Pompeii in Mexico

Sometimes “the penny drops” just when you are not expecting it. While I have been at the Getty, apart from tidying up the final stages of my Triumph book (and no, I still haven’t quite finished the proofs), I’ve been getting down to the next thing. As I've mentioned before, this is a book on Pompeii.

The project is a simple one: to use Pompeii to capture something about life in the ancient city. Books on daily life in the Roman world, with one or two honourable exceptions, tend to be disappointing (“Romans rose early and took a light breakfast” – you know the kind of thing). So why not try to go in through the one city we know best?

Besides there is a huge amount of specialised new work on Pompeii (like the ruts I posted about earlier) that hasn’t much impacted on books for a wider audience. They tend to make more of the vulcanology and its horrors (“their brains boiled”) than life pre-eruption. In my book, Vesuvius will definitely not have the starring role.

The problem I have is not getting together some marvellously evocative material. I had, for example, no idea that a monkey’s skeleton had been found among the bones at Pompeii. And I’m still curious about those ruts. The problem is being able simply to picture the street scene. I haven’t been able to close my eyes and conjure up the living city.

Until I went to Mexico.

As we drove from the airport on the first day through the backstreets of Oaxaca, I said straightaway: “This is Pompeii”. There were narrow, paved main(ish) roads – intersected by unpaved, dirt-track cross-streets. Low-rise shops and workshops, with wide doorways, line the streets; sometimes they have an upper storey, sometimes not. Every now and then, a larger and grander residential property emerged, with an impressive portal but an otherwise off-putting blank exterior. On the more populous streets, there were political slogans too – not on posters or bills, but painted directly on the walls by obviously professional sign writers (and there were a good few old ones, which had clearly been painted over). Just like those Pompeian “electoral dipinti”.

When we got to the ex-village, now suburb, where we were staying, it was much the same. Grand houses, with peristyle gardens, lurking behind curtain walls, cheek by jowl with the local internet café or hardware store. The husband aptly compared our hotel to the House of the Faun.

The point, I reflected, was not that this place looked like Pompeii might have done. It was more that it seemed to share with the ancient world an idea of what (to put it in the jargon) “urban space” was for, and the acceptable collocations between poverty and wealth, luxury and squalor. In London (or Los Angeles), the very rich tend not to live next to hardware stores.

The irony was, I discovered, that one of the painted wall-slogans had already made a link to the Roman world. Not far from the hotel was the local library, with its name and an improving message painted on its façade. That message ran (in Spanish):

“Science and letters are the nourishment of youth and the diversion of old age”.

It’s a quote from Cicero’s speech Pro Archia (the defence of a poet): haec studia adulescentiam alunt, senectutem oblectant.

Comments

[anthony alcock]

I've just seen on my copy of Archaeogate Newsletter that 10 houses in Pompeii are open to the public until Oct. 31st 2007.

[Tony Francis]

The longest existing time span for the existence of DNA in an unchanged state is 3.6 billion years. It is found in thermophilic bacteria. These were discovered in the hot-springs of Yellowstone Park. Some of these live and thrive in water heated beyond boiling. They produce Vitamin B 12 (cyanocobalamin), with a twist. Other bacteria produce this vitamin, as well. The thermophilic bacteria produce Vitamin B 12 with one methyl group out of place. It is assumed this was the original form of B 12, and somewhere in the dim past, there was a mutation, which led all subsequent bacteria to produce the molecule with the methyl group in the wrong place. This latter molecule is the one our protein has been structured to accept. Recent papers report that B 12 deficiency contributes to Alzheimer's disease. Predicting protein folding seems a simple problem. After all, there are only 20 or so amino acids, and the forces in them are calculable. But this is another mathematical problem which cannot be solved, even with computers (along with the n-body problem, p = np, travelling saleman). B 12 is based on the porphyrin ring, which is the building block of hemoglobin, myoglobin and chlorophyll. Amino acids are ubiquitous, being found in outer space, albeit in plasma form. Thermophilic bacteria exist in compost piles, and are what makes them hot.

