If the mimes do not suffice, call into the Odeon the rope-dancers, the acrobats, the jugglers, the ventriloquists,—­for all these lower orders of public performers existed among the ancients and swarmed in the Pompeian pictures,—­or the flute-players enlivening the waits with their melody and accompanying the voice of the actors at moments of dramatic climax.  “How can he feel afraid,” asked Cicero, in this connection, “since he recites such fine verses while he accompanies himself on the flute?” What would the great orator have said had he been present at our melodramas?

We may then imagine what kind of play we please on the little Pompeian stage.  For my part, I prefer the Atellan farces.  They were the buffooneries of the locality, the coarse pleasantry of native growth, the hilarity of the vineyard and the grain-field, exuberant fancy, grotesque in solemn earnest; in a word, ideal sport and frolic without the least regard to reality—­in fine, Punchinello’s comedy.  We prefer Moliere; but how many things there are in Moliere which come in a direct line from Maccus!

It is time to leave the theatre.  I have said that the Odeon opened into the gladiators’ barracks.  These barracks form a spacious court—­a sort of cloister—­surrounded by seventy-four pillars, unfortunately spoiled by the Pompeians of the restoration period.  They topped them with new capitals of stucco notoriously ill adapted to them.  This gallery was surrounded with curious dwellings, among which was a prison where three skeletons were found, with their legs fastened in irons of ingeniously cruel device.  The instrument in question may be seen at the museum.  It looks like a prostrate ladder, in which the limbs of the prisoners were secured tightly between short and narrow rungs—­four bars of iron.  These poor wretches had to remain in a sitting or reclining posture, and perished thus, without the power to rise or turn over, on the day when Vesuvius swallowed up the city.

It was for a long time thought that these barracks were the quarters of the soldiery, because arms were found there; but the latter were too highly ornamented to belong to practical fighting troops, and were the very indications that suggested to Father Garrucci the firmly established idea, that the dwellings surrounding the gallery must have been occupied by gladiators.  These habitations consist of some sixty cells:  now there were sixty gladiators in Pompeii because an album programme announced thirty pair of them to fight in the amphitheatre.

The pillars of the gallery were covered with inscriptions scratched on their surface.  Many of these graphites formed simple Greek names Pompaios, Arpokrates, Celsa, etc., or Latin names, or fragments of sentences, curate pecunias, fur es Torque, Rustico feliciter! etc.  Others proved clearly that the place was inhabited by gladiators:  inludus Velius (that is to say not in the game, out of the ring) bis victor libertus—­leonibus, victor Veneri parmam feret.  Other inscriptions designate families or troops of gladiators, of which there are a couple familiar to us already, that of N. Festus Ampliatus and that of N. Popidius Rufus; and a third, with which we are not acquainted, namely, that of Pomponius Faustinus.