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The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found
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About The Fires Of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost And Found
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. Review “Engrossingly mischievous… Beard takes cheeky, undisguised delight in puncturing the many fantasies and misconceptions that have grown up around Pompeii―sown 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’ serves as her battle cry, and it’s a noble one… This is a wonderful book, for the impressive depth of information it comfortably embraces, for its easygoing erudition and, not least, for its chatty, personable style.” ― Steve Coates , New York Times Book Review “[ The Fires of Vesuvius] offered me a wealth of riveting information on the vanished city, written with clarity, wit and a detective’s eye for solving conundrums.” ― Alberto Manguel , Times Literary Supplement “Doing her level best to unpack the ‘Pompeii paradox’―how ‘we simultaneously know a huge amount and very little about ancient life’ in Rome’s foremost ruin, the seaside city wholly consumed by a vomitous Vesuvius in 79 A.D.―Beard, the subversive and spiky Cambridge classicist, leaves few forensic (or semiotic) stones unturned. Alternately recreating daily life and picking, brick by symbolic brick, at the abundant archaeological and psychological detritus, she proceeds to exhume, analyze, and reconstitute the time and place in a manner pleasing to traditionalists, revisionists, and inevitabilists alike.” ― The Atlantic “As Mary Beard shows in The Fires of Vesuvius, her marvelous excavation of Pompeii’s history, the city is rarely what it is billed to be. A leading historian of Roman culture, a prolific essayist and an irrepressible blogger, Beard punctures conventional pieties about history and culture with formidable scholarly authority, always paying keen attention to the layering effects of the passage of time… With The Fires of Vesuvius, Beard has produced a lusciously detailed, erudite account of life in ancient Pompeii… The challenge of The Fires of Vesuvius rests in the way that its portrait of Pompeii overturns longstanding conceptions about the empire to which the city belonged. Most important is Beard’s depiction of the chaotic diversity of Pompeian life―the sheer variety of its religious experience, its linguistic multiplicity, its class tensions―which raises far-reaching question
