POMPEII
Books
from the November 18, 2003 edition
POMPEII
By Robert Harris
Alfred A. Knopf
248 pp., $24.95
The day it rained fire
Roman engineering could master a river, but it couldn't tame Vesuvius
By Ron Charles
One cataclysmic disaster can ruin your whole day, but at least it has the advantage of surprise. That's more than can usually be said for stories about cataclysmic disasters, which lumber toward their climax like some bore telling a multipart joke you've already heard. Who honestly didn't feel the urge to push a few heads under water to speed up James Cameron's interminable "Titanic"? We endure documentaries about German aerodynamics because we want to see the Hindenburg in flames. "Oh, the banality!"
Robert Harris confronts this very problem in his new novel about the explosion of Vesuvius, called simply "Pompeii." When the story opens on Aug. 22, AD 79, we know that by the end of the week, none of these characters will be shouting "TGIF." But how to fill the pages till that moment when the mountain erupts with a force 100,000 times as strong as the Hiroshima atomic bomb, shooting magma at a speed of Mach 1?
Harris admits that he just barely avoided disaster himself. After observing the United States for more than a year, he had intended to write a novel set in the near future. "The story I had in mind," he says, "might loosely be described as 'The Walt Disney Company takes over the world': a thriller about a utopia going horribly wrong," but "the characters stubbornly refused to come alive and the subject remained as flimsy as smoke." Or, perhaps he realized that Julian Barnes had already written that novel brilliantly just three years ago in "England, England." But for whatever reason, we've been spared another Brit's satire of America ("Vernon God Little" is enough to endure for this season), and given this terrifically engaging novel instead.
The key to Harris's success is his concentration on a crisis that preceded the volcano's eruption by two days. Back in 33 BC, the Romans had constructed a 60-mile aqueduct that eventually served towns all along the Bay of Naples, giving rise to a culture and an economy that floated high on the presumption of dependable, clean water. When a break in the main line begins shutting off one town after another, only Marcus Attilius Primus knows how to save the day.
Attilius, as he's called, is a young widower, a water engineer from a long line of water engineers, who's just been appointed to Misenum, home to a Roman fleet. His early weeks on the job have been rough: His predecessor has vanished mysteriously, his staff mocks his authority, and now the water has stopped flowing for the first time in 100 years, threatening to plunge a quarter of a million people into dry chaos.
Piecing together reports from travelers about the status of other towns along the coast, Attilius quickly deduces that the break must be some- where near Pompeii. As the reservoir drains in Misenum, he secures permission from Pliny the Elder (wonderfully brought back to life here) and heads out with a small, reluctant crew.
The passage of 2,000 years has not diminished the technical dimensions of this task - nor the social risks of failure. Harris conveys the modern elements of this ancient life with startling effect.
One can't help considering the two crumbling tunnels that supply New York City with all of its water. Let's hope there are many Attiliuses toiling away on Tunnel No. 3, to be completed in 2020. (Sip slowly, New Yorkers.)
In fact, what's even more interesting than the mechanical aspects of this ancient system are the moral developments that Harris traces through these characters. First-century Romans enjoyed the benefits of a remarkably advanced system of commerce, science, and art, but their society was dogged by that familiar triumvirate of corruption, cruelty, and sloth. Attilius emerges as a timeless hero, a man driven by duty but animated by compassion, courageous enough to fight nature, but wise enough to fear its fury. His struggle to solve this engineering crisis, fend off his mutinying workers, and resist the grief that always threatens to wash back over him makes him an utterly fascinating and sympathetic character. And though he's far removed from the sophisticated economy humming around him, he demonstrates that essential requirement for a successful market economy: integrity.
But in the literary tradition of all great struggles, the flashier part goes to the villain. Numerius Popidius Ampliatus rose from slave to master the modern way: insider trading. Cruel and clever, he's both Caligula and Ken Lay. We meet him on the afternoon he's trying to generate a little entertainment by feeding a servant to the eels. Attilius interferes, earning Ampliatus's rage and his daughter's heart. But this self-made crook owns a heavily mortgaged empire of bathhouses that need cheap water so he pretends to support Attilius's emergency efforts - at least until he can kill him.
Of course, while our hero races against the clock to stave off a collapse of the aqueduct and avoid being murdered, we know that his clock is about to be blasted away by one of history's most spectacular natural disasters. Harris marks the passing hours and minutes with fanciful precision at the beginning of each chapter, along with pithy quotations from volcano experts ancient and modern.
