The Rebirth of Herculaneum: Archaeologists Restore a Roman City
by AMEDEO MAIURI
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THE resurgence of postwar Italy has been reflected in a brisk resumption of archaeological research and excavations, especially in the South, where work has been proceeding with an intensity unequalled in the prewar period. The South, though poor in modern industry, is rich in classical antiquities: the splendid Greek temples of Pæstum, Agrigentum, Selinunte, and Segeste; and the important excavation sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum. It was recognized that the tourist trade could somewhat compensate for the economic backwardness of this industrially underdeveloped zone. Hence not only did the Southern Development Fund allocate financing for land reclamation and industrialization and for roads and aqueducts, but special subsidies were also granted to promote archaeological research. It was thus hoped to make the region around the Bay of Naples and Sicily as attractive to tourists as Venice, Florence, Rome, and the Italian Riviera.
The excavations at Pompeii and the reclamation of the surrounding marshlands and lava fields were already accomplished facts. But there remained Herculaneum, offering the most promising lure of archaeological discovery and the most challenging problems of excavation.
The difficulties were staggering, and indeed, fifty years ago, the task had been considered impossible. For Herculaneum had not been buried by a rain of lapilli and ash; it had been engulfed, after the famous eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D., in a muddy landslide of eruptive material washed down the mountain by heavy rains. The resulting solidified tufa bank preserved the city — but more than forty feet under the present level of surrounding areas, with its location indicated only by enigmatic outcroppings and inaccurate descriptions. To add to the complications, an important section was covered by the heavily-populated modern town of Resìna.
The first excavations at Herculaneum, begun in 1738 by Prince Elbeuf, were accomplished by means of wells and subterranean galleries, with results miraculous for the period. These first sporadic and inconclusive efforts, however, were several times abandoned between 1828 and 1875. It was not until 1927 that they were systematically resumed.
This time the plan was, as at Pompeii, to remove all volcanic material and lay the city bare. Thus rediscovered, Herculaneum is no longer enveloped in the gloom of underground galleries, but lies open, with its streets and buildings, after centuries of darkness, basking once more in the bright Mediterranean sunshine. After thirty years of labor, interrupted only by the Second World War, Herculaneum has been reborn.
The recovered area is limited, so far, to the southern quarter extending toward the coast. It includes the residential zones, two public baths, an imposing palœstra (gymnasium), and the beginnings of the Forum district. The rest of the Forum, to the north, still lies buried under Resìna.
Foreign visitors to Herculaneum, particularly those acquainted with recent excavations in Pompeii south of Via dell’ Abbondanza, are filled with wonder at the sight revealed. The best panoramic view is obtained from the bridge at the entrance avenue spanning the eolonnade of thepalœstra. The city nestles between sleep slopes near the end of a valley, its streets laid out with geometrical precision, its houses capped by their original roofs.
The uncovering of Herculaneum has proceeded methodically, street by street and building by building, as at Pompeii. Every house and every shop, whether rich or poor, has added its bit to what is now considered to be the most complete physical documentation of a human agglomeration living within the urban structure of an ancient city. Only the Campania region and the area buried by Vesuvius can offer such concrete evidence of a long-dead city’s plan and architecture, its economic and artistic life.
It is, furthermore, precisely in such minor cities of the Roman Empire, with their vivid picture of what day-to-day life was like for the average citizen of the average provincial town, with its handful of notables, its large middle class, its craftsmen and laborers, that the more human aspects of Roman civilization can best be studied and evaluated. Such towns are more to the measure of man than the swollen and turbulent capital. Removed from the great events and great figures of history, these people were motivated by more modest passions and ambitions, whose goals were administrative and judiciary offices and honors. Humbler men, living more unpretentiously, they nonetheless provided their little cities with perfect town planning, well-run institutions, and a sense of the dignity of civic life. The great squares and public buildings, the well-kept private homes, remain as mute evidence of their devotion to these ideals.
It was already surprising that Pompeii, with a maximum of 25,000 inhabitants, possessed a forum comparable to the most beautiful in Italy, an entertainment quarter with two theaters, two palœstras, an amphitheater, and three public baths, while some of the private residences were spacious enough for royalty. But relatively, Herculaneum, with only a quarter of Pompeii’s population, is all the more incredible for the monumental character of its public buildings, the dignity of all its houses, and the richness of many of them. The erroneous explanation that Herculaneum was a resort town whereas Pompeii was a business and trading center arose from failure to discriminate between the city proper and the famous Villa of Herculaneum with its treasures of sculpture and its library of papyri.
The fact that Herculaneum was a normal town renders the more amazing the contrast between its limited size and the unusual grandeur and opulence of its public buildings. There is a theater whose stage was ringed with marble statues, many of which were removed during Prince Elbeuf’s first excavations. There is a basilica decorated with bronze and marble statues and heroic paintings celebrating the feats of Hercules and Theseus. The public palœstra vies with that of Pompeii in size and is perhaps superior to it in architectural lines. There are two public baths, one in the center of town, the other outside the city walls. The network of streets, with fountains at the intersections, exemplifies ideal town planning. In a volcanic region of sparse natural resources, Herculaneum had a water supply abundant enough for the large swimming pools of the palœstra and for the Villa of the Papyri as well as for the gardens of upper-class homes. Various inscriptions show that most of the public works were donated by wealthy and noble Herculaneans—proof of their civic pride and lively interest in the welfare and dignity of their little city.
