Being Mary Beard is a difficult balancing act. On the one side is the
unrepentant scholar, trained in Latin epigraphy in the rigorous school of
Joyce Reynolds, passionately determined to get things exactly right, ready
to weigh probabilities judiciously, and thoroughly informed about the
contents of the latest Dutch festschrift. On the other is the ardent
blogger, and the writer (and TLS Classics editor) determined to communicate
with audiences larger than a Roman historian or archaeologist can normally
reach.
Pompeii: The life of a Roman town combines these two personae, often
triumphantly, sometimes a little uneasily. Beard’s knowledge of what has
been written about Pompeii – a huge amount – is encyclopedic and
up-to-the-minute. She knows, for example, who has argued (in a Dutch
festschrift) that the wall painting which shows a man on horseback labelled
“Spartaks” is not after all Spartacus with his name in Oscan, as some of us
had fondly imagined and as I still believe. She is also capable of
practising the important ars nesciendi and leaving insoluble problems
unresolved, such as the meaning of the famous wall paintings in the Villa of
the Mysteries, which as a historian of religion she is well qualified to
write about. Pet theories are not pushed, or at least not often. Thus though
the book is personal in tone, it is also a remarkably reliable resource.
What you expect nowadays from a book about Pompeii is that it will explain how
the site developed over the several centuries of the town’s life that
preceded the awful day of death, August 24, ad 79. And also what happened
after that, from the first attempts at salvage and plundering down to the
Allied bombs dropped in 1943 and the most recent thefts. All this Beard does
extremely well, while sensibly organizing the book by themes: “Street Life”,
“House and Home”, “Earning a Living”, “Who Ran the City?”. This is not a
guide book, though it ends with two sensible pages on how to pay a visit. At
the head of the list of places not to be missed we find not the forum or the
amphitheatre, but, characteristically, the House of the Tragic Poet (a
fairly ordinary yet fascinating house important in the imagination of Edward
Bulwer-Lytton among others, and endowed with a particularly fine “beware of
the dog” mosaic).
This is, thank heavens, a history book and not yet another glorified piece of
antiquarianism. Beard always has context. This historicizing approach can
sometimes, alas, have a slightly deflating effect, when you learn, for
instance, that the wall paintings at the Villa of the Mysteries, unearthed
in 1909, look so splendid because they were heavily restored very early on.
But the overall effect is to replace the simplifications of the coffee table
books with a complex story, in which archaeologists too are human, doing
their best – or what is convenient – according to their lights, in whatever
age they happen to live.
Beard creates a credible Roman Pompeii that is both noisy and smelly, yet she
does so without exaggeration. The reason the Pompeians needed stepping
stones from pavement to pavement was probably that the streets were not only
well spattered with dung and refuse but turned into waterways every time it
rained heavily, for Pompeii had few underground drains. (This leads to a
far-fetched comparison with Venice.) What is said about the wide variety of
Pompeian housing and about the use of domestic space could hardly be
bettered. Public amusements – baths, theatres, wild-beast and gladiator
shows – are all expertly handled.
Gladiators were mostly slaves, and mostly dead by the age of twenty-five. And
Beard points out that the graffiti commonly thought to support the notion
that gladiators were a hot sexual attraction – “Celadus, heartthrob of the
girls” and so on – were written inside the gladiatorial barracks and
probably by the gladiators themselves.
Pompeii is not particularly empathetic towards the Romans, still less towards
the early excavators. It is true that it starts with a gripping description
of how some of those Pompeians who fled during the eruption in 79 came to
die where they did, overwhelmed by pumice stones or heat or asphyxiation.
But Beard is too careful a scholar to think that she can somehow take on the
identity of a Pompeian. Her instinct for realism is powerful, however. Only
once does it fail her, when she describes the colonization carried out by
the dictator Sulla, an event about which we admittedly know quite little.
The town had annoyed the insurgent general, and he punished it by settling
numerous veteran soldiers there; these colonists ruled the place for the
next generation to the exclusion of the surviving, largely Oscan-speaking,
inhabitants. Many of the latter are likely to have been impoverished if not
worse.
