10 things you need to know about Pompeii

OK – to celebrate my new book (officially out on 18th, sorry to repeat)… here’s my favourite facts and non-facts about Pompeii.

1. The inhabitants of the Roman town were all killed by the eruption of 79. Wrong. Just over 1000 bodies have been discovered – out of a population of perhaps 12,000. Most of them made it to safety.

2. The city lay undisturbed from the day Vesuvius erupted until its rediscovery in the eighteenth century. Wrong again, I’m afraid. Almost straightway the locals came back to salvage their stuff, digging through the volcanic rubble, and if they were lucky, heaving out some of the most valuable stuff. If they were unlucky, their tunnels collapsed and they got smothered in the process.

3. The people of Pompeii were caught completely unawares by the disaster. Well only the very unobservant ones were. There had been rumblings and mini-earthquakes for days. Cracks were appearing everywhere. That’s why so many of the houses had the decorators in. They might not have known exactly what – but they knew something nasty was going on.

4. The body of a rich lady was found in the gladiators’ barracks – she was visiting her gladiator toy-boy when the eruption came. OK, half right. A female skeleton with expensive jewelry WAS found in a room in the barracks, but she wasn’t on an assignation – unless she didn’t mind 17 other people and a couple of dogs sharing her love-nest. She was probably using the barracks as a refuge on her flight out of town, with all the rest of them.

...and more...

5. Pompeii is a marvellous example of Roman water engineering. That is Robert Harris’s line in his novel  Pompeii – and certainly the aqueducts and water supply were pretty impressive. BUT there were no sewers. Pompeii was a town of cess-pits, and streets that acted as drains. (No wonder they needed the stepping stones to cross from pavement to pavement.)

6. Pompeii was full of brothels. Sure, some eager archaeologists have thought they can count more than 30 of them – in other words about one for ever 75 free male inhabitants of the town. But that is the result of counting any place with a hint of an erotic painting as a brothel. On my count there is just one – currently the most visited place in the town, doing a brisker trade than it ever did in antiquity I suspect.

7. Vesuvius erupted on 24 August 79 CE, as Pliny records in his letter describing the disaster. Sadly even this probably isn’t true. Pliny certainly describes the eruption, but as with almost all dates in Latin literature they get awfully mangled in the process of centuries of copying by hand. We don’t actually know what Pliny wrote (or, of course, even if he remembered right). And a dated coin, which couldn’t possibly have been dropped by looters, seems to show the town was still going strong in September 79.

8. The Pompeians had good teeth – thanks to that healthy Mediterranean diet. Partly true. The teeth that have been examined show much less caries than modern populations have, but there is still plenty of it about. But without toothbrushes the calculus build-up was dreadful. Bad breath must have been a feature of Pompeian life. 

9. The Pompeian baths were a good way of keeping clean. There were plenty of bathing establishments in the town – with cold rooms, hot rooms, saunas, swimming pool, exercise yards and so on. Great in theory, but there were problems in practice. Imagine it. No chlorination and only a limited water circulation. The pools must have been festering, steamy, hotbeds of germs. Even Ronan doctors recommended not going to the baths if you had a wound – it could lead to gangrene.

10. Pompeian bars served wine and chunky stews as take-aways from the great vats  set in their counters. A complete no-no here I’m afraid. Those bars with counters facing the street, and the jars set into them are one of the regular sights of the Pompeian street. But they cant have had liquid in them, and certainly not stews. They were made of unglazed earthenware and were permanently set in the bars. How would you have cleaned the remnants of the stew out?  The wine amphorae were kept in racks and the plonk decanted into jugs. The jars held nuts, fruit, lentils and other dry stuff.

