HISTORY: Pompeii:The Life of a Roman Town by Mary Beard, Profile, pp360 £25AS MANY READERS will know, on August 27th, AD 79, the volcano Vesuvius blew its top, and engulfed in ash and lava the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, thus sealing in for us two ancient urban sites of remarkable interest - whatever about the terror and misery caused to their inhabitants at the time.
Records of this terror and misery, indeed, are still visible to us on site, in the form of plaster casts of the bodies of many of those who failed to escape the holocaust, providing grim reminders of the precariousness of human existence. But, of course, along with these sad records, we also have fascinating remains of houses, shops, temples, brothels, and other aspects of daily life - including, in the case of Herculaneum, but not yet of Pompeii, priceless records in the form of carbonised, but still readable, manuscripts from a well-stocked philosophical library.
What Mary Beard, professor of classics at Cambridge, and one of the most distinguished Roman historians in the English-speaking world, has given us here is a delightfully readable account of what there is in the more popular of these two cities, and what we have been enabled to know of its history and daily life by reason of this disaster. Pompeii has, of course, been celebrated in story and film; much scholarly ink has been spilled over it, and various popular guide books to the site are available, but what Beard presents us with here is an account that is uniquely scholarly and readable.
Indeed, while emphasising the complexities of the evidence before us, she also makes use of it to give a more general account of what life in a medium-sized Roman city would have been like, while adducing inscriptional and literary evidence from elsewhere to fill in gaps in our knowledge of Pompeii.
In a series of nine chapters we are taken through the various salient aspects of Pompeii life, viewing the inhabitants at home, at their jobs, at their pleasures and their worship. We learn of the governing structure of the city, the local bigwigs - both old money and upwardly mobile parvenus, such as ex-slaves - and of the town's relationship to the imperial administration.
Pompeii is in many respects an average Roman town, but it has an interesting history, as being originally Oscan (a south Italian nation), with strong Greek influences as well - the Greeks had been in the Bay of Naples since the sixth century BC, before it was taken over by Rome in 89 BC. We can discern in the surviving remains all these strands: the great nobleman Marcus Holconius Rufus, who restored the Large Theatre, and whose fine statue still stands outside the Stabian Baths; the distinguished lady Eumachia, bearing a Greek name, but still able to finance the building of the largest building in the Forum, which her statue still adorns; the garum-maker Aulus Umbricius Scaurus, whose house and factory is still identifiable (garum being the rather vile rotten-fish sauce much beloved by the Romans); and the politically-active ex-slave Gaius Julius Polybius, whose house we can also identify, and whose election posters adorn its front - for an election that never took place.
Beard has the facility for bringing all these characters, and many others, to life, and placing them in an appropriate setting, without sacrificing scholarly accuracy; indeed, she frequently warns against facile conclusions from inadequate evidence. She reminds us also of the negative aspects of an ancient city: the awful smells, the cramped quarters, the dangers on the street from traffic and footpads. The total population was probably no more than 12,000, with a rural hinterland of a further 24,000, of whom perhaps 5,000 were adult male citizens - as Beard remarks, about the size of a modern university. It was therefore pretty much a "face-to-face" society, where everybody (who mattered) knew everybody else.
The book is profusely illustrated, with useful maps and plans, fine paintings of both mythology and daily life from the walls of Pompeian houses (now, alas, often no longer visible), and many delightful vignettes, such as a winged-phallus lamp (with bells), and a dormouse fattener (roast dormice dipped in honey were a great delicacy). She ends with some very useful practical suggestions for a visit, and a guide to further reading.
The book, enormously informative as it is, gives much food for thought. Some subversive thoughts that it provokes in me are certainly no criticism of Beard, but are rather a lament over what has happened to Pompeii (and to Herculaneum) in general. These sites, after all, had the misfortune of being first uncovered back in the 18th century, when scientific archaeology was, to put it politely, in its infancy, and in any case the passage of time has wrought much havoc among the more delicate remains such as wall-paintings (there was even an Allied bombing raid in 1943, God help us).
Many items have been removed, quite properly, to the Naples Museum, but what I would put in a plea for now (as in the case of many other sites, such as Akrotiri on Santorini), is a policy of substitution of high-class facsimiles on site for what must inevitably be removed, together with the judicious touching-up of the treasures that remain, when we know just what they looked like from old illustrations. Archaeological purity may revolt against such a proposal, but to me it seems the merest common sense. If necessary, Unesco could be appealed to, as these are World Heritage sites.
John Dillon is emeritus professor of Greek at Trinity College Dublin. His most recent academic work is Salt and Olives: Morality and Custom in Ancient Greece (Edinburgh University Press, 2004). His novel The Scent of Eucalyptus: An Ethiopian Tale was published last year.