guilds, especially of shopkeepers, could and did play their parts in determining the election of a candidate.  The elections might make a difference to them in those ways in which modern town-councillors and mayors, may influence the rates, the conditions of the streets, the rules of traffic, and so forth.  There are sixteen hundred election notices painted, in red and black about the walls of Pompeii, and we find So-and-So recommended by such-and-such a trade as being a “good man,” or “an honest young man,” or a person who will “keep an eye on the public purse.”  It is amusing to note that, in satirical parody of such appeals as “the fruitsellers recommend So-and-So,” we find that “the petty thieves recommend So-and-So,” or we get the opinion of “the sleepers one and all.”  Special objects connected with these and other associations were the provision of “widows’ funds,” and of proper burial for the members.  Of the importance of the latter to the ancient world we shall speak when we come to a funeral and the religious ideas connected with it.

The most difficult task in dealing with antiquity is to visualise the actual life as it was lived.  In the life of the humbler citizens the remains of Pompeii lend more help than anything else to the desired sense of reality, but they are the remains of Pompeii, not of Rome.  Nevertheless there are many points in which we may fairly argue from the little town to the larger, and it is customary to adopt this course.

[Illustration:  FIG. 76.—­POMPEIAN COOK-SHOP.]

We may, therefore, think of the common people among these ancients as very much alive in their frank curiosity, their broad humour, their love of shows, and their keen enthusiasm for the competitions, their interest in petty local elections, their advertising instincts, their insatiable fondness for scribbling on walls and pillars, whether in paint or with a “style,” a sort of small stiletto with which they commonly wrote on tablets.  The ancient world becomes very near when we read, side by side with the election notices, a line from Virgil or Ovid scrawled in a moment of idleness, or a piece of abuse of a neighbouring and rival town—­such as “bad luck to the Nucerians”—­or a pretty sentiment, such as “no one is a gentleman who has not been in love,” or an advertisement to the effect that there are “To let, from July 1, shops with their upper floors, a flat for a gentleman, and a house:  apply to Prinus, slave of So-and-So”; or “Found wandering, a mare with packsaddle, apply, etc.”—­the latter, by the way, painted on a tomb.

[Illustration:  FIG. 77.—­IN A WINE-SHOP.]