"Pompeii" by Mary Beard

The archaeological evidence from the city of Pompeii, buried for two thousand years by an eruption of neighbouring volcano Vesuvius, is assessed to provide evidence for daily life in the Roman world. The main message from this book is that the Romans weren't as homogenous as they are normally portrayed and that individuality reigned. How they did things in this city does not necessarily tell you how they did things elsewhere. What happened at the time that Pompeii was buried does not necessarily reflect what happened during the other many centuries of Roman Republic and subsequently Empire. And what one citizen or slave does is not the same as how another lives their life.

The biggest disappointment for me was the lack of narrative about the disaster. I suppose this has been covered elsewhere but it is the tabloid stuff. And I am not that interested in archaeology. So some of this book was rather hard going.

Nevertheless, there are some fascinating moments:

• "The hint of 'officer class' prejudices in many modern archaeologists who have so confidently equated social mobility and the rise of new money with revolution or decline." (Introduction)
• "Pompeii stood at the heart of a region - known, then and now, as Campania - where, long before the Romans came to dominate, indigenous peoples speaking the native Oscan language rubbed shoulders with Greek settlers." (C 1)
• "The town of Baiae, across the Bay from Pompeii, had become by the first century BCE a byword for an upmarket, hedonistic resort." (C 1)
• "It is hard to belive that all those Pompeians whoi lived in a single room above their shop, with not always adequate lavatory facilities, never found it convenient simply to piss in the streets." (C 2)
• "For us, it is the rich who visit restaurants, the poor who cook economically at home. At Pompeii, it was the poor who ate out [because they didn't have kitchens]." (C 2)
• In Pompeii, as in other early modern cities, "the mansions of the rich rubbed shoulders" with shops and workshops. (C 2)
• "If by 'poverty' we mean 'destitution', then there were very few poor in the ancient world: for the simple reason that destitution was the first step on a fast track to death." (C 3)
• "A tombstone from Rome ... includes the following piquant observation: 'wine, sex and baths ruin our bodies, but they are the stuff of life'" (C 7)
• "The conventions of bathing brought everyone down to size. Bathing naked, or nearly naked ... the poor were in principle no different from the wealthy - possibly healthier and of finer physique." (C 7). I related this to Acts of Undressing by Barbara Brownie.
• "The emperor Hadrian ... was visiting the baths one day (for even emperors might bathe in public ...) he noticed a retired soldier rubbing his back against the wall ... the man explained that he could not afford a slave to rub him down. So Hadrian gave him some slaves and the cost of their maintenance. Returning on a later occasion, he found a whole group of men rubbing their backs on the wall. ... He suggested they should rub each other." (C 7)
• "The hot tubs in the bathing suite itself must have been a seething mass of bacteria ... Roman medical writer Celsus offers the sensible advice not to go to the baths with a fresh wound ('it normally leads to gangrene')" (C 7)
• "The repeated slaughter of animals by humans to gods was an emblem of the hierarchy of the cosmos, with humans in the middle between beasts on the one hand and the divine on the other." (C 9)
• "In the 1760s, the Temple of Isis was among the first buildings fully excavated on the site ... Exotic and a little bit sinister, it gave Mozart, who visited Pompeii in 1769, ideas for the Magic Flute." (C 9)

A comprehensive study. October 2019; 316 pages

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