If the present-day dialogue sounds a bit incongruous in togas and the romance a bit forced, such minor objections are quickly blasted away. When the moment finally arrives - a column of magma shooting miles into the sky - the story rises spectacularly to convey the surreal conditions that tortured these people for days: the sea filled with pumice, the ground rolling in waves, whole towns flash-burned, asphyxiated, and then sealed beneath tons of ash.
But Harris hasn't brought those haunting, calcified forms to life just for the sport of entombing them again 2,000 years later. The light he shines on that awesome crisis, and the way good and bad people responded, illuminates our continued dependence on the most fundamental elements - a stable earth and a righteous man.
Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor.
By Erica Marcus
November 23, 2003
POMPEII, by Robert Harris. Random House, 278 pp., $24.95.
Is there a more fulfilling read than a good historical novel? Entertaining and
edifying in equal measure, it's the most painless method of picking up what you
would have learned in college if you'd been paying attention. With "Pompeii,"
Robert Harris has done the genre even one better: The bestselling author of
"Fatherland," "Enigma" and "Archangel" has chosen for his subject a historical
period that is penetratingly relevant to our own.
"Pompeii" is a thriller set during the two days before and day of the volcanic
eruption that buried the book's eponymous city. In 79 AD, the Roman Empire was
the most powerful the world had ever seen. And not only powerful, but seemingly
eternal: The Roman mind could not conceive of a world in which the empire did
not reign supreme. Just as the Titanic has become a modern metaphor for man's
technological hubris, Harris deploys Pompeii to stand in for Rome's blindness to
its own vulnerability.
To amplify the parallels between the Roman world and our own, Harris peoples his
novel with characters who would be equally at home on "Larry King Live."
Ampliatus, our villain, is a sort of antique Donald Trump who early on reveals
that the secret of his real estate success lay in buying up semi-ruined property
at rock-bottom prices after an earthquake hit Pompeii 17 years earlier. "Some of
these big old houses from the time of the Republic were huge. I split them up
and fitted 10 families into them. I've gone on doing it ever since." He adds,
deliciously, "Here's a piece of advice for you, my friend: There's no safer
investment than property in Pompeii."
The "friend" to whom he addresses this advice is our hero, Marcus Attilius, an
engineer freshly dispatched from Rome to oversee the Aqua Augusta. The Augusta
is the Empire's longest aqueduct, providing water to the entire Bay of Naples -
an area that encompasses modern-day Avellino, Salerno, Nola, Pompeii and Naples.
Attilius, whose job title is "aquarius," is a familiar hero: intelligent,
incorruptible and heartbroken over the recent death of his wife in childbirth.
Upon his arrival at the Piscina Mirabilis, the terminus of the aqueduct, he is
confronted with two mysteries to solve. First, what happened to the last
aquarius, who went missing two weeks earlier, and second, why does the water all
of a sudden stink of sulphur?
By questioning residents from all over the Bay Area, Attilius deduces that the
aqueduct has been contaminated just after it passes Pompeii, somewhere in the
vicinity of the big mountain called Vesuvius. He appeals to the admiral of the
fleet of the Bay of Naples, none other than Pliny the Elder, the polymath author
of "Natural History," to be transported across the bay to Pompeii, where he will
hire horses to take him to the area of the breach, and acquire building
materials to repair it. Harris masterfully conveys the limitations of the
technology of the day. Attilius is as smart and capable as any modern thriller's
protagonist, but he has precisely three speeds at his disposal: foot, horse and
boat.
Another of Harris' master strokes is to entwine his plot with Rome's aqueduct
system. Water, he makes very clear, is what defines the empire. In an age before
electricity or telecommunications, water is the symbol of municipal strength, of
civilization. Says Pliny, "When we consider the abundant supplies of water in
public buildings, baths, pools, open channels, private houses, gardens and
country estates, and when we think of the distances traversed by the water
before it arrives, the raising of arches, the tunneling of mountains and the
building of level routes across deep valleys, then we shall readily admit that
there has never been anything more remarkable than our aqueducts in the whole
world." In short, the aqueduct is the grid.
As with the Titanic, any novel about Pompeii faces the challenge of creating
suspense in the face of the reader's foreknowledge of the ending. The eruption,
when it comes, is every bit as terrifying and destructive as a natural-disaster
buff could want. But Harris goes to great lengths to devise a plot full of
nongeological intrigue. Yes, there's even a love interest for our aquarius.
Corelia is the typical historical-anomalous heroine, plucky and beautiful - and
the daughter of the villain! But Harris shows some restraint here: She and
Attilius don't have sex.
