A Don’s Life

Is Ostia the new Pompeii?

I am now – and for the next 5 weeks – living the life of a hermit-scholar, writing my Sather lectures, one a week. I’ve taken the car back to the rental company because I shan’t be going anywhere and I walk to the campus each day, or go by bus (equipped with the local equivalent of an Oyster card).

The bus has its humiliations I should say. Berkeley is a town full of caring, liberal, socially conscious young people. Almost every time I get on, some nice person gets up, beaming and gives me their seat. They think they have made my day. They have in a way, seeing that having a seat is an altogether nicer way to travel. But I get off the bus feeling about 85. If only the kids realised, they’d just keep sitting.

But I have in off moments been catching up with archaeological news. The first bit I  came across (thanks to a friend who sent me a link) was the publicity campaign of the ancient Roman port-town of Ostia (pictured above), being marketed once again  by the local archaeological service as the new Pompeii. Well, it’s a great site, covered over by centuries of sand rather than the volcanic ash of the eruption, well preserved and not much visited and only 15 miles on an easy train ride from Rome.

And indeed there are some highlights. As well as the glimpse you get of Roman high-rise living (the insula blocks talked about by Juvenal among others), my own particular favourite is the Bar of the Seven Sages whose paintings take the piss (literally) out of Greek philosophical wisdom. The walls are decorated with men on the loo, and painted slogans of advice as given by ancient philosophers – on shitting.

But Pompeii, it isn’t. There’s none of the bric a brac of daily life or the illusion of a town deserted in mid stream or that sense of a real city.

Quite what the new Berlusconi commissar will do to Pompeii itself, we still wait to see. There were threats of hiring the place out to corporate events for those companies that could still afford to pay during the credit crunch (perhaps this is a good side to the global economic meltdown – not even the biggest multinational will be able to afford Pompeii).

Meanwhile in Mexico, they’ve been having their own similar controversy with Placido Domingo singing at the pyramid of Chichen Itza.

Sailing to Byzantium

I am now on my own in our rented house in Berkeley. The husband has gone back home. This is probably not too bad an idea, as my Sather Lectures begin tomorrow and I shall no doubt be impossible to live with for the next six weeks.

That said, I have the first lecture written. Of course, I don’t know how it will go down tomorrow (it’s in Berkeley at 8.10, Thursday: all welcome, but it will I think be podcast). But suffice it to say that I feel a bit like you do before an exam when you know you’ve done all the revision: you don’t know what you’ll get at the end of the day, but you know you’ve done the best you can. Now I’m more worried about what to wear. The Emmy outfit, I think.. at least for the first one?

But the real reason he went back to London was because the show on Byzantium he has been curating at the Royal Academy is about to open – and he needs to be there. This is the biggest Byzantine Art show that there has ever been in the UK, and probably will ever be. And it should be the Academy’s autumn blockbuster.

Of course, it feels a bit different when you live with its preparation domestically. The material from Sinai is stunning, but I tend to think more about the eight hours of the poor husband trundling over the desert from Cairo to view and request the icons from the monks at the monastery.

Getting a multinational show like this together is knife edge. Will the one thing you really want be certified ‘fit for travel’? And how much will it all cost? And -- to think selfishly for a minute - what bit of modern warfare will scupper your best-laid plans?