The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found [Hardcover]

Mary Beard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 15, 2008 | ISBN-10: 0674029763 | ISBN-13: 978-0674029767

Pompeii is the most famous archaeological site in the world, visited by more than two million people each year. Yet it is also one of the most puzzling, with an intriguing and sometimes violent history, from the sixth century BCE to the present day.

Destroyed by Vesuvius in 79 CE, the ruins of Pompeii offer the best evidence we have of life in the Roman Empire. But the eruptions are only part of the story. In The Fires of Vesuvius, acclaimed historian Mary Beard makes sense of the remains. She explores what kind of town it was—more like Calcutta or the Costa del Sol?—and what it can tell us about “ordinary” life there. From sex to politics, food to religion, slavery to literacy, Beard offers us the big picture even as she takes us close enough to the past to smell the bad breath and see the intestinal tapeworms of the inhabitants of the lost city. She resurrects the Temple of Isis as a testament to ancient multiculturalism. At the Suburban Baths we go from communal bathing to hygiene to erotica.

Recently, Pompeii has been a focus of pleasure and loss: from Pink Floyd’s memorable rock concert to Primo Levi’s elegy on the victims. But Pompeii still does not give up its secrets quite as easily as it may seem. This book shows us how much more and less there is to Pompeii than a city frozen in time as it went about its business on 24 August 79.

(20081006)

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Pompeii is the most famous archaeological site in the world, visited by more than two million people each year.

Yet it is also one of the most puzzling, with an intriguing and sometimes violent history, from the sixth century BCE to the present day. Destroyed by Vesuvius in 79 CE, the ruins of Pompeii offer the best evidence we have of life in the Roman Empire. But the eruptions are only part of the story. In The Fires of Vesuvius, acclaimed historian Mary Beard makes sense of the remains. She explores what kind of town it was--more like Calcutta or the Costa del Sol?--and what it can tell us about “ordinary” life there. From sex to politics, food to religion, slavery to literacy, Beard offers us the big picture even as she takes us close enough to the past to smell the bad breath and see the intestinal tapeworms of the inhabitants of the lost city. She resurrects the Temple of Isis as a testament to ancient multiculturalism. At the Suburban Baths we go from communal bathing to hygiene to erotica.

Recently, Pompeii has been a focus of pleasure and loss: from Pink Floyd’s memorable rock concert to Primo Levi’s elegy on the victims. But
Pompeii still does not give up its secrets quite as easily as it may seem. This book shows us how much more and less there is to Pompeii than a city frozen in time as it went about its business on 24 August 79.

Amazon.com Exclusive: Author Mary Beard on the Ten Reasons Why the Romans Were Great Lovers--and Ten Books to Tell You How

1. Staying power
Roman lovers could keep going all night (at least if we take their word for it). Ovid – the first-century-BC’s man about town – claims that he could perform nine times in a single night. Read all about it in his ‘Love Poems” (Book 3, number 7). Read: Ovid, The Erotic Poems, translated by Peter Green.

2. Sweet talk
Roman men could make you feel so good. Mark Antony and Julius Caesar both talked their way into the heart of feisty Cleopatra. The chat-up lines of Rome’s founding father Aeneas drove Queen Dido senseless. Read: Virgil, The Aeneid, translated by Robert Fagles. (Go straight to Book 4)

3. Body beautiful
There was no flab or beer belly on these six-pack hunks. All that gym and exercise kept Greeks and Romans bronzed and trim. Read: Nigel Spivey, The Ancient Olympics.

4. Inventiveness
Sexual positions became (literally) an art-form for the Romans--two-somes, three-somes and more. You’d better stay supple though, or those more testing acrobatics will be beyond you. Read: John Clarke, Looking at Lovemaking: Constructions of Sexuality in Roman Art.

5. Romantic agony
Roman men could do anguish better than any others. “I hate and I love . . . and it hurts” as the poet Catullus succinctly wrote to his fickle mistress. Don’t expect to escape a Roman affair without tears. Read: Catullus, The Poems, translated by Peter Green.

