Book Review: From Pompeii

From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Townby Ingrid RowlandThe Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014 Notre Dame professor Ingrid Rowland's new book From Pompeii does a good deal more than simply re-hash the familiar story of the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, the eruption that buried the bustling cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Her book expounds at delightful length and with delightful gusto not just that famous tragic story but its fascinating protracted epilogue - indeed, virtually every history of the Vesuvius eruption includes an actual epilogue doing much the same thing as Rowland's book does, only necessarily less extensively. It's a great and unexpected pleasure to read an author as knowledgeable and interesting as Rowland take her time and digress as her stories tempt her.She certainly has a great many stories to tell. Pompeii and Herculaneum hardly had a chance to rest in their buried peace before they became the focus of almost unrelenting interest. People began spelunking almost before the stone was cooled, and it wasn’t until very recently that this indiscriminate traffic was halted and controlled. Tourists today aren’t allowed access to the bulk of the excavated Pompeii, for instance, and even those granted leave are carefully escorted the whole time. “In 2013 [Pompeii] stands silent and inaccessible,” Rowland writes, “Pompeii is a living city, but much of what lives there is vegetable, reptile, bird, or insect: the bumblebees are huge and fat, jet black or black striped with yellow, the sign of a healthy environment.”Hovering over the whole of a book like this, a book charting the many ways Pompeii and Herculaneum make their way into the imagination of later ages, is the omnipresent threat the exact same cataclysm happening again. Rowland is at her best in contemplating this:

At the same time, a radically reshaped Vesuvius, its symmetrical ancient cone blown to pieces in more recent eruptions, stands above Pompeii as a reminder that the city's disastrous end in the early years of the ancient Roman Empire is still a matter of present concern. Seismographers and volcanologists keep the mountain under constant surveillance, but when it decides to erupt again, its power over the human inhabitants of the Bay of Naples will be no less absolute than it was in the reign of the Emperor Titus, nearly two thousand years ago. The beauty of Pompeii's natural setting and the mildness of its climate exert the same potentially fatal attraction for the city's modern settlers as for their ancient predecessors, who repeated stories of long-ago earthquakes and subterranean fires but never expected to endure a calamity at first hand. It is this combination of beauty and danger that gives Pompeii its excitement ...

(She can also be refreshingly gloomy on the point! She’s far from the first person to point out how thoroughly the power of Vesuvius has been forgotten in a present day that should know better. “After centuries of oppressive government, moreover, Neapolitans are born skeptics,” she points out, “But generations of experience in getting by as individuals, in providing ingenious, generous help to family, friends, or guests is nothing like participating in a great collective action, which an evacuation needs to be. It was probably easier for Pliny the Elder to manage his rescue operation in 79, under the strong arm of the Roman Empire, than it will be for his democratic successors in the Protezione civile two millennia later.”)But whether or not the cities survive in their stones and pavements, the bulk of Rowland’s sparkling book makes it clear that they’ve done a great job of surviving in the collective imagination. Most enjoyable are the parts where Rowland turns her attention to other books, from forgotten works like 1832’s The Last Night of Pompeii, an epic poem by American cleric Sumner Lincoln Fairfield to runaway bestsellers like Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1843 blockbuster The Last Days of Pompeii. Rowland’s readings of all these books are briskly smart, and those readings extend to the latest of those blockbusters:

For many twenty-first-century visitors, novelist Robert Harris has performed the same role as Bulwer, but rather than pondering Sodom and Gomorrah, his readers will be scouring the site for its waterworks. First published in 2003, Pompeii obeys many of the same narrative laws as Fairfield's Last Night and Bulwer-Lytton's Last Days of Pompeii, an important reason for this recent book's popular success. The good guy wins, the bad guy loses, and the damsel in distress is saved; the same timeless laws of narrative govern the myths portrayed on the Pompeian walls: Theseus saves Ariadne from the hideous Minotaur, Perseus saves Andromeda from the sea monster, baby Hercules throttles the snakes that have come to strangle him in his cradle.

And of course the saga of Pompeii’s aesthetic afterlife goes on: 2014, for instance, saw the appearance in movie theaters of a multimillion-dollar special effects extravaganza, Pompeii, starring Game of Thrones’ sylphlike Kit Harington and some truly spectacular scenes of volcanic eruptions (including Kiefer Sutherland’s scenery-chewing). That aesthetic afterlife has never had quite so spirited a guidebook as this one.