Comments

[anthony alcock]

The most informative accounts of the eruption of Vesuvius are those in two letters of Pliny the Younger, the nephew of Pliny the Elder. They can be found in Book 6 and are numbered 16 and 20. Both are addressed to a friend, the historian Tacitus, who was slightly older than Pliny. Pliny, according to the article by Michael Sage in ANRW, wrote 6,16 sometime about 106-107 AD, apparently at the request of Tacitus, who wanted an eye-witness account of the death of Pliny the Elder. So the nephew obliged, with the comment that he was now certain that Tacitus' celebration would bring his uncle "immortal glory".

Like many letters, both ancient and modern, they were intended not only for the recipient but also for posterity. Pliny draws up a neat little scheme of genre and "intended reader" in the final sentence of 6,16 (aliud est enim epistulam aliud historiam, aliud amico aliud omnibus scribere) We have to assume, in the absence of any other information to the contrary, that both letters are what they say they are: responses to requests for information. One question in my mind is and has been for a long time: did Tacitus really intend to use the material provided ? Or is he just on the receiving end of an earbashing ?

In his own works he mentions the eruption once indirectly (Histories 1,2) and once directly (Annals 4,67). The first of these books is said to have been written in 109 AD, i.e. a couple years after receiving Pliny's detailed accounts, and it deals with the period 68 to 96 AD (the death of Nero to the death of Domitian). The opening passages contain authorial statements about why and how he is constructing this history, and the unspecific mention of the eruption can be found among the many misfortunes that have plagued Rome, several of them man-made but this one caused by nature:

"Italy afflicted by new disasters or ones which had come back after many centuries. Cities, the most fertile region of Campania swallowed up or buried" (iam vero Italia novis cladibus vel post longam saeculorum seriem repetitis adflicta. haustae aut obrutae urbes, fecundissima Campaniae ora).

The Annals, supposedly published betweeen 110 and 12 AD, contain this specific but unspectacular statement about the view Capri provided for Tiberius:

"it used to look on a most beautiful bay before the burning mountain of Vesuvius changed its appearance" (prospectabatque pulcherrimum sinum antequam Vesuvius mons ardescens faciem loci verteret).

It is clear from Pliny's letter in 6,20 that Tacitus had read the first one and was now asking for additional information. Armed with all the information he had received from Pliny, why is it that he wrote only the two relatively bland comments cited above and, as far I know, did not mention Pliny the Elder anywhere in his writings ? If the information was provided for Tacitus while he was busy with the Histories, what are we to make of his understanding of Pliny's injunction at the close of 6,16 ( "tu potissima excerpes") ? Well, yes, I suppose that's one way of looking at Tacitus's oblique description in 1,20.

[Stefan]

You've made the front page of Arts and Letters Daily (http://www.aldaily.com/), with a link to the Guardian review.

When are you coming back to Cambridge? I think you should hold a book-signing.

[Mary]

Bingley. Yes -- sorry about the two titles. One problem was that Harvard UP already have a Pomepii on their list (by P Zanker).

Anthony A... the BSR plus Oxford are currently looking at the contents of a vast cess pit at Herculaneum -- which should reveal many fascinating things about what went through the ancient alimentary tract (and what was thrown down the loo). Like the track by the way.

[anthony alcock]

A book has just appeared in Germany by Hans-Joachim Glücklich called "Pompeii lebt" and is a sort of "reception history" of the Vesuvius-Pompeii Connection.

[bingley]

Mary, I realise you're only the author, but cannot something be done about this practice of having different titles either side of the Atlantic? No doubt it didn't matter when people on one side were largely unaware of how books were sold on the other, but in these days of internet ordering through Amazon etc. it just confuses the bookbuying public.

And unless Amazon's sales figures are a lot more sophisticated than its abysmal search engine, doesn't having two different titles affect your ranking?

[anthony alcock]

MB: I read recently that you raised the question of how one would identify a brothel. In this country there would be a big red heart that lit up at night and the place would probably be among used car lots (easy rider). In the UK of 30 years ago it would have been by the luncheon vouchers (Cynthia Payne).

