Again, still other inscriptions were notifications to the public in reference to the cleanliness of the streets, and recalling in terms still more precise the “Commit no Nuisance” put up on the corners of some of our streets with similar intent.  On more than one wall at Pompeii the figures of serpents, very well painted, sufficed to prevent any impropriety, for the serpent was a sacred symbol in ancient Rome—­strange mingling of religion in the pettiest details of common life!  Only a very few years ago, the Neapolitans still followed the example of their ancestors; they protected the outside walls of their dwellings with symbolical paintings, rudely tracing, not serpents, but crosses on them.

[Footnote C:  These olives which, when found, were still soft and pasty, had a rancid smell and a greasy but pungent flavor.  The kernels were less elongated and more bulging than those of the Neapolitan olives; were very hard and still contained some shreds of their pith.  In a word, they were perfectly preserved, and although eighteen centuries old, as they were, you would have thought they had been plucked but a few months before.]

IV.

THE SUBURBS.

     THE CUSTOM HOUSE.—­THE FORTIFICATIONS AND THE GATES.—­THE ROMAN
     HIGHWAYS.—­THE CEMETERY OF POMPEII.—­FUNERALS:  THE PROCESSION, THE
     FUNERAL PYRE, THE DAY OF THE DEAD.—­THE TOMBS AND THEIR
     INSCRIPTIONS.—­PERPETUAL LEASES.—­BURIAL OF THE RICH, OF ANIMALS,
     AND OF THE POOR.—­THE VILLAS OF DIOMED AND CICERO.

    “Ce qu’on trouve aux abords d’une grande cite,
      Ce sont des abattoirs, des murs, des cimitieres: 
    C’est ainsi qu’en entrant dans la societe
      On trouve ses egouts.”

Alfred de Musset would have depicted the suburban quarters of Pompeii exactly in these lines, had he added to his enumeration the wine-shops and the custom-house.  The latter establishment was not omitted by the ancients, and could not be forgotten in our diminutive but highly commercial city.  Thus, the place has been discovered where the collector awaited the passage of the vehicles that came in from the country and the neighboring villages.  Absolutely nothing else remains to be seen in this spacious mosaic-paved hall.  Scales, steelyards, and a quantity of stone or metal weights were found there, marked with inscriptions sometimes quite curious; such, for example, as the following:  Eme et habbebis, with a b too many, a redundancy very frequent in the Naples dialect.  This is equivalent, in English, to:  Buy and you will have.  One of the sets of scales bears an inscription stating that it had been verified or authorized at the Capitol under such consuls and such emperors—­the hand of Rome!

Besides the custom-house, this approach to the city contained abundance of stables, coach-houses, taverns, bath-houses, low drinking-shops, and other disreputable concerns.  Even the dwellings in the same quarter have a suspicious look.  You follow a long street and you have before you the gate of Herculaneum and the walls.