Review by Choice Review
Beard's new book on ancient Pompeii is the latest in a spate of recent works on the subject, aimed at a general audience but firmly grounded in archaeological evidence and modern specialist literature. The author is aware of controversial scholarly debates, but her book does not become bogged down in them. The result is an informative overview of life in the ancient city, engagingly written in a quasi-conversational style that is both erudite and colloquial. While it contains fewer illustrations than Joanne Berry's The Complete Pompeii (2007), Beard's book is much more interesting to read, since each page contains thought-provoking insights that bring the city and its inhabitants to life. Nevertheless, Beard (Cambridge) augments her work with over 150 illustrations, including 23 in color, all of excellent quality and closely keyed to the text. Although it lacks notes, the book does provide a section of further readings containing an up-to-date and annotated listing of sources arranged by chapter, as well as a useful index. Beard concludes with a brief appendix that gives helpful suggestions for a visit to Pompeii. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. R. I. Curtis University of Georgia
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Mary Beard pokes holes in the popular myths about Pompeii. IN Edward Bulwer-Lytton's popular 19th-century novel "The Last Days of Pompeii," a scrumptious multicourse dinner of the stereotypically Roman sort is served in the superbly appointed house of the hero, Glaucus. With its peristyle garden, luxurious furnishings, nimble attendants and an atrium filled with paintings that "would scarcely disgrace a Raphael," Glaucus' Campanian bachelor pad might serve as "a model at this day for the house of 'a single man in Mayfair,'" Bulwer-Lytton wrote. In her engrossingly mischievous "Fires of Vesuvius," Mary Beard recreates the scene with gusto, pointing out that this Pompeiian mansion is in fact based closely on a real one, the so-called House of the Tragic Poet. But among some unsavory facts that Bulwer-Lytton "fails to point out to his readers," Beard writes, is that the kitchen, too tiny to have produced much of a banquet anyway, was the site of the house's only latrine. And worse: "Just over the back wall of the garden . . . was a cloth-processing workshop, or fullery. Fulling was a messy business, its main in- gredient being human urine. . . . The work was noisy and smelly. In the background to Glaucus' elegant dinner party there must have been a distinctly nasty odor." Beard, a classics professor at Cambridge University, takes cheeky, undisguised delight in puncturing the many fantasies and misconceptions that have grown up around Pompeii - sown over the years by archaeologists and classicists no less than Victorian novelists and makers of "sword and sandal" film extravaganzas. While many scholars build careers through increasingly elaborate reconstructions of the ancient world, Beard consistently stresses the limits of our knowledge, the precariousness of our constructs and the ambiguity or contradiction inherent in many of our sources. "There is hardly a shred of evidence for any of it" serves as her battle cry, and it's a noble one. The overarching notion she combats here is that when Pompeii was buried by volcanic debris from Vesuvius in the great eruption of A.D. 79, it became a city " 'frozen in time,' as so many guidebooks and tourist brochures claim," a pristine Roman town just waiting to be discovered. In fact, Beard points out that Pompeii, "disrupted and disturbed, evacuated and pillaged, . . . bears the marks (and the scars) of all kinds of different histories." Those scars didn't begin with the eruption - there was a devastating earthquake 17 years earlier - and didn't end with it. Ancient scavengers, looters of all eras and "the rough and ready approach" of early excavators have all severely damaged the site, making it much harder to reconstruct an accurate building history. For good measure, Pompeii was heavily bombed by the Allies in World War II; as Beard wryly notes, most visitors are not aware that many of the houses they pass through, now expertly restored, have in essence been destroyed twice. A disheartening aspect of the book is the great number of paintings and painted signs, mentioned by Beard in passing throughout the text, that were recovered only to fade or vanish entirely, reminiscent of the subway-excavation scene in "Fellini's Roma." These have been as elaborate as a series of bright murals from the amphitheater's curtain wall, destroyed by frost in the year after their discovery in 1815, or as homey as the sign "Women" over their separate entrance to one of the town's sets of public baths. If Pompeii is no time capsule, however, it is as close as we are likely to come on such a scale. Together with its lesser-known sister city Herculaneum, it is a place crucial to our conception of Roman art, domestic architecture and daily life. Beard leads a fine tour and lives up to her promise of surprises around every corner. She walks down the sewerless town's streets ("a smelly mixture of animal dung, . . . rotting vegetables and human excrement - which was, just to complete the picture, no doubt covered in flies"); looks into houses (those empty atriums with the misleadingly modernist aesthetic would have been hung with gaudy curtains and stuffed with wooden furniture, storage cupboards, looms and whatnot) ; saunters into the baths (despite their hygienic reputation, in the days before chlorination, they were filthy); steps up to the bar (the big, unglazed jars set into the counter were for dry foodstuffs, not for doling out the hot stew of our fantasies); and ventures into the brothel (there were probably far fewer than is often supposed, and the one clear example, whatever it was in 79, is a cramped, grim place today, Beard says: average tourist visit, three minutes). Over all, Pompeii was "an assault on the visual senses," to use Beard's phrase, not least for the range of art, public and private, it contained. For one thing, much of the art is highly eroticized, even when not bluntly pornographic. Much else can only strike the modern viewer as bizarre - something out of Petronius or Apuleius rather than Cicero or Horace - like a fresco