The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found |  | Author: Mary Beard
Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
Buy New: $16.85
as of 3/10/2010 00:13 WIT details
You Save: $10.10 (37%)
New (24) Used (17) from $14.99
Seller: pbshop
Rating:  16 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 384
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.5
ISBN: 0674029763
Dewey Decimal Number: 937.7256807
EAN: 9780674029767
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9780674029767 | | • | Condition: NEW | | • | Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark. |
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
| |
| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
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. In The Fires of Vesuvius, acclaimed historian Mary Beard makes sense of the remains. She explores what kind of town it was--more 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 Floyd’s memorable rock concert to Primo Levi’s 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. Amazon.com Exclusive: Author Mary Beard on the Ten Reasons Why the Romans Were Great Lovers--and Ten Books to Tell You How
1. Staying power
Roman lovers could keep going all night (at least if we take their word for it). Ovid – the first-century-BC’s man about town – claims that he could perform nine times in a single night. Read all about it in his ‘Love Poems” (Book 3, number 7). Read: Ovid, The Erotic Poems, translated by Peter Green.
2. Sweet talk
Roman men could make you feel so good. Mark Antony and Julius Caesar both talked their way into the heart of feisty Cleopatra. The chat-up lines of Rome’s founding father Aeneas drove Queen Dido senseless. Read: Virgil, The Aeneid, translated by Robert Fagles. (Go straight to Book 4)
3. Body beautiful
There was no flab or beer belly on these six-pack hunks. All that gym and exercise kept Greeks and Romans bronzed and trim. Read: Nigel Spivey, The Ancient Olympics.
4. Inventiveness
Sexual positions became (literally) an art-form for the Romans--two-somes, three-somes and more. You’d better stay supple though, or those more testing acrobatics will be beyond you. Read: John Clarke, Looking at Lovemaking: Constructions of Sexuality in Roman Art.
5. Romantic agony
Roman men could do anguish better than any others. “I hate and I love . . . and it hurts” as the poet Catullus succinctly wrote to his fickle mistress. Don’t expect to escape a Roman affair without tears. Read: Catullus, The Poems, translated by Peter Green.
6. Great pick-up lines
Romans knew they had to work hard at the first impressions. Ovid, in a lover’s manual, gives the beginner plenty of advice on how to break the ice. Stand right next to her at a procession, and when some elaborate display goes past explain to her what it is. It doesn’t matter, says Ovid, if you don’t really know – make it sound plausible, to impress. Read: Ovid, The Art of Love and Other Poems, translated by J. H. Mozley.
7. Open minds
Not many Romans were prudes. Most men were happy to contemplate sex with women, men, or if it came to it, animals – just so long as they were the active, not the passive partner. Read: Apuleius, The Golden Ass, translated by E. J. Kenney.
8. Rough-trade
Roman women went for the rough, tough sporting heroes of the ancient world. Successful gladiators became the heart-throbs of the Roman girls. Read: Catharine Edwards, The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome.
9. In touch with their inner-selves
The anxiety of Roman men was one of their more endearing features. Images of the phallus were everywhere in Roman towns – but so too were images of castration and mutilation. The ancient man never took his prowess for granted. Carlin A. Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans.
10. Not afraid to say 'I love you'
The walls of the buried city of Pompeii are covered with written messages from satisfied (and a few unsatisfied) men. ‘Oh Chloe, I had a wonderful time, twice over in this very spot, I love you. . . .’
Read: Antonio Varone, Eroticism in Pompeii. And, in case you are looking for the woman’s point of view, try Marilyn B. Skinner, Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture.
Product Description
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. In The Fires of Vesuvius, acclaimed historian Mary Beard makes sense of the remains. She explores what kind of town it was—more 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 Floyd’s memorable rock concert to Primo Levi’s 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. (20081006)
|
| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 16
A Vibrant View of Pompeian Life and Mysteries February 14, 2009
R. Hardy (Columbus, Mississippi USA)
21 out of 21 found this review helpful
Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, sending hot gases, pumice, and rivers of bubbling mud through the city of Pompeii. Over a thousand of the victims were preserved within the ash, as were buildings and artworks. Since it was first excavated centuries ago, Pompeii as "frozen in time" has had a real tourist appeal. You can walk the streets feeling that you are experiencing something close to what the Pompeians did two thousand years ago; such feelings are not baseless, but Pompeian life was drastically different from our own, and the clues the ruins give us about the people's lives are significant but often mysterious and even more often incomplete. Classicist Mary Beard is the perfect guide to the city, as it is now and as best as we can understand it before the eruption, and in _The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found_ (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), she has written a delightful, sometimes irreverent, guide to the city. Sure, it has plenty of scholarship attached; ancient texts and modern reports are referenced, and there is an amazing range of evidence (bones of humans, skeletons of animals, oyster shells, bracelets, spilled paint, and traffic barriers), but she writes in a relaxed, almost chatty way that ensures readers will enjoy the fun of the often strange details she has included.
