Fire from heaven
Jasper Griffin
POMPEII by Robert Harris Hutchinson, .E17.99, pp. 341, ISBN 0091779251 0 f all the places that have from time to time been devastated by the powers of nature, few can hope to compete, for historical interest, with the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The Greeks very early found their way right round Sicily and the boot of Italy to the beautiful Bay of Naples. There they founded Neapolis, later Napoli, English Naples. Other peoples from further north in Italy soon joined them in appreciating that delicious coast. The Romans, from the second century BC, swarmed there, and every Roman grandee wanted a villa, or several villas, on that favoured bay; Cicero, inveterate buyer of country houses, owned a number, though he found it very hard to pay for them. The standard of luxury was very high. Naturally the emperors, when autocracy replaced aristocracy, were not to be left out, and soon the dream island of Capri was an imperial possession. Under the hated Tiberius rumour insisted, smacking its lips, that the place was the scene of nameless orgies.
The area had always been subject to earthquakes. The inhabitants, as people do, tended to forget about them afterwards, once the walls and roofs had stopped collapsing and the houses had been rebuilt. Another peril was less familiar; that of the volcanic Mount Vesuvius. There had been no significant eruption for ages. If you go there now you will again see cultivated fields and farmhouses extending up the side of the volcano to a height which must astonish the observer. But in AD 79, on 24 August, there was an enormous eruption, estimated by sober modern scientists to have released thermal energy about 100,000 times greater than that of the atomic explosion that destroyed Hiroshima and to have ejected magma and pumice at about 1.5 million tonnes per second to a height of 33 kilometres.
The impact on the Bay of Naples was catastrophic. The cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were completely overwhelmed, buried and abandoned for centuries, until excavation, at first amateur, later systematic, began to unearth them. Works of art were extracted, passed into the royal collection, and can be seen in the museum in Naples. This is the most important source of paintings from antiquity, preserved in the warm, dry ash and dust. Lost works of literature came to light, preserved on papyrus rolls: carbonised by the heat, hard to read, perilous to unroll. We are still unrolling them, using special machines. So far most of them have proved rather drily technical in subject matter, but there are hopes that Herculaneum may yet yield up treasures of high literature.
The cities themselves were uncovered, offering us a unique view into the life of the first century as it was really lived and abruptly cut off, complete with shops, public baths, advertisements, electioneering posters, graffiti, and houses of ill fame. Some of the people and their animals were coated in lava and preserved with disconcerting fidelity. We can sit at the counters of Roman snack bars, follow the tracks of wheeled vehicles in the streets, look at the indecent exhibits in the Secret Museum (ladies traditionally not admitted).
A visit is a moving experience. Far more than in most ancient sites, one is irresistibly led to imagining the lives of these people. We have, by great good fortune, a detailed account of the eruption by a Roman writer, the younger Pliny, whose uncle (you guessed it) the elder Pliny was a high official on duty in the area. He happened to be a man of insatiable curiosity, author of the huge and still extant Natural History in 37 books, which set out the state of knowledge on all aspects of the natural world. The old man could not resist exploring the eruption for his researches. He did too much, went too far, was overcome by his exertions and the choking air and died, a martyr to duty and scientific curiosity.
Historians have naturally been drawn to the site. Imaginative writers have not been far behind. Bulwer Lytton's novel, The Last Days of Pompeii, put an edifying Victorian slant on the destruction of the city, and artists were not slow to follow. Robert Harris, author of Fatherland and Enigma, now gives us a full-blooded novel on Pompeii and its doom. In the 19th century it was inevitable that a novelist should handle the role in the Roman empire of the Christian religion. Nowadays, evidently, it is not.
Harris has no Christians. His hero is an engineer, newly appointed to the charge of the water supply, in succession to a predecessor who has mysteriously disappeared. Something is wrong; the water is not flowing. Other sinister signs abound. Is it because something is happening in the natural world, or is it caused by human skulduggery? The hero investigates, gets entangled with dangerous men, stumbles on plots and financial corruption, risks his life, falls in love. A slave is fed to the eels. We meet a gladiator. We meet the Plinys. We witness the eruption of Vesuvius. Harris has done his homework. The knowledgeable will recognise passages from Petronius and Seneca and Pliny — both Plinys — deftly introduced and touchingly savoured. The picture of life as it was lived in a Roman town, not one of the very first importance but an interesting place, is vivid and convincing. The book's ending is pleasingly unsatisfying. While we know all the time, of course, that the great eruption is on its way — I don't think I am giving away a secret in revealing that — the events are handled with a skill that kept me turning the pages.
Atillius, the engineer hero, conforms to the classic Raymond Chandler recipe: through those mean streets a man must go who is not mean. The Chandler model is indeed one that recurs to the mind of the reader. The hero — Philippus Marto, he
might almost have been called is a conscientious and decent man, trying to act well and uncorruptly in a society bristling with mafioso types. It is true that we do not meet the voluptuous molls and floozies who so abound, at least in fiction, in southern California. The young lady who wins Attilius's love is a young lady indeed, and the cheek of the reader, as he follows the course of their story, is not mantled by the crimson blush of embarrassment.
The last days of Pompeii happen to be unusually accessible to us. The great eruption occurred in a period of history well illuminated both by physical remains and by literature. Harris is therefore handling a subject on which it would have been easy to slip up and incur the scorn of persons who have enjoyed, or endured, a classical education. He has handled it with skill and created a setting which carries conviction, avoiding the traps of stuffing in too much local colour, or of emptying out in front of us the contents of a well-filled card catalogue. In that setting he tells a story which commands the reader's interest and which possesses an artistic shape. Those who have done time in the Classical Sixth, and those who are less committed to the ancient world but who enjoy a good read, will be alike pleased to find it in their stocking on Christmas morning.
Previous page
