Many of us are familiar with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the volcano on the Bay of Naples whose catastrophic eruption in 79 CE preserved the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum in near-perfect condition for almost 1,700 years. But it is less well known that there were, in fact, several warning signs of the impending eruption in the decades before the volcano erupted. The marble panel shown above (originally part of a household shrine in the house of L. Caecilius Iucundus) commemorates one of the most traumatic of those early warnings: an earthquake of 62/63 CE, which caused significant damage to the city of Pompeii (some of the buildings, including the House of the Surgeon where I excavated in 2006, were still in the process of repair when the eruption happened). Not only are the buildings on the left shown shockingly tilted – as if frozen in the midst of an earthquake – but they are even identifiable. The image below shows one of the most well-known monuments of Pompeii – the temple of Jupiter in the Forum: You can see the similarity to the columned temple shown on the panel above, with the altar before it, the frontal steps, the columns, and even the arch to one side. The figures on the pedestals to either side are thought to represent statuary, showing figures mounted on horses. On the right we can see a bull being led to sacrifice (the sacrificial implements are shown to the far right and left of the scene), perhaps connecting the devastating earthquake to the wrath of the gods and the Pompeians attempts to placate them. This panel was one of two (possibly three) such depictions of the earthquake of 63, and provides us with an extraordinary insight into the years leading up to the fatal eruption.
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As we move into early imperial Rome in our history of the classical world in 100 objects, we can't help but take a long detour into Pompeii. Preserved almost untouched in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, the site of Pompeii is an archaeologist's – and a classicist's – dream in terms of the information it provides about the everyday lives, and objects used by, ordinary inhabitants of Italy in the 1st century CE. (I was actually lucky enough to participate in an archaeological dig there back in 2006.) In the image above we have one of my favourite artefacts from Pompeii (now housed in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples): a loaf of bread, carbonised in the eruption of the volcano, and thus providing almost-unparalleled evidence for perishable objects like food, which are often lost to us in the archaeological record. Here you can see the impression of the baker's stamp preserved in the carbonised bread, as well as the scoring marks that would have been used to divide it into separate pieces.
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AuthorEmily Hauser is a classicist and researcher at Harvard and author of historical fiction recovering the lost women of the ancient world, including FOR THE MOST BEAUTIFUL and FOR THE WINNER. Archives
June 2018
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