Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum - British Museum

I went to see the latest blockbuster exhibition at the British Museum, 'Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum'. It was exceptionally busy when I went and suspect the whole run will be like that but it is definitely worth seeing if you can make it.

Of course, we all know the story of Pompeii - and therefore of Herculaneum - in that Vesuvius erupted and splurged the region in volcanic ash that covered the two cities and buried them and the people and artefacts deep in ash for nearly two thousand years. This exhibition tries to bring the old cities back to life by not just showing an array of amazing artefacts dug from the buried cities but by putting them in context. The exhibition is themed around a 'standard' Roman house of the time, placing the artefacts in and around the rooms of a typical villa.

We're given the kind of exhibits usually found in bedrooms, in kitchens and gardens. We see the frescoes, implements and furniture usually found in different rooms as well as the beautiful wall paintings decorating some rooms. Some are extensions of the spaces they represent, like the reconstruction of a garden room decorated with delicate plants and birds to take the garden into the house. We're also shown some of the statuary that might be found in a typical garden, some more salubrious than others.

There are statues, paintings and mosaics of gods and heroes, of noble men and women of Pompeii and Rome, of scholars and athletes, of Greek tales and Egyptian goddesses. They're all there somewhere. We're given statues of stags dragged down by hunting dogs, of a drunk Hercules under the influence of Bacchus and taking a leak wherever he choses just like any mortal, of Pan and a goat. This is everyday stuff for those ancient Romans, just like having the household toilet in the kitchen since it helps with kitchen waste (maybe not the best design feature of the house).

Because this is about Pompeii and Herculaneum then, of course, we have to have plaster casts of the dead folks and this was quite sad. The bodies are long gone but the space they left in the ash give us casts of the bodies of people and animals. This was rather sad, us gawping at rough casts of dead people, particularly the family group of parents and two children as we see them lying where they fell, killed by the heat and the ash, seeing the space their bodies occupied as their liquids evaporated and tendons went into spasm and we see them leaving a space of pain. I silently apologised to them for looking in at their final agonies.

The exhibition closes with the busts of a man and a woman and a quote from shortly after the catastrophy sometime in AD 90s:

"In a future generation, when crops spring up again, when this wasteland regains its green, will men believe that cities and peoples lie beneath? That in days of old their lands lay closer to the sea? Nor has that fatal summit ceased to threaten." Statius Silvae AD90s.

So soon after the eruption of AD79 the cities had vanished so completely that is was easy to believe they'd never been there. The exhibition also notes that an area of Naples used to be called Herculaneum, presumably because that's where so many refugees settled.

There was a small joy for me in the exhibition. Under one of the statues was a reference to Lucius Caecelius Iucundus, a banker of Pompeii who I was introduced to 38 years ago when I did Latin at school as part of the Cambridge syllabus. I was rubbish at Latin but I remember Caecilius and his family, his wife and children, slaves and his villa. Their world ended with the eruption and, although no-one knows whether they died in Pompeii or escaped, they live on in the Latin syllabus and in the memories of people like me. My teacher, Mr McCleod, might not have got me through the exam (more about my own laziness than anything else) but he gave me memories.

One of the most touching things in the exhibition is the portrait of the baker and his wife that forms the poster for the exhibition. Him with his rolling pin and her with her stylus. It's a touching portrait that says 'we were just like you'. The ages may pass but do we really change?

If you get the chance, go and see this exhibition. There's so much more to it than I mention here.