Bakeries were not lacking in Pompeii.  The most complete one is in the Street of Herculaneum, where it fills a whole house, the inner court of which is occupied with four mills.  Nothing could be more crude and elementary than those mills.  Imagine two huge blocks of stone representing two cones, of which the upper one is overset upon the other, giving every mill the appearance of an hour-glass.  The lower stone remained motionless, and the other revolved by means of an apparatus kept in motion by a man or a donkey.  The grain was crushed between the two stones in the old patriarchal style.  The poor ass condemned to do this work must have been a very patient animal; but what shall we say of the slaves often called in to fill his place?  For those poor wretches it was usually a punishment, as their eyes were put out and then they were sent to the mill.  This was the menace held over their heads when they misbehaved.  For others it was a very simple piece of service which more than one man of mind performed—­Plautus, they say, and Terence.  To some again, it was, at a later period, a method of paying for their vices; when the millers lacked hands they established bathing-houses around their mills, and the passers-by who were caught in the trap had to work the machinery.

Let us hasten to add that the work of the mill which we visited was not performed by a Christian, as they would say at Naples, but by a mule, whose bones were found in a neighboring room, most likely a stable, the racks and troughs of which were elevated about two and a half feet above the floor.  In a closet near by, the watering trough is still visible.  Then again, religion, which everywhere entered into the ancient manners and customs of Italy, as it does into the new, reveals itself in the paintings of the pistrinum; we there see the sacrifices to Fornax, the patroness of ovens and the saint of kitchens.

But let us return to our mills.  Mills driven by the wind were unknown to the ancients, and water-mills did not exist in Pompeii, owing to the lack of running water.  Hence these mills put in motion by manual labor—­the old system employed away back in the days of Homer.  On the other hand, the institution of complete baking as a trade, with all its dependent processes, did not date so far back.  The primitive Romans made their bread in their own houses.  Rome was already nearly five hundred years old when the first bakers established stationary mills, to which the proprietors sent their grain, as they still do in the Neapolitan provinces; in return they got loaves of bread; that is to say, their material ground, kneaded, and baked.  The Pompeian establishment that we visited was one of these complete bakeries.

[Illustration:  Discoveries of Loaves of Bread baked 1800 years ago in a Baker’s Oven.]