Pompeii - The Life of a Roman Town
Mary Beard
360 pages including index
published in 2008

We think we know Pompeii. An ordinary Roman town like so many others in 79 CE, made extraordinary because it was overwhelmed without warning by the eruption of the Vesuvius, through its death granting us a rare glimpse of what daily life in the Roman Empire really was like. Under a metres thick layer of volcanic ashes Pompeii laid hidden for centuries, only discovered in the eighteenth century, its secrets kept intact, preserved by the very disaster that caused the death of the city. With the slow and careful excavation of the city those secrets are unlocked, giving up definitive answers to all kind of questions about how the Romans lived. This is the view of Pompeii that countless books, magazine articles and television specials have given us. Unfortunately, as Mary Beard explains in Pompeii - The Life of a Roman Town, it's wrong.

Or at least, not entirely accurate. As she explains, Pompeii wasn't overwhelmed by an unforeseen catastrophe, as most likely its inhabitants had had at least several days warning before the actual eruption. Quite a few of them therefore had already left the town when it got buried, while many of the dead found under the lava had been overtaken in their flight, or while having sought shelter nearby or within the city itself. What's more, the city wasn't immediately abandonded after the disaster either, as all through the city evidence has been found of people coming back to their houses or businesses to rescue possessions - as well as of plunderers looking for easy riches. What's more, once Pompeii was rediscovered, obviously things gut dug up, damaged, disappeared or just altered through being exposed to the elements again. All of which means that what we can see in Pompeii now is not entirely the city that the inhabitants would've known in 79 CE, that if we dig up a largely empty villa it doesn't necessarily mean the Romans were great minimalists...

Everything Mary Beard writes about in Pompeii - The Life of a Roman Town than is hedged with uncertainty; throughout the book she has to make clear what we genuinely know about daily life in Pompeii and what we assume about it and how these assumptions are derived. This sort of history, of how people lived their lives rather than the momentous events they lived through of traditional history, is always difficult to get straight, as so much of it is undocumented and has to be derived from archeological finds and offhand mentions in historical documents. To her credit Mary Beard never falls in the trap of making her descriptions more authorative than they should be, always making sure to note the evidence supporting it as well as alternative interpretations for it. At the same time she also manages to keep her explanations clear, something not all historians manage.

In the process Beard skewers a lot of beloved myths and suppositions about Pompeii, from the idea that a phallus drawn on the street meant a brothel nearby, to -- as mentioned above -- the concept of Pompeii as a sort of giant scale Mary Celeste, kept pristine from the moment of its disappearance. In fact, even the date of the disaster is thrown in doubt, as archeological evidence suggests it happened in autumn, rather than in August as Pliny would have it. As Beard goes through the routines of Pompeiian daily life, she also talks about the history of the discovery of Pompeii and how our ideas of it changed over the years and centuries. Again, she manages to do so without muddling up what we know, how we know it and why we know think we know better than we used to. Two points she emphasises again and again in the book is how much we know about Pompeii, yet how little we are certain of, as well how much of what we see in Pompeii itself is overlain with over two centuries of excavation, restoration as well as post-excavation damage.

With all the caveats, the picture of Pompeii that Mary Beard sketches is one of a reasonable sized (several tens of thousands inhabitants) provincial town, not one of the big cities of the empire, but with ties connecting its ruling classes with the imperial and senatorial circles in Rome itself. It has a history that dates back to well before Roman times and seemed to have always been an important city in the region. Daily life emerges as somewhat on the seedy side, with streets that may have been choked by filth, both animal and human (hence the high pavements), a circus that might have more gladiatorial fights against goats and bulls than lions and bears, comfortable multiroom homes filled with luxury goods for the richer inhabitants, but bare bedsits for the free poor, who tended to eat out in one of the many cheap eating stalls below their flats. It's all somewhat more grungy than our own cities, but still sounds surprisingly similar to ours.