Tom Holland

Pompeii’s greatest gifts are not all archeological

A review of Ingrid D. Rowland’s ‘From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town’. The dead city is still capable of changing lives – Ingrid Rowland proves it

Wall painting of a female head, Pompeii, 1st century AD [www.bridgemanart.com] 
issue 12 April 2014

The first visitor to take a break on the Bay of Naples was Hercules. He had just defeated some rebellious giants and buried them beneath Mount Vesuvius. To celebrate, he staged a procession across the mountain’s slope — in Greek, a ‘pompe’. He also founded two cities: one named after the procession, the other after himself. To this day, visitors from across the world still beat a trail to Pompeii and Herculaneum.

The popularity of the two cities as tourist destinations owes everything, of course, to the restless thrashing of the giants imprisoned beneath Vesuvius. In AD 79, a particularly violent spasm resulted in an eruption so devastating that both cities ended up entombed in ash. The memory of the disaster never entirely faded. In 1264, Pompeii was still being identified by name on a map of Italy; in 1504, the Neapolitan poet Jacopo Sannazaro namechecked one of the giants buried beneath Vesuvius, and asked rhetorically of the mountain’s slopes, ‘beneath them who would believe that there are populations and villas and noble cities that lie buried?’

By the mid-6th century, though, the precise location of the ‘noble cities’ had been forgotten, and the process of identifying them, and then of bringing their streets to light, would turn out to be a protracted one.

The story — which in most studies of Pompeii provides, at best, a desultory side-chapter — is one that Ingrid Rowland tells in rich and fascinating detail.

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