6. Great pick-up lines
Romans knew they had to work hard at the first impressions. Ovid, in a lover’s manual, gives the beginner plenty of advice on how to break the ice. Stand right next to her at a procession, and when some elaborate display goes past explain to her what it is. It doesn’t matter, says Ovid, if you don’t really know – make it sound plausible, to impress. Read: Ovid, The Art of Love and Other Poems, translated by J. H. Mozley.

7. Open minds
Not many Romans were prudes. Most men were happy to contemplate sex with women, men, or if it came to it, animals – just so long as they were the active, not the passive partner. Read: Apuleius, The Golden Ass, translated by E. J. Kenney.

8. Rough-trade
Roman women went for the rough, tough sporting heroes of the ancient world. Successful gladiators became the heart-throbs of the Roman girls. Read: Catharine Edwards, The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome.

9. In touch with their inner-selves
The anxiety of Roman men was one of their more endearing features. Images of the phallus were everywhere in Roman towns – but so too were images of castration and mutilation. The ancient man never took his prowess for granted. Carlin A. Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans.

10. Not afraid to say 'I love you'
The walls of the buried city of Pompeii are covered with written messages from satisfied (and a few unsatisfied) men. ‘Oh Chloe, I had a wonderful time, twice over in this very spot, I love you. . . .’ 
Read: Antonio Varone, Eroticism in Pompeii. And, in case you are looking for the woman’s point of view, try Marilyn B. Skinner, Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In a grand synthesis, one of our most distinguished classicists relates all that we know—and don't know—about ancient Pompeii, devastated by a flood of lava and volcanic ash from Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Beard splendidly recreates the life and times of Pompeii in a work that is part archeology and part history. She examines the full scope of life, from houses, occupations, government, food and wine to sex, and the baths, recreation and religion. In this bustling seaside town, makers of garum, a concoction of rotten seafood and salt, did a modest business, but Umbricius Scaurus marketed his product as premium garum and became one of Pompeii's nouveaux riches. Focusing on the restored houses, Beard refutes the common notion that most Romans ate their meals while reclining on a triclinium. Rather, they ate wherever they could within the home. Finally, Beard reminds us that everybody except the very poorest went to the baths, which served as a great social leveler. Beard's tour de force takes the study of ancient history to a new level. 23 color and 113 b&w illus. (Dec.)
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (December 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674029763
• ISBN-13: 978-0674029767
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #390,018 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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75 of 76 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Dirt on Pompeii, December 7, 2008

By 

J. Moran (Illinois, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found (Hardcover)

Beard holds a chair in Classics at the University of Cambridge (UK) and has published several books on ancient history for the general reader. "Fires of Vesuvius" is in the nature of a summary or handbook of what the excavations and other scholarly efforts at Pompeii have to tell us about life there (and by extension in similar towns in Italy and perhaps elsewhere in Rome's empire). The book has separate chapters on the major aspects of life in Pompeii, from religion to sex, from daily commercial life to "fun and games." While relating what scholars have concluded about Pompeii, Beard casts a questioning and frequently skeptical eye at the evidence that supposedly supports their positions, often finding it ambiguous or thin or both.

A book of this sort can often be as dry as dust. This one is interesting throughout, thanks to Beard's well-honed and fluid style. The overall approach is that of an overview rather than a deeply detailed study. The tone is civilized but relaxed, and the writing is both clear and well-paced, occasionally laced with quiet humor. The very numerous illustrations are well-integrated with the narrative. Beard's "further reading" section, as with other books of hers that I have read, is fairly extensive. This is a good up-to-date summary for readers who are already familiar with Pompeii and an excellent introduction for those coming new to the subject.

The book is slightly marred by minor errors of diction or style that should have been caught in the editing process, something that doesn't seem to happen today even at "prestigious" imprints such as the Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press. Such blemishes, indeed, have occurred in each of the last two or three Harvard Press books that I have read. This should be unacceptable at such a house. Veritas.

