Plate LXXX - Drinking scene

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This scene, Plate LXXX, which is found, in exceedingly bad company, in an inner room of the lupanare, is, though superior in style to the profanations of the art by which it is surrounded, but moderate in execution. The picture itself is nevertheless valuable, being the only one yet discovered in which a common table, with a party sitting round it, is represented. On the left, a figure in a dress of dark green seems of superior rank to the rest of the company, whose hoods are like those of the capotes of the modern Italian sailors and fishermen.

It is curious that, at so late a period, horns seem to have been used instead of drinking-cups, notwithstanding the multiplicity of glasses and cups which abounded in Pompeii, and the inconvenience arising, as may be observed in this plate, from the want of a foot.

Horns were used for cups in very ancient times, as may be learned from several of the Greek scholiasts. Bacchus was called Corniger from this circumstance, according to the scholiast on Nicander. The Sileni were the nurses of the horned Bacchus. Horns, says the scholiast on Homer, Iliad, Q. v.189. were used previously to the invention of cups. Nonnus says, «He held in his left hand a horn filled with delicious wine».

Λαιὴ κέρας μὲν εἶχε βεϐρισμένον ἡδέος οἴνου

It would appear that the ancients, during their feasts and ceremonies, the representations of which have come down to our times, studied and practised what was best suited for show and conducive to elegance, but that their common usages and everyday customs were not very widely different from those of the moderns in the same country.

Nearly opposite this house were found, at an elevation of more than twelve feet above the pavement of the street, eight or ten skeletons, with a gold chain, four gold coins, two gold rings, twenty-six silver medals, a candelabra, and other utensils in brass and earthenware. These persons must have been smothered by the vapour while searching for objects of value among the ruins already half buried.

The learned Dr. Panofka, of Berlin, who visited Pompeii in the month of April, 1829, saw another chamber of the lupanare excavated, and reports that the paintings are of a much higher order, both in subject and execution. On one side is a female with a lyre, and opposite is Anchises with a boy, supposed to be Aeneas. A third wall has Ulysses and Penelope, like that in the Pantheon ; and the fourth has Paris and Helen. Paris is sitting in the posture of the Paris of M. Hawkins's beautiful bronze, and Hector is near, chiding him for not returning to the battle : a beautiful Homeric subject, which would be a great ornament to this work.

In the border are given ten different specimens of ornamental borders from Pompeii.