long portico, turned on the east toward the Forum. Different
observers have fancied that they discovered in it a _poecile_, a museum,
a divan, a club, a granary for corn; and all these opinions are equally
good.

Behind the poecile open small chambers, of which some are vaulted.
Skeletons were found in them, and the inference was that they were
prisons. Lower down extends along the Forum the lateral wall of the
temple of Venus. In this wall is hollowed a small square niche in which
there rose, at about a yard in height from the soil, a sort of table of
tufa, indented with regular cavities, which are ranged in the order of
their capacity; these were the public measures. An inscription gives us
the names of the duumvirs who had gauged them by order of the decurions.
As M. Breton has well remarked, they were the standards of measurement.
Of these five cavities, the two smallest were destined for liquids, and
we still see the holes through which those liquids flowed off when they
had been measured. The table of tufa has been taken to the museum, and
in its place has been substituted a rough imitation, which gives a
sufficient idea of this curious monument.

The temple of Venus is entered from the neighboring street which we have
already traversed. The ruin is a fine one--the finest, perhaps, in
Pompeii; a spacious inclosure, or peribolus, framing a portico of
forty-eight columns, of which many are still standing, and the portico
itself surrounding the podium, where rose the temple--properly speaking,
the house of the goddess. In front of the entrance, at the foot of the
steps that ascend to the podium, rises the altar, poorly calculated for
living sacrifices and seemingly destined for simple offerings of fruit,
cakes, and incense, which were consecrated to Venus. Besides the form of
the altar, an inscription found there and a statue of the goddess, whose
modest attitude recalls the masterpiece of Florence, sufficiently
authorize the name, in the absence of more exact information, that has
been given to this edifice. Others, however, have attributed it to the
worship of Bacchus; others again to that of Diana, and the question has
not yet been settled by the savans; but Venus being the patroness of
Pompeii, deserved the handsomest temple in the little city.

The columns of the peribolus or inclosure bear the traces of some
bungling repairs made between the earthquake of 63 and the eruption of
79. They were Doric, but the a