The Classical World (81 page)

As the identity of so many houses’ owners is still uncertain, their connections with outlying farmhouses and country villas are still uncertain too. Was Pompeii a town based on consumer-spending, where property-owners simply spent their rents and other income and consumed goods, including crops, which were only produced locally? It seems most unlikely, not just because of casual long-range imports found in the city (a pack of fine pottery from Gaul or a superb ivory statuette of a nude Indian goddess), but also because Pompeian produce is discovered so far abroad in Gaul or Spain. The town’s wine was not high class, but it was widely known and widely drunk as a result: its good millstones were famous too, as was its salty fish sauce whose use is also widely attested outside the town. In the years before 79, the king of fish sauce was the freedman Umbricius Scaurus whose product was exported out into Campania: he even commemorated it in prominent mosaics in his house. Continuing excavations of the villa-farmhouses nearby confirm their role as centres of storage and production, often on an impressive scale: it was presumably not all produced for local consumption. Nor was such production ‘undignified’ for the town’s ruling class. A big vineyard, surely a commercial one, has been found down near the amphitheatre with holes for more than 2,000 vines: the production was surely sold in the
street shops and perhaps even sent outside. Prominent families in Pompeii’s civic life were even remembered for giving their names to particular types of grape (the ‘Holconian’). Profits from wine-growing surely mattered to them, though the workforce were their slaves and freedmen: perhaps those villa-houses with the most florid paintings of vines and grapes really were owned by keen profit-making wine-growers.
⁴
There must have been frequent connections between the place in town, the big house for social and political obligations, and another place in the country, a landed centre of produce. Unfortunately, the inter-connections are seldom attested by what survives. But Pompeii was excellently sited above the navigable river Sarno, with fine access to the sea. It was important to the town’s outward-looking economy.

Profit did not exclude a passion for display. Hence the impressive tombs of Pompeian families extend outside the town gates along the main roads: they are most visible outside the south wall, where they are now known to run for more than a mile along the road towards Nuceria. These tomb-monuments were introduced to the locals by the Roman settlers. Some of the smarter ones commemorate whole families, even including a few of their slaves. As the tombs’ public siting reminds us, life was an open-air existence, where important people wished to be seen to be important: the boasting and social competition would surprise even New Yorkers.

Culturally, the theatres in the town did matter, although mimes and pantomimes would be important in the programme. As for literary taste, the inscriptions may mislead us. The Virgil graffiti are not all evidence for bookishness or a deeply literate society. Many of them come from the opening lines of a book or poem (known through writing exercises?) and able inscribers were commissioned to write them elegantly (had the customer only heard them from others or in a theatrical recitation?). Lines from Virgil’s homosexual eclogue (a pastoral poem) are particularly favoured, no doubt because of their sexual reference. One painting even parodies Aeneas and his family as dog-headed figures with huge penises.

Among the electoral posters, some, too, are rather contrived. They give ostentatious praise of a candidate who has already been elected, rather than support for a bid for electoral power. The town was
headed by two magistrates (
duumviri
), with two lesser ones (the aediles), and their election was annual in March. In the last days of the town, the jobs of lesser magistrates are the ones which appear to be the most contested. The few posters which cite women’s names proclaim them as supporters, or cheerleaders, but naturally not as candidates: they may sometimes even be satirical, implying that a candidate is ‘fit onlyfor women’. Candidates had to be male, free-born and elected members already of the town council (a life appointment). As the councillors had had to pay for their election (sometimes offering gladiatorial games) they, and therefore the magistrates, would be the richer citizens. But the aediles’ elections, at least, were still lively: about a hundred electoral posters have been recovered from the election-campaign for one Helvius Sabinus as an aedile in what was probably the last, fateful year of 79. They have been found on most of the main streets and they allude to the usual wide range of supporters: trademen’s groups, households, a woman or two and even the ‘dicethrowers’. ‘Are you asleep?’ one poster for him says. ‘Vote for Helvius Sabinus as aedile’.
⁵
These posters are all in Latin, but not in our classical Latin. The Bay of Naples was still multi-cultural in 79, a place where Greek was widely spoken along with Latin and the south Italian language, Oscan. All three would be heard in Pompeii, where the Oscan, which our Latin literature conceals, was still being inscribed in the first century
AD
.

The town was so very close to the luxurious villa life on the Bay: were Pompeii’s ‘last days’ nonetheless indicative of steadier ‘Italian values’? The last days had in fact been quite long. In 62 the town had already been badly damaged by an earthquake whose aftershocks continued into the 70s. A final phase, from 62 to 79, has been isolated by excavators, allowing us to see ‘little Italy’ in action during Vespasian’s rise to power. In this phase, the need to repair and restore certainly did not kill off the urge to decorate, paint and fresco; houses were enlarged, and sometimes took over new plots: shops, apartments and work-spaces sometimes turned basic house-plans at an angle to their main entrance. Among all this activity, were the previous owners moving out of town and selling or developing their former urban homes for new purposes? The earthquake has been widely blamed for their departure, but so far as there was a change, it was probably
longer-term, and social. Even without an earthquake, no governing class of a town remained stable in this age of early death and uncertainty. Up and down Italy, ‘new blood’ always had to be exploited for money, after a time in which its ‘newness’ could tone down. Part of the story may be that a new class of parvenus, freedmen by origin, were taking over old houses in Pompeii and showing off by over-doing them up. In several properties, there is evidence of this change, and there are also signs in this period of that designer-disaster, the ‘small town garden’. Like the gardens of the Chelsea Flower Show, it crams in a jumble of scaled-down grandeur, including painted
trompe l’
œ
il
on the walls, pergolas and third-rate sculpture. The style is not so much that of a ‘villa in miniature’ (big villa gardens were an agglomeration of features, anyway) as a distinctive town-garden fantasy, which often evoked quite other landscapes (woodlands, waterfalls and even Egypt and the Nile). A similar taste is visible indoors: after 62 new paintings proliferated in houses such as the ‘House of the Tragic Poet’, where they smothered the walls with episodes from Greek myths. Only some of the paintings evoke theatrical scenes which might be known from nights out in the town. Like prints and wallpapers from a modern pattern book or a newspaper special offer, most of these big panels evoke a world of culture which the owners themselves did not have to comprehend. Outside and inside, there was a taste for pretty, decorating style for its own sake.

Such redecoration was bright and, in its way, luxurious. This ‘luxury’ was not morally problematic. It was not that it was somehow distanced safely from its spectators by its faraway fantasy, nor was it ‘acceptable’ because it could be perceived as a celebration of ‘abundance’.
⁶
The point was that, by Roman or Julio-Claudian standards, it was relatively minor luxury, and what we see at Pompeii was not a dangerous, enervating sort of luxury, one for moralists to deplore. To our eyes, the representations of ‘sex’ are the licentious element. However, no local protest is known about them, and not all of them belong to the town’s last days, either. On doorbells, lamps or door-posts there had long been images of erect penises: there had also been sexual scenes, very explicit, on the surrounds of personal hand-mirrors and so forth. Some of them may be coarse jokes, like modern souvenirs, while others maybe unfussed images of ‘fertility’ or apt erotica
suitable for the walls of a