"While waiting for their masters, young slaves strewed over the pavement saw-dust dyed with saffron and vermilion, mixed with a brilliant powder made from the lapis specularis, or talc."
Pinacotheca, the picture-gallery, and Bibliotheca, the library, need no explanation. The latter was usually small, as a large number of rolls (_volumina_) could be contained within a narrow space.
Exedra bore a double signification. It is either a seat, intended to contain a number of persons, like those before the Gate of Herculaneum, or a spacious hall for conversation and the general purposes of society. In the public baths, the word is especially applied to those apartments which were frequented by the philosophers.
Such was the arrangement, such the chief apartments of a Roman house; they were on the ground-floor, the upper stories being for the most part left to the occupation of slaves, freedmen, and the lower branches of the family. We must except, however, the terrace upon the top of all (solarium), a favorite place of resort, often adorned with rare flowers and shrubs, planted in huge cases of earth, and with fountains and trellises, under which the evening meal might at pleasure be taken.
The reader will not, of course, suppose that in all houses all these apartments were to be found, and in the same order. From the confined dwelling of the tradesman to the palace of the patrician, all degrees of accommodation and elegance were to be found. The only object of this long catalogue is to familiarize the reader with the general type of those objects which we are about to present to him, and to explain at once, and collectively, those terms of art which will be of most frequent occurrence.
The reader will gain a clear idea of a Roman house from the ground-plan of that of Diomedes, given a little further on, which is one of the largest and most regularly constructed at Pompeii.
We may here add a few observations, derived, as well as much of the preceding matter, from the valuable work of Mazois, relative to the materials and method of construction of the Pompeian houses. Every species of masonry described by Vitruvius, it is said, may here be met with; but the cheapest and most durable sorts have been generally preferred.