A more compelling character is Pompeii itself, here portrayed as a classical
boomtown whose official motto is Salve lucrum! (Hail profit!) "A man could buy
anything he needed in the harbor of Pompeii. An Indian parrot, a Nubian slave,
nitrum salt from the pools near Cairo, Chinese cinnamon, an African monkey,
Oriental slave- girls famed for their sexual tricks."
What elevates "Pompeii" above the level of equally propulsive thrillers ("The Da
Vinci Code," for one) is Harris' ability to express tragedy. During the
harrowing first hours of the eruption, Attilius finds himself in the luxurious
home of the senator Pedius Cascus. Cascus' wife, Rectina, pleads with Attilius
to rescue not herself, but the family's library. "This was where we kept the
volumes that my ancestors brought back from Greece," she says. "One hundred and
twenty plays by Sophocles alone. ... They are irreplaceable. We have never
allowed them to be copied." Attilius, sadly, can offer no help. And thus did all
but seven plays vanish.
Like any good tragedian, Harris delights in irony. Near the conclusion of
"Pompeii," Ampliatus assures his cronies that despite the approaching lava, they
have nothing to fear: He has consulted an oracle. "She saw a town - our town -
many years from now. A thousand years distant, maybe more ... She saw a city
famed throughout the world. Our temples, our amphitheater, our streets -
thronging with people of every tongue. ... Long after the Caesars are dust and
the empire has passed away, what we have built here will endure."
Sunday, November 23, 2003, 12:00 A.M. Pacific
Spectacular fall of Pompeii, in technicolor
By David Flood
Always. In horror movies, the hero escapes the haunted house within an inch of his life, only to return to the deathtrap to save the heroine. "No, don't go back in! You fool!" you yell, but it's too late — back he goes, only to face more peril.
Robert Harris' latest novel, "Pompeii," is no exception. It's 79 A.D., Mount Vesuvius blows with a power "100,000 times that of the atomic bomb," brown skies release dry pumice like hail and young Marcus Attilius Primus narrowly escapes, only to return to the hellfire of Pompeii to save Corelia, our heroine.
British author Robert Harris, however, is no fool. A Cambridge University graduate and political editor of the Observer, he's got eight books under his belt, three of which are fiction: "Fatherland," "Enigma" and "Archangel." The three novels, which have been translated into more than 30 languages, strive to illuminate history through page-turning suspense.
Now with Pompeii, Harris has found an explosive opportunity to animate this juncture in history, capitalizing on the era's gross disparities between upper and slave classes, arranged marriages, prostitution and corrupt politics.
The novel's initial hook is the dying of an expensive delicacy: eels. An innocent slave is blamed for the deaths and fed to the eels, to the delight of the slave-owner. Soon, Marcus Attilius, the aqueduct engineer, is summoned by the beautiful Corelia to help solve the mystery of dying eels. Attilius discovers a scent of sulfur in the water, an ominous sign. He travels to Misenum to plead with the scholarly Admiral Pliny to get supplies and sail to Pompeii to fix the aqueduct. The fact that our hero is an engineer is a convenient opportunity to describe the elaborate water systems of 79 A.D. Harris writes:
"The great Roman roads went crashing through Nature in a straight line, brooking no opposition. But the aqueducts, which had to drop the width of a finger every hundred yards — any more and the flow would rupture the walls, any less and the water would lie stagnant... "
The novel is carefully divided into Roman time over a brisk four days called "Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus." Mount Vesuvius erupts by the third day, which almost seems late in the novel, but it allows for enough building of tension and character to make the blast not only a cinematic spectacle (Hollywood take notice) but one which buries communities we have come to know.
Although many events take place in this short period, the story does not feel crammed, managing to keep the reader wondering until the very last sentence.
Mount Rainier, a slumbering volcano, is within eye-range of most of us in Puget Sound, and I found this book a haunting reminder of what could happen here. (Harris' lucid descriptions of the blowing volcano worked their way in to my dreams). Bottom line: Harris has not only provided a chilling reminder of what happened in ancient Pompeii but an object lesson in the consequences of collisions between civilization and the awesome forces of nature.
Shadow of
doom
Life, love in Pompeii — before
Vesuvius unleashed death
Sunday, November 16, 2003
POMPEII
By Robert Harris
Random House, 304 pages, $24.95
If you pick up Robert Harris' exciting new novel, "Pompeii" - and you should - carve out plenty of time to savor the last 100 pages. You'll discover just what hell is like.
