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…
chris y
July 13, 2009 at 4:02 pm“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.”
This would be the Pliny who actually observed the thing and was killed trying to get a closer look, who I imagine must have realised what month it was at the time? Or his irritating nephew, the compulsive correspondent and soi-disant Stoic?
Martin Wisse
July 14, 2009 at 1:20 amThe latter one, who only wrote about it some twenty seven or so years later. Neither should be confused with Sky’s one eyed talking pirate history crow.