Emily Hauser's Blog, page 3

Pompeii: A Guided Walking Tour (Part I)

You can also read Emily's blog, "Missives from Iris", online at www.irisonline.org.uk/index.php/blog I once spent two summers digging in Pompeii as an archaeologist. As someone whose only experience of the Classical world thus far had been books and verb tables, I thought it’d be a good experience to get my hands dirty and see where all the objects we study actually come from.

Pompeii is unique among all ancient sites. After the eruption of the volcano Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, the city was buried in layers of ash that preserved it perfectly until its discovery 1700 years later. Visitors to the site can see beautiful paintings, as vividly colourful as they were to the Romans; a loaf of bread that was left in the oven; even the bodies of the tragic victims who did not escape the eruption. Pompeii is like a time capsule from the past, bringing to life an ancient city in all its shabby glory, taking us closer to the world of the Romans than we’ve ever been before.

There’s something about Pompeii that captures the imagination in a way nowhere else in the ancient world does. As participants of the dig, we were allowed to enter the site a full hour before the tourists did. I used to take advantage of that hour when I had the city to myself to explore the deserted streets and empty houses of Pompeii, and to imagine how it must have been to live there, two thousand years ago.

So, this week, I’m going to give you my guided walking tour to Pompeii. Above is a map of your route to get you started. Make sure you keep it handy as you make your way around the city – it can get confusing!

 
Before we begin, though, I’m going to send you back two thousand years, to the year 75 CE. You are a Roman merchant who has come to Pompeii hoping to buy some of Pompeii’s famous fish sauce so you can sell it back in Rome (hopefully for a big fat profit). You’ve had an easy journey down the coast of Italy from Rome, following the shoreline until you reached the beautiful Bay of Naples with its sparkling blue sea, colonnaded villas nestled around the bay and pleasure yachts cruising the waters. You marvelled at the gigantic mountain, Vesuvius, that towers over it all, with its slopes covered in vineyards and its peak stretching up to the sky – the tallest mountain you’ve ever seen. At the mouth of the river Sarno your ship continued its journey inland towards the southern slopes of Vesuvius, until, at last, you reached a busy port full of bustling merchants, boats large and small jostling to get their place in the dock.

You have arrived in Pompeii.
            “Move out the way, move out the way.”

            You can hear a strident voice calling over the noise of the seagulls and the cries of sailors and chattering merchants. You look up. A large, portly man with a big belly and a sunburned face is pushing his way through the crowds, gesturing to you and calling your name.

            “You – over there!” he shouts to you, gesturing again. “Come on up here!”

            He holds out a large hand and pulls you out of your ship onto the quayside. You sway a little, not used to being on land again after your long journey, and he catches you with a laugh.

            “Rufus,” he says, holding out a hand. “I can see you’re a Roman. Not used to being at sea, eh?”

            You smile as you take the hand that’s being held out to you and shake it. “I don’t mean to be rude, Rufus, but — who are you?”

            Rufus chuckles again. “I’m a friend of your father’s,” he explains. “He wrote to me that you’d be coming and that you’re new to these parts, asked me to give you a tour of the city, show you the ropes and so on. Shall we go?” He motions over to a ramp up to a large gate, and you fall into step beside him as you walk up into the city.

            “This is the Porta Marina,” he says, gesturing up to the huge gate. “It’s the main gate from the harbour up into the city.” You squeeze to the side as an enormous cart trundles past, ringing a bell to warn pedestrians to get out of the way. 

            “How many gates are there into the city?” you ask, once the cart has made its way past and down into the port.

            Rufus rubs his chin, and you can see he’s counting up the gates. “Seven,” he says, after a while. “Oh, wait, no, I forgot the Herculaneum Gate – eight, then.” He pauses. “It’s not the largest town on the bay, Pompeii, and it’s certainly not the biggest you’ll ever see – but it makes up in liveliness what it doesn’t have in size.”

            You’ve come out from under the gate now, and are walking uphill into the city on a road paved with large stones. To your right is an ornate temple covered in marble, with tall fluted columns and white-robed priests milling around the steep front steps. 

            “The Temple of Venus,” Rufus says, seeing where you’re looking. “But that’s old. The one you really want to see is the Temple of Isis.” He raises his eyebrows and gives a low whistle. “We won’t have time for it today, but it’s worth a visit, trust me.”
You’re just wondering why when you round a corner, and suddenly – quite unexpectedly – you emerge into a large open space. A colonnade runs around it, and at the other end, you can just make out another temple, smaller than the Temple of Venus but just as impressive, set against the backdrop of Mount Vesuvius. People are milling around everywhere selling their wares, and you can hear sellers calling out everything from freshly baked bread to custom-made shoes. 

