Pompeii and Herculaneum

"But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea." -Plato

...Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

- Percy Shelley, Ozymandias

Pompeii and Herculaneum are perhaps the most famous Roman cities outside of Rome itself, and the tragedy that consumed both cities in 79 AD actually preserved a great deal of what we know about Roman life in the glory days of the Empire. In the death of both cities, Rome yet lives.

Herculaneum is the smaller and better-preserved of the two cities, partly because it was excavated later and not as extensively. A number of the houses still have wall frescoes and the baths still have their floor mosaics. Most of these pieces of art are about as artistic as the stuff most people probably have hanging in your living room, i.e. not all that good. Herculaneum was apparently a ritzy seaport town, and the quality of construction is highly variable from very cheap and shoddy to largely intact despite having been hit with pyroclastic surge. In short, it was Roman Suburbia sans two-chariot garages. Interestingly enough, speaking of cheap construction it was interesting to note that many of the Corinthian and other columns at both Pompeii and Herculaneum were not sold stone as we would think they are, but rather a brick core surrounded by a kind of concrete cladding. Some of the house construction did look a little slapdash/not exactly up to code, and in fact Herculaneum was home to a kind of "experimental" construction made largely of random rocks and library paste, more or less, that is not found in Pompeii because Pompeii apparently had stricter building codes.

Pompeii is much larger, though not many artifacts have been left in situ: if you want to see those frescoes and mosaics you've seen in all the books, you need to go to the Archaeological Museum in Naples. Apparently at some point the authorities were afraid of Vesuvius erupting again and burying the site along with destroying the now-very-vulnerable uncovered works of art. As such, entire segments of walls were removed for safekeeping. A fair amount of that artwork is erotic and as such was highly offensive to the Catholic rulers of Naples. For quite some time such works were kept behind locked doors in a "Secret Cabinet" (yes, that's what it is still called), and to this day in theory you need to be at least 14 and have an appointment in order to enter. This being Italy that for all intents and purposes means you can walk right in as long as you don't snicker too much or otherwise act like you're 12.   

What I found interesting about Herculaneum was that the buildings were very similar to the buildings of contemporary Italy as well as those of places like California: the Romans were doing Spanish Style Architecture well before the Spanish. It goes to dictate the mantra of architect Louis Sullivan that form follows function: the function is living in a Mediterranean climate without air conditioning, and the low-slung buildings have forms that were very familiar. Also, the shops and taverns in both locations were identifiably so, and not just because I read the brochure that came with the cost of admission. An eatery typically had two walls more or less open to the outside to let air in, the front was lined with a bar with built-in holders for soup urns, and to eat you would go to a back room. And in some of these back rooms were found carvings along the lines of "Naughtius Maximus was here" and "I have a very great friend in Rome called Biggus Diccus" proving that the human urge to leave graffiti on things is very, very old. I might have seen some of that kind of Roman graffiti, but (and this seriously irritated me), much more visible was modern graffiti, some of it dating back nearly 40 years ("Bob and Louise [heart] forever, May 1976" for example).

Pompeii was probably the more impressive of the two sites just for its sheer scale. We're talking block after block of complete devastation in a city that measures around 160 acres but feels bigger. It's probably about a mile long by about 3/4 of a mile wide. The baths, theater, and amphitheater stayed more or less intact, but other than that, well, you try dumping a layer of rocks 5 meters thick on your house from a tremendous height and see how the roof holds up. Oddly enough, the amphitheater is still in use as a performance space today, as there are row and seat numbers in each place. I will say that the legroom is not tremendous.

The curbs on the Roman sidewalks are actually quite high, and many streets had two large stones built into them. I need to do some reading as to what they were there for, but they appeared to function as a combination of speed bump and crosswalk. There are still wagon ruts visible in the streets closer to the industrial quarter of the city, and what seemed odd to me was that the fancier houses tended to be found closer to that quarter whilst the more modest ones were located near the theater. Some of these, in fact, looked like miserably small places to live though it is possible a few of them could have been shops instead. The main street of Pompeii (and it's fairly obvious which one this was) still has a few buildings with signs painted on the walls, things like "Gaius Flavius Wine Co.", that sort of stuff. There are also the ruins of a brothel in Pompeii, complete with 8 small rooms containing stone beds that are clearly too short for sleeping, and frescoes that show presumably satisfied customers. The historical record is mum as to whether certain politicians may have been recorded on plaster or papyrus and thereby blackmailed.

In general, I would recommend seeing the ruins in the order I saw them, i.e. seeing Pompeii with Herculaneum firmly in mind. Herculaneum makes it much easier to imagine what Pompeii must have been like when it was an active city, but Pompeii sparks more of the imagination in my opinion.

A roommate of Cassie's said that she doesn't like to go to Pompeii or Herculaneum because they remind her of Sachsenhausen. As someone who has also been to a concentration camp (see my earlier post in December on Majdanek), I think that's not a fair comparison. Both were places where about 20,000 people died in one day. Despite that, while Pompeii can be a sad place, it is not a place of evil. It was a place that had an accident. Vesuvius didn't kill those people on purpose, it erupted because, well, that's what volcanoes do. I am not yet so thoroughly cynical that I would say, "well, in the camps people killed people, because that's just what people do."


It is also worth noting how people died in both Pompeii and Herculaneum. I saw two of the famous plaster-cast people at Pompeii, and it was remarkable how peaceful both of them looked, as if they were just sleeping. Current thought is that what killed the vast majority of people at both sites is in fact pyroclastic flow, or a rush of hot gases at temperatures of above 250 C. Most of those who died never knew what hit them.

Instead of being monuments of human evil, Pompeii and Herculaneum are monuments of human frailty and that's what makes them scary. Looking up at the mountain looming over the entire scene, and perhaps feeling a small earthquake while walking in the street, were reminders that even though 2000 years have passed, when Vesuvius rumbles and erupts again, we are still powerless to do anything other than get out of the way.