But Beard has a nice feel for local politics in the years before the eruption,
when local bigwigs, including the pretentious Holconii Rufi, contended with
each other for office, keeping out upstart freedmen, who, however, were able
to set their sons on the path to political success: thus the freedman’s son
Numerius Popidius Celsinus was made a member of the town council at the age
of six in gratitude for his having rebuilt the Temple of Isis at his own
expense. This was not a splendid little democracy, but at least the town was
not in the hands of a single family or a party machine.
Speaking of politics, Beard asserts that the male citizens of Pompeii “were
people who knew each other”. It depends what you think about how numerous
they were, an annoying problem that nags at us throughout. There is no easy
way of knowing, and estimates of the population of the urban nucleus in ad
79 have ranged from 6,400 to 30,000. Beard plumps for an estimate of about
12,000, half of whom she thinks would have been slaves (some people would
think that this proportion is too high). Another 24,000 people may have
lived in the surrounding territory. What matters most about all this
guesswork, however, is that on any sensible estimate of the population – and
12,000 for the town itself seems about right to me – Pompeii may have been a
“face-to-face” society, but it cannot have been a place where everyone knew
everyone; inside your own social circle, or inside your own quartiere
perhaps – but not, I would think, across the whole community. That, no
doubt, gave added importance to the other identities, local and
occupational, that are so visible in the election propaganda that festooned
the streets.
Who could read that propaganda? Pompeii looks like an excellent laboratory for
settling some of the much-contested questions about the extent and
significance of literacy in the ancient world. Not so, really, because
Pompeii, at least before the earthquake of 62, had been much better- off for
many generations, and hence probably more literate, than most places in the
western Roman Empire. But the main questions are normally taken to be: Who
wrote all those graffiti and painted notices, and who was expected to
understand them? Beard sees that these are hard questions to answer, but she
gives in too easily to the argument that the graffiti in Pompeii’s famous
brothel must have been written by poor men because the rich had slaves to
provide them with casual sex, an argument that begs several major questions,
and in fact proves nothing. She might have said more about the vital matter
of schooling, formal and informal. And some readers will feel a need here
for comparisons with other pre-modern towns. That, indeed, was an
intractable problem for the entire project: a social historian is likely to
want comparisons, while the prospective visitor to the site might find them
intrusive.
Pompeii in 79 contained a huge number of graffiti. It also contained a huge
number of metal artefacts, in metals precious and base: nails, locks,
knives, carpenters’ tools, rakes and hoes and farm implements, pipes,
kitchen and eating utensils, statues, jewellery, lamps and candelabra, horse
and wagon paraphernalia, and gadgets that we do not understand, not to
mention coins and many, many other things. The majority of these objects,
except the coins, were made in Pompeii or neighbouring towns, with raw
materials that were imported. Which raises a set of questions about the
Pompeian economy, Beard’s weakest suit. In essence her model of the
first-century economy is too “primitivist”, in spite of her attempt to
distance herself from that school of thought.
She is haunted by the concept of “staples”, even though her whole study
powerfully suggests that there was strong demand for great numbers of things
besides grain, olive oil and wine (what, incidentally, of the butchers? The
great difference between this book and almost any social history of a
medieval Italian town you care to open is the absence of the macellai). A
second edition might look more closely at Roman Campania’s dynamic economy.
Finally, sex: in the face of the erotic art and graffiti, Beard keeps her head
better than most other recent writers, taking the wind out of the sails of
the over-excited American scholar who claimed to identify no fewer than
forty-one Pompeian whorehouses. But when she judged the wall paintings in
the House of the Chaste Lovers to be “decorous”, she must have been looking
at the wrong wall.
This is an indispensable book for the Pompeian visitor, including those who
know the site well. It succeeds in being wonderfully readable, though
certain pages, with their “chaps” and “fiendishly difficult”, may make some
readers feel that Professor Beard is talking down to them. My only real
regret is that we did not get Herculaneum too.
Mary Beard
POMPEII
The life of a Roman town
360pp. Profile. £25.
978 1 86197 516 4
W. V. Harris’s book Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity will
be published next year.