Harris sets "Pompeii" in the days leading up to and including the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79 when the Roman town of Pompeii and several other nearby villages were destroyed by ash, pumice and, finally, a cloud of poisonous gases.
That no one sees it coming only compounds the destruction and the irony. Of course, everyone now knows what happened. At the time, though, and despite a series of signs that catastrophe is at hand, the people are clueless.
At its heart, "Pompeii" is part mystery and part love story, with more than enough historical detail to add realism. Marcus Attilius is an aquarius, an engineer recently assigned to keep watch over the Augustus aqueduct. The aqueducts are the shining lights of the Roman Empire, marvels of engineering design that helped separate the Roman Empire from the rest of the known world.
The Augustus brings water from the slopes of Vesuvius to the coastal towns, like Pompeii and Miseneum, home to the Roman naval fleet. It provides water not only for drinking purposes of the general population, but also to feed the many baths of the elite whose villas dot the Bay of Naples coastline. It is essential to the Roman way of life.
Attilius has been sent to Miseneum to take the place of the previous aquarius, Exomnius, who has recently disappeared. Soon after his arrival, the trouble begins. Springs are running dry and there appears to be a major clog somewhere along the 60-mile run of the aqueduct. It's Attilius' job to fix the problem and do it quickly.
Complicating matters are a recalcitrant assistant and the dangerous enmity of a smarmy entrepreneur named Ampliatus, a former slave who through guile, shrewdness and an absolute lack of morality has amassed a great fortune. He is the power in Pompeii, controlling the elected officials who ostensibly run the town. When Attilius finds himself attracted to Ampliatus' 16-year-old daughter, Corelia, the die is cast for conflict.
Attilius is a morally stand-up guy, and Corelia, though young, is one of the strongest characters in the tale. And if the love story is a little thin, you still pull for them to come through the impending disaster unscathed.
But all that is prelude to the forces of Mother Nature running out of control, and Harris masterfully weaves in the science of the time to describe the workings of the aqueduct and the buildup to the cataclysm.
Knowing what's coming keeps the tension palpable, and Harris' skill at storytelling keeps the reader interested in the characters, be they fictional, like Attilius, or historical, such as the historian Pliny. It's Pliny's insistence and skill at keeping a written record of things around him, both natural and manmade, that provided an eyewitness account of the catastrophe.
Harris also displays a keen eye for historical details of the era, many of which will suprise you. Some of those details are simply bizarre. Check out his description of a meal on a special feast day: "Sow's udder stuffed with kidneys...Roast wild boar filled with live thrushes that flapped helplessly across the table as the belly was carved open...Then the delacicies: the tongues of storks and flmaingoes (not too bad), but the tongue of a talking parrot had always looked to Popidius like nothing so much as a maggot and it had indeed tasted much as he imagined a maggot might taste if it had been doused in vinegar. Then a stew of nightingales' livers..."
While all of this is intriguing, and the story of Attilius and all his trouble will keep you interested, the star of the show is the mountain and its inner forces. As you read the story, the sense of foreboding increases until it is almost sinister, as if some monster is preparing to unleash its bloodlust on an unsuspecting people. By the time it finally does, you'll be too enmeshed in the spectacle of it all to want to think about anything else.
13-2-2004
ROBERT HARRIS: Pompeji. Roman. Aus dem Englischen von Christel Wiemken. Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, München 2003. 382 Seiten, 20 Euro.
Das leise Zittern des Weines im Glase
Aus der Kanalarbeiter-Fraktion des historischen Romans: Robert Harris legt eine Wasserleitung nach „Pompeji“
Hundertsiebzig Jahre hat es dieses Mal gedauert, bis eine Geschichte wieder an ihrem Anfang ankam. Hundertsiebzig Jahre sind eine lange Zeit – genug, damit aus einem historischen Roman, der auch eine große Romanze war, ein anderer historischer Roman wird, einer, dem das Historische wichtiger ist als die Hindernisse der Liebe, einer, der hauptsächlich für große Knaben geschrieben ist, für Leute, die wissen wollen, wie es ist, im alten Neapolis eine Fischfarm zu betreiben, oder was man braucht, um ein Leck in einer antiken Wasserleitung zu flicken. Nichts gegen „Pompeji“, den jüngsten Roman des britischen Journalisten Robert Harris. Das Buch tut alles, was ein literarisches Werk für das große Publikum in den Zeiten der Bildungskrise tun muss: Es belehrt und unterhält, es hat einen sympathischen Helden, die Spannung hält über fast vierhundert Seiten. Es schildert ein spektakuläres Ereignis, den Ausbruch des Vesuv im Jahr 79 n. Ch., es steckt die Phantasie seines Lesers für ein paar Stunden in ein Paar Sandalen und hängt dem Geist eine Toga über. „Bei Jupiter!“, ruft dieser dann noch eine Weile, nachdem er die letzte Seite erreicht hat, und es ist nichts Verwerfliches daran.