Even those who have been to Pompeii themselves will have to adjust their imaginary pictures of life there. For instance, take Beard's description of the baths. We think of the baths as promoting the sort of cleanliness that we ourselves value, but if you find yourself time-machined back to Pompeii, you might want to avoid this sort of "cleanliness". There was, of course, no chlorination, and not even any proper filters. The water was not always replaced, and wounds bathed in them could turn gangrenous. Beard concludes that the baths "may have been a place of wonder, pleasure, and beauty for the humble Pompeian bather. They might also have killed him." The baths also had a seamy reputation; they were, after all, a place where people got nearly naked and pursued pleasure. The more famous site for sex was the brothel, one particular house in downtown Pompeii that everyone acknowledges as having been a brothel, but there may have been many others. One sign that some categorizers (and some tour guides within the city) proclaim as a mark of a brothel is a phallus pointing to it, but in Pompeii there are phalluses everywhere. The famous picture of the god Priapus weighing his hefty organ in scales against a money bag, Beard says, used to have a curtain over it, not in the Roman days, to be sure, but in the seventies when she first visited the place. You could ask for the curtain to be withdrawn; perhaps, now that there is no such curtain, moralists will say that we are descending into pagan immorality. But there would have to be a lot of such curtains: "There are phalluses greeting you in doorways, phalluses above bread ovens, phalluses carved into the surface of the street, and plenty more phalluses with bells on - and wings." Beard points out that we can't really be sure what all these wands were for, but that thinking of them as lucky charms (something like a horseshoe on a wall) might make them less naughty, but they still cannot avoid being sexual tokens.
Throughout, Beard illustrates the "Pompeii paradox": "We simultaneously know a huge amount and very little about ancient life there". We don't know much about the upper stories of buildings, since their ground floors and foundations survived while the upstairs did not. Did they keep their bedrooms up there, and where did the children stay, and how many lived in a house? We can tell that Pompeians played lots of different board games, and we have rulebooks for none. One game was called _latrunculi_, and of the many election posters reviewed here, one said that a candidate had the support of the _latrunculi_ players; was this sarcasm? Everyone who has visited Pompeii has seen the bars with large jars set in the counter, and guides give the impression that there was a bartender who ladled wine from them, but the jars are porous. They may have been filled instead with dry goods, like fruit or chick peas, so were they for bar snacks? And then there are the mysteries of the creedless Roman religion, which allowed hundreds of gods and goddesses, and accepted new ones regularly, and was based on animal sacrifice. Wandering the streets of Pompeii, one can feel that this is a livable town, almost like a modern one; but Beard's book provides the useful service of showing that however much we appreciate the recovered art and architecture of the ancient city, we have to appreciate also how vastly the culture differed from ours, and how difficult it is to interpret the archeological evidence that is available.
Best introduction January 22, 2009
Richard Campbell (Alexandria, Virginia United States)
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
The best single book on Pompeii that I now own, even given (he sniffs) her annoying abuse of the comma. This is my first Mary Beard book, and quite different than all the other over 400 Roman books that I own. In a style that is almost scolding of our preconceptions, she presents a wonderful overview of the state of knowledge of Pompeiian culture and times. She synthesises all the current research on Pompeii from all angles and presents a very convincing description of what Pompeii was like not only at the time of the eruption but in the decades and centuries leading up to it.
This will be recommended reading in our Roman reenactment group. It might be interesting for her to know that she can get a reproduction of that "engaging jug in the shape of a cockere" since I've had it commissioned in the thermopolium of Asellina.
Engrossing Survey of Pompeiian Daily Life March 10, 2009
Barry Bedrick (Glen Cove, NY)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
This terrific and absorbing book discusses all aspects of life in Pompeii before the eruption in 79 CE. Beard synthesizes what we know of family life, making a living, entertainment, worship, ceremony, religion, civic life, etc.
As an interested amateur, I have no basis for judging her conclusions, but I find them convincing if only because she is so cautious: she is skeptical about a lot of the claims made by other scholars based on what she says is scant or non-existent evidence. When she speculates, she makes explicit that is what she is doing, and when we don't know and can only guess, she says so clearly. Another reviewer was disappointed that she rejects some of the tales told by guides, but to me her insistence on relying only on the evidence or lack thereof is one of the great virtues of the book.
The book is clearly written and entirely accessible to a non-scholar. Beard sometimes resorts to English demotic to great and occasionally shocking effect, both for translations and for her own observations. It is well-illustrated with both color plates and black-and-white illustrations placed in close proximity to the accompanying text and with helpful captions. (I wished on occasion that the illustrations were larger so that I could see better the detail she describes, and that cross-references to illustrations were by page number rather than illustration number.)
In short, this book is among the very best popular histories (I don't intend that adjective to be denigrating, rather an acknowledgment of the book's broad appeal beyond academia) I've ever read.
Archaeological Writing at Its Best March 31, 2009
C. Pellegrino (Long Beach, New York)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
My own area of research in forensic archaeology (which in this case focuses primarily on the physical effects of the Vesuvian surge clouds) has brought me up close and personal with Pompeii and Herculaneum. Yet, even to someone who works professionally in the ruins, Mary Beard's wonderful book has many new lessons to teach.
"The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found," has a rare quality of being accessible to an intelligent Junior High School student with an interest in the subject - yet, simultaneously it is so full of new details about individual homes and public buildings as to be endlessly fascinating even to professional scientists and classicists already quite familiar with the cities of Vesuvius.
- - Charles Pellegrino
Great commonsenese introduction March 10, 2009
K. Braithwaite (inkster, MI USA)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is an excellent introduction to Pompeii. Beard looks at the evidence for different theories, and points out where it is weak or strong. This is very helpful, because in many ways we know less about life in Pompeii than some scholars pretend.
Gives a good idea of what we can say about life in Pompeii, and she points out a LOT of interesting stuff that neither I nor my guide book noticed at the time. If you have gone or will go to Pompeii, this is an excallent book. And visit the Naples museum!
Showing reviews 1-5 of 16
|
|
|
|
