Come on, hurry up! Hurry up, if you want to see something before you leave! I told you: the villa is enormous. It was built on the side of a hill, just outside Herculaneum. Artificial terraces go down to the sea, where the owner has a private pier for his boats and his guests.
The villa has four floors. On the main floor, after the atrium and service rooms, there are two peristyles or gardens with porticoes. Then there are banquet halls, baths, covered walkways… plus the library, of course.
The frescoes and mosaics take your breath away, not to mention the ivory-covered wooden furniture. But the best things are the statues, made of bronze and marble… some are so beautiful that they seem… alive! When you are reading in the library, its like being watched by the busts of ancient philosophers and men of letters. And when you walk in the gardens, or when you are dining or bathing, you see on kings, leaders, speakers, animals and gods…
By the way: if you want to swim, take a dip in the peristyle pool. It is so long that when I was a child, it seemed like a river!
Once the villa also had another pool: it was on a terrace overlooking the sea, with a ladder carved into the rock down to the beach. There was also a very elegant pavilion where the owner would eat with friends on summer evenings. Sadly, recently, the sea level keeps rising and the terrace has been abandoned… what with the rising sea and the constant earthquakes, who knows what is going on underground!
Anyway, in the peristyle you will also find my favourite statues, the so called “Corridor statues”. How I’ve been teased because of them!
Let me explain. Before I was sold at auction, I worked with my mother in a mill outside the city: I had never seen a statue, apart from the terracotta statuettes of the Lari, the protective spirits of the house.
When I arrived here, the head servant showed me the banquet halls, to steop me getting lost when carrying the dirty plates back to the kitchens. I followed him with my head down. Suddenly I looked up, I thought I saw two athletes running at me! I screamed and jumped into the bushes, trampling on the master’s precious roses. The head servant shouted at me, but the other slaves laughed so hard they got stomach aches…
What, are you leaving already? Before you go, do go up to the Belvedere: it is a round structure, covered by a dome, with large windows overlooking the bay . Nobody in the whole of Herculaneum has a view like that! It’s one of the privileges of wealth…
It is easy to say: “self sufficiency is the greatest of wealth” (sic, yim), as the master and his friends keep saying. Let them try saying that to the slaves chained up like beasts on country farms, or the children working in laundries and dry cleaners, burning their hands and crippling their legs!
Sorry, I did not mean to raise my voice. “The wise man is not troubled by passions”, as Epicurus teaches…