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YET the major interest of Herculaneum lies less in the sumptuousness of its public buildings than in the near-perfection and attractiveness of its private homes. The city’s dwellings have been preserved almost intact, including their upper stories. There remain, not only household utensils in their proper places, but the interior wood: beams, door frames and doors, wardrobes, beds, staircases, and partitions. This wood has the characteristic appearance of slow fossilization in peat soil rather than carbonization. This type of preservation is rare in Pompeii, but in the Herculaneum bed of solidified mud, not only the sturdier materials, but even thin papyrus and the delicate fibers of woven cloth have remained unseathed.
The larger residences of the upper classes were built atop the ramparts facing the sea, so laid out that from their loggias and reception and living rooms there is a superb panorama of the Bay of Naples, with Capri and the coast of Sorrento directly opposite. Typical of these are the now famous houses known as “The Mosaic Atrium,” “The Stag,” “The Jewel,” the so-called “ Hotel,” and the house of the “Telephus Bas-relief.” In their vast installations and their panoramic orientation they combine the characteristics of town house and country villa. Their interiors have yielded a number of important sculptures, notably a group of stags under attack by hunting dogs in marble carved as delicately as onyx, some remarkable portraits, and a statue of Eros considered the finest of the innumerable amorini found in standard Roman decorative art.
Between the homes of the rich and those of craftsmen and shopkeepers lies the whole gamut of middleclass dwellings. Each seems to have its own unmistakable stamp of brightness, reflecting a sense of well-being and loving care (and even sometimes touches of bourgeois ostentation): the freshly painted triclinium or dining room; the lararium, a sort of shrine for the household gods or lares, in front of the entrance door to catch the eye of passers-by; the tiny garden kept green with well-water to provide a cool spot for siestas on hot summer afternoons. What makes reborn Herculaneum seem really alive is the manifest affection of its people for their homes, with their gaily painted walls, their mosaic floors, and their few but beautiful household implements. Some of these houses could conceivably have been transferred from seventeenthcentury Perugia or Siena.
Urbanistically, little Herculaneum, with its typical two-family houses, provides a link between Pompeii, where we find the domus-type house of the Republican age and the first century B.C., and Ostia, the seaport of Rome, which is characterized by the large apartment buildings of the second and third centuries of the Empire. The Herculaneum “House with Trellis Work” is a prime example; its vast palaestra building prefigures structurally the complex and imposing apartment houses of Ostia.
Although recent excavations have revealed no new library of historical, literary, and philosophical papyri, a number of domestic archives on wax tablets (tabulœ ceratœ) have been unearthed, and studied by the epigraphist G. Pugliese Carratelli and the great Romanist Arangio Ruiz. They provide much information on Herculaneum’s economic and juridical life, and make vivid its daily affairs. One example is the proceedings in a lawsuit in which a woman slave-owner was suing the freed daughter of one of her slaves. The case, involving an inheritance, was being contested on the basis of the legal status of the mother at the time of the girl’s birth. The case, like much else, ended abruptly and for all time when Vesuvius buried the contested property under volcanic mud.
The last thirty years of excavation at Herculaneum have culminated in two climactic events: the revelation of the suburban baths outside the main gate opening toward the sea; and the clearance of the slums of Resìna from above the ancient Forum.
The technical difficulties involved in excavating the suburban baths made this one of the riskiest and most arduous archaeological efforts ever undertaken. Bradyseismic shifting of the earth had permitted underground waters to transform the mud that had poured through the skylights and windows into a rock-like mass, so that the building seemed a single bank of stone forty feet below the surface. Though it had been identified as a bath as long ago as 1942, it was only in the past few years that special equipment was available for its excavation. With mechanical devices for chisel work usually done by pick and rasp, entry was effected through the skylights. One of these, however — that of the laconium or sweating bath — was so narrow that only the thinnest of all the workmen was able to be lowered through a cowl. Long, slow work with knife and rasp finally permitted him to push his way through to the vault. But as soon as excavation created any empty spaces, Vesuvius, instead of fire, this time sent water in such abundance that pumping apparat us more suitable for land reclamation became necessary to channel out the floods.
But these immense difficulties were more than compensated for by the results. These baths are among the most unusual yet discovered, not only for the uniqueness of their installations, their decoration (especially the warriors in high stucco relief in one of the halls), and the extraordinary luxury of the still-intact marble floors, but most particularly for the bold and novel way in which the ancient architect solved the problem of overhead lighting. He converted the vestibule into a sort of four-columned atrium with a double series of superimposed arches that reach the high rib of the vault. With their spacious corridors and halls, their aspiring arches and vaults, their rich marble floors and painted stucco walls, and with their bathing tubs still filled with water filtering up from the subsoil, these baths give the impression of a subterranean basilica. This feeling is intensified by the light streaming down through the skylights onto the walls, moldy and damp, and not yet wholly free of the mud in which they were sealed for nineteen centuries.
The other climactic event at Herculaneum is the initiation of the slum clearance program in Resìna to permit completing the excavation of the Forum. This will restore the natural center of the ancient city’s life, bringing to light the famous basilica from which skilled and patient Neapolitan quarriers in the eighteenth century raised a host of statues and some of the most significant murals of the Campania. This task has been undertaken by the Community of Resina in collaboration with the Southern Development Fund and the Low-Cost Housing Project Administration. As new housing becomes available, the population will be resettled near the coast, which offers better economic possibilities. There is something particularly heartening about the duality of purpose in this relocation: by solving Resìna’s pressing problems of public health and social welfare, it helps to provide for man’s present and future; and by enabling the excavation of Herculaneum to be completed, it reaches another great milestone in the tireless search for man’s past.
Translated by E. L. and H. C.