Pompeii

 

 

 

Edward Hutton devoted a chapter to Pompeii and Herculaneum, two small Roman towns destroyed by an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. He paid particular attention to Pompeii, a "Roman pleasure resort" whose magnificent wall paintings were preserved under volcanic ash until modern times.

Photo courtesy of David Orme

Nothing, I think, to be seen anywhere else in Europe is at once so monstrously dreary and so moving as this strange city of Pompeii with its broken houses and narrow, paved lanes, which once boasted some 20,000 inhabitants. It is, of course, a great misfortune for us of the modern world that Pompeii was not overwhelmed by Vesuvius in A.D. 62 before she was overthrown by an earthquake, rather than in A.D. 79, when the final catastrophe actually happened. What we see is not the ruin of the town that Cicero loved, but the town half rebuilt by the ruined inhabitants in the Roman style, upon the old site, and largely with the old remains. It is, partly for this reason, then, very disappointing. And yet what else in all Europe can be compared with it?...

One is altogether overwhelmed by these magnificent paintings. They seem to suggest that Pompeii must have been something more than a third-rate provincial town, or that a provincial town in antiquity must have been very different  from a provincial town in modern Europe. That is certainly so. Bourgeois life in Pompeii, the houses attest it , was at once more private and more public than we know today. Those paintings, so light, so airy, so exquisite in their grace and their gaiety, suggest a civilization and a culture far above anything known in the middle-class, commercial town of the medieval or modern world….

Yet they knew how to live in their happy slave State, in their sunny town with its ample theatre and ampitheatre, its games, gladiatorial shows, its light-hearted paintings, its delightful bronzes, its airy homes and beautiful temples. Here are the very ways up which Cicero passed, the ruts of the wagon wheels still deep in the stones—those narrow ways, across which you may leap without effort from side to side. Here stands the two public edifices, the temple and the brothel. Here in these little houses, sometimes just drawn as it were from the grave, the frescoes still fresh on the walls, the little sculptures in their place beside the fountain, and about the atrium even flowers—here they lived. And if you go out by the Herculanean gate you may see their tombs all beside the way, a long avenue, where lie the ancestors of those who saw the catastrophe. And if you have the courage to creep into that new museum by the gate you may see the images of those who suffered it, who fled too late from the amphitheatre by the Porta di Sarno, who returned for their gold or their treasure, to look for their children or to find a friend, or who never left home upon that tragic day when the mountain bellowed with thunder and the darkness and vileness  of the heart of the earth rose suddenly and descended upon this place in the face of the sun. There they lie, the young matron beside the slave, the master by the daughter, close together…. Ah, why should our curiosity demand so horrible an outrage as this?

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958.Preface. Pp. 181, 191-193.