Pompeii Read Free Page B

activities is found in two words scratched by the main door of one grand house, which was found to be almost empty when uncovered by nineteenth-century excavators. It reads: ‘House tunnelled’, words hardly likely to have been written by an owner, so presumably a message from one looter to the rest of his gang, to tell them that this one had been ‘done’.
    We know almost nothing about who these tunnellers were (but the fact that the message, though written in Latin, was in Greek characters is a pretty clear sign that they were bilingual, part of the Greco-Roman community of South Italy which we shall explore in Chapter 1). Nor do we know exactly when they made their raid: post-eruption Roman coins have been found in the ruins of Pompeii, dating from the end of the first century CE to the beginning of the fourth. But whenever, and for whatever reason, later Romans decided to dig down to the buried town, it was a phenomenally dangerous activity, driven by the hopes of recovering substantial quantities of the family wealth, or coming away with a prize haul of loot. The tunnels must have been perilous, dingy and narrow, and in places – if the size of the holes in some of the walls is anything to go by – only accessible by children. Even where it was possible to walk more freely, in pockets unfilled by the volcanic debris, the walls and ceilings would have been in danger of imminent collapse.
    The irony is that some of the skeletons that have been found are almost certainly not the remains of the victims of the eruption, but of those risking a return to the city in the months, years or centuries that followed. So, for example, in a smart room off the garden courtyard of the House of the Menander – a modern name, taken from the painting of the Greek dramatist Menander found there (Ill. 44) – the remains of a little party of three have been discovered, two adults and child, equipped with a pick and a hoe. Were these, as some archaeologists believe, a group of residents, maybe slaves, trying to batter a way out of the house as it became engulfed, and losing their lives in the attempt? Or was it, as others imagine, a party of looters, battering their way in , killed perhaps as their fragile tunnel collapsed on top of them?

    5. The engraving of one of a pair of sculptured panels, almost a metre long, depicting the earthquake of 62 CE. On the left, the Temple of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva in the Forum visibly totters. On the right, a sacrifice is in progress. A bull is being brought up to the altar, while around the scene are dotted various instruments of sacrifice – a knife, bowls and offering dishes.
    This picture of a disrupted city is made even more complicated by an earlier natural disaster. Seventeen years before the eruption of Vesuvius, in 62 CE the town had been badly damaged by an earthquake. According to the historian Tacitus, ‘a large part of Pompeii collapsed’. And the event is almost certainly depicted in a pair of sculptured panels found in the house of a Pompeian banker, Lucius Caecilius Jucundus. These show two areas of the city rocked by the quake: the Forum, and the area around the northern gate of the city facing towards Vesuvius. In one the Temple of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva leans alarmingly to the left; the equestrian statues on either side of the temple seem almost to come alive, the riders unseated from their mounts (Ill. 5). In the other the Vesuvian Gate takes an ominous lurch to the right, parting company with the large water reservoir on its left. This disaster raises some of the trickiest questions in the history of Pompeii. What was its effect on life in the town? How long did it take the city to recover? In fact, did it ever recover? Or were the Pompeians in 79 CE still living in the wreckage – the Forum, temples and baths, not to mention many private houses, not yet restored?
    There have been theories aplenty. One idea is that a social revolution struck Pompeii after the earthquake.