[Ilja]

Tony Pandy, you seem to be forgetting how a pyroclastic flow - the vulcanic phenomenon that most likely killed the Pompeijans - works. There is no doubt that the first flow that covered Pompeij was massive, but you need to be only slightly outside the flow to survive, as eyewitness accounts from (a.o.) St. Pierre confirm. Pompeij would've been an extremely nasty place to be in at the time of the eruption, but not necessarily lethally nasty (unlike, say, Herculaneum, which was).

[Al Schlaf]

I really look forward to reading this book. It is sure to be a good counter to Charles Pellegrino's "Ghosts of Vesuvius," which was just rife with WTF statements.

Finally, your book on the Roman triumph was just great.

[Paul Potts]

About plaque

If you never ever brush your teeth, the plaque builds up to provide a good defence against caries, and if you suffer from halitosis, that's more likely to arise from the digestion or the throat. So maybe that's why the Pompeians had such good teeth, apart from the fact that there was no sugar and definitely no Coca Cola. No doubt dentists will demur, but I am now assured by an honest dentist that just about all the extensive and costly dental treatment I have been through in the last fifty years was mostly unnecessary, and sometimes counterproductive.

One of the problems with human teeth is that the nerve supply to the centre is cut off, (still hurts with a cavity, though) so that the teeth stop growing, the dentine wears out, rots etc, whereas with rabbits, say, the teeth keep growing, and they have to keep gnawing things to wear them down. I suggest that dentists find a way of restoring this nerve/blood supply, so that the only dental treatment required will be paring down the teeth from time to time. Yes, I know this is all rubbish, but try talking to your dentist about teeth, and I'm afraid embarrassment will ensue.

About porous amphorae.

I was told that porous amphorae were used for keeping water, the evaporation from the surface keeping the water cool, even in the sun - a form of refrigeration. Has someone disproved this? Is that all rubbish too?

If so, someone should have told the poor old Pompeians, and how to distinguish between toothpicks and toothbrushes.

Paulo

[anthony alcock]

I thought that the excavations being carried out by Oxford,the DAI and a bunch of others had taken a brief gander (last year) at a sewer in Pompeii and were planning to looking more extensively at the sewers in Herculaneum. Does "sewer" mean "cesspit" ?

[Mary]

GI.. I see your logic, and must admit that possibility!
I would perhaps have been better to say that we have two temporalities clashing here ... a beginning on 21 April and a beginning on Kal March.

[Tony Pandy]

It's wishful thinking, Mary, to say that the 1000 bodies so far discovered mean that the other 11,000 inhabitants of Pompeii 'made it to safety'. Only a part of the city itself has been excavated, so many hundreds more bodies will still lie undiscovered even within the city walls, while many thousands more inhabitants will have radiated out from the town and died struggling to get to a safe area 5-10 miles or more away from Vesuvius. What chance of that on foot, carying their possessions, babies and elderly relatives, in pitch blackness day and night, with six feet of ash accumulating on the roads and burning coals landing on their heads? No, probably almost all 12000 Pompeiians died, but their remains are far enough outside the walls of the town itself and buried too deep and too far apart ever to be stumbled upon by excavators. A lucky few may have got away from the seashore, provided Pliny's imperial fleet were prepared to embark crowds of panic-stricken plebs!

[Gi]

Mary, best wishes for the new book!

I'm almost at the end of The Roman Triumph and may I ask you a question?

In page 314 of my hard-cover edition, you mention the tradition that the first recorded triumph, Romulus', took place on the "Kalends of March in the first year of the city", and raise the issue of "chronological paradoxes", namely "How does it relate to the famous birthday of the city celebrated on April 21? How was Romulus' victory secured before Roman time had begun?"

My question is only, could the Romans have meant the Kalends of March "after" that first April 21? It would be a date "in the first year of the city", wouldn't it? What do you think?

And sorry to ask you this when surely you're much more concerned with the new book.

[Mary]

Deafguy
Yes .. they are the same. The US publishers wanted a different title! Sorry if this is likely to cause confusion.

