The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found PDF by Mary Beard: The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found ISBN: # Date: 2010-04-30 Description: PDF-b4a8f Pompeii is the most famous archaeological site in the world, visited by more than two million people each year. The Fires of Vesuvius lays out decades of specialist debate in clear, reader-friendly prose.”―Andrew Curry, Wilson Quarterly “In The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found Mary Beard cheerfully dismantles as many assumptions about what we are looking at in the city’s remains as she constructs hypotheses. She shows conclusively that.
In 79 CE, Vulcan pounded his forge beneath Vesuvius a little too harshly, and fiery destruction was rained down on several communities in its wake. Bad for the people living there, but good for us: Towns like Pompeii have yielded innumerable archaeological treasures about life in Roman towns in the first century. In Fires of Vesuvius, Mary Beard lends the latest voice of classical inquiry into this subject, furnishing a cautionary and skeptical account of the material remains of Pompeii and what we can conclude from them. Mary Beard is the chair of classics at Cambridge University. She has published numerous books on the classical world, as well as many widely read articles, and maintains a lively blog. Ms. Beard should need no further introduction, as she is one of the most recognizable of modern classical scholars. The author states we simultaneously know much and very little about Pompeii. By that she means there is a considerable amount of material evidence, but a lack of certitude as to its proper interpretation. Much has been written about Pompeii by various authors boldly asserting their pet theories. Beard seems to delight in annihilating their overly presumptuous conclusions. 'When it comes to reconstructing the everyday life of an ancient, it matters a very great deal exactly where your evidence is found,' she asserts. Case in point: if you see some graffiti extolling the sexual virility of gladiators, you might conclude it came from females with first hand satisfactory encounters. However, if said graffiti is located inside the gladiator barracks itself, one then wonders if it is nothing more than typical male locker room posturing. Another example: Widespread graffiti throughout the city may be in indication of levels of literacy among the broader population. But if much of the graffiti occurs on well-to-do homes, and is found at a level of height concurrent with an adolescent, one can just as well conclude much graffiti was the result of upper class youths who had become bored with their studies. This kind of insight into location and context occurs continuously throughout the works and is food for thought. After an introduction recounting the events surrounding the volcanic explosion of Vesuvius, the work is divided into nine chapters which explore different areas of Pompeian life. While these chapters occasionally reference each other, for the most part they can be read out of order depending on your topical proclivities. Chapter one recounts Pompeii's colorful history. Archaeological traces point to a past stretching as far back as the sixth century BCE, when Oscans, Greeks and Etruscans competed for power in the region of Campagnia. From there it fell under Samnite influence, before finally coming into the Roman orbit in the early third century BCE. It participated in the Social War in 91 BCE, and afterwards officially became a Roman colony under Sulla, who dedicated it to his patron god Venus. After the eruption, it passed into history. It became a tourist attraction to European dignitaries in the 18th century. Allied bombs damaged parts of the city in 1943, and surprisingly some of what modern tourists see has been reconstructed from wartime rubble. Pompeii, despite some assertions that it was a backwater, seems to have fully participated in the economic and political life of the empire. There are many inscriptions in Greek, and at least one in Hebrew (along with remains of kosher fish sauce). A figurine of a Hindu goddess has also been discovered. However, Beard cautions us that Pompeii is not a snapshot of a Roman town frozen in time from the eruption. For one thing, the town had been damaged by an earthquake several years before the eruption, and it may have never fully recovered from the incident. For another thing, in the days leading up to eruption there would have been tremors and other portends, and some of the populace probably had already evacuated by the time the pumice hit. In the days after the eruption, it's clear that looters and homeowners returned to the city to dig out their property and remove what valuables they could. The next four chapters discuss the lay of the town and its streets, housing and family life, painting and decoration, and professions. After that, successive chapters explore local politics, food, sexuality, bathing, entertainment, and religion. What emerges is a lively attempt to recreate the daily life of this damaged town without promoting speculation as fact. Given the detail and the analytical thought behind it, this book is not a fast read. It is first and foremost a scholarly work using archaeological methodology. However, Beard writes with a prose that is vivacious without being condescending. The interested general reader should have no problem understanding this fascinating study, provided they are willing to digest the copious detail. Splinter cell blacklist dlc plans. To further aid the reader there is a map of the city, various illustrations and color photographs, and a bibliography for further study. In short, this is a recommended work for getting the record straight on Pompeii. In contrast to smarmy tour guides and too-confident scholars, Beard lets us know when we can't draw unfounded conclusions about life in Pompeii before Vesuvius - which, unfortunately, is all too often.
