Partner Highlight
March 2008
Founded in 1874, the San Diego Society of Natural History is the oldest scientific institution in southern California, and the third oldest west of the Mississippi. Its mission is to interpret the natural world through research, education and exhibits; to promote understanding of the evolution and diversity of southern California and the peninsula of Baja California; and to inspire in all a respect for nature and the environment.
Scientists at the Museum are actively engaged in research programs and regularly publish in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The extensive scientific collections of the Biodiversity Research Center of the Californias (BRCC) support the research of many scientific disciplines, including those working to define and preserve biodiversity and monitor global change.
The Museum houses a permanent exhibition, “Fossil Mysteries,” that covers the prehistory of southern California and Baja California, Mexico, during the past 75 million years, from the age of dinosaurs to the Ice Ages. Visitors can also view films in the giant-screen theater or enjoy programs and lectures, included with general admission. Current temporary exhibitions include “Photography at the Poles,” “Dangerous Volcanoes of the World,” and “A Day in Pompeii.”
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The fresco (above) of a winged female figure evokes the taste for lush, rich color so char- acteristic of Pompeian home decor. Blending realism and fantasy, the painter has com- bined elements of Roman social status (in the adornments of golden jewelry and the purple- striped sash) with the mythology of a gar- landed, vine-covered goddess. Detail (right) shows golden jewelry worn by upper class women in Pompeii. Women fleeing the city often seized such precious objects, as we know from the contents of purses found near the corpses of women who were buried by volcanic ash. |
Pompeii By Joseph Andrew Smith, Ph.D. City of Risk and Prosperity Pompeii was a bustling seaport town in August of 79 C.E. The residents of Pompeii would have thought of that year as the tenth in Emperor Vespasian’s rule (or the year of his ninth consulship); more likely they would have been thinking of themselves as living at the start of a new era. For in late June, Vespasian, after having guided the empire from a disastrous series of civil wars into a decade of firm yet prosperous rule, had died peacefully. He left his title, Caesar, with all the mighty imperial powers of authority associated with it, to his elder son, Titus. This new Caesar
The smooth transition of power within the Flavian family would have been welcome news to Pompeians that summer and surely would have been a sign for the steady continuance of policies appealing to the sensibilities of the merchant class. The people of Pompeii had fared well even under the reign of Nero (whose wife, Poppaea Sabina, had family connections in the immediate area), had seen little detrimental imperial policy change under Vespasian, and were now looking forward to continued prosperity under Titus. |
Pompeii’s population that summer would have numbered about 12,000 residents: not too big—a mere fraction of Rome’s population of approximately one million—but big enough to make it a dominant port south of Rome. Just north on the Bay of Naples was Misenum, home (since the time of Augustus a century earlier) to the naval fleet of the western Mediterranean. Nearer still were resort communities thick with the get-away rustic villas of Rome-weary aristocrats. During the dog days, which brought stifling heat to Rome, the region’s seaboard population would have been swelling with annual vacationers.
But Pompeii itself was hardly a resort town. From its modest beginnings as a cluster of houses around a forum for holding local farmers’ markets, Pompeii had grown as a Greek colony in the fashion of the planned communities of Hippodamus, with thoroughfare roads lattice-worked across the town to form neighborhoods (or insulae) into blocks. Pompeii grew into a merchant center whose densely packed townhouses (villae urbanae) doubled as both domiciles and workshops. From their shops Pompeians busied themselves with the readying of high-demand luxury goods for trade.
Its location in Campania was perfect for such business: as Pompeii was located right on the bay, moving goods up and down the Italian seaboard would have been safe and convenient for the town’s merchants. Land travel would have been relatively easy as well, given the proximity of Pompeii to the major north-south artery, the via Appia, or Appian Way. But it was Pompeii’s proximity to Vesuvius that was the true secret of its prosperity. The mountain contributed generously (with some hidden costs) to the resources of the town’s trade: the region’s soil provided a signature red clay to Pompeians who were expert in molding sturdy amphorae (large two-handled storage vessels shaped as long tubes that could easily be stacked, leaned, or lashed together in large bundles). Into these storage vessels Pompeians would stock the bounty of rich, volcanic soil: olives grew abundantly in the region, as did grapes harvested from vineyards right on the volcano’s slope, which became world-renowned Campanian wines. Equally sought after by cultured Romans throughout the empire was Pompeii’s cooking sauce, garum Pompeianum. This garum, the product of fermented mackerel, was akin to Worcestershire Sauce or that essential Thai flavoring, nam pla. The production of this table condiment had become a boom industry in town, and the strong smell of drying fish emanating from the workshops might have struck the Pompeian nose as the pungent odor of lucre.
