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. But Pompeii still does not give up its secrets quite as easily as it may seem. 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. At the Suburban Baths we go from communal bathing to hygiene to erotica. The Fires of Vesuvius lays out decades of specialist debate in clear, reader-friendly prose. She resurrects the Temple of Isis as a testament to ancient multiculturalism. 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 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. In The Fires of Vesuvius, acclaimed historian Mary Beard makes sense of the remains. But the eruptions are only part of the story. Destroyed by Vesuvius in 79 CE, the ruins of Pompeii offer the best evidence we have of life in the Roman Empire. Yet it is also one of the most puzzling, with an intriguing and sometimes violent history. Even the experts don’t know why.Pompeii is the most famous archaeological site in the world, visited by more than two million people each year. Some of the city’s major buildings stood in ruins before the eruption. There are also perplexing signs that on that day Pompeii was already a city under stress. (79 BC is the accepted date but this is far from certain). She writes of a populace who voted, patronized brothels and bars, munched on the fast food of their time, and enjoyed going to the theater,īut as vivid and detailed a depiction as Beard is able to provide, what is equally fascinating about Pompeii is how much we do not know.Įverything, even the actual date of the eruption that buried the city, is unclear. She describes a mid-size city, one that was provincial yet highly culturally diverse, a hive of busy traffic, in-your-face advertising, and noisy commerce. In The Fires of Vesuvius, Cambridge University classics professor Mary Beard restores Pompeii in all its bustling everydayness. Of those who escaped we know little or nothing. About 2,000 (of an estimated population of up to 30,000) did not. To read about Pompeii is to be disconcertingly reminded of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 – so many people perished while performing such ordinary tasks (shopping, painting walls, baking bread).
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