Weidenfeld £20 pp354

Lucius Caecilius Jucundus, a local banker and auctioneer, lived in an up-market house — complete with a vastly pretentious front door, shady garden and some sexy wall paintings — near the centre of ancient Pompeii. We can be sure that the house belonged to him thanks to a hoard of 150 writing tablets found inside, detailing Jucundus’s loans, contracts and commission (a modest 1-4%). It is also tempting to see a bronze bust, found in the front hall and labelled “Lucius” — a shrewd-looking individual — as a careful likeness of the owner.

This matching up of real people to the surviving houses of the ruined city is the holy grail of Pompeian studies. Ruins are exciting enough in their way. But there is a limit to what abandoned houses, extravagant collections of tableware, erotic amulets or pottery lamps can tell you, unless you know who lived in them or used them. We want to write a social history of a living city. That means trying to put names to houses and their inhabitants.

Sadly, it is not usually so easy as with the House of Jucundus. Archeologists rely on tiny hints such as the name on a signet ring or in the graffiti liberally daubed around the city. Of course, you don’t need to know much about archeology to realise that a signet ring lost behind a cupboard need not necessarily belong to the house’s owner. But such level-headed doubts often get swept away in modern attempts to repopulate the city.

Pompeii by Alex Butterworth and Ray Laurence (the latter a research fellow in the Institute of Archeology and Antiquity at Birmingham University, the former a writer and dramatist) is the most ambitious re-creation yet of life in the city over the 20 years or so leading up to the eruption. There are worrying signs from the outset. The dust jacket shows a picture of an implausibly luxurious Pompeian dinner party that is obviously soon to degenerate into a bona fide orgy: women stare steamily into their grapes, while the men’s togas have already fallen from their shoulders to reveal glistening bronze chests (no tunics or other decorous undergarments in Pompeii, obviously). And this tone continues in the account of metropolitan Roman history that is told alongside the story of Pompeii. Here Butterworth and Laurence conjure up a lurid picture of a “spinning moral universe”, full of “amber-haired temptresses”, “seething knots of sexual jealousy” and emperors like “gender-bending international pop- stars”.

As far as their narrative of Pompeian life goes, however, they appear to offer more reassurance of accuracy. They are careful to distinguish between history based on clear evidence, which they print in Roman type, and “straightforward fictional reconstructions” (including a good deal of sex as well as the dramatic death of Jucundus — in an earthquake in AD62), which are printed in italics. In fact, if any reader is lulled by this into thinking that there is much real history in this book, they should beware.

It is not just a question of the usual problem of reconstructing “daily life” in the ancient world though that is certainly part of it. These poor Pompeians are forced to worship obscure godlets known only from a single reference in St Augustine; they are the victims of many a modern theory (their attitudes to sex owe much to the work of Michel Foucault) and of some odd rules invented for them by Butterworth and Laurence themselves (wherever did they get the idea that “by the rules of Roman patronage, a man could only have one patron”?).

But there are also problems with the bigger picture. The centrepiece of this reconstruction and the subject of a whole chapter (in Roman type) is a visit to Pompeii by Nero in May AD64, rather like an Elizabethan royal progress. The emperor arrives with his wife, Poppaea, the “amber-haired temptress”, plus a substantial retinue of hangers-on (including his accountant, Cucuta). Lodgings have to be found throughout the town, food ordered in, sex-shows laid on. The visit culminates in a ceremony in the temple of Venus (then in ruins after the earthquake), during which the emperor makes a lavish gift of gold towards the restoration.

The trouble is that there is no firm evidence that Nero ever visited Pompeii. This is the signet-ring problem writ large. There is a graffito in a house in the city that addresses “Augustus” (the imperial title) and refers, opaquely, to his “divine feet” bringing him to “holy Venus” and to there being “thousands and thousands of pounds of gold”. But this is probably a literary fantasy and certainly doesn’t add up to the ceremonial occasion re-created by Butterworth and Laurence. There is a painting of the god Apollo in a lodging house outside the city that is said to resemble the emperor, but this hardly proves that the lodging house was redecorated for Nero’s visit. As for Cucuta, Butterworth and Laurence have fallen victim to the wit of a Pompeian graffiti artist. One graffito in the city does run “Cucuta is Nero’s accountant”, but it isn’t a signature of a visitor in the imperial party. “Cucuta” is Latin for “hemlock”. This is a joke about the emperor’s habit of killing off the rich and diverting their wealth to the exchequer.

This book might have made an excellent drama-documentary, with all the health warnings that come with that particular genre. At the very least, a great deal more of the book should have been printed in italics. Caveat lector.

Mary Beard is a professor of classics at Cambridge University and classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Pompeii is available at the Books First price of £16 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

MUSTN'T CRUMBLE

Pompeii is one of the most prized sites on Unesco’s world heritage list — “Nowhere else is it possible,” it says, “to identify any archeological site that even remotely stands comparison” — but it is also one of the most threatened. Within the past 20 years, visitor numbers have more than doubled to around 2m a year, causing serious problems of erosion; many houses that were open in the 1950s are now closed to visitors. Herculaneum, its ancient neighbour, restricts tourism to weekends only.

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