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[Chapter titles are listed at the end of the review.]
Mary Beard’s wonderfully engaging book about Pompeii is the answer to what to read before one’s first visit to the site or what to assign one’s students to interest them in the breadth of fields that pertain to the study of antiquity. The “Introduction” is a fine survey of what we know today about ancient Pompeii, and it is guaranteed to draw the attention of general readers — the imprint of a breast, burnt loaves of bread in ovens, paint-pots and buckets of plaster left behind on a scaffold, and a tethered guard dog that failed to escape. Skeletons reveal infectious diseases, spinal disorders, and tartar on everyone’s teeth, a record of ubiquitous bad breath in ancient Pompeii. Beard explains terms and the names of gates, streets, and houses, as well as why numbers were eventually assigned to houses. She gives dates of excavation, linking these to Pompeii’s entry into the world of tourism and popular culture, reminding the reader that the city has not always been what it is now.1
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Beard presents questions, and notes conflicting viewpoints about the answers. For example:did Pompeii decline as a result of a social revolution that occurred after the earthquake of 62? Why would the town have been under repair for nearly 20 years? Did earthquakes continue during that time? Didn’t the coastline shift, as it did at Herculaneum? She also points out how much we know about Pompeii from archaeological and epigraphical evidence, and how much of that evidence has been lost through 18th-century digging, tourism, the Allied bombing in 1943, and general neglect.
In the first chapter, “Living in an Old City,” Beard focuses on the history of Pompeii, particularly in the phases preceding that of the AD 79 destruction. Campania had strong Etruscan and Greek undertones from the 6th century BC onwards, and the region wasmulti-lingual , to judge from evidence like a Latin message written in Greek letters (p. 11). Pompeii and its neighbors were allies of Rome by the early 3rd century BC. After Mummius defeated Corinth in 146 BC, he gave Pompeii some kind of trophy, on whose base was an inscription in Oscan, the native pre-Roman language of the region.2 The oldest part of the walled city is in the southwest, and eventually some grand houses were built along the western wall, commanding fine views of the sea. An interior house-wall incorporates an Etruscan column from a 6th-century-BC sanctuary; elsewhere, 2nd-century Etruscan terracotta reliefs from a sanctuary were reused as decoration in a garden wall. The 9,700-square-foot House of the Faun, at least 200 years old in AD 79, had a mosaic floor showing a scene from Greek history: Alexander the Great defeating Darius. Beard does not mention that at the bottom of the tumultuous scene of fleeing and dying Persians were 3 charming Nilotic scenes, rarely remarked upon because all the figured mosaics from this house were removed from the floors and installed on walls in the Naples Archaeological Museum.3 And in the architecture and decoration of its Forum and public buildings, Pompeii is clearly tied to Rome.
In “Street Life” (ch. 2) Beard observes that beneath the romance of rediscovered Pompeii lies a dirty city that produced some 6,500,000 kilos (14,300,000 pounds) of human feces and urine each year. One graffito warned passersby to “keep it in till you’ve passed this spot” (p. 56). Beard describes the streets, the shop signs (20 food and drink outlets within 600 meters [650 yards]) of each other, ads, noises (all night long), smells, public fountains (there were 40 of them, and few lived more than 80 meters [260 feet] from a fountain). She even notes a study of one-way streets in Pompeii. Beard brings alive the people, the markets, the colors, and the “children at their lessons, beggars plying for cash, traders and hucksters of all kinds, or local officials at their business” (p. 77). “All those statues” get only half a dozen lines of text (p. 77-8, 186), but these too deserve treatment equal to that given in these pages to so many other aspects of ancient Pompeii.
Bulwer-Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii (1834), a reconstruction of the House of the Tragic Poet, and recollections of the Satyrica by Petronius vividly introduce “House and Home” (ch. 3), bringing to life the entrance, the atrium, the food, and the houses themselves. Beard summarizes the evidence for the types of houses, which, like today’s houses, have “a certain predictability to their layout” (p. 88). She includes rentals, dining, sleeping, and furniture, as well as images in a lararium, lamps, gardens, water, toilets, bone and bronze fittings for chests, and items that were in a chest at the time of the eruption. But courtyard and garden décor, for which there is so much evidence at Pompeii, is in need of greater emphasis.
