The normal form of electioneering advertisements contains the name of the person recommended, the office for which he is a candidate, and the name of the person, or persons, who recommended him, accompanied in general with the formula O. V. F. From examples written in full, recently discovered, it appears that these letters mean orat (or orant) vos faciatis: "beseech you to create" (ædile and so forth). The letters in question were, before this discovery, very often thought to stand for orat ut faveat, "begs him to favor;" and thus the meaning of the inscription was entirely reversed, and the person recommending converted into the person recommended. In the following example for instance—M. Holconium Priscum duumvirum juri dicundo O. V. F. Philippus; the meaning, according to the older interpretation, will be: "Philippus beseeches M. Holconius Priscus, duumvir of justice, to favor or patronize him;" whereas the true sense is: "Philippus beseeches you to create M. Holconius Priscus a duumvir of justice." From this misinterpretation wrong names have frequently been given to houses; as is probably the case, for instance, with the house of Pansa, which, from the tenor of the inscription, more probably belonged to Paratus, who posted on his own walls a request to passers-by to make his friend Pansa ædile. Had it been the house of Pansa, when a candidate for the ædileship, and if it was the custom for such candidates to post recommendatory notices on their doors, it may be supposed that Pansa would have exhibited more than this single one from a solitary friend. This is a more probable meaning than that Paratus solicited in this way the patronage of Pansa; for it would have been a bad method to gain it by disfiguring his walls in so impertinent a manner. We do not indeed mean to deny that adulatory inscriptions were sometimes written on the houses or doors of powerful or popular men or pretty women. A verse of Plautus bears testimony to such a custom (Impleantur meæ foreis elogiorum carbonibus. Mercator, act ii. sc. 3). But first, the inscription on the so-called house of Pansa was evidently not of an adulatory, but of a recommendatory character; and secondly, those of the former kind, as we learn from this same verse, seem to have been written by passing admirers, with some material ready to the hand, such as charcoal or the like, and not painted on the walls with care, and time, and expense; a proceeding which we can hardly think the owner of the house, if he was a modest and sensible man, would have tolerated.
Recommendations of candidates were often accompanied with a word or two in their praise; as dignus, or dignissimus est, probissimus, juvenis integer, frugi, omni bono meritus, and the like. Such recommendations are sometimes subscribed by guilds or corporations, as well as by private persons, and show that there were a great many such trade unions at Pompeii. Thus we find mentioned the offectores (dyers), pistores (bakers), aurifices (goldsmiths), pomarii (fruiterers), cæparii (green-grocers), lignarii (wood merchants), plostrarii (cart-wrights), piscicapi (fishermen), agricolæ (husbandmen), muliones (muleteers), culinarii (cooks), fullones (fullers), and others. Advertisements of this sort appear to have been laid hold of as a vehicle for street wit, just as electioneering squibs are perpetrated among ourselves. Thus we find mentioned, as if among the companies, the pilicrepi (ball-players), the seribibi (late topers), the dormientes universi (all the worshipful company of sleepers), and as a climax, Pompeiani universi (all the Pompeians, to a man, vote for so and so). One of these recommendations, purporting to emanate from a "teacher" or "professor," runs, Valentius cum discentes suos (Valentius with his disciples); the bad grammar being probably intended as a gibe upon one of the poor man's weak points.
The inscriptions in chalk and coal, the graffiti, and occasionally painted inscriptions, contain sometimes well-known verses from poets still extant. Some of these exhibit variations from the modern text, but being written by not very highly educated persons, they seldom or never present any various readings that it would be desirable to adopt, and indeed contain now and then prosodical errors. Other verses, some of them by no means contemptible, are either taken from pieces now lost, or are the invention of the writer himself. Many of these inscriptions are of course of an amatory character; some convey intelligence of not much importance to anybody but the writer—as, that he is troubled with a cold—or was seventeen centuries ago—or that he considers somebody who does not invite him to supper as no better than a brute and barbarian, or invokes blessings on the man that does. Some are capped by another hand with a biting sarcasm on the first writer, and many, as might be expected, are scurrilous and indecent. Some of the graffiti on the interior walls and pillars of houses are memoranda of domestic transactions; as, how much lard was bought, how many tunics sent to the wash, when a child or a donkey was born, and the like. One of this kind, scratched on the wall of the peristyle of the corner house in the Strada della Fortuna and Vicolo degli Scienziati, appears to be an account of the dispensator or overseer of the tasks in spinning allotted to the female slaves of the establishment, and is interesting as furnishing us with their names, which are Vitalis, Florentina, Amarullis, Januaria, Heracla, Maria (Maria, feminine of Marius, not Maria), Lalagia (reminding us of Horace's Lalage), Damalis, and Doris. The pensum, or weight of wool delivered to each to be spun, is spelled pesu, the n and final m being omitted, just as we find salve lucru, for lucrum, written on the threshold of the house of Siricus. In this form, pesu is very close to the Italian word peso.
We have already alluded now and then to the rude etchings and caricatures of these wall-artists, but to enter fully into the subject of the Pompeian inscriptions and graffiti would almost demand a separate volume, and we must therefore resume the thread of our description.
A little beyond the house of Siricus, a small street, running down at right angles from the direction of the Forum, enters the Via del Lupanare. Just at their junction, and having an entrance into both, stands the Lupanar, from which the latter street derives its name. We can not venture upon a description of this resort of Pagan immorality. It is kept locked up, but the guide will procure the key for those who may wish to see it. Next to it is the House of the Fuller, in which was found the elegant little bronze statuette of Narcissus, now in the Museum. The house contained nothing else of interest.
The Via del Lupanare terminates in the Street of the Augustals, or of the Dried Fruits. In this latter street, nearly opposite the end of the Via del Lupanare, but a little to the left, is the House of Narcissus, or of the Mosaic Fountain. This house is one of recent excavation. At the threshold is a Mosaic of a bear, with the word Have. The prothyrum is painted with figures on a yellow ground. On the left is a medallion of a satyr and nymph; the opposite medallion is destroyed.
The atrium is paved with mosaic. The first room on the right-hand side of it has a picture of Narcissus admiring himself in the water. The opposite picture has a female figure seated, with a child in her arms, and a large chest open before her. The tablinum is handsomely paved with mosaic and marble. Behind this, in place of a peristyle, is a court or garden, the wall of which is painted with a figure bearing a basin. At the bottom is a handsome mosaic fountain, from which the house derives one of its names, with a figure of Neptune surrounded by fishes and sea-fowl; above are depicted large wild boars.
On the opposite side of the way, at the eastern angle of the Street of the Lupanar, is the House of the Rudder and Trident, also called the House of Mars and Venus. The first of these names is derived from the mosaic pavement in the prothyrum, in which the objects mentioned are represented; while a medallion picture in the atrium, with heads of Mars and Venus, gave rise to the second appellation. The colors of this picture are still quite fresh, a result which Signor Fiorelli attributes to his having caused a varnish of wax to be laid over the painting at the time of its discovery. Without some such protection the colors of these pictures soon decay; the cinnabar, or vermilion, especially, turns black after a few days' exposure to the light.
The atrium, as usual, is surrounded with bed-chambers. A peculiarity not yet found in any other house is a niche or closet on the left of the atrium, having on one side an opening only large enough to introduce the hand, whence it has been conjectured that it served as a receptacle for some valuable objects. It is painted inside with a wall of quadrangular pieces of marble of various colors, terminated