Up Pompeii

I've just been to see 'Pompeii Live', the British Museum's live broadcast event from their current exhibition 'Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum'.  Excellent.  Several of my favourite people gathered together in one place at one time and being fascinating.  Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Mary Beard, Bettany Hughes ... even Georgio Locatelli, who had baked a loaf of bread based on a carbonised one found at Pompeii.  Not only did he explain the 'name stamp' on the Pompeiian one as being similar to the identifying marks found on loaves baked even today in public ovens in Sicily, but he also came up with an explanation for the shape of the Pompeii loaf.  It was like a very large 'cottage loaf'': round, and seemingly made in two parts with the lower half larger than the upper and a kind of groove around the middle.  His interpretation?  The groove was there to tie a piece of string around the loaf once cooked in order to carry it home more easily.  Genius!

It's a strange thing that the everyday lives of these people who lived almost two thousand years ago seem so similar to our own, and yet so very different.  The commonplace ownership of other human beings as slaves, and their background omnipresence in every aspect of the life and activity of the family and household.  And yet, unlike other slave owning cultures, Roman slavery was surprisingly fluid and mobile, with former slaves rising to high ranking positions in society once freed.

It was also, at times, a very moving experience.  Having examined in great detail the wall paintings, from the garden room in The House of the Gold Bracelet at Pompeii, we then met the family who had lived there: parents and two children who died together hiding under the stairs as the pyroclastic flow of superheated gases hit the town.  Finally, we were shown the gold bracelet found with the remains of the woman and after which the house is named.  Whilst I'm sure that the connection between all three will be clear in the exhibition, somehow I doubt that it will be as evocative and emotive as live transmission managed to convey.  Really very touching.  And a poignant reminder, if  we still need it after two major tsunami events in the last few years, that a rich (on many levels) society can still be wiped out in a matter of a few hours.

Anyway, loved the live event and the way the experts, including the exhibition's curator, fleshed out the bones (quite literally, in the case of the skeletons and body casts) of so many of the items on display.  Looking forward even more than ever now to seeing it all in person in a couple of weeks!