Unlocking the Mysteries of Ancient Pompeii

Discounting the ravages of over 250 years of excavation and exploitation by collectors and trampling tourists, the city of Pompeii, famously frozen in time in the year 79 AD, continues to offer the most complete material presentation of the past of classical antiquity. This unique completeness, showing rather than telling of life in ancient Rome at a peak period of empire, makes a visit to Pompeii extraordinarily rewarding for even the most casual visitor.

But at the same time the complexity of studying and analyzing what was an entire city, surrounded by outlying farms and villages and resorts, is extraordinarily difficult. As Cambridge classicist Mary Beard points out in the Introduction to her brilliant The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found, “The bigger picture and many of the more basic questions about the town remain very murky indeed.” It is Beard’s achievement to have maintained the highest possible level of scholarly inquiring while synthesizing what is known today about Pompeii into a single, accessible and delightfully readable volume. To such a huge task, she brings impeccable credentials: she holds the Chair of Classics at Cambridge and is a Fellow of Newnham College. She is classics editor of The Times Literary Supplement and has published books on, among other things, the Parthenon and is co-author of one on the Roman Colosseum. The British School at Rome has an active program at Pompeii, from which she took benefit; and she was also a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Villa in Los Angeles.

The murkiness begins with the number of inhabitants: 15,000, perhaps, but then tens of thousands more lived in the neighborhood, but no one knows for sure. Nor is the distance separating the town from the seafront known with certainty, and archaeologists are still trying to fix the shoreline with its bays; two lagoons seem to have stood between sea and Pompeii, but no one knows for sure.

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March 5, 2009