Yet another distinctively rich smell in the summer air of Pompeii would have been the steam emanating from the fullers’ shops, whose bleaching process depended upon the liquid ammonia of boiling urine. Daily collections from the public urinals (posted abundantly at the street corners of the town) were dumped into fullers’ vats, heated, and steamed onto wool hung up above the vats.
Even the patron goddess of the town, Venus, was a reflection of a Pompeian love of profits. Only 150 years earlier, the emeriti (discharged veterans) of the Roman army whom the dictator Sulla had settled in Pompeii, had established Venus, Sulla’s patron goddess, as the town’s guiding star. The goddess appears throughout Pompeii, in her welcome guises as Fortune and Abundance. Venus Pompeiana was eventually joined by the favored goddess of the eastern empire Isis, the Egyptian queen of seas. Her presence in town (with a temple just south of the forum) gives evidence of cosmopolitan commingling of religions and cultures.
The summer of 79 C.E. was, in short, the best of times for that busy town.
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Death Warns Pompeians to Live
Mementos of death appear everywhere in and around Pompeii. One might think the residents of that vital town on the Bay of Naples were extraordinarily fixated on death, living as they were in a region whose natural wonders were so foreboding and ominous that few could doubt the legend of an entrance to the underworld somewhere nearby. When history’s most famous natural disaster struck in August of 79 C.E., it gave final proof—it might be argued—that the Pompeians had lived too familiarly with the threat of an imminent doom. And yet those Pompeians, who inadvertently left behind so much evidence of their awareness of the precarious nature of their lives and their vigorous respect for death and all it claimed, seem fairly representative of the wider culture of the empire.
One would see it manifested ubiquitously in Pompeii. Reverence for tutelary ancestral gods was at the core of their home lives and it so thoroughly imbued their culture that the very architecture of their houses made prominent accommodation for pious display of the genial spirits of the household. Every home’s foremost receiving room, the atrium, contained a lararium, a small shine for worship and presentation of the family Lar. Familial lares, when represented in figurines, cut striking figures of nimble-footed sprites whose energy promised projection of the household into the future. Along with these lares would be other small statues or tokens of deceased ancestors, showing that “the departed” were expected to stay near and protect the household.
Far more striking would have been the prominent display of waxen death masks, imagines, in the atria of Pompeii’s foremost families. We can appreciate how imagines might have looked through sculpted marble busts left behind in Pompeian houses. These give an indication of how “real” (to an exaggerated degree) dead ancestors would have been portrayed in the atrium. One of the most well-known residents of Pompeii, the financier Lucius Caecilius Iucundus, already dead for a generation at the time of Vesuvius’ eruption, has had his fame secured down to our own day, thanks to the marble bust his family kept on proud display in his home. When one sees this representation of Caecilius, one thinks first on its fantastic preservation, but as one studies the face in stone, it becomes hard not to think of the wax mold pressed down on the dead man’s face soon after his death. The imago captured the likeness of a man not as he lived but as he would be in death. Such a representation would undoubtedly have had a sobering effect on the surviving members in a family, encouraging an earnest engagement with the world outside the home worthy of the dead man’s reputation and values.
In Roman practice, these waxen death masks would have been taken out of the household to accompany funeral processions; the ritual conducting of a deceased family member from the home to the final resting place outside the town’s walls would have been attended by a train of ancestors (that is, masks worn or carried by living family members) with whom the departed would be taking up permanent residence.
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Indeed, the names of dead Pompeians endured through funereal inscription in a state of preservation far beyond what the denizens of that town could or would have hoped for. What good is it, after all, to have ancestors looking over a dead city void of living family members?
There is another, ultimate monumentum that the Pompeians left for us, the one that had no place in their ordinary daily commemoration of death—that is, the installation of their own bodies impressed into the layers of volcanic ash and mud which buried the city. These poignantly prompt us to reflect on the meaning of their lives in absolute terms. These bones and body casts are anonymous. And they serve to make us think about the lives of Pompeians beyond the trappings of their family connections. They prompt us to think about the vitality of Pompeii in a way exactly opposite to what their own monuments were intended to accomplish: we see the image of the dead of Pompeii and we are immediately struck by their loss of the prosperous future toward which all their reminders of death were compelling them to strive.
Joseph Andrew Smith, Ph.D., is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Classics and Humanities at San Diego State University and curator of the exhibition “A Day in Pompeii” at the San Diego Natural History Museum through June 15.
Copyright © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 2008