Books
Once and future town
Published 18 September 2008
Pompeii: the Life of a Roman Town
Mary Beard
Profile Books, 416pp, £25
Pompeii continues to fascinate. But saying "continues" is, of course, a terrible elision. It was. It went under. Then it was rediscovered and, like all rediscoveries, reinvented to suit our purposes. Mary Beard revisits both the city and its (re)creation in a meticulous and captivating book which, though probably designed to tie in with the film of Robert Harris's novel (currently in abeyance), stands brilliantly on its own.
I'm tempted to say that if you read one book of history this year, it should be Pompeii. Not just because it's written with a rare mixture of scrupulous scholarship and a relaxed, conversational narrative drive - Beard seems to actually like her readers, which is rare among serious scholars - but because Pompeii itself matters. The idiot politician who said he couldn't see why the state should put money into ancient history demonstrated a failure of imagination, coupled with the sort of brutish materialism that wants every discipline to produce spin-offs, like management theory or Teflon. Balls. Studying the likes of Pompeii is no different from studying whatever is going to happen in the Large Hadron Collider.
What we want to know (and it's probably the question that makes us human) is: What the hell is actually going on? And Mary Beard not only answers the question, but explains why it is unanswerable.
The range of evidence she uses is astonishing, but always accessibly presented. There are texts and reports, both from (and about) Pompeii and about (and from) elsewhere. There are bones. There are ruins. There are joist-holes and splashes of paint, skeletons in bracelets, grave-goods, middens and oyster-shells. There are graffiti and coins, animals and specula, keys and chisels, and even rough notices, chillingly reminiscent of modern disasters (think New Orleans), saying "House tunnelled".
Much of the grunt-work elucidating these traces of the dead has been done by decades of silent men in beards who see no reason for eye contact. Like a fine advocate, Beard transmutes it into a compelling narrative, while showing at the same time that it is, as it must be, provisional.
As unfair criticisms go, one of the most unfair is the one levelled at Donald Rumsfeld for saying: "As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know."
Only fools and dullards would complain. It's magnificently clear, it's not original, and it sums up not only politics, but history. It is particularly apposite in the case of Pompeii. We all know about Pompeii: a sort of Saturnalia-by-the-sea, a brothel on every street corner, playground of the rich, suddenly and without warning engulfed in the pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius, entombing in their entirety a population so taken by surprise that they didn't even have time to climb off their whores or, in one case of a richly bejewelled woman, get the hell out of the gladiators' barracks where she'd gone for a bit - or, indeed, a lot - of rough. We know that it was a typical Roman town, as well as one of atypical luxury. We know its street names and its buildings. We know its people.
And we are, in most cases, wrong. It's just that we don't know what we don't know. Beard puts us right. Her imaginative reconstruction of Pompeii, its people and the catastrophe that befell it is all the more impressive for being backed up, at every turn, with evidence. It's not so hard to rebuild an ancient town in the mind, much harder to reveal, in the process, the actual method of doing ancient history. All too often, reading ancient history is like having an operation: you read the book, you wake from the anaesthetic, and it's all done. In this case, you're awake all the way through, and everything is explained. It's a virtuoso performance, seemingly effortless; you have to keep reminding yourself of the meticulous scholarship underpinning it.
Beard's Pompeii is so populous that we meet people in passing with the promiscuity of a crowded marketplace. Here's the doctor, taking his surgical instruments with him as he tries to get away. Here are people who have slipped their keys into their pocket. Here are some little children pressing coins into damp plaster (the decorators have been in) to make patterns. Here are the painters, scarpering as the cloud comes down.
More importantly, Beard shows us Pompeii, not as a town that somehow existed in order to be engulfed then rediscovered, but as a living place. A little figurine of red Baltic amber was someone's treasured possession; what does this tell us? What does the mad garden of the Octavius Quartio villa - you couldn't stroll two abreast in it without falling into an ornamental pool - tell us about nouveau riche pretension? Who was Rufus and why is there a graffito of him labelled "Rufus est" - "It's Rufus"? And what on earth was going through the mind of the garum-maker who had his house decorated with mosaics of bottles, displaying the source - or sauce - of his riches? (Always scrupulous about possible alternative interpretations, Beard invites us to consider the other possibility: that there was a customer so satisfied that he turned his house into a sort of living memorial to his favourite sauce.)
We are first presented with and then meticulously disabused of our own assumptions. Beard even has a go at the old problem of epiphenomena: the known unknowns, little things that nobody mentioned because everyone knew. Did the toga itch? Did anyone actually wear it all that often? (No.) Were they all clean and fresh from the baths? (No. The water was endlessly recirculated, with no proper filters or chlorine, and doctors said not to bathe if you had a cut or you'd get gangrene.) What did they eat? It wasn't things stuffed with live larks, for sure. Most meat was pork. Most pork was sausage. They loved dishes that you couldn't tell what was in them. Did you really have three people in a triclinium at dinner? How did they get served? Where did the dishes go? What did Jucundus the Banker actually do? What were the streets really called?
It is that last question which, for me, illuminates the reality. The Herculaneum Gate was nothing of the sort. We call it that. They called it Porta Salis: the Gate of Salt. So? So swap it round and concatenate the two words: Saltgate. You could be in York, Cirencester, Nottingham. "I said I'd see him up Saltgate around six. You want to come?" Suddenly, they're alive. And they're not for us; they're for themselves, even if Vesuvius had other ideas.
And so, Beard reminds us, subtly but continually, of the unknown unknown, the thing we don't know that we don't know: that Pompeii's purpose was not to be engulfed for our later edification. The Pompeii of the tour guides is the Hollywood back-lot creation. The real Pompeii was something different: a place that was getting on with stuff (building, decorating, trading, breeding and, yes, whoring, but not half as much as you would get in Cheltenham) until, suddenly, but not without warning, it all went terribly wrong. A city preserved? Not really. More Aberfan than aspic.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
