Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary/Caminus

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Rich, Anthony (1849). The illustrated companion to the Latin dictionary, and Greek lexicon. p. vi. OCLC 894670115. https://archive.org/details/illustratedcompa00rich. 

CAMI'NUS (κάμινος). A smelting furnace. (Plin. H. N. xxxiii. 21.) The illustration (Caminus/1.1) represents the section and plan of a Roman smelting-furnace discovered near Wandsford in Northamptonshire. (Artis, Durobriv. p. 25.) A is the smelting pot, below which the fire was kindled, as shown in the illustration to FORNACULA; B, the slag lying about as it ran from the furnace; C, the channel which conveyed the metal into the moulds, D.

2. A blacksmith's forge (Virg. Aen. vi. 630. Juv. Sat. xiv. 118.), which, as shown by the annexed illustration (Caminus/2.1), from a sepulchral marble at Rome, resembled in all respects those of our own days. The centre figure holds the iron on the anvil (incus) by a pair of pincers (forceps); under the anvil is a vessel with water, for plunging the heated iron and instruments into; the fire is seen in the back ground; and the bellows (follis), with a man working them, behind the left-hand figure.

3. A hearth or fire-place in private houses, for the purpose of warming an apartment (Hor. Ep. i. 11. 19. Id. Sat. i. 5. 81. Suet. Vitell. 8.), or for cooking, such as in early times was constructed in the atrium, and which consisted of a mere stone hearth raised above the level of the floor, and upon which the logs of firewood were placed, but without a flue to carry away the smoke.

4. It still remains a doubtful point, whether caminus ever means a chimney in our sense of that word, that is, a flue intended to carry off smoke through the different stories of a house, and discharge it above the roof; as the passages which might be cited for that purpose are not at all conclusive, and the absence of any thing like a chimney on the top of a building in the numerous landscapes pourtrayed by the Pompeian artists, and of any positive traces of such a contrivance in the public and private edifices of that town, affords sufficient evidence that, if known to the ancients, it must have been very rarely applied; consequently, in most houses, the smoke must have escaped through a mere opening in the roof, at the windows, or through the doors. But contrivances for making a fire in the centre of a room, accompanied at least with a short flue, have been discovered in several parts of Italy, one at Baiae, another near Perugia, and a third at Civita Vecchia, the plan of which is given in the annexed wood-cut (Caminus/4.1), from a MS. by Franceso di Giorgio, preserved in the public library at Siena. The form is a parallelogram, entirely enclosed by a wall of ten feet high on three of its sides, but having an opening or doorway on the other. Within this shell are placed four columns with an architrave over them, which supported a small pyramidal cupola, underneath which the fire was made on the hearth; the cupola served to collect the smoke as it ascended, and allowed it to pass out through an aperture in its top. If the edifices in which these stoves were constructed were only one story high, no flue, perhaps, was used; but if, as is most probable, there were apartments above, it seems almost certain that a small flue or tube would have been placed over the vent hole of the cupola, in the same manner as it is in a baker's oven at Pompeii, which is represented in the annexed engraving (Caminus/4.2); though the original height cannot be determined, as only a portion of the ground story now remains.

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  Caminus/1.1
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  Caminus/2.1
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  Caminus/4.1
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  Caminus/4.2