Aber was für Bücher sind diesem vorausgegangen: Nicht nur historische Romane in großer Zahl, vor allem aus dem späten neunzehnten Jahrhundert, vor allem solche aus den Wirren des Kulturkampfs, in denen Heiden bekehrt und Christen den Märtyrertod sterben, nicht nur die Aufzeichnungen, die Plinius der Ältere, der Augenzeuge, vom Ausbruch des Vulkans angefertigt hat. Sondern vor allem einer der bedeutendsten antikisierenden Romane schlechthin: Edward Bulwer-Lyttons „Die letzten Tage von Pompeji“ aus dem Jahr 1834. Dieses Buch ist die alte, schwarze Muräne, an der gemessen alle anderen historischen Romane mit demselben Stoff zu silbrigen Sardinen schrumpfen.
Robert Harris gibt sich große Mühe. Sicher und effizient erzählt er von den letzten achtundvierzig Stunden vor dem Knall. Die Spannung entsteht dadurch, dass der Leser zwar weiß, wann die Erde sich öffnen und die Rauchsäule aufsteigen wird, aber im Unklaren darüber ist, was dem Helden in dieser Frist alles gelingen wird: Kann Attilius, der junge Wasserbaumeister, das Leck in der Acqua Augusta stopfen? Wann wird er bemerken, dass die Brunnen rund um den Golf von Neapel versiegen, weil der Ausbruch des Vulkans bevorsteht? Wird es ihm gelingen, die korrupten Machenschaften des Immobilienspekulanten Ampliatus zu durchkreuzen? Und vor allem: wird er Corelia, die ihm in einem nassen Hemd entgegensteigende Tochter des Ampliatus, gewinnen können? Wird er mit ihr die Katastrophe überleben?
Dieser Art sind die Fragen, von denen die Lektüre begleitet wird. Nach schlichtem Muster also ist dieser Roman gebaut, und nicht einmal mit den Charakteren gibt sich Robert Harris viel Mühe: Der Held ist jung, schlank und Ingenieur, und das muss reichen. Das ist nicht falsch kalkuliert. Denn das eigentliche Verdienst dieses Buches liegt im Stofflichen. Wer die technischen und zivilisatorischen Errungenschaften der römischen Kultur auf dem Höhepunkt ihrer Entfaltung kennen lernen möchte, wer wissen will, wie Aquädukte konstruiert sind, wie sich ein Vulkanausbruch im Zittern des Weines im Glas ankündigt und dass die Immobilienspekulation in der Antike ein ähnlich ehrloses Geschäft war, wie es das heute ist – der wird hier üppig bedient.
Eher, als dass er seine eigenen erzählerischen Möglichkeiten einholte, literarisiert dieser Roman das Prinzip des rigorosen Details, das dem Zeichner David Macauley in den achtziger Jahren mit Darstellungen der mittelalterlichen Burg oder der Untergrundbahn zu so großem Erfolg verhalf. „Pompeji“ ist ein Buch für die Zeiten international vergleichender Bildungsforschung: eine Lehreinheit aus dem Geschichtsunterricht nach dem Verfahren der „Dead Poets’ Society“.
Abgründig ist daran nur eines: Dass sich der Historismus, der in dieser, seiner schlichtesten Form, in den Geisteswissenschaften schon vor knapp hundert Jahren mit triumphierender Geste verabschiedet wurde, in der populären Kultur so konsequent fortgeführt wird. Literarisch ist Bulwer-Lyttons Roman seinem modernen Nachfahren vor allem deshalb überlegen, weil er die Schilderung des antiken Milieus in einer romantischen Liebesgeschichte aufgehen lässt. Das Pathos der Romanze, Leidenschaft, Ränke, Treue, Eifersucht und Neid bringen nicht nur die Antike zum Glühen, sondern imprägnieren „Die letzten Tage von Pompeji“ zugleich mit dem Aroma des frühen Viktorianismus – so dass dieser Roman nicht nur von historischen Dingen erzählt, sondern selbst als Produkt vergangener Zeiten, als interessantes Gebilde der Geschichte erscheint. Es ist schwer, sich vorzustellen, dass die Liebe zum Kanalbau an diese Stelle rücken könnte.
