I finished my Rome book and have now begun one about Pompeii. Iām 65 pages in and I already love it: yes, it covers the volcano, but most of the book is about āthis is what the town and daily life of it would have been like, actually.ā Fascinating stuff. Things Iāve learned so far:
- The streets in Pompeii have sidewalks sometimes a meter higher than the road, with stepping stones to hop across as ācrosswalks.ā Iād seen some photos before. The book points out that, duh, Pompeii had no underground drainage, was built on a fairly steep incline, and the roads were more or less drainage systems and water channels in the rain.
- Unlike today, where ādining outā is expensive and considered wasteful on a budget, most people in Pompeii straight up didnāt have kitchens. You had to eat out if you were poor; only the wealthy could afford to eat at home.
- Most importantly, and I canāt believe in all the pop culture of Pompeii this had never clicked for me: Pompeii had a population between 6-35,000 people. Perhaps 2,000 died in the volcano. Contemporary sources talk about the bay being full of fleeing ships. Most people got the hell out when the eruption started. The number who died are still a lot, and itās still gruesome and morbid, but itās not āan entire town and everyone in it.ā This also makes it difficult for archeologists, apparently (and logically): those who remained werenāt acting ānormally,ā they were sheltering or fleeing a volcano. One famous example is a wealthy woman covered in jewelry found in the bedroom in the glaridator barracks. Scandal! She must have been having an affair and had it immortalized in ash! The book points out that 17 other people and several dogs were also crowded in that one small room: far more likely, they were all trying to shelter together. Another example: Houses are weirdly devoid of furniture, and archeologists find objects in odd places. (Gardening supplies in a formal dining room, for example.) But then you remember that there were several hours of people evacuating, packing their belongings, loading up carts and getting outā¦ maybe the gardening supplies were brought to the dining room to be packed and abandoned, instead of some deeper esoteric meaning. The book argues that this all makes it much harder to get an accurate read on normal life in a Roman town, because while Pompeii is a brilliant snapshot, itās actually a snapshot of a town undergoing major evacuation and disaster, not an average day.
- Oh, another great one. Outside of a random laundry place in Pompeii, someone painted a mural with two scenes. One of them referenced Virgilās Aeneid. Underneath that scene, someone graffitiād a reference to a famous line from that play, except tweaked it to be about laundry. This is really cool, the book points out, because it implies that a) literacy and education was high enough that one could paint a reference and have it recognized, and b) that someone else could recognize it and make a dumb play on words about it and c) the whole thing, again, means that thereās a certain amount of literacy and familiarity with āRoman pop cultureā even among fairly normal people at the time.
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