[Tony Francis]

I gave an incorrect title for Jane Jacobs book last night. It should have been "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" (1961). This has been listed by some as one of the 100 greatest books of the 20th century. (This should insure that this is a totally boring and unreadable book. But it is readable.) Other books by her are: "The Economy of Cities" (1969); "Cities and the Wealth of Nations" (1984); "The Dark Age Ahead" (2004). This last book is critical of the US and Canada because people increasingly choose consumerism over family welfare, consumption over fertility. Higher education is more interested in credentials than providing a quality education. She believes it is a mistake to consider economics a science, and to base public policy on its conclusions; and bad government which panders to deep pocket special interest groups at the expense of the governed. Her thought has been especially influential in Canada.

[anthony alcock]

Generally speaking, there seem to be two approaches to writing about the past: one takes the facts as it starting point and adds a dose of fiction to make the product palatable; the other takes fiction as its starting point and adds facts to make its product believable. It seems ultimately to depend on the publisher.

[Tony Francis]

So-called urban sprawl occurred in the US after WW II. Some of this was "white flight" to avoid the increasing black population in cities. Prior to WW II, the urban center was the place where all sorts of consumer items were purchased. The growth of the automobile industry, highways, and the desire for a house with a large yard spawned the present situation. In the process, the downtown was abandoned, replaced by the suburban mall. It is why the US uses so much gasoline. An interesting book is Jane Jacobs "The Death and Birth of the American City". She was in opposition to the influential Robert Moses, the father of post war "urban planning". Under his direction, New York City was made "car friendly", meaning highways were placed through old traditional neighborhoods. He is blamed for the destruction of Penn Station in NYC and the ruining of the South Bronx. This led to a public outcry when Grand Central Station in NYC was scheduled to be demolished. It went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled that "historic buildings" could be preserved,even if the owner wanted to tear them down. Jackie Kennedy gave a high profile to the protest. The Federal Courts got involved in "forced busing" to integrate suburban "mostly white schools". It was never a popular program with whites or blacks, since children spent 3-4 hours a day on a bus. It destroyed the "local school". The program continues 35 years after it was ordered. It is archaic, since there are blacks (and all other ethnic groups) in virtually every neighborhood. Jane Jacobs led a movement to force the closing of the Spadina Expressway in Toronto.

[anthony alcock]

I should imagine the quote is or is based on a proverbial utterance of some sort.
The only country in the Near East familiar to me is Egypt, and the juxtaposition of poverty and wealth is not really so unfamiliar there. I think you find things like that at Amarna, but I'm not sure, since I don't have much to do with archaeology. It's probably quite a convenient arrangement for those who live in big houses to have the skivvies living close by.

[Oliver Nicholson]

Did you find the Motel of the Mysteries ? OPN

[Tony Francis]

Mary, how wonderful of you to notice the resemblence of this Mexican town to Pompeii. It raises the question: how persistent is culture? In this case, it is in the subtlety of urban planning. I am told that the villas of the rich (surrounded by walls with barbed wire and fragmented glass) are intermixed with poverty through out South America. After all, it is called "Latin America". This would never occur in the Northern European culture of North America, where wealth and abundance segregates itself. You are the first person to notice this. It is said that Languadoc was the most Roman of the non-Italian provinces. But Spain couldn't have been far behind. Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius and Theodosius I are all said to have spoken Latin with a Spanish accent. (This is disputed in the case of Hadrian.) So why wouldn't the cities in Mexico be built with the zoning sense of ancient Rome? But who could have predicted it? This reminds me that when the ice man was found in the Alps, he had a cape weaved of grass that was identical to traditional capes worn by Tyroleans until the 20th century. Who would have guessed this? It reminds me of Stephen Gould's theory of evolution: there is rapid change, then millions or even billions of years with no change in DNA structure. Clearly, this occurs with culture. Unfortunately, it is difficult to study it. But it is a worthwhile endeavor, one we should encourage.

[Robert Logan]

Your post was very interesting to me, as a (UK-born) public librarian in Texas (where there is a large population of Mexican origin). Public library coverage in Mexico is far from universal, so it was encouraging to see the picture of the branch library in Oaxaca. The City of Oaxaca’s website lists the library in the photo, but also makes clear that the services offered there do not yet compare to what library users here (or in the UK) expect.

Btw, your description of the outer edge of Oaxaca reminded me strongly of Masaya in Nicaragua, which I used to know well. I am sure you are right in suggesting that the urban environment of traditional Latin American cities must resemble that of the cities of the Roman world.

The Cicero quote is the icing on the cake!