The Wonders of Pompeii

Senate hesitated a long time before they allowed the city to be rebuilt and the deserted district to be re-peopled. The Pompeians at last returned; but the decurions wished to make the restoration of the place a complete rejuvenation. The columns of the Forum speedily reappeared, but with capitals in the fashion of the day; the Corinthian-Roman order, adopted almost everywhere, changed the style of the monuments; the old shafts covered with stucco were patched up for the new topwork they were to receive, and the Oscan inscriptions disappeared. From all this there sprang great blunders in an artistic point of view, but a uniformity and consistency that please those who are fond of monuments and cities of one continuous derivation. Taste loses, but harmony gains thereby, and you pass in review a collective totality of edifices that bear their age upon their fronts, and give a very exact and vivid idea of what a municeps a Roman colony must have been in the time of Vespasian.

They went to work, then,