            “This would be a good place to look for fish sauce,” you say, more to yourself, but Rufus shakes his head.

            “You want to go to the Herculaneum Gate for that,” he says, and he leads you forwards into the crowds of people.

            “This is the Forum,” he shouts over the humdrum noise of buyers and sellers, lawyers and priests. “It’s the heart of Pompeii. Great place, the Forum. You can do anything and meet anyone here.”

            You nod. You’ve been to the Forum in Rome many times, you know how it serves as the beating heart of the city, housing the law courts, markets, temples, shops and council houses. But this one is very different – more organised than the Roman Forum, you think. At least this one doesn’t have centuries-old mythical monuments littering it all over the place.

            You busy yourself with fighting your way through the crowds until you reach the other side of the Forum and the crowds thin a bit. Rufus is sweating and mopping his brow with a dirty cloth.

            “Phew,” he says. “I’m always glad when I reach the Main Street. It’s great for business, the Forum, but it can get a little —”

            Another cart passes by, clanging its bell, and you miss the rest of the sentence.

            After a little while walking down the street in silence, you come to a crossroads, with a magnificent set of baths on the left. Rufus doesn’t pay them any attention though. He’s pointing to a large pair of doors on the opposite side of the road, set in what looks like a pretty plain wall.

            “Doesn’t look like much, does it,” he says with a knowing smile, seeing the look on your face. “But that’s the house of one of the oldest families in Pompeii.”

            You look at the huge bronze doors, and feel a shiver run down your spine, even though the day is hot.

            “Who lives there?”

            Rufus gives a snort. “Lucius Popidius Secundus,” he says derisively, though he lowers his voice to a whisper and looks around him all the same. He gives you a knowing look. “There are plenty of stories I could tell you about him, my friend.”


Continued on Thursday– come back to find out where Rufus goes next!

Why Study A Dead Language

You can also read Emily's blog, "Missives from Iris", online at www.irisonline.org.uk/index.php/blog
It’s a question every Classicist has been faced with at one time or another. You’ve just met a friend you haven’t seen for a few years, say.

“And what are you up to now?” they ask politely.

“Oh — I study Classics,” you say, a little apologetically.

They look a bit bewildered. Sometimes they venture a guess: “Classical music?” “Shakespeare?” Even — “Classic cars?” (I’ve had that one myself.)

“No,” you say patiently. “Classics. It’s the study of the civilisations of the ancient world. You know, ancient Greece and Rome. I read their literature, study the history, that sort of thing.”

Now the look of polite bewilderment has turned into incredulity. “You mean you actually read ancient Greek?” they say. Your heart sinks. You can feel the question coming. You ready yourself for it. And then it happens.

“So tell me – why do you study a dead language?”

Every student of Latin or Greek has to learn to cope with this question. Not only that, they have to have an answer ready to draw from their pockets whenever it’s sprung upon them – and believe me, it happens in the places you least expect it. I’ve been accosted with it everywhere from petrol stations and driving tests to job interviews. So how do you give friends, colleagues and potential employers the sure-fire answer to exactly why you study Classics – one that will bowl them over with your intelligence and wit, and, at the same time, show them that the study of the ancient world is still absolutely relevant?

Read on for a couple of ideas that should get you started the next time someone drops the ‘Why Classics’ question.    
Learning Languages

A good one to start with is the basic fact that ancient Greek and Latin are fantastic toolkits for understanding language better. Few of us have a good understanding of English grammar – after all, we’re brought up speaking it, not reciting verb tables. When you learn Greek and Latin grammar, you start to learn your own grammar at the same time; which means you get to be the annoying person who always corrects everyone else’s syntax. There’s also the fact that the roots of so many English words come from ancient Greek and Latin, which gives you a huge advantage in knowing fancy words other people don’t (it also helps in winning Balderdash). And many of the Romance languages – Italian, Spanish, French – are descended from Latin, making it hugely easier to pick them up once you’ve got a bit of Latin behind you.

