Exhibition notes for A Day in Pompeii - Museum Victoria

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http://museumvictoria.com.au/Pompeii Exhibition Notes Pompeian farmers also specialised in growing vegetables, especially onions, for which the town was famous, and olives for oil. Herders raised sheep for their meat and milk as well as their wool – another important Pompeian product, which was cleaned, dyed and made into felt at numerous fulleries (fullonica) in the city. Pompeii’s coastal location also made it a popular producer of garum, a fish sauce which was in great demand as a relish; jars containing Pompeian garum have been found as far afield as Gaul. Shops of all kinds lined the bustling main streets of Pompeii; even today, they are identifiable by the remains of the sliding shutters which merchants used to close their storefronts at night. The shopping in Pompeii was world-class for its time: when tallying customers’ purchases, shopkeepers used standardised weights which had to be periodically checked against the official weights kept in the Forum. The bakery was a daily stop for most residents; many bakeries contained mills to grind their own grain, and the bread was baked and sold on the same premises. Bars (cauponae) selling snacks and drinks were also common; they consisted of an L-shaped counter in which were sunk large jars, or dolia, containing foodstuffs. Sometimes they offered a back room for customers to eat a meal, drink and perhaps even gamble. A number of inns probably offered more intimate entertainment in the form of prostitution, and archaeologists have even discovered a large purpose-built brothel, complete with small cubicles and wall paintings showing the variety of services offered. WATER SUPPLY Water, water everywhere: Pompeii’s amazing aqueducts In its first several centuries as a town, Pompeii got most of its water from underground cisterns, which were fed by rainwater collected from roofs. One of the perks of being part of the Roman Republic, however, was having access to all the latest technology, and in the early first century AD Pompeii constructed an aqueduct system to bring fresh, clean water from the hills 40 kilometres away. This water flowed into a roofed reservoir (castellum aquae) before dividing into three large lead pipes which ran under the pavements. Six-metre-high towers with lead tanks on top were built at intervals along these three pipelines. The 35-metre height difference between the castellum and the lowest point in the city meant that the water in the pipes was under pressure, allowing smaller pipes to carry water up to the tanks, then back down the towers to supply public fountains, houses, shops and facilities such as baths. Water pipes usually entered houses at the front door and fed fountains at the side of the impluvium or in the peristyle or garden — the early forerunner of the running water in our homes today. Any overflow went into a drain which emerged in the road at the base of the kerbstones and was used to flush the streets of rubbish before ending up in storm drains which carried it neatly to the river. Lavatories, while decidedly rare in other parts of the world at this time, were commonplace in sophisticated Pompeii, and often occupied a small room off the kitchen. In these hygienic marvels, a wooden seat was built over a lavatory pit, which, when flushed with a bucket of water, discharged into a cesspit near the house or under the street. 2
http://museumvictoria.com.au/Pompeii Exhibition Notes PUBLIC BATHS Leisure time in cosmopolitan Pompeii Bathing in Pompeii was a public activity, not a private one, and the public baths were important social meeting places. They were so important, in fact, that Pompeii (which had only 12,000 residents) boasted three major bathing complexes: the Stabian baths, which were the oldest; the Forum baths, built after 80 BC; and the Suburban baths, built in the early first century AD. A fourth, the Central baths, was under construction, but was still incomplete at the time of the 79 AD eruption. At the baths, men and women had separate areas; if there were no separate facilities, women bathed in the morning and men in the afternoon. In addition to the main bathing block, which had facilities for hot, warm and cold bathing, there was usually an adjoining gymnasium for exercise. After the aqueduct system was built and a plentiful water supply was assured, an open-air swimming pool was even added to the Stabian baths. The procedure most Pompeians followed was to undress in the apodyterium, oil their bodies and then exercise in the gymnasium. After exercising, oil and sweat was scraped off with a curved tool called a strigil, then followed up with a series of baths, starting in the hottest pool and working their way via the warm pool to end with a bracing dip in the cold pool. Furnaces behind the hot rooms supplied the heat for the hot baths; it circulated under the hollow floors and rose up through cavities in the walls, finally escaping by means of chimneys in the vault. PRIVATE RESIDENCES What does a 2,000-year-old house look like, anyway? In some ways, Pompeian houses were very different to those we live in today. For one thing, in Pompeii, all the living rooms of the house faced inward. Instead of having a front garden or even a gate, the front door opened directly onto the pavement, and the rooms to either side of the door were usually either utility rooms or a shopfront. From the front door, a passage led back to the largest room in the house, the atrium, which was lit by a rectangular aperture (compluvium) in the middle of its high, wooden roof. Rainwater fell through this open skylight into a rectangular basin (impluvium) in the floor beneath, and ran into a storage cistern under the floor — an arrangement similar to our modern water tanks, though almost certainly more attractive! Private rooms, which often contained couches, were situated to either side of the atrium, and at the far end lay the three most important rooms: the outer triclinia, or dining rooms, and the central tablinum, a formal reception room used by the master of the house for business and greeting guests. The doors to the house were thrown open at an early hour to admit the family dependents (clientes) who had been waiting patiently on the benches beside the front door. Pompeian architecture was clearly more homogeneous than our modern houses today; most, if not all, of the private dwellings found in the city conform to this basic Roman layout. However, the wealthier citizens of Pompeii were in many ways as attuned to style and fashion as we are today, and newer houses were built to conform to the latest trends. The so-called First Pompeian Style used the formal, austere atrium as a showplace to impress visitors with grand decorations of moulded plaster painted to imitate polychrome marble blocks. All manner of business was conducted in the atrium, so it was designed 3
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Exhibition notes for A Day in Pompeii - Museum Victoria

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