34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Vibrant View of Pompeian Life and Mysteries, February 14, 2009

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found (Hardcover)

Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, sending hot gases, pumice, and rivers of bubbling mud through the city of Pompeii. Over a thousand of the victims were preserved within the ash, as were buildings and artworks. Since it was first excavated centuries ago, Pompeii as "frozen in time" has had a real tourist appeal. You can walk the streets feeling that you are experiencing something close to what the Pompeians did two thousand years ago; such feelings are not baseless, but Pompeian life was drastically different from our own, and the clues the ruins give us about the people's lives are significant but often mysterious and even more often incomplete. Classicist Mary Beard is the perfect guide to the city, as it is now and as best as we can understand it before the eruption, and in _The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found_ (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), she has written a delightful, sometimes irreverent, guide to the city. Sure, it has plenty of scholarship attached; ancient texts and modern reports are referenced, and there is an amazing range of evidence (bones of humans, skeletons of animals, oyster shells, bracelets, spilled paint, and traffic barriers), but she writes in a relaxed, almost chatty way that ensures readers will enjoy the fun of the often strange details she has included.

Even those who have been to Pompeii themselves will have to adjust their imaginary pictures of life there. For instance, take Beard's description of the baths. We think of the baths as promoting the sort of cleanliness that we ourselves value, but if you find yourself time-machined back to Pompeii, you might want to avoid this sort of "cleanliness". There was, of course, no chlorination, and not even any proper filters. The water was not always replaced, and wounds bathed in them could turn gangrenous. Beard concludes that the baths "may have been a place of wonder, pleasure, and beauty for the humble Pompeian bather. They might also have killed him." The baths also had a seamy reputation; they were, after all, a place where people got nearly naked and pursued pleasure. The more famous site for sex was the brothel, one particular house in downtown Pompeii that everyone acknowledges as having been a brothel, but there may have been many others. One sign that some categorizers (and some tour guides within the city) proclaim as a mark of a brothel is a phallus pointing to it, but in Pompeii there are phalluses everywhere. The famous picture of the god Priapus weighing his hefty organ in scales against a money bag, Beard says, used to have a curtain over it, not in the Roman days, to be sure, but in the seventies when she first visited the place. You could ask for the curtain to be withdrawn; perhaps, now that there is no such curtain, moralists will say that we are descending into pagan immorality. But there would have to be a lot of such curtains: "There are phalluses greeting you in doorways, phalluses above bread ovens, phalluses carved into the surface of the street, and plenty more phalluses with bells on - and wings." Beard points out that we can't really be sure what all these wands were for, but that thinking of them as lucky charms (something like a horseshoe on a wall) might make them less naughty, but they still cannot avoid being sexual tokens.

Throughout, Beard illustrates the "Pompeii paradox": "We simultaneously know a huge amount and very little about ancient life there". We don't know much about the upper stories of buildings, since their ground floors and foundations survived while the upstairs did not. Did they keep their bedrooms up there, and where did the children stay, and how many lived in a house? We can tell that Pompeians played lots of different board games, and we have rulebooks for none. One game was called _latrunculi_, and of the many election posters reviewed here, one said that a candidate had the support of the _latrunculi_ players; was this sarcasm? Everyone who has visited Pompeii has seen the bars with large jars set in the counter, and guides give the impression that there was a bartender who ladled wine from them, but the jars are porous. They may have been filled instead with dry goods, like fruit or chick peas, so were they for bar snacks? And then there are the mysteries of the creedless Roman religion, which allowed hundreds of gods and goddesses, and accepted new ones regularly, and was based on animal sacrifice. Wandering the streets of Pompeii, one can feel that this is a livable town, almost like a modern one; but Beard's book provides the useful service of showing that however much we appreciate the recovered art and architecture of the ancient city, we have to appreciate also how vastly the culture differed from ours, and how difficult it is to interpret the archeological evidence that is available.

25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best introduction, January 21, 2009

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Richard Campbell "RichSC" (Alexandria, Virginia United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found (Hardcover)

The best single book on Pompeii that I now own, even given (he sniffs) her annoying abuse of the comma. This is my first Mary Beard book, and quite different than all the other over 400 Roman books that I own. In a style that is almost scolding of our preconceptions, she presents a wonderful overview of the state of knowledge of Pompeiian culture and times. She synthesises all the current research on Pompeii from all angles and presents a very convincing description of what Pompeii was like not only at the time of the eruption but in the decades and centuries leading up to it.

This will be recommended reading in our Roman reenactment group. It might be interesting for her to know that she can get a reproduction of that "engaging jug in the shape of a cockere" since I've had it commissioned in the thermopolium of Asellina.