Pompeii by Mary Beard

From The Week of September 10, 2012 The past is handed down to us through images frozen in time. For as much as literature can teach us about the nuts and bolts of historical eras, only images have the power to captivate our imaginations, to depict, with a stroke, both the continuity of human need and the mutability of human custom. With shocking ease, they can declare to us the realities of life so often buried by the portentousness of the word. But such images go beyond tapestry and graffiti. They go beyond art. Some are bestowed upon us by fate and physics, both of which combined, with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, to gift to us a town frozen in time, a town Ms. Beard thoroughly reconstructs in her vivid snapshot of this most infamous Roman town.

A town of merchants and slaves, citizens and gladiators, Pompeii was, until 79 AD, a fairly typical town in the heart of the Roman Empire. Filled with shops and brothels, conflict and politics, it operated within the great shadow cast by the imperial capital at Rome. But though its significance may have been vanishingly small relative to the historical heart of the Republic, this did not dissuade its people from availing themselves of its public baths, of congregating in its numerous bars, of praying in its temples and attending its numerous parties. The town even possessed a 20,000-seat coliseum at which its gladiators fought and died for the pleasure of its residents. For generations, the loving and the lovelorn, the fortunate and the foolish, packed its streets and lived under its roofs until, one day, it all came to an end.

A tempestuous region that had been recently shaken by earthquakes powerful enough to damage homes, it would've come as little surprise to the wise that Pompeii was in line for another temblor. But none of them could've imagined that this latest disaster would be the last as they knew it. On that fateful day in 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted, angrily dumping upwards of 20 feet of ash onto Pompeii's streets, burning into the souls of its inhabitants and into the walls of its structures, scars that would outlast the empire, to be rediscovered and chronicled centuries on by historians eager for a glimpse at a place and a time enshrouded in legend. The volcanic holocaust preserved all from the trivial to the portentous while leaving, for scholars, tantalizing gaps in the context necessary to properly place such evidence. It is a town millennia gone. And these are its bones.

Though at times beset by a scholarly dryness, Pompeii is, in the main, a rewarding journey through a town preserved in volcanic amber. Ms. Beard, a professor of Classics at Cambridge, attacks her subject with passion and skepticism. The former permeates the work, enlivening her summations of Pompeiian life which range from food to sex, casts to coins. The latter, meanwhile, is the wise lens through which Ms. Beard views her archaeological delvings. For while others are willing to draw exciting but hasty conclusions from scrawls on the walls of brothels and from bowls on the bartops of shops, she holds herself to a higher, more admirable standard which prevents her from misleading the reader down the path to supposition. This wariness is most welcome, not only because the author presents it with deftness and humor but because of ancient Pompeii's place in modern culture, a fascinating, engrossing tourist trap at which many tall tales can be spun for personal gain.

There's no avoiding that the work, at times, stalls, burdened by too many names and too many customs unfamiliar to those of us who have not spent a lifetime studying antiquity. Nonetheless, when Pompeii shines, it does so brightly, reminding us of the temporary nature of custom and tradition. For what seems to us both obvious and permanent seems to those who follow us strange and ephemeral. This is a welcome lesson, one that opens our eyes to the foreign and compels us to view it with as much legitimacy as we do the familiar.

A pleasing if uneven journey. (3/5 Stars)