"In Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s popular 19th-century novel “The Last Days of Pompeii,” a scrumptious multicourse dinner of the stereotypically Roman sort is served in the superbly appointed house of the hero, Glaucus. With its peristyle garden, luxurious furnishings, nimble attendants and anatrium filled with paintings that “would scarcely disgrace a Raphael,”Glaucus’ Campanian bachelor pad might serve as “a model at this day for the house of ‘a single man in Mayfair,’ ” Bulwer-Lytton wrote.
In her engrossingly mischievous “Fires of Vesuvius,” Mary Beard recreates the scene with gusto, pointing out that this Pompeiian mansion is in fact based closely on a real one, the so-called House of the Tragic Poet. But among some unsavory facts that Bulwer-Lytton “fails to point out to his readers,” Beard writes, is that the kitchen, too tiny to have produced much of a banquet anyway, was the site of the house’s only latrine. And worse: “Just over the back wall of the garden . . . was a cloth-processing workshop, or fullery. Fulling was a messy business, its main ingredient being human urine. . . . The work was noisy and smelly. In the background to Glaucus’ elegant dinner party there must have been a distinctly nasty odor.”
Beard, a classics professor at Cambridge University,takes cheeky, undisguised delight in puncturing the many fantasies and misconceptions that have grown up around Pompeii — sown over the years by archaeologists and classicists no less than Victorian novelists and makers of “sword and sandal” film extravaganzas. While many scholars build careers through increasingly elaborate reconstructions of the ancient world, Beard consistently stresses the limits of our knowledge, the precariousness of our constructs and the ambiguity or contradiction inherent in many of our sources. “There is hardly a shred of evidence for any of it” serves as her battle cry, and it’s a noble one.
The overarching notion she combats here is that when Pompeii was buried by volcanic debris from Vesuvius in the great eruption of A.D. 79, it became a city “ ‘frozen in time,’ as so many guidebooks and tourist brochures claim,” a pristine Roman town just waiting to be discovered. In fact, Beard points out that Pompeii, “disrupted and disturbed, evacuated and pillaged, . . . bears the marks (and the scars) of all kinds of different histories.”
Those scars didn’t begin with the eruption — there was a devastating earthquake 17 years earlier — and didn’t end with it. Ancient scavengers, looters of all eras and “the rough and ready approach” of early excavators have all severely damaged the site, making it much harder to reconstruct an accurate building history. For good measure, Pompeii was heavily bombed by the Allies in World War II; as Beard wryly notes, most visitors are not aware that many of the houses they pass through, now expertly restored, have in essence been destroyed twice.
A disheartening aspect of the book is the great number of paintings and painted signs, mentioned by Beard in passing throughout the text, that were recovered only to fade or vanish entirely, reminiscent of the subway-excavation scene in “Fellini’s Roma.” These have been as elaborate as a series of bright murals from the amphitheater’s curtain wall, destroyed by frost in the year after their discovery in 1815, or as homey as the sign “Women” over their separate entrance to one of the town’s sets of public baths.
If Pompeii is no time capsule, however, it is as close as we are likely to come on such a scale. Together with its lesser-known sister city Herculaneum, it is a place crucial to our conception of Roman art, domestic architecture and daily life. Beard leads a fine tour and lives up to her promise of surprises around every corner. She walks down the sewerless town’s streets (“a smelly mixture of animal dung, . . . rotting vegetables and human excrement — which was, just to complete the picture, no doubt covered in flies”); looks into houses (those empty atriums with the misleadingly modernist aesthetic would have been hung with gaudy curtains and stuffed with wooden furniture, storage cupboards, looms and whatnot); saunters into the baths (despite their hygienic reputation, in the days before chlorination, they were filthy); steps up to the bar (the big, unglazed jars set into the counter were for dry foodstuffs, not for doling out the hot stew of our fantasies); and ventures into the brothel (there were probably far fewer than is often supposed, and the one clear example, whatever it was in 79, is a cramped, grim place today, Beard says: average tourist visit, three minutes).
Over all, Pompeii was “an assault on the visual senses,” to use Beard’s phrase, not least for the range of art, public and private, it contained. For one thing, much of the art is highly eroticized, even when not bluntly pornographic. Much else can only strike the modern viewer as bizarre — something out of Petronius or Apuleius rather than Cicero or Horace — like a fresco of the Judgment of Solomon story enacted by pygmies. And under both headings fall the phalluses. There seem to be phalluses everywhere. Enormous ones, tiny ones, doubles, singles; attached to men, gods or satyrs in every medium, or in disembodied splendor; over doors, carved into the pavement, on chains and serving trays, turned into lamps, winged like birds, with bells on. Even some of the phalluses have phalluses. If they were good luck charms, as is sometimes thought, it obviously didn’t work.
Aside from the melodramatic and misleading American title (there’s a minimum of volcanology or disaster drama; in Britain, the title is aptly “Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town”), this is a wonderful book, for the impressive depth of information it comfortably embraces, for its easygoing erudition and, not least, for its chatty, personable style. Perhaps it’s no surprisethat Beard, who certainly can’t be accused of ivory-towerism, writes an appealing blog for The Times of London, “A Don’s Life.” (She is also the classics editor for The Times Literary Supplement.)
If anything disappoints about “The Fires of Vesuvius” it’s that the mostly black-and-white photographs fall well short of conveying the sensual assault that Beard so skillfully evokes in her text. For that, we can turn to another general-interest book on the subject, THE COMPLETE POMPEII, by Joanne Berry (Thames & Hudson, $40). Berry, who teaches ancient history and archaeology at Swansea University in Wales, packs her magazine-style pages with large-format color photographs of the art, artifacts and buildings of the town, and the result is suitably dazzling.
Beard’s mild but persistent polemical tone — another mark of the successful blogger? — is a dynamic means of structuring her writing, but it often has the effect of casting a Yeats-like shadow over the mass of her fellow scholars: “All wear the carpet with their shoes; / All think what other people think.” One longs to leap up and shout, “Not all!” Berry, for example, has a drier style and makes no special effort to project a personality onto the page. But she seems no less critical of the evidence than Beard and discredits many of the same “myths.”
Both of these books, which make excellent companions, remind us that there will be more to look forward to: after 1,930 years, a quarter of Pompeii remains unexcavated. "
THE FIRES OF VESUVIUS
Pompeii Lost and Found
By Mary Beard
Illustrated. 360 pp. The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. $26.95
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