POMPEII, p6m-pa'ye (Lat. pom-peyi), an cient city of Italy, near the Gulf of Naples, and 12 miles southeast of Naples, lying at the south east base of Vesuvius, and important as being preserved almost intact to our own time by a shower of ashes and pumice from Vesuvius 24 Aug. 79 A.D., which also covered Herculaneum. The city, according to Strabo, was founded by the Oscans; it must have come under Hellenic influence by the 6th century for a temple un earthed in the city is of the Doric of that cen tury. Held by the Samnites from 420 B.C. to the end of the Samnite War in 290, Pompeii then became dependent on Rome; and two cen turies later at the close of the Social War the city which had sided with the Italian allied forces was captured by Sulla, and was forced to cede a third of its territory for a Roman mili tary colony. In the years that immediately followed Pompeii became a favorite resort of rich and fashionable Rome, being near the sea and having the glamor of Greek elegance. An earthquake in 63 A.D. nearly destroyed the city, and when it was rebuilt and resettled, Roman architecture somewhat took the place of Greek and the work of building seems to have been shabby and far from thorough in many in stances. But the city had regained much of its old popularity when it was destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in the year 79. Few of the inhabitants escaped, but the better class of buildings was scarcely injured by the alternat ing falls of ashes and rapilli, or pumice. These with the additional covering of earth now amount to about 20 feet. The eruption is described by Pliny the Younger in letters writ ten to Tacitus telling of the death of the elder Pliny, who perished in the city. The site, for a time occupied by a little village, was deserted after the eruption of Vesuvius in 472, and no attention was paid to this great storehouse of antique life until the middle of the 18th century. Indeed the precise position of the buried city was problematic, for the volcano had changed the coast line so that it is now some distance from Pompeii. In 1748 valuable finds were made by a peasant digging a well. In 1755, Charles III having become interested in the work, the amphitheatre and other public build ings were discovered. But during the next 50 years nothing systematic was done: there was still search for rare objects, but when these were found houses and streets were left to decay or were covered up again. No one real ized that the prime value of the city archwol ogically is that it is the genuine setting of Roman life, a very different thing fr m remnants, no matter how curious, in a museu Under Murat (1808-15) houses and stre were again excavated; and since the establis ment of the united Italian kingdom work s been carried on systematically by the gove went, notably under the management of Fiorel , who devised a method of making casts of th human remains by pouring plaster into the hoh lows occupied by the bones of the victims; The streets are now nearly half exposed; the completion of the work may take 50 years more. The fear has occasionally been expressed that an eruption of Vesuvius might undo all this work, and, if lava were poured down on the city, all the ancient monuments be destroyed.
The importance of the city, as has been re marked above, is that the very pose and setting of 1st century Italy is here preserved in a won derful degree, even loaves of bread keeping their shape though turned to charcoal It is, however, important to notice that the city is neither typical of Rome because of its being subjected to Greek influence, nor of Greece, because hastily rebuilt after the earthquake of 63 A.D. Hence generalizations as to Roman manners and customs founded merely on Pom peian remains are liable to error. The city was an irregular oval, the length being east and west, surrounded by a wall with a circuit of a little more than a mile and five-eighths (2,925 yards), which is pierced by eight gates. At each there were sentry boxes in which the Roman legionaries were found, still 'Con duty* when the excavations began. The most import ant gate is that opening toward Herculaneum, on the west end of the ovoid. From this gate leads a road paved with tombs, the Pompeian Via Appia. Parts of this region, the Pagus Auguitus Felix, were among the earliest ex, cavated; in 1771-74 the diggers discovered the villa of Diomedes, which got its name from the tomb of Marcus Arrius Diomedes across the street. It seems to antedate the empire. Thirty-four bodies were found in this one house, 20 of them in the wine cellar. Within the walls the streets are straight but narrow (14 to 24 feet wide), paved with lava blocks, and with high stepping stones at crossings. The
