A City Unbottled: Mary Beard's Pompeii

[Ludovicus]

Excerpts from Joy Connolly's lengthy review of Mary Beard's Pompeii, The Nation: October 21, 2009:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091109/connolly

 

Beard insists on only one thing: "'Our' Pompeii is not a Roman city going about its business, then simply 'frozen in time' as so many guidebooks and tourist brochures claim. It is a much more challenging and intriguing place."

 

She reveals how a city badly roughed up by earthquakes, rebuilt, shaken again, partly evacuated, blasted and blanketed by volcanic ash from Vesuvius in 79 CE, then tunneled into, looted and finally forgotten was rediscovered in the eighteenth century, excavated, rebuilt, bombed by Allied forces in 1943 and reconstructed once more, becoming the "city in a bottle" dramatically if misleadingly packaged for tourists.

 

The eyewitness account of the younger Pliny, who wrote that his naturalist uncle died getting a closer look at Vesuvius on August 24-25, is undermined by medieval manuscript variants recording several different dates and the on-site discovery of autumnal vegetables and a coin minted later in the year.

 

With its focus on labor, education and religion, The Fires of Vesuvius is a testament to how much Roman studies has to offer the contemporary political imagination. Well-informed in the latest research in demography, the history of Roman politics, architecture, ancient economics, feminist and post-colonial studies, Beard probes the experience of men and women, free and slave, rich and poor.

[Ursus]

I read Fires of Vesuvius, and I believe I sent in a review as well. It is an interesting look at things.

[Klingan]

Damn, that women write a lot these days!