Pompeii : the life of a Roman town

384 Pages·2008·13.681 MB·English

by  Beard, Mary

Pompeii
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also by mary beard
Religions of Rome (with John North and Simon Price)
The Invention of Jane Harrison
The Parthenon
The Colosseum (with Keith Hopkins)
The Roman Triumph
Pompeii.indb 2 5/8/08 17:18:38
P o m p e i i
The Life of a Roman Town

Mary Beard
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First published in Great Britain in 2008 by
PROFILE BOOKS LTD
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Pine Street
London ec1r 0jh
www.profilebooks.com
This eBook edition first published in 2009
Copyright © Mary Beard, 2008
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Typeset in Fournier by MacGuru Ltd
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This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced,
transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in
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allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as
strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised
distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s
and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
eISBN 978 1 84765 064 1
CONTeNTS
Plan of Pompeii vi
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 Living in an Old City 26
Chapter 2 Street Life 53
Chapter 3 House and Home 81
Chapter 4 Painting and decorating 120
Chapter 5 earning a Living: Baker, Banker and
Garum Maker 152
Chapter 6 Who ran the City? 188
Chapter 7 The Pleasures of the Body:
Food, Wine, Sex and Baths 216
Chapter 8 Fun and Games 251
Chapter 9 a City Full of Gods 276
Epilogue 309
Making a Visit 314
Further Reading 317
Acknowledgements 336
List of Figures 338
List of Illustrations 339
Index 346
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INTr Odu CTION
Life interrupted
In the early hours of 25 august 79 Ce, the rain of pumice falling on Pompeii was
easing off. It seemed a good moment to leave the city and make a bid for safety.
a straggling group of more than twenty fugitives, who had been taking shelter
within the walls while the dreadful downpour had been at its worst, took a chance
on one of the eastern gates of the city, hoping to find a way out of range of the
volcanic bombardment.
a few others had tried this route some hours before. One couple had fled, car-
rying just a small key (they presumably hoped one day to return to whatever it
locked – house, apartment, chest or strong box) and a single bronze lamp (Ill. 1).
This can hardly have made much impact against the darkness of the night and the
clouds of debris. But it was an expensive and fashionable object, moulded in the
shape of a black african head – a hint of the (to us) disconcerting forms of inge-
nuity we shall often come across in Pompeii. The pair didn’t make it. Over-
whelmed by the pumice, they were found in 1907 where they had fallen, next to
one of the grand tombs which lined this road, like others, out of the city. They
collapsed, in fact, next to the lavish memorial to a woman who had died perhaps
fifty years before, aesquillia Polla, the wife of Numerius Herennius Celsus. Just
twenty-two years old (as we can still read on the stone), she must have been less
than half the age of her rich husband, a member of one of Pompeii’s most promi-
nent families, who had served as an officer in the roman army and had twice been
elected to the highest office in the city’s local government.
The layers of pumice had built up to several feet by the time the other group
1
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POMPeII
1. Small lamps in the shape of human
heads (or feet) were fashionable in the
first century Ce. Here the oil was
poured into the hole in his brow and the
flame burned at his mouth. Including
the petals which form the handle, it is
just 12 centimetres long.
decided to risk escape in the same direction. Walking was slow and difficult. Most
of these fugitives were young men, many carrying nothing with them, either
because they had nothing to bring or because they could no longer get to their
valuables. One man had taken the precaution of arming himself with a dagger,
in an elegant sheath (he had another sheath with him too, empty, because he had
perhaps lost or lent the weapon it had held). The few women in the group had
rather more. One carried a little silver statuette of the goddess Fortuna, ‘Good
Fortune’, sitting on a throne, plus a handful of gold and silver rings – one with a
tiny silver phallus attached by a chain, as a lucky charm perhaps (and another
object we shall often meet in the course of this book). Others had their own little
store of precious trinkets: a silver medicine box, a tiny base to hold a (missing)
statuette and a couple of keys, all stuffed into a cloth bag; a wooden jewellery
case, with a necklace, ear-rings, silver spoon – and more keys. They had also
brought what cash they could. For some just a bit of loose change; for others,
whatever they had stashed away at home, or the takings of their shop. But it was
not much. all in all, between the whole group there was barely 500 sesterces –
which is in Pompeian terms about what it cost to buy a single mule.
Some of this group got a little further than the earlier couple. Fifteen or so had
reached the next grand memorial, twenty metres further down the road, the tomb
of Marcus Obellius Firmus, when what we now know as the ‘pyroclastic surge’
from Vesuvius wiped them out – a deadly, burning combination of gases, vol-
canic debris and molten rock travelling at huge speed, against which nothing
could survive. Their bodies have been found, some mixed up with, even
2
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