streets are deeply worn with ruts. On the walls there are scribbled inscriptions, the famous graffiti, which are full of the gossip, scandal and politics of the city. The forum, a little southwest of the geographical centre of the town, was an open market place surrounded by buildings, the temple of Apollo lying to the west, the temple of Jupiter to the north and that of Mercury to the east. The last temple was flanked by the curia on the left and the house of Eumachia on the right; south of this house, across a street leading to the Sarno gate, Was a school. At the intersection of this street with that connecting the Vesuvian and Stabian gates were situated the public baths ;- and near the latter gate were a second forum, called the *triangular,* a temple of Isis north of it, a large and a small theatre to the east, the extensive gladiators' barracks to the south east, noted for the fine arms, shields, hel mets, etc., discovered here, and to the south a temple of Heracles. The gladiators' quarters include a large rectangular enclosure, which Measures 183 feet long by 148 feet wide. It is surrounded on all four sides by a colonnade whose columns are painted red at the lower part, and alternately red and yellow at the upper. The wall back of the columns is covered with stucco. Other baths are on the street crossing the city from the Nolan gate. iEt The unfinished temple of Venus Pompeiana in the southern corner of the city, near the old Sea gate and the modern hotel, seems to have been the repository of many valuables, probably left by the inhabitants who escaped from the city at the first alarm. Valuable finds of the same sort are to be looked for in villas out side the city; in 1895 in a well at Boscoreale a set of silver utensils, lamps, mirrors and cande bra was discovered. The type of art in these ieces of silver and in the mural paintings is pparently Alexandrian, with a profusion of Among the better known private ellings, apart from the *Villa of Diomedes* already named, are the house of Pansa, one of the largest residences of the city, a pattern of the Roman house which has often been re produced, notably at Saratoga; the house of the Tragic Poet, so called because of the incor rect interpretation of one of its mural paintings, a small but tasteful house with remarkable scenes from the Homeric poems; the unusually elegant house of Sallustius; the double house known as Castor and Pollux; and the house of the Vettii, excavated in 1894, the home of a rich fuller, with brilliant, fresh frescoes, and the interior equipment of the house in such good condition that it has been left there in stead of being carried to the Museum in Naples.
The discoveries produced bv the excavation pf the ruins of buried Pompeii and Hercu laneum were of vast interest from the view point of archaeology; but a far greater effect produced was from a popular standpoint, namely, the revolution in the modern world of art, and the decorative arts especially. The early excavations created a classic influence in the architecture and decoration in France dur ing the reign of Louis XV, which, with the More advanced disclosures, entirely dominated the style Louis XV, to become excuse for the debased copies of these antiquities in the em pire style. In England the disinterment of these Greco-Roman ruins and relics brought into being the Adam Period of architecture and decorative art (1760-94).
S., 'Relics of An tiquity exhibited in the Ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum) (New York 1826) ; Barre, L., and Rouxaine, H., 'Herculanum et Pompei' (Paris 1840) ; Cerillo, E., Wipinti murals di Pompeii' (Naples 1886) ; Clark, G., 'Pompeii; its Destruction and (London 1853) ; Dyer, T. H., (Pompeii, its History, Buildings and Antiquities' (London 1906) ; Engelmann, R., 'Pompeii' (Leipzig 1898) ; Furchheim, F., 'Bibliografia di Pompeii, Erco lano e Stabia' (Naples 1891) ; id., 'Biblio theca Pompejana' (Naples 1879); Gell. Sir W., and Gandy, J. P., 'Pompeii; its Destruc tion and Rediscovery' (New York 1880) ; Marechal, P. S., 'Antiquites d'Herculanum' (Paris 1780); Monnier, M., 'The Wonders of Pompeii) (New York 1886) ; Museo Nazionale di Napoli, 'Nuova Guida generale del Museo Nationale di Napoli) (Naples 1876) • Overbeck, J. A., 'Pompeii in seinen Gebiiii;len, Alter thiimern and Kunstwerken) (Leipzig 1875) ; Pistolesi, E., 'Antiquities of Herculaneum and Pompeii) (Naples 1842) •, Winckelmann, J. J., 'Recueil de Lettres sur les Decouvertes faites it Herculanum, I Pompeii, a Stabia, (Paris 1874). See also HERCULANEUM.