Note 940 — CHIMNEYS.

As it would be tedious to transcribe all these passages, I shall, as examples, give only the following:—

These lines show that the poet had an aversion to cold when enjoying his bottle, and that he wished for a good fire; but they do not inform us whether the hearth, focus, had a chimney. We learn as little from the advice of Cato, c. 143: “Focum purum circumversum quotidie, priusquam cubitum eat, habeat.” It was certainly wholesome to rake the fire together at night, but it might have burned either with or without a chimney. Cicero, Epist. Famil. lib. vii. 10: “Valde metuo ne frigeas in hibernis; quam ob rem camino luculento utendum censeo.” Cicero perhaps understood under that term some well-known kind of stove which afforded a strong heat. Suetonius, in Vita Vitellii, cap. viii.: “Nec ante in Prætorium rediit, quam flagrante triclinio ex conceptu camini.” As Vitellius was proclaimed emperor in January, a warm dining-room was certainly necessary. Du Cange in his Glossarium quotes the word fumariolum from the Paræneticum ad Pœnitentiam of the Spaniard Pacianus; but the latter takes the whole passage from Tertullian, who wrote more than a century before. Sidonius Apollin. lib. ii. epist. i.: “A cripto porticu in hyemale triclinium venitur, quod arcuatili camino sæpe ignis animatus pulla fuligine infecit.” No one can determine with certainty the meaning of arcuatilis caminus. A covering made of a thin plate of metal, or a screen, was perhaps placed over a portable stove; we however learn, that even where the arcuatilis caminus was used, the beauty of the dining-room was destroyed by smoke and soot. Ammianus Marcell. lib. xxv. in the end of the life of Jovian: “Fertur recente calce cubiculi illiti ferre odorem noxium neqnivisse, vel extuberato capite periisse succensione prunarum immensa.” This in an apartment where there was a stove or a chimney would have been impossible.

The passage of Athenæus, lib. xii. p. 519, which speaks of πύελοι, will admit of various explanations. Dalechamp thinks that they were the poëles of the French (something like our stoves). Casaubon says they were bathing-tubs. This opinion is in some measure confirmed by Suidas, who gives that meaning to πύελος; and by Jul. Pollux, in whom it occurs in the same sense more than once. Lipsius however rejects these explanations, and considers πύελοι to have been thecæ, or vessels similar to those which in low German are called riken, and which, instead of our stoves, are much used in Holland by the women, who seldom approach the chimney.