Another big advantage of learning Greek and Latin is that it broadens your perspective on language more generally. With English so widespread in the modern world, it’s a humbling and valuable experience to try to get under the skin of another language from scratch. It makes us appreciate what foreign speakers go through when they try to learn our language. And it invites us to begin to understand how relative language is to culture – how different cultures have different words to express the concepts that mean something to them, and how we can begin to understand them in our own languages and our own ways. 

Logic

Anyone who’s done any ancient Greek will confirm this for you in a heartbeat: to learn a dead language, you need to have a highly sharpened sense of logic. The only way you can possibly learn all those irregular verbs is to get a grip on the patterns underlying their structure. I still have my grammar notes from school with all the different conjugations of Greek verbs colour-coded according to tense, person, voice and mood! Let’s just say you have to learn logic pretty quickly to wrap your head around Classics. It’s a quality that’s highly valued in many professions, from finance to business to law – and it’s something that learning Latin and Greek gives you the chance to develop early on.

A Broad Expertise

When people ask you exactly what Classics is, their first guess when you tell them you study Ancient Greece and Rome is normally, in my experience, that you read the literature of the Greeks and Romans (most people have usually heard of Homer). But all of us know that Classics is so much more than that. Studying Classics, you can be expected to know everything from the style of Alexander the Great’s hairdo and how it was depicted on coins, to the philosophical arguments of Socrates, to the origins of modern language in Indo-European roots, as well as some pretty funky myths. We do everything from language, literature and linguistics to philosophy, history, art and archaeology; and it’s one of the things which I think sets Classics apart. It’s hard to find many other subjects that ask you for such a broad skill set – which means that Classics can provide invaluable training for a whole range of different interests.

Cultural Sensitivity
I already touched on this one earlier, but it bears repeating. One of the great things about studying Classics is that it doesn’t just cover the languages, as many people think – it’s the study of an entire culture (actually, two entire cultures). Being exposed to how other people, who lived in a very different time and place from our own, thought, wrote, talked, drew, philosophised, ate, prayed, partied and slept gives you a tremendous window onto the varieties of culture. It makes you comfortable with different gods and different religious practices. It allows you to accept and analyse alternative gender norms to our own with a critical, rather than a prejudiced, eye. Often I have found myself taking friends and relatives around the Classical galleries in some museum or other and being asked in tones of scandalised shock about some of the ruder depictions on vase paintings or in statues. Even more often, I have become so used to these depictions that I hardly notice them, and have to recall my own prejudices when I first started studying Classics in order to understand why my friends are so offended. Being in touch with cultures other than our own forces us to confront our own prejudices and assumptions, again and again. And that, in my opinion, is the first step to letting those assumptions go, and starting to go a little bit deeper into what it really means to be a human on this planet.

Understanding Historical Patterns

Isaac Newton, the famous physicist, once remarked that, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” (His comment is also etched around the edge of two pound coins, just in case you need to whip it out at unexpected moments.) The quotation goes to the heart of history and why we study it. Not only do our historical and cultural achievements rest on the discoveries of the past, as Newton put it; our mistakes are, more often than not, repetitions of the mistakes that were also made by the figures of history. By “standing on the shoulders of giants”, as Newton did, we gain an invaluable perspective on the way that history unfolds, in both good times and bad. The opportunity Classics provides us with is particularly unique in this respect. We can look back to the past from our present vantage point, survey the Classical period and the enormous impact it had on later European civilisation. And we can also climb up onto the shoulders of some of the Classical giants – Cicero, Homer, Augustus – and get inside their heads. What was Augustus thinking when he fought the Battle of Actium and defeated the last remaining opponent to his rule and brought about the end of the Republic? Who was Homer, and why did he decide to commemorate the story of Achilles’ wrath? Why did Cicero make the choices he did – and how would modern politicians face similar dilemmas? 
Learning From The Past

And so this brings me to my final point: the way in which Classics enables us to learn from the past. Some scholars would disagree, but it is my belief that, whilst cultures and historical events may change around us, humans remain largely the same. By comparing ourselves to the people of the past, we can begin to explore how and if humans change. We can start to investigate what we share: what interests us, what we’re passionate about, what we find frightening, what motivates us, what we hate, what we love. We can start to understand what it is that makes us human, and explore the big questions that ultimately underpin every search for knowledge in every book that has ever filled the shelves of a library: the question of why we’re here, how agency and history (or free will and fate, put it whichever way you like) interact, what, if anything, is our relationship to the divine, and, last but not least, the question of how to live the good life.

Now that, I think, is something worth learning. Wouldn’t you agree?