of the Judgment of Solomon story enacted by pygmies. And under both headings fall the phalluses. There seem to be phalluses everywhere. Enormous ones, tiny ones, doubles, singles; attached to men, gods or satyrs in every medium, or in disembodied splendor; over doors, carved into the pavement, on chains and serving trays, turned into lamps, winged like birds, with bells on. Even some of the phalluses have phalluses. If they were good luck charms, as is sometimes thought, it obviously didn't work. Aside from the melodramatic and misleading American title (there's a minimum of volcanology or disaster drama; in Britain, the title is aptly "Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town"), this is a wonderful book, for the impressive depth of information it comfortably embraces, for its easygoing erudition and, not least, for its chatty, personable style. Perhaps it's no surprise that Beard, who certainly can't be accused of ivory-towerism, writes an appealing blog for The Times of London, "A Don's Life." (She is also the classics editor for The Times Literary Supplement.) If anything disappoints about "The Fires of Vesuvius" it's that the mostly black-and-white photographs fall well short of conveying the sensual assault that Beard so skillfully evokes in her text. For that, we can turn to another general-interest book on the subject, THE COMPLETE POMPEII, by Joanne Berry (Thames & Hudson, $40). Berry, who teaches ancient history and archaeology at Swansea University in Wales, packs her magazine-style pages with large-format color photographs of the art, artifacts and buildings of the town, and the result is suitably dazzling. Beard's mild but persistent polemical tone - another mark of the successful blogger? - is a dynamic means of structuring her writing, but it often has the effect of casting a Yeats-like shadow over the mass of her fellow scholars: "All wear the carpet with their shoes; / All think what other people think." One longs to leap up and shout, "Not all!" Berry, for example, has a drier style and makes no special effort to project a personality onto the page. But she seems no less critical of the evidence than Beard and discredits many of the same "myths." Both of these books, which make excellent companions, remind us that there will be more to look forward to: after 1,930 years, a quarter of Pompeii remains unexcavated. Pompeii is hardly a city 'frozen in time,' Beard notes. Its marks and scars betray a succession of histories. Steve Coates is an editor at the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
At first glance, Pompeii indelibly impresses visitors as arrested in time, which is a popular conception challenged in this fine presentation of the ruined Roman city. Author of such interesting histories as The Roman Triumph (2007), Beard is a fount of vibrant information about Pompeii and the strands of its history preceding its volcanic burial in 79 CE. For one thing, Beard explains, Pompeii had existed for centuries previously, becoming a Roman town a relatively recent 150 years before Vesuvius erupted. As in other categories she explores, such as Pompeii's commerce or politics, Beard directs attention to Pompeii's dynamics, detectable in archaeological traces of Pompeii's pre-Roman period and in the city's political and religious connections to Rome and the wider Mediterranean world. Taking up the immensely evocative concrete evidence about Roman civilization discovered in Pompeii including paintings, graffiti, advertisements, ritual and workaday objects, and even a merchant's account book Beard underscores the busyness of the place, even as she cautions against speculative interpretations of such relics. Enthused and informed, Beard ably guides the actual or armchair visitor to Pompeii.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In a grand synthesis, one of our most distinguished classicists relates all that we know--and don't know--about ancient Pompeii, devastated by a flood of lava and volcanic ash from Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Beard splendidly recreates the life and times of Pompeii in a work that is part archeology and part history. She examines the full scope of life, from houses, occupations, government, food and wine to sex, and the baths, recreation and religion. In this bustling seaside town, makers of garum, a concoction of rotten seafood and salt, did a modest business, but Umbricius Scaurus marketed his product as "premium" garum and became one of Pompeii's nouveaux riches. Focusing on the restored houses, Beard refutes the common notion that most Romans ate their meals while reclining on a triclinium. Rather, they ate wherever they could within the home. Finally, Beard reminds us that everybody except the very poorest went to the baths, which served as a great social leveler. Beard's tour de force takes the study of ancient history to a new level. 23 color and 113 b&w illus. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The ruins of Pompeii, remarkably preserved after the violent eruption of Vesuvius in 79 C.E., have long been used as a basis for theories concerning life throughout the Roman Empire as a whole. In this vivid historical examination, however, Beard (classics, Univ. of Cambridge; The Roman Triumph) is more interested in digging into the world of Pompeii itself. While centering each chapter on general topics such as architecture, religion, and commerce, she sifts through archaeological observations in order to provide reconstructions of such everyday details as the flow of cart traffic through a particular street or what sort of plants grew in a house's kitchen garden. It's an entertaining study that demonstrates just how much we can learn from the city's remains-and how much information is still absent, for Beard is always careful to point out gaps in the evidence and casts a critical eye on several conjectural ideas about Pompeii and Roman life in general. Included are an extensive bibliography of sources for further reading and a short chapter of suggestions for those who wish to visit Pompeii themselves. Recommended for academic and public libraries, especially those with sections on Roman or Classical history.-Kathleen McCallister, Univ. of South Carolina, Columbia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