In “Painting and Decorating” (ch. 4), Beard examines an unfinished room in the so-called House of the Painters at Work, then the black, white, blue, yellow, red, green, and orange paints found in the room, and the wide range of styles, subjects, programs, and decorative designs and patterns that have been found on the walls and columns of Pompeian houses. Criticizing the imposition of chronological development in the so-called Four Styles, Beard warns of the similarities among styles, the few survivals of the First and Second Styles, and touches upon the link between a room’s use and its wall decoration. Some wall paintings enhance our understanding of ancient mythology; others give the illusion of a view; and still others are repeated enough times (some in both painting and mosaic) that they must evoke “well-known and ‘quotable’ masterpieces” (p. 144). Beard intersperses her narrative with remarks about modern impact and our incomplete perception of paintings cut out of walls and framed in the 18th century. She reminds us that the excellent appearance of the paintings in the Villa of the Mysteries are the result of “aggressive restoration” (p. 133) in 1909.
Beard humorously introduces “Earning a Living: Baker, Banker and Garum Maker” (ch. 5) by explaining how the home of a garum producer is identified by self-promoting mosaics in the atrium of his house. Beard covers grapes, olives, cereal crops, production, storage, slaves, farming, sheep, a cattle market, regulation of weights and measures, and light industry, but not much about the local ports or about foreign trade. There was, after all, a thriving trade in marble from Greece, and the skills of Greek artisans around the Bay of Naples were in great demand. Canon ic d800 driver windows 7 64 bit. To make her points, Beard enlists a wide range of archaeological material, such as finds from the Villa Regina near Boscoreale,4 and the tools and illustrations of dozens of crafts and trades found in the excavation of Pompeii. Her evidence ranges from painted shop signs, advertisements, and graffiti to carved memorials for a architect, a baker, and a pig-keeper. In the kitchen of a bakery (known as the House of the Chaste Lovers), a bird and a boar were cooking at the time of the eruption, a large decorated dining room probably served as a restaurant, and a stable beside the kitchen housed the delivery crew of five horses and donkeys that were fed oats and broadbeans.
“Who Ran the City?” (ch. 6) Here Beard tells a fascinating tale of election posters, precincts, and town council-members. There were probably about 2500 male voters — no slaves, women, or children. The local government owned and rented out properties. Elected officials decreed the erection of public statues, folowing the rules that”old money always counted” (p. 204), and “public office of any sort entailed public generosity” (p. 212). It is particularly interesting that the so-called Building of Eumachia, which borrows many decorative details from important buildings in Rome, was sponsored by a local priestess.
“The Pleasures of the Body: Food, Wine, Sex and Baths” (ch. 7) begins with a description of a cage for a dormouse, but Beard gives no citations for this subject, which fascinated a number of visitors to the Royal Museum at Portici, including J. J. Winckelmann.5 Trimalchio’s feast appears again, along with the silver service from the House of the Menander, and the mechanics of an actual meal. Pompeian grocery lists included bread, oil, wine, sausage, lard, cheese, beets, cabbage, mustard, mint, salt, onions, leeks, whitebait, pork, and maybe beef. Apparently there were 200 bars and restaurants in Pompeii, some of which were perhaps grocery stores. Graffiti provide good evidence for bars and brothels, but even so we cannot tell whether there were one or 35 brothels in Pompeii, and whether some of them were simply bars. Public baths too receive interesting archaeological and literary coverage, including a remark by Celsus, who lived at the same time as Tiberius, to the effect that baths were dangerously dirty for people with infections (p. 247).
Noting in “Fun and Games” (ch. 8) that the two permanent theaters in Pompeii seated 5,000 and 2,000, Beard asks whether the extensive theatrical iconography in wall painting meant that “the theatre provided a model for the whole spectacle of Pompeian wall-painting” (p. 255). Much entertainment in Pompeii had to do with the theater, including mime and pantomime with male and female actors. There are two portraits in the city of a famous actor, Caius Norbanus Sorex. 20,000 people might attend an event in the amphitheater, and the gladiatorial regalia suggest magnificent processions of the short-lived combatants.
