Lost Cities, Enigmatic Lives

Back writing at last.  I seem to have a ridiculous amount of travel lined up between now and Christmas, some of it through choice but a lot work related.   At least it’s a bit more varied than the usual shuttle to Brussels, with Vilnius and Milan (or at least Milan airport…) on the agenda.

Before I went off on the holiday to Italy which gave rise to the photos on my Flickr account, I went to see the British Museum’s exhibition on Pompeii and Herculaneum.  This was wonderful; sadly it’s over now.   I first encountered the buried cities of Vesuvius many, many years ago as part of a family holiday and I’ve never forgotten the impact Pompeii made on me- a place where people actually lived once and where their presence seemed very real.   The British Museum exhibition recaptured that sense of intimacy with the past rather brilliantly.

At times one has a sense that after years of increasingly sophisticated archaeological study we actually know rather less about the two towns than we did, say, a hundred years ago.   Take the date they were wiped out.  For centuries it was an unchallengeable certainty that this was 24 August 79 AD because that was the date apparently given in the earliest surviving manuscript of the letters of Pliny the Younger, an eye witness whose uncle died while trying to stage a rescue operation.   Admittedly other dates popped up in other manuscripts, but they were assumed to be errors.  In the past few years, however, a number of factors (the relatively heavy clothes people were wearing, heating braziers deployed in rooms, the fruit and vegetable remains analysed) have led to a reassessment.   While the traditional August date hasn’t quite been abandoned- nothing has come to light which makes it absolutely impossible- the tendency now is to slide the date back later in the year, towards October or even a bit later. 

Or consider the question of what sort of state the towns were in when the volcano blew.   For the past half century or so it has been received wisdom that Pompeii was in deep trouble.  There had been a major earthquake in 62 (or possibly 63) and, the argument ran, the place never really recovered- especially when one took account of the upheavals of the wars which followed the overthrow of the Emperor Nero and the fact that members of the Neronian establishment ha links with the region (his notorious second wife Poppea came from a local family).   The clear evidence of industrial or artisanal activity on the ground floors of even some of the grandest houses was taken as evidence of downward social mobility, a town deserted by its elites and facing deep social problems.   This view was particularly associated with Amadeo Maiuri, who was superintendant of both sites for some forty years.  Given that his tenure ran from the early 1920’s to the 1960’s, one would like to know more about him.  It’s very tempting to suggest that, whatever his technical abilities as an archaeologist, he must have been a consummate time server to survive the upheavals of Italian history in that period.   He must have been able to give a convincing enough show of loyalty to the Fascist regime or he’d never have got the job- classical archaeology was an affair of state in a regime which presented itself as the heir to the empire of the Caesars.  How far his political views- and his personal experience of an Italy wracked with war and social upheavals which often did a very bad job of coping with natural disasters- shaped his interpretations can only be guessed at.  

The current view, based mostly on looking at the same evidence but with a few more high-tech tricks to help in its interpretation, is that he was totally wrong.   Pompeii on the eve of the eruption may still have been a building site but it wasn’t a ghost town or a squatter camp.   Public buildings has been largely repaired (with major kudos being awarded by the town council to the local citizens who chipped in to pay for the work) and houses were being redecorated- in one case the painters were actually in mid-job when they had to flee, giving valuable information on how Roman house painters organised a major project.    Most properties appear to have been occupied.   There was nothing at all strange or aberrant about having business premises inserted into the houses of the rich- they were probably a nice little earner and a good way of multiplying the patronage which mattered so much to the Roman elites.   Indeed in some cases the rich house owner might be the proprietor of the business- like Terentius Neo the baker who can be seen with his wife here.

Obviously there are no end of enigmas which may never be resolved.   To take one example, Pompeii is covered with graffiti.  Much relates to the annual electoral cycle (needless to say there’s much debate over how far the elections were genuinely hotly contested affairs or basically charades fixed by the local elites- and the presence of electoral propaganda on the walls isn’t a knock out blow in favour of the former view; there were lots of election posters in the Soviet Union….).  Other scrawlings are in the lonely hearts category- or make insulting suggestions about the price of the local barmaid’s virtue.  It’s a wonderful source. The successive overpaintings with different names give a chronology of who was running the town and provide linkages to people who can be identified in other ways (like Terentius Neo, whose activity in local politics can be detected from graffiti).   They suggest that literacy levels were pretty high- even that a certain superficial familiarity with literary classics went well down the social scale (tellingly the quotes from Virgil tend to be the same ones, the Roman equivalent of “To be or not to be”…).   By contrast Herculaneum has next to no graffiti.   As far as is known, the political structures of the two towns were identical- Herculaneum would have had annual elections too.   Is this confirmation that (as some other evidence hints) Herculaneum, a much smaller town (maybe 5,000 inhabitants as against 15,000 in Pompeii) was a rather more select sort of place where they collected the rubbish better and threw graffiti scribblers to the lions?   A result of more subtle social differences- Herculaneum also seems to have had a very high percentage of ex-slaves among its population?   It remains a puzzle.

