Jeremy Clarke would have felt at home in Pompeii

Classical literature has the reputation of being pretty serious stuff, far removed from the world that Jeremy Clarke inhabited. But he would have felt perfectly at home in Pompeii.

Take the conversation decorating the grave monument of the bar-owners Lucius Calidius Eroticus and Fannia Voluptas (beat that, Frankie Howerd!): ‘Innkeeper! The bill!’ ‘You’ve had a sextarius of wine, and bread: one as. Relish, two asses.’ ‘Right.’ ‘The girl, eight asses.’ ‘Right.’ ‘Hay for the mule, two asses.’ ‘That mule – it’ll be the ruin of me.’

Jeremy would also surely have admired the lifestyle and works of the scandalous author Petronius, whom the historian Tacitus described as follows: ‘He slept during the day and spent the nights in business and pleasure. Others achieved greatness by the sweat of their brow. Petronius idled into fame.’ Ordered to commit suicide by Nero, he opened his veins, then bound them up again, and ‘spent his last hours not discussing the immortality of the soul, but at dinner, accompanied by frivolous songs and light verse’. His last deed was to send Nero, under seal, ‘an account of Nero’s shameful behaviour and novel debaucheries of his male and female companions’. It was Petronius who wrote Satyricon, describing the disreputable low-life adventures and sexual escapades of a number of unprincipled and generally worthless characters, including a dinner put on by the vulgar millionaire Trimalchio. Jeremy’s superbly crafted tales were as rich in character and incident as Petronius’s, but his kindly, non-judgmental humour (that was the man) was a far cry from Petronius’s vicious satire – as well as being all true. When Orpheus descended into Hades to bring back his beloved Eurydice, Ovid wittily imagined Orpheus so charming its inhabitants that everything stopped. Even Sisyphus ceased rolling his boulder up a hill but sat on it to listen.