The Fires Of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost And Found [Paperback]

Pompeii is the most famous archaeological site in the world, visited by more than two million people each year. Yet it is also one of the most puzzling, with an intriguing and sometimes violent history, from the sixth century BCE to the present day.

Destroyed by Vesuvius in 79 CE, the ruins of Pompeii offer the best evidence we have of life in the Roman Empire. But the eruptions are only part of the story. InThe Fires of Vesuvius, acclaimed historian Mary Beard makes sense of the remains. She explores what kind of town it wasmore like Calcutta or the Costa del Sol?and what it can tell us about ordinary life there. From sex to politics, food to religion, slavery to literacy, Beard offers us the big picture even as she takes us close enough to the past to smell the bad breath and see the intestinal tapeworms of the inhabitants of the lost city. She resurrects the Temple of Isis as a testament to ancient multiculturalism. At the Suburban Baths we go from communal bathing to hygiene to erotica.

Recently, Pompeii has been a focus of pleasure and loss: from Pink Floyds memorable rock concert to Primo Levis elegy on the victims. But Pompeii still does not give up its secrets quite as easily as it may seem. This book shows us how much more and less there is to Pompeii than a city frozen in time as it went about its business on 24 August 79.

Engrossingly mischievous& Beard takes cheeky, undisguised delight in puncturing the many fantasies and misconceptions that have grown up around Pompeiisown 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 servel#”