“A City Full of Gods” (ch. 9) promises more than it delivers, because it contains little about the vast array of privately owned statuary in Pompeii. Although the chapter begins with a reference to the archaizing bronze statue of Apollo from the House of Julius Polybius, Beard does not mention that the statue was not simply a work of art, but that it held a tray.6 Beard covers other categories — gods shown in wall paintings, statuettes from lararia, images of gods that were brought home from abroad, and a colossal head of Jupiter from the Temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva in the Forum. Was the ivory figurine of Lakshmi a souvenir brought home after a long journey? This chapter, which could contain a far wider array of topics and evidence, seems somehow undirected, though there is a very interesting section on the Temple of Isis, in which Beard covers its probable function, its rediscovery, and the Roman Isis-cult.
“Epilogue: City of the Dead” is too short, considering the extensive cemetery outside the Herculaneum Gate, its wide range of inhabitants, and the impact of that cemetery upon early tourists. “Making a Visit,” a 3-page chapter, might have been eliminated, as first-time visitors will be far better served by one of the guidebooks produced by the Soprintendenza and available in the museum shop at the entrance to the site.7 Thorough explanations of terms and names that occur in the text obviate the need for a glossary. Unfortunately, there is no general bibliography, and readers who have been intrigued by a topic or a monument mentioned in the text may be disappointed not to find footnotes or endnotes, only a brief selection of Further Readings for each chapter.
Beard suggests answers to the questions that students always ask and that sometimes stymie their professors. What was the population of Pompeii? Estimates range from 6,400 to 30,000. Beard suggests that it was around 12,000, along with 24,000 additional inhabitants in the area. How many people died? Maybe 2000, but only about 1100 of them have been found, and some bones may have been misidentified early on as animals rather than children (p. 10). When was Pompeii rediscovered? In Antiquity it wasn’t lost: former inhabitants and looters returned soon after the eruption to see what they could salvage. How far was the city from Rome? 240 km (144 mi.). Were Pompeians literate? More than 10,000 texts have been found in Pompeii, from loan agreements to wine labels, in Latin, Greek, Oscan, and even Hebrew; thus many people had to be able to read to do things like choose their wine and do their jobs. What was money worth? Wine cost 1 to 4 asses (copper coins: per glass or bottle isn’t clear). Travelers and university students alike will thoroughly enjoy the many approaches to ancient Pompeii that Mary Beard presents here with clarity, enthusiasm, and humor.
Table of Contents Introduction Living in an Old City Street Life House and Home Painting and Decorating Earning a Living: Baker, Banker and Garum Maker Who Ran the City? Fun and Games A City Full of Gods Epilogue: City of the Dead Making a Visit
Notes
1. For a thorough history of the excavations and the impact of Pompeii upon the modern world, see Alison E. Cooley, Pompeii, London: Duckworth Archaeological Histories, 2003.
2. For such dedications, see Margaret Miles, Art as Plunder: The Ancient Origins of Debate about Art as Cultural Property, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
The Fires Of Vesuvius Pompeii Lost And Found Pdf 2017
3. See especially Stefano De Caro, I mosaici la casa del fauno, Naples: Soprintendenza Archeologica di Napoli e Caserta, 2001. Studies of mosaics and of the House of the Faun are not given in Further Reading for ch. 1.
The Fires Of Vesuvius Pompeii Lost And Found Pdf File
4. The Antiquarium at Boscoreale, right beside the farm known as the Villa Regina, provides excellent illustration of the locale and its economy: see Grete Stefani, Uomo e ambiente nel territorio vesuviano: Guida all’Antiquarium di Boscoreale, Pompeii: Edizioni Marius, (2003).
5. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Sendschreiben von den herculanischen Entdeckungen, Dresden 1762, p. 57.
6. For a photograph of the statue and its tray being excavated in 1977 in the triclinium of the House of Julius Polybius, and for bibliography, see Carol C. Mattusch, Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture Around the Bay of Naples, Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2008, pp. 141-143.
The Fires Of Vesuvius Pompeii Lost And Found Pdf Full
7. See, for example, Pier Giovanni Guzzo and Antonio d’Ambrosio, Pompeii, Naples: Electa and “L’Erma” di Bretschneider, 1998, and Antonio d’Ambrosio, ed., Discovering Pompeii, Milan: Electa, 1998.