THOMAS STEINFELD
June 05, 2005
Ancient world: Pompeii by Alex Butterworth and Ray
Laurence
POMPEII: The Living City
by Alex Butterworth and Ray Laurence
Weidenfeld £20 pp354
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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.
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.
READ ON...
websites:
http://touritaly.org/pompeii/pompeii-main.htm
Virtual tour of Pompeii
Saturday 03 September 2005
Under the volcano again
Reviewed by Jane Gardam
Pompeii: A Novel
Pompeii: The Living City
In the Shadow of Vesuvius
In 2003, Robert Harris published Pompeii: A Novel, which for vitality and entertainment and the atmosphere of the decadent Roman world around the Bay of Naples in the first century AD can hardly be beaten. The great eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 and the destruction of the playground city of Pompeii is made even more cataclysmic by Harris’s angle on it. Not until nearly the end of the book does he describe the mushroom cloud, the blood-red lightning, the choking ash four feet deep, the terrifying withdrawal of the sea, the darkness and the final silence.
Harris concentrates on the early warnings, the disappearance of the drinking water, the drying up of the sparkling fountains, the mysterious blockage of the Matrix, one of the wonders of the Roman world that carried the water of life across Italy. The mountain watches as it had watched Hercules in mythical times trying to drive back the giants who had wracked the place with fire.
Vesuvius is an old mountain. But it is the young scientist, a water-engineer, who comes out of the horrors better than the locals: the sleazy politicians, epicureans and con-men who mostly lose their heads, search for scapegoats, throw the innocents to be eaten alive in a tank of great eels. A few intellectuals — Pliny the Elder, who was dying of obesity anyway — some women and the odd slave die well and bravely. Some even survive. It is a full and first-rate yarn.
Harris, however, acknowledges on the jacket of a new Vesuvius book, Pompeii: The Living City, by an archaeologist and an art historian and dramatist, that here is a different thing. It is a very detailed narrative, mixture of historical fact and patches of italicised fiction, and Harris wishes that it had been available when he wrote his novel. Pompeii is seen not through the eyes of a foreign water-engineer engrossed in his profession but those of Decimus Lucretius Valens, an historical character, Prefect of the Camps in Egypt and destined for political power.
We first meet him sitting silent on the steps of the ruined, ancient statue of King Memnon, where he has just heard of the destruction of Pompeii, his home. The epigraph of this heavily researched but readable book, which is also splendidly illustrated, is a graffito found 1,700 years later in the 18th-century revelation of the shrouded city: ‘Nothing can last for ever.’
A slighter book — and three books so committed to Vesuvius published so near together is slightly unnerving, for the magma is building! — is Dr Jordan Lancaster’s In the Shadow of Vesuvius. This is a study not only of Pompeii but also of the whole Golfo di Napoli, which she feels to be her spiritual home. She describes a landscape and seascape that for centuries have been used to extinction and rebirth; a city of Naples that was once the intellectual capital of the classical world and then became a byword for vice and squalor. She is as interested in Naples as in Pompeii and its bare promontory that stood for centuries, mysteriously called ‘The City’.
She takes us through from Hercules and Odysseus (who stood firm against the Neapolitan Sirens), Poseidon, god of the sea who dwelt at Baiae, to Virgil who wrote The Aeneid in Naples and eventually to Spike Milligan, a young gunner in the second world war, about to make the push up Italy. ‘Cor! Naples, eh?... According to the brochure, venereal disease walks the streets of Naples and you can catch it by shaking the hand of a priest!’
Two million tourists now walk through the ruins of Pompeii each year. There are many complaints about its faded buildings and administration. It seems there is a mass of archaeological work not even started. ‘Pompeii contains probably the greatest density of data of any archaeological site in the world’ (Butterworth). It is 200 years since the city was first unveiled in ‘luminous colours’ and ‘dazzling pigments’ and Goethe and Mozart and Stendhal rushed to see them (20 years later Mozart wrote The Magic Flute). But then, as now and in the first century (according to the wall paintings), vines and flowers and fruit were planted far up the fickle slopes of the mountain. The hectic colours and the hedonism in the shadow of Vesuvius must have been rather like San Francisco today, standing on its similar time-bomb.
Of the three books, I’d take Lancaster as a handbook, Pompeii: The Living City for the plane and to finish at home. Harris I would gallop through on the Isle of Capri, saying, ‘Cor! Naples, eh?’