Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town

Product Information

Enormous ones, tiny ones, doubles, singles; attached to men, gods or satyrs in every medium, or in disembodied splendor; over doors, carved into the pavement, on chains and serving trays, turned into lamps, winged like birds, with bells on.

Pompeii was a lively resort flourishing in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius at the height of the Roman Empire. The ruins of Pompeii, buried by an explosion of Vesuvius in 79 CE, offer the best evidence we have of everyday life in the Roman empire. Beard, a classics professor at Cambridge University,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. On the way to the ticket office, you will pass a large display of plaster casts--the archaeological remains of some victims of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.When Vesuvius explodes into a cloud of fiery ash and rocks fall from the sky like rain, will they have time to escape -- and survive the epic destruction of Pompeii? It ends where the reader has to make up the rest of the story on their own, but the good news is they survive the volcano.

This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. In this collection, Brenda Longfellow and Molly Swetnam-Burland have gathered an outstanding group of scholars to give voice to both the elite and ordinary women living on the Bay of Naples before the eruption of Vesuvius. Her books include the Wolfson Prize-winning Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town (2008) and the best-selling SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015).

Plenty of streets blocked to traffic here and lots of detailed archaeological evidence to get to grips with, but coming through the book to the reader is the passion of the author and his need to discover and reveal new facts about Pompeii to his readers. Beard, a professor of classics at Cambridge, always wears her learning lightly, and in this outstanding book she has excelled herself, puncturing preconceptions and exposing a whole layer of myth about the world's best-preserved ancient town. Poehler, an authority on Pompeii's uniquely preserved urban structure, distills over five hundred instances of street-level "wear and tear" to reveal for the first time the rules of the ancient road. I am fundamentally interested in the people, how they lived their lives, and have published widely on tombs, epigraphy, and politics in Pompeii. Though the Romans have long departed Pompeii, the swirl of humanity keeps going in Pompeii and beyond.

This remarkable book rises to the challenge of making sense of those remains, as well as exploding many myths: the very date of the eruption, probably a few months later than usually thought; or the hygiene of the baths which must have been hotbeds of germs; or the legendary number of brothels, most likely only one; or the massive death count, maybe less than ten per cent of the population. It is the first book in any language to comprehensively explore the gastronomy and cuisine not just of Italy, and not just the regions of Italy, but all 109 provinces of Italy, linking each with each other in terms of history, agriculture, economics, and the material culture of creative food illustrated with recipes. Does the book contain anything that teachers would wish to know about before recommending in class (strong language, sensitive topics etc. Head for the Garden of the Fugitives and then walk as far east as you can to the palestra, the amphitheater and any of the streets along its north side. She quite literally wrote the book(s) on gardens, and her archaeological approach to plant remains revolutionised how botanical evidence is collected.Beneath layers of volcanic ash lies the Vil Lucia does not want to marry her father’s choice, a far from attractive middle-aged man, and finds herself falling in love with Tag. I have a clear memory of standing in the Forum and thinking it was the most amazing place I had ever been. 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.

The Government, The Media and the Falklands Crisis, and A Higher Form of Killing (with Jeremy Paxman). Pliny the Elder played a famous role in the evacuation attempts from the volcanic eruption in 79AD and I used him as a fictionalised character in The Wolf Den .

The last sentence of the novel reports a local legend that a man and woman had emerged from the aqueduct after the eruption, which implies that Attilius and Corelia likely survived the trip up the aqueduct. Most of the city was evacuated during the catastrophe, its contents largely removed by the fleeing inhabitants.