The Fires of Vesuvius is Mary Beard's introduction to the two and a half centuries of scholarly exploration of the ancient city of Pompeii, buried in volcanic ash in 79 AD. Beard combines a wealth of detail about the houses and people destroyed and preserved at this fascinating site.
The book is laid out in nine chapters: Living in an Old City; Street Life; House and Home; Painting and Decorating; Earning a Living; Who Ran the City?; The Pleasures of the Body; Fun and Games; and A City Full of Gods. Many color plates are included with the book--not in my copy, but I'm sure they add quite a bit to the text. Beard includes tips for the tourist as well as a thick 20 page annotated bibliography for those who wish to look further.
The Fires of Vesuvius and Inspiration
Reading the book took much longer than I expected--not from any flaw in the book, but because the book inspired me to read further or find images of the specific sites Beard discusses. It also inspired me to reconstruct slices of the city, to apply the pieces she provides to specific pieces of the city. I can't say I've ever been quite so inspired by a single text before.
Interestingly, I don't think Beard has much use for archaeologists. In several places she dismisses archaeological interpretations as too much rebuilt from too little data. But, as Thoreau has said "Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk," and, speaking as an archaeologist, I think that she's a little too harsh on us.
But the text is lively, and deeply grounded in history. Beard does much to bring the city alive, and at the same time to bring to earth the various high-flown bits that everybody 'knows' about Pompeii: the graffiti, the numerous phalluses, the plaster body casts of the victims are all treated with pragmatic detail.
