A City Unbottled: Mary Beard's Pompeii (Page 3)

Beard ventures no claim about the broader impact of her down-to-earth portrait of Pompeii. But it will surely help the broad readership for whom it is written to distinguish between the ideals of a closely knit ancient elite and the seedier realities of the Roman social and political experience. Such a distinction should make Rome more interesting to contemporary political thinkers, not less. With its focus on labor, education and religion, The Fires of Vesuvius is a testament to how much Roman studies has to offer the contemporary political imagination. Well-informed in the latest research in demography, the history of Roman politics, architecture, ancient economics, feminist and post-colonial studies, Beard probes the experience of men and women, free and slave, rich and poor. Along with the formal rituals that circumscribed urban social interaction, such as the morning salutatio, when clients lined up to greet their well-off patrons, she describes the busy working life of the city, whose lack of zoning meant that the pungent, noisy labor of metalwork, tanning and garum production (the Romans' preferred condiment, a sauce made from rotted, fermented seafood) permeated the air. One of Beard's more controversial points involves the probable literacy rate of the poor. From the graffiti scrawled all over the city, from irreverent comments on a rich family's imposing tomb to quotes of Virgil on the walls of a building near the Stabian Baths that appears to have been used as a brothel, she concludes that "humble" working-class Pompeians had some command of reading and writing. Not every scholar will agree. W.V. Harris, author of Ancient Literacy (1989), argues that severely limited access to education in the Greek and Roman worlds kept levels of literacy low.

Against the backdrop of Roman civic religion, an area Beard knows intimately, she sketches a variegated world of religious practice, embodied in the Temple of Isis, a lovely ivory statuette of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, bottles made for kosher garum and the words "Sodom" and "Gomora" scribbled on a wall of a small dining room. Similarly, though phalluses were prominently depicted everywhere in the city--"phalluses greeting you in doorways, phalluses above bread ovens, phalluses carved into the surface of the street"--Pompeii was far from a purely male-run show. In Beard's account, women emerge as important players in the city's commerce and politics. One woman finances the construction of the largest building in the Forum, adorning it fashionably with statues copied from the Forum of Augustus in Rome; another scrawls her support for her grandson's run for office on a city wall, on one of more than fifty graffiti (most of these apparently sincere) that name women as the backers of candidates. Barred from electoral office, though they actively participated in the politically inflected religious life of the city, wealthy women may have held metaphorical court in their homes, and Beard presents these as the combination of private refuge, entertainment venue, business office and place of worship that they were.

Each age may believe it chooses its own objects of veneration and study, but there is no such thing as a cultural tabula rasa: like a wave that changes the shape of the sea as it rushes forward, the convictions of one era form the horizons of the future as well as understandings of the past. Scholars of ancient Greece and Rome have never exactly ignored the ideologically charged history of Western convictions about classical antiquity, but most have been content to coast upon rather than scrutinize its authority.

Beard's generation of classical scholars is the first to make the transmission and reception of the concept we call "the classical past" the object of expert, theoretically informed study. Into the analysis of ancient texts and material evidence they have integrated the hows and whys of what we know about ancient Greece and Rome--the host of filters created by the politics and pedagogy of empire, national identity, religion and class. Their success so far--The Fires of Vesuvius is a prime example--suggests that the positivist mindset that has long characterized the field of classics is gradually modulating into a productively self-critical approach to history. Here the classical past is viewed as the collective composition of generations of storytellers, from Homer and Thucydides to modern members of the American Philological Association and the makers of Troy and 300. Some wish the past to mirror the present, and others privilege difference; some are openly eager to create fantasy, while others aim to set right a picture distorted by prior prejudices. These desires and purposes are usually (though not always) self-evident. The point that permeates Beard's work, along with much of the best of classical cultural and literary studies, is that part of the job of studying the past is to examine the assumptions of each storyteller and the effect each of their stories has, ripple-like, on the rest. Beard's depiction of Pompeii manages to do justice to all its alien strangeness while prompting us to reflect on the significance of felt resemblances between its experience and our own--in the formation of cultural identity, habits of consumption, political nepotism, religion, sexuality, violent entertainments and much more.

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