Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town

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A wonderful series of paintings of scenes of life in the Forum seems to show exactly that happening – with one poor miscreant being given a nasty beating in front of his classmates.

Pompeii - the Life of a Roman Town by Mary Beard | Goodreads Pompeii - the Life of a Roman Town by Mary Beard | Goodreads

It was part of a world of literary drunken glamour that I didn’t, as a good girl growing up in Shrewsbury, know existed,” said Beard.There is no clear sign of any Christians, but in one house an ivory statuette of the Indian goddess Lakshmi has turned up.

Mary Beard (classicist) - Wikipedia

Hygiene aside, it presumably functioned as a convenient waste-disposal unit, in addition to its more familiar function. She found that this kind of public writing could be conveniently slotted in around parenting duties, and it had the attraction of being immediate: “You could see the fucking thing in print the next week. and "The Eye of Faith", two of the nine episodes in Civilisations, a reboot of the 1969 series by Kenneth Clark. She turned to the Vestal Virgins, she told me, because she realised that state religion in the Roman republic “wasn’t much of an opener at a party”.

Her mother was headmistress of a junior school, her father an architect, 'an endearing public-school boy, you know, [pause] drunkard, [pause] you know. In archaeological terms, this is gold," he told her, with a leap of the imagination worthy of the record books. At this point, she does that English amateur thing of affecting to treat her studies as a bit of a game: 'Never being much of a swot, with no interest in homework, I used to do a term's worth of unseen translations in the first week and have the rest of the term to myself. But then, with the charmless boy band out of the way, it was a contest between Matt's custard-coloured trousers and Rebecca's BacoFoil minidress.

Pompeii | The Folio Society Pompeii | The Folio Society

It was a work of sceptical history that debunked myth after myth, and battled against received opinion. But, in retrospect, all that teaching – quite broadly spread through archaeology, ancient history and Latin literature – had its advantages: she was amassing knowledge, not least of how to make the ancient world seem exciting. One-person rule, she said, “does not just operate through political reform or by military power, important as they may be.Rome in the Late Republic, which she co-wrote with Cambridge historian Michael Crawford, was published the following year. The old town has attracted its fair share of popular attention, from Frankie Howerd to Robert Harris, but rarely has it inspired the scrutiny of a classical scholar who confesses to a fascination with bad breath, Roman sex and 'the sheer puzzlement of it all. At one point, she sketched out an argument for a second referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU.