THE ROMANCE OF EXCAVATION.
WRILE the explorers are busy around tombs and rubbish- heaps, happy if they can, like Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt at Oxyrhynchus, recover stray and fragmentary leaves of ancient writers, it is curious to reflect that there exists in all completeness an ancient city, well-nigh untouched by the excavator, and waiting only for the spade and the necessary millionaire. In excavating an Egyptian tomb there is always the possibility that its occupant, and the friends who laid him there, knew no Greek nor Latin, and consequently the chances are against its containing papyri in either one of those languages ; and there is, moreover, always the risk that the tomb has been opened before, and its contents rifled. But the city of which Mention is now Made has never been exposed to plunder by ignorant hands, and its inhabitants did know Latin, and most of them Greek. It is Herculaneum.
Most people imagine that this city, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D., has been as carefully and completely excavated as its neighbour Pompeii; but this is not so. It lies nearer to Naples, and its site was the sooner covered with houses. Two or more villages now stand above it, or rather above the hardened mud seventy feet below which sleeps the little Graeco-Samnite town. When the curiosity of the eighteenth century started to explore and to dig through this mud, houses were already in existence above the trenches and tunnels then cut, and the excavators had to go with caution, and eventually to be contented with a very partial execution of their task. Indeed, one corner merely of the city was dug out, and then the' matter was left for want of funds and for fear of trouble with the owners of the soil above. Little was done in the nineteenth century ; and while excavation has been busy in other parts of the classical lands, and its neighbour, more happily situated for the explorer, has been revealed in its entirety, nothing has been added to the knowledge of Herculaneum. What little has been discovered of this 'town suggests, and all but proves, that its contents waiting quietly below the mud are of a far more valuable character than were those of Pompeii.
In the first place, the nature of the destruction was different at the two spots. On Pompeii fell a shower of hot ashes that quickly burnt up anything so inflammable as parchment or papyrus. Herculaneum was not so much smothered as over- flowed by wave on wave of mud that preserved things by covering them up before cinders and scoriae had time to set anything alight. The town itself was inhabited, there is reason to believe, by a more cultivated class of people than the pleasure-seekers of Pompeii, whose one anxiety, as their inscriptions prove, was that gladiators might be many and sport good. The paintings and sculptures that have been recovered from Herculaneum are of greater artistic value ; -and, to put the matter beyond question, while Pompeii has not yielded a single manuscript, the one house in Herculaneum that has been thoroughly explored contained numerous rolls of papyri. Unfortunately, the house belonged to a man .who specialised in Epicurean philosophy, for the rolls were all works by philosophers of this school. Most of these have been deciphered and copied ; some were published by the Clarendon Press about the year 1824; some, for all we know, may still be undeciphered. After all, there is a limit to the demand for the Philosophy of the Garden. But the houses in Herculaneum are numerous, and it is against all reason to suppose that they were all inhabited by students of Epicurus and his doctrines. It is equally against reason to suppose that there was only one reading man in the whole town. Other interests and branches of literature must have had their representative§ ; the libraries would be various, dealing with every kind of subject. Where the one house excavated has preserved its books, it is unlikely that in the others they would have been destroyed, and what they may contain is tantalising to think on,—possibly almost the whole literature of antiquity. By the year 79 A.D. the ancient world had produced its writers of genius, with the exception of Tacitus and Lucian. Their works are later, but with that exception there need be no limit to the imagination in picturing the :ontents of Herculaneum. Under the mud waves there may lie the lyric poets of Greece, whose loss makes, perhaps, the worst gap in all ancient literature. Sappho, Alcaeus, Simonides, the critics speak of them, but they are hardly more than names. There also may be the lost writers of tragedy, such as Phrynichus, whose songs, so Aristophanes tells us, the veterans of Marathon hummed as they went through the streets at night, and of the Old Comedy, the rivals of Aristophanes himself, Cratinus and Ameipsias. There, too, may lie the writers of the New Comedy, whose loss the ancient critics would have accounted as the worst we have to suffer. They read Menander and quoted him, and could not have conceived a world without him. He was all that Pope was to our grandfathers. He was all that Montaigne is to some men of the present day. He had intimacy and flavour, and the interesting thing will be whether, when he is rediscovered, that flavour is not found to have evaporated with time. Nor are the poets the only writers men would wish to recover. The historian of Greece and Rome, because of his scant material, has to piece together much of his story from inscriptions and later authorities. He has the "impenetrable stupidity" of Diodorus and the anecdotes of Plutarch, but he would prefer something more contemporary. He would like to read the rise of Athens as recorded by Hellanicus, and the story of Sicily as told by the " pusillus Thucydides," Philistus, who took part in his own subject-matter and was the contemporary of Dionysus. Not least, he would wish to see Alexander and his successors as they appeared to those with whom they lived. If his interests were more with Latin literature, he might then hope to find in Herculaneum the lost "Civil Wars" of Sallust and the lost " Decades " of Livy. Something, too, might be found that would give new knowledge, if not of early Christianity, yet perhaps of the early Christians. The superstitio externa " did gain converts of high rank even in its first days, and possibly the buried walls may hold records, memoirs, letters—who can tell ?—of another Pomponia Graecina whose new faith withdrew her from the vulgarity and self-indulgence of the world around, and to whom also there was a " longa aetas et continua tristitia." Any- thing is possible in this case, for this corner of the earth has been securely embalmed by its catastrophe, and the drums and tramplings have passed over and left no trace.
To test these speculations one chief thing is wanting,— money. The owners of house property above the buried town cannot be expected to make the learned world a gift of their possessions ; and unless they are bought out the excavations cannot be effected with thoroughness. Con- sequently, before the work of exploration begins there must be an expropriation on a large and costly scale. The assist- ance of the Italian Parliament would be needed, for if the owners got wind of the scheme they would raise their price until it became prohibitive. Legislation would have to confer powers that would secure a fair compensation at current rates, but no fancy prices. Even then the sum required would be large, perhaps a quarter of a million, perhaps more. But there are many men living to whom the cost would present little difficulty ; and if four or five of them joined together. they would hardly know that they had been giving anything away. Want of money, and that alone, has prevented the attempt being made ; but the money should be found some- how. Here is the greatest romance of excavation and discovery waiting. The town has lain asleep and covered up all through these centuries; it is time that it be brought to the light once again. Then perhaps people will marvel why it was not uncovered sooner, and why, with this rich untouched field near to their hand, men went far afield gleaning for chance relics, gathering with care the flotsam and driftwood of the ancient world, when with little more trouble they might have made salvage of the whole ship.
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