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Though Vespasian had gone, his reign continued. Not long, it is true, and punctuated by a spectacle of which Caligula, for all his poetry, had not dreamed the burial of Pompeii. But a reign which, while it lasted, was fastidious and refined, and during which, again and again, Titus, who commanded death and whom death obeyed, besought Domitian to be to him a brother.
It is hardly too much to say that to the trained eyes of the day the visible Naples hardly existed, so absorbed were they in the perusal of her buried past. The fever of excavation was on every one. No social or political problem could find a hearing while the subject of the last coin or bas-relief from Pompeii or Herculanaeum remained undecided.
In fact, a baseball player could easily sling a stone across the river into Dixmude, or what remains of it, for, like most of the other Flemish towns, it is now only a blackened skeleton. Many cities have been destroyed in the course of this war, but none of them, unless it be Ypres, so nearly approaches complete obliteration as Dixmude. Pompeii is a living, breathing city compared to it.
Let us now put back to port and walk through the city, visiting first Old Nice, then the modern Pompeii, as Alphonse Karr pleasantly calls the new town. In the narrow streets surrounding the cathedral a large and showy building, formerly a parish church is a market supplied with native fruits oranges, lemons, grapes, figs, and many varieties of melons and nuts.
The creation of Nydia, the blind flower-girl, was suggested by the casual remark of an acquaintance that at the time of the destruction of Pompeii the sightless would have found the easiest deliverance. I. The Athenian's Love Story Within the narrow compass of the walls of Pompeii was contained a specimen of every gift which luxury offered to power.
Under these circumstances the marvel is that anything of beauty or value should have survived at all, for this selfish plundering of Herculaneum, in strong contrast with the reverent treatment meted out to Pompeii, may be considered one of the greatest pieces of vandalism ever perpetrated.
It is a pity that the colors of this beautiful fresco are grown so dim, and a greater pity that most of the other frescos in Pompeii must share its fate, and fade away. The hues are vivid when the walls are first uncovered, and the ashes washed from the pictures, but then the malice of the elements begins anew, and rain and sun draw the life out of tints which the volcano failed to obliterate.
Neither Pompeii nor Herculaneum invites the gayety of the spectator, who as he walks their disinterred thoroughfares has the weird sense of taking a former civilization out of storage, and the ache of finding it wholly unadapted to the actual world.
For this reason, where the whole territory was not confiscated, as at Pompeii, the colonists were not amalgamated with the urban-community, but the old burgesses and the colonists were constituted as two bodies of burgesses associated within the same enclosing wall.
Vesuvius broke into eruption on August 24 in the year 79, and in a few hours Pompeii and two other towns were buried under a downpour of pumice and ashes, and streams of lava and mud. Among the victims was the elder Pliny. Several years afterwards, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote to the younger Pliny and asked him for information about the manner of his uncle's death.
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