Paul Mullan. Thanks -- glad (and relieved) you're enjoying it.

[Paul Mullan]

My copy arrived by post yesterday. Based on the first 50 pages it is a pure delight. Well done!

[Nicholas]

It is also possible that the inhabitants were somewhat less licentious than all those pictures and Dionysian phalluses suggest. Pictorial art ever represents illusory ideals rather than reality.

[Steve the neighbour]

Can't quite remember which TV epic told it, but I believe it was the waves of asphyxiating hot airborne ash that did the 1000 unlucky ones in, and very quickly; hence the postures of pain (and surprise, presumably). Is this so?

[mj]

Interesting--I only knew of a few of those myths, but it must make some Pompeii research folks unhappy that you're refuting what they've written.

[deafguy]

In the US amazon is showing two new Pompeii titles--Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town, 416 pages, due out 18 Sept. and The Fires of Vesuvius, 368 pages, due out Dec. 1. Are these the same text?

[Michael Bulley]

I feel like a character from the Life of Brian. So, apart from the pollen, the autumnal fruit, the wrong wine, the heavy clothing, the September dated coin, what....? For what it's worth, Dio Cassius says the eruption happened "at the end of summer".

[mary]

Lostinfrance... sorry (my husband, who is an art historian, would complain too.. and say that I was treating the images as just decoration). OK, This is pic very like one I have in the book. It shows a cast of a corpse who obviously died crouched up, head in hands. On the site, it can be seen in one of the main archaeological storeroom, visible from the Forum -- people look through the bars at him, as if a caged animal.
Michael Bulley. The date... The argument here is that the text of Pliny, like any author, is particularly vulnerable in the copying process to slips with numerals and dates. So what Pliny actually write may not be certain. There are other arguments.. but more impressionistic. The overall impression of the biological, pollen analysis looks more compatible with early autumn (though contamination is a problem here). The people are dressed in autumnal gear (but then they are in the middle of an eruption) The coin is from a sealed deposit, and gives the imperial titles as they were only from late September. Other late coins have been found in the debris, but never from a sealed position such as this... so more likely the coins of looters etc

[anthony alcock]

If Pompeii really does come, as suggested, from the Oscan word "pompa", you might wish to reduce your list to "five things".
One thing you might like to know about an absurd piece of esoteric speculation.
The OT book Judges 4,6ff. tells the story of the events leading up to the defeat inflicted by Israel on Canaan. The judge and prophetess, Deborah, called upon Barak ("lightning") to go forth and smite Canaan, whose ruler lived in Hazor. Barak went forth and smote Canaan. Good and proper. Will Barak of Illinois similarly smite McCain of Arizona ?

[lostinfrance]

first I should say I'm already a convert - have recently read with interest and pleasure your 'Roman Triumph' book and would have ordered the new one except that the supplier (yes, THAT e-mail supplier) wanted to send me 2 and the screens wouldn't let me change the quantity so I cancelled (here in rural France we don't seem to have many 'real bookshops' (your previous post) so the internet is our saviour...) (Though I must admit our local supermarket sells on its shelves both French translations of Shakespeare and C18 French classics, so all is not lost, Ovid next, perhaps?)

However, my gripe here is that you don't always source your admittedly intriguing pictures - the title of the top one on your blog this time, baffles me!

PS: but the internet links are impeccable and fascinating...

Keep up the blogs - I don't know whether you're 'wicked and subversive' as often quoted, but always provocative and interesting...

[PL]

What about the risks of another big eruption soon? Vesuvius is currently in one of its longest dormant periods on record, almost 65 years. Its activity over the past 2,000 years is well recorded, and after every long period of quietude there has been an unusually big eruption. Are there reasons the large population of that part of Campania should not be worried?

[Chris Hallworth]

Well, just one things struck me about this - surely all towns of Italy and possibly the Empire as a whole suffered from bad breath due to lack of toothbrushes. Surely this phenomenom was not unique to Pompeii?