Just opposite the gate of Siricus was another house also supposed to be a caupona, or tavern, from some chequers painted on the door-posts. On the wall are depicted two large serpents, the emblem so frequently met with. They were the symbols of the Lares viales, or compitales, and, as we have said, rendered the place sacred against the commission of any nuisance.

The cross, which is sometimes seen on the walls of houses in a modern Italian city, serves the same purpose. Above the serpents is the fiollowing inscription, in tolerably large white characters:

Otiosis locus hic non est discede morator.

"Lingerer, depart; this is no place for idlers." An injunction by the way which seems rather to militate against the idea of the house having been a tavern.

The inscription just mentioned suggests an opportunity for giving a short account of similar ones; we speak not of inscriptions cut in stone, and affixed to temples and other public buildings, but such as were either painted, scrawled in charcoal and other substances, or scratched with a sharp point, such as a nail or knife, on the stucco of walls and pillars. Such inscriptions afford us a peep both into the public and the domestic life of the Pompeians.

Advertisements of a political character were commonly painted on the exterior walls in large letters in black and red paint; poetical effusions or pasquinades, etc., with coal or chalk (Martial, Lpig. xii. 61, 9); while notices of a domestic kind are more usually found in the interior of the houses, scratched, as we have said, on the stucco, whence they have been called graffiti.

The numerous political inscriptions bear testimony to the activity of public life in Pompeii. These advertisements, which. for the most part turn on the election of aediles, duumvirs, and other magistrates, show that the Pompeians, at the time when their city was destroyed, were in all the excitement of the approaching comitia for the election of such magistrates. We shall here select a few of the more interesting inscriptions, both relating to public and domestic matters.

It seems to have been customary to paint over old advertisements with a coat of white, and so to obtain a fresh surface for new ones, just as the bill-sticker remorselessly pastes his bill over that of some brother of the brush. In some cases this new coating, has been detached, or has fallen off, thus revealing an older notice, belonging sometimes to a period antecedent to the Social War.

Inscriptions of this kind are found only on the solid stone pillars of the more ancient buildings, and not on the stucco, with which at a later period almost everything was plastered. Their antiquity is further certified by some of them being in the Oscan dialect; while those in Latin are distinguished from more recent ones in the same language by the forms of the letters, by the names which appear in them, and by archaisms in grammar and orthography.

Inscriptions in the Greek tongue are rare, though the letters of the Greek alphabet, scratched on walls at a little height from the ground, and thus evidently the work of school show that Greek must have been extensively taught at Pompeii.

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 0. V. F.

From examples written in full, recently discovered, it appears that these letters mean

orat (or orant) vos fasciatis.

beseech you to create (aedile 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 duumvirium juri dicundo 0. V. F. Phillipus

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 aedile.

Had it been the house of Pansa, when a candidate for the aedileship, 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 meae 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 dignissitnus 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), caeparii (green-grocers), lignarii (wood merchants), plostrarii (cart-wrights), piscicapi (fishermen), agricolo (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, Valenlius 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 grafflti, and occasionally painted inscriptions, contain sometimes well-known verses 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 grafitti 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 grafitti would almost demand a separate volume, and we must therefore resume the thread of our description.