The exhibition was organised loosely round the layout of one of the grander houses in Pompeii, with artefacts related to the activities which would have taken place in a given space grouped there (food preparation in the kitchen, for instance, or sleeping/intimate family life/sex in the bedroom).   This worked pretty well- for once, despite the numbers going to the show it didn’t end up hopelessly crowded in places.   It also served to bring the reality of daily life very close to see pieces of furniture (mostly from Herculaneum, where the physics of the pyroclastic flow which buried the town were just right to preserve wooden items in a slightly charred but intact state) which didn’t look so very far removed from what one can buy at Ikea or jewellery which I’m sure my lovely friends would be very happy to wear.   They might find the cosmetics a bit more alarming, though- I could just about imagine moisturisers based on crushed beans popping up in Lush or Bodyshop but I don’t think lead based foundation creams would find much of a market.  

The approach also brought certain aspects of Roman life into sharper focus.   I was aware that the fish sauce called garum (a kind of remote cousin to Worcester Sauce or Vietnamese Namh Plah) was important in Roman cuisine but hadn’t realised just how central it was to daily life- it ranked just below bread and wine as a staple item.  Fortunes could be made from making and trading it; one of the grandest properties in the region belonged to a man who had made his pile in the smelly business of garum manufacture.  There was even a market for kosher garum, a jar of which was on display.   It was intriguing to encounter a little ceramic jar in which dormice were kept while they were fattened up for the pot- after years of debate it is now accepted that Romans did indeed eat dormice as literary sources suggest.   Perhaps the most striking exhibit in the food section, though, was an intact, if blackened, loaf identical to ones shown in frescoes (round, with markings suggesting it would normally be broken up into eight slices).   

Not dissimilar loaves can still be seen on sale in modern bakeries- though hopefully these won’t have the grit content to be found in Roman loaves (due to millstone grit getting into the flour) which in the long run ruined Roman teeth.  Overall, though, evidence from one of the sewers in Herculaneum suggests that the population enjoyed a pretty healthy and varied diet with lots of fruit, nuts and fish products (the latter clearly shared with the cats…). 

On the other hand kitchens (where these existed- the less well off would at best have had a charcoal brazier to heat things up and there appears to have been a busy street food sector to supply that market) had a nasty habit of being in very close proximity to the privy (where that existed).  Contrary to certain stereotypes, Romans were not especially strong on personal hygiene.   Running water from the aqueduct, when it was piped into private properties rather than feeding the public fountains, was far more likely to be used for elaborate garden watering installations than to supply domestic washing facilities.  Chamber pots were the norm; privies existed but were pretty ghastly.  Only a few of the hyper-rich had full private bathing facilities and the much famed grand public baths were a good deal less hygienic than was implied when I was at school- water in the bathing pools was rarely changed and often filthy.   I suspect that Pompeii and Herculaneum would have smelled pretty rank to modern nostrils- especially as it’s not certain that the streets were cleaned very often either.  Pompeii may have had a one way system but the chances are that the street paving disappeared under horse and mule droppings for much of the year…..

Obviously there were elements of the exhibition one could quibble with.  It was inevitably weighted towards the life styles of the better off- the sort of folk who gave dinner parties, had loads of clients calling to pay respects every morning, lived in houses with lavish fresco or mosaic decorations and possessed gardens or at least wonderfully painted bowers depicting nature scenes

The only classic Roman multi-occupancy tenement building (familiar from other Roman cities like Ostia and the sort of place where the urban lower classes tended to live) which has been dug thus far is in Herculaneum.    There are however bits of Pompeii which appear to have been occupied by the less well off- and predictably they generate fewer interesting finds, though paintings in the show which appear to come from the décor of a tavern cast a sardonic eye on the propensity for the lower class Roman male to drink too much, gamble and get into fights.

One of the beauties of the exhibition and something which gave it a real emotional punch was a very clear sense of human contact with identifiable individuals across the centuries.  This came from artefacts like the portraits of Mr and Mrs Neo or the wonderful “warts and all” bust of Lucius Caecilius Iucundus, auctioneer and money lender (whose business records have also survived to give an added dimension).   

Perhaps strangely I found these more compelling and “human” than the examples of the famous casts of the dead from Pompeii included in the show, whose perfect capture of the sheer agony in which the individuals died left a slightly uncomfortable impression of being a spectator of another person’s ghastly end.    This strong “human interest” aspect does however carry its own dangers.  There is, for instance, a very strong temptation to see the inhabitants of Pompeii and Herculaneum as “just like us”.  On some levels this is clearly true, and at more than just the level of some cliché about “common humanity”.   They lived in a complex and sophisticated urban society, surrounded by artefacts which (as noted earlier) look remarkably like things one might find in one’s own home.  Aspects of their life look very familiar to 21^st century eyes- a notice from Herculaneum setting out precisely where one person’s property began and another’s ended in a shared dwelling suggested some very modern disputes..   It is all too easy to overlook just how very different aspects of these people’s society was from what a modern “western” audience would regard as the basic norms of civilised life- and how that must have affected the way they interacted with their surroundings.

I don’t suppose Roman attitudes to sexuality seem as strange now as they did a hundred years ago, though I suspect a modern visitor projected on to the streets of Pompeii a week or two before Vesuvius blew would have come to raise an eyebrow at the sheer omnipresence of depictions of male sexual organs on every imaginable surface (supposedly this had religious/ritual origins, though I wonder if that could be true in every case…..).   Some aspects of sexuality, however, can still bring one up short.  One of the more intriguing items in the exhibition was a statue of the god Pan engaged in sexual intercourse with a nanny goat.   Obviously Pan has the lower parts of a he-goat and as far as one could judge both parties were enjoying the experience- Pan was stroking his partner’s chin in an affectionate way.   When the statue was found in the 18^th century, it was immediately put under lock and key, only accessible to bona fide classical scholars and artists.   In the exhibition it appeared to arouse a kind of uneasy amusement amongst the visitors- and I’m not going to include a photo either here or on Flickr in case I get into trouble with the morals police……

Other aspects of Roman society might be more alienating.   The sheer amount of religious rital which was an absolutely routine part of daily life might seem a bit excessive- though the (intriguingly sexually ambiguous) folk below seem to be enjoying their Dionysiac rituals.

The exhibition skated rather lightly over the gladiatorial “barracks” on the edge of Pompeii even though it is clear from the graffiti that the shows staged there were a subject of considerable popular interest- indeed the only time Pompeii attracted contemporary notice before its destruction came in the 50’s when violent crowd confrontations with people from a neighbouring town at the amphitheatre left many dead and the authorities imposed a ten year ban on gladiatorial games in the town (the riot was commemorated in a wall painting, which was part of the show).   In other words, this was a society where many people paid good money to watch other human beings try to kill each other for sport.

The really big issue, though- so big that it becomes almost invisible at times- to my mind is slavery.  This was a world in which it was a simple unquestioned reality of life that one could buy and sell other human beings and ,as their owner, treat them pretty much as one chose (there were some legal constraints on extreme ill usage but they were pretty limited and largely ineffectual).  Slaves were literally everywhere in a Roman household of any size (slave ownership went well down the social scale)- dossed down on the floor of workshops and kitchens, serving dinner, working in the gardens, helping the lady of the house to dress- even in the bedroom when master and mistress were having sex, if the wall paintings are to be believed. 

It wouldn’t be fair to the exhibition or to the associated lavishly illustrated book (not exactly a catalogue, more of an interpretative study based on the artefacts in the show) to imply that slavery was ignored- it wasn’t.   One sensed however that the references to sexual abuse and other unpleasant aspects of slave societies were just a little bit pro forma.  There was rather more emphasis on the factors mitigating slave status- the absence of any clear cut racial element to Roman slavery (almost anybody could become a slave- even if most slaves in Pompeii or Herculaneum would probably have come from the fringes of the Empire), the inclusiveness of the Roman household, which included everybody living under the same roof, the right to build up private savings which could be used to buy freedom etc.  Above all there was a great deal of stress on the central role of ex-slaves- freedmen and women- in Roman society.  According to the book, they may have represented about a third of the population.   On this reading, Roman society was marked by considerable social mobility.  Other than a certain sniffishness about vulgar parvenus in elite-authored literature (think of Petronius’ Trimalchio) there was no entrenched social prejudice against ex-slaves and few if any legal restraints on what they could do in business terms.   Some became very rich, many became (in anachronistic terms) solidly middle class.   It was relatively easy to become a full Roman citizen- some of the papyrus work on specific cases survives in Herculaneum, whose citizen body seems to have contained a very high percentage of freedmen.   While freedmen could not stand for election to the town council, their sons could (and did).  There was also considerable stress on the strong, often affective, links between ex-masters and their former slaves, which could ramify over several generations.   Freedmen would for instance as a matter of course adopt their former master’s family name (meaning that over time it can become increasingly hard to separate their descendents from each other- and it was suggested that a Roman family would rather see its name live on amongst its ex-slaves than die out for lack of heirs).

I’m sure this is all very true and a necessary corrective to a view of slavery which universalises the norms of plantation slavery in the 18^th century West Indies or 19^th Century Deep South.   I couldn’t help feeling it was a little cosy at times.  Did no former slave ever resent having to adopt a whole new name for the rest of their life?  The social expectations on freedmen (and their wives and families) were burdensome, with lots of forelock-tugging to the ex-master and his heirs to go on top of a requirement to give them a slice of your profits.   How many of those who turned up to pay their respects on a virtually daily basis did so with glad faces but rebellious hearts?   We can never know, obviously.   These people are at once so very close to us and infinitely far away both in time and mental processes- and perhaps that was the ultimate message which I took from a wonderfully rich and informative exhibition.