum. Outside the walls of houses too one not unfrequently comes across indelicate figures. Just facing the house of the vestal virgins is a house of ill fame, denoted by a most disgusting sign sculptured over the door-way. This public exposure of indecency is shocking to modern ideas. I do not think the moderns have improved very much over the ancients in morality, but modern nations choose wisely to throw a veil over their sins which ancient peoples thought unnecessary.

Herculaneum is nearer the foot of Visuvius, and is therefore covered over, not by lava dust like Pompeii, but by hard,