Connecting To The Past
Jan. 17th, 2010 02:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselJuly 2009
Pompeii - Mary Beard - Profile Books, 2008
* * * * *
One of the problems with the traditional western philosophy of individualism is that it treats people as if they were metaphorical billiard bills who interact by bouncing off each other. In my view, this is incorrect - a better model of human personality is that we are nodes in a network, each one of us a unique and complex tangle of our interactions with other humans and things in our environment*. One of the ways in which the network manifests is what happens when someone dies. In the billiard ball model, it shouldn't matter - there's simply one less ball to bounce off. But we all know that this isn't true. Bereavement leaves long-lasting and sometimes bizarre effects, as would be expected if the relationship threads connecting us to the dead person were flapping loose and changing who we are.
I mention this because it might explain one of the odder ways in which I remember my mother, which is to watch or read things that I would not otherwise be interested in - like bonnet-buster tv series - because she would have done if she were alive. This book is a case in point. She loved history, but her interest was not in its epic sweep, grand personalities or major battles. What she liked was social history, the colour and texture of everyday life. She made scrap books with pictures culled from magazines, books and photographs which traced the development of furniture or clothing styles down the ages, and her interest in dolls houses (notorious to certain readers of this blog) was chiefly about the imaginative reconstruction of domestic interiors from different historical periods. She never did a Roman scene but this book, with its quirky insights into Roman everyday life as deduced from the findings at Pompeii, would have been absolutely grist to her mill and would, I think, have inspired her to try. And I must say that I enjoyed it too.
The book covers the major social themes - history, domestic arrangements, street life, art, politics, economics, entertainments and religion - illustrating each with recent finds from the ongoing archaeological excavations. Along the way, some of the more fanciful interpretations beloved by tour guides are firmly rebuffed. Pompeii had at most one brothel, not the dozens that they would have you believe. The high stepping stones and pavements were not to keep Roman feet away from ordure, but to avoid the water that swirls through the streets during rainstorms. The famous graffiti celebrating the popularity of Celadus and Crescus with the girls of Pompeii are in the gladiators' barracks and so are almost certainly self-penned. And the baths were not the sparkling and pristine temples to cleanliness that reconstructions would have you believe; in all likelihood, they were filthy and germ-ridden.
Beard's style is a joy and quite unexpected for a Cambridge academic. It is authoritative without being dry and accessible without being chummy. She explains just enough about the archaeological evidence to give weight to her assertions but not so much that the reader is overwhelmed with unnecessary detail. While some academic point-scoring is clearly going on, she gives both sides of the argument before expressing her opinion. Her text is complemented by the illustrations - some decidedly NSFW - and there are plenty of maps.
There are - thank goodness - no "imagine the scene" purple passages describing Pompeian citizens going about their lives, but the accumulation of small details connects us with them in a very effective way. The fact that Pompeiians would have had to negotiate one-way streets and pedestrianised areas just as we do brings them alive in our minds. Granted, there are mysteries. Why did a small and apparently not particularly prosperous bakery have such a large and elaborate triclinium (dining room)? How on earth did an exporter of a stinking fish paste (garum) manage to make so much money? What exactly were the responsibilities of the duoviri (the two men who were the town's most senior officials)? What form did the worship of the household gods (lares) take? Some of these questions will never be answered, but clues may come from the 25 percent or so of Pompeii that has yet excavated. Let us hope that Mary Beard will be around to write about the new discoveries and surprises (there are bound to be some) when they happen. For the more connections we create, the stronger and richer our personalities become.
* I came to the billiard ball vs network node metaphor independently, but so have others. See Madeleine Bunting's interesting article.
Pompeii - Mary Beard - Profile Books, 2008
* * * * *
One of the problems with the traditional western philosophy of individualism is that it treats people as if they were metaphorical billiard bills who interact by bouncing off each other. In my view, this is incorrect - a better model of human personality is that we are nodes in a network, each one of us a unique and complex tangle of our interactions with other humans and things in our environment*. One of the ways in which the network manifests is what happens when someone dies. In the billiard ball model, it shouldn't matter - there's simply one less ball to bounce off. But we all know that this isn't true. Bereavement leaves long-lasting and sometimes bizarre effects, as would be expected if the relationship threads connecting us to the dead person were flapping loose and changing who we are.
I mention this because it might explain one of the odder ways in which I remember my mother, which is to watch or read things that I would not otherwise be interested in - like bonnet-buster tv series - because she would have done if she were alive. This book is a case in point. She loved history, but her interest was not in its epic sweep, grand personalities or major battles. What she liked was social history, the colour and texture of everyday life. She made scrap books with pictures culled from magazines, books and photographs which traced the development of furniture or clothing styles down the ages, and her interest in dolls houses (notorious to certain readers of this blog) was chiefly about the imaginative reconstruction of domestic interiors from different historical periods. She never did a Roman scene but this book, with its quirky insights into Roman everyday life as deduced from the findings at Pompeii, would have been absolutely grist to her mill and would, I think, have inspired her to try. And I must say that I enjoyed it too.
The book covers the major social themes - history, domestic arrangements, street life, art, politics, economics, entertainments and religion - illustrating each with recent finds from the ongoing archaeological excavations. Along the way, some of the more fanciful interpretations beloved by tour guides are firmly rebuffed. Pompeii had at most one brothel, not the dozens that they would have you believe. The high stepping stones and pavements were not to keep Roman feet away from ordure, but to avoid the water that swirls through the streets during rainstorms. The famous graffiti celebrating the popularity of Celadus and Crescus with the girls of Pompeii are in the gladiators' barracks and so are almost certainly self-penned. And the baths were not the sparkling and pristine temples to cleanliness that reconstructions would have you believe; in all likelihood, they were filthy and germ-ridden.
Beard's style is a joy and quite unexpected for a Cambridge academic. It is authoritative without being dry and accessible without being chummy. She explains just enough about the archaeological evidence to give weight to her assertions but not so much that the reader is overwhelmed with unnecessary detail. While some academic point-scoring is clearly going on, she gives both sides of the argument before expressing her opinion. Her text is complemented by the illustrations - some decidedly NSFW - and there are plenty of maps.
There are - thank goodness - no "imagine the scene" purple passages describing Pompeian citizens going about their lives, but the accumulation of small details connects us with them in a very effective way. The fact that Pompeiians would have had to negotiate one-way streets and pedestrianised areas just as we do brings them alive in our minds. Granted, there are mysteries. Why did a small and apparently not particularly prosperous bakery have such a large and elaborate triclinium (dining room)? How on earth did an exporter of a stinking fish paste (garum) manage to make so much money? What exactly were the responsibilities of the duoviri (the two men who were the town's most senior officials)? What form did the worship of the household gods (lares) take? Some of these questions will never be answered, but clues may come from the 25 percent or so of Pompeii that has yet excavated. Let us hope that Mary Beard will be around to write about the new discoveries and surprises (there are bound to be some) when they happen. For the more connections we create, the stronger and richer our personalities become.
* I came to the billiard ball vs network node metaphor independently, but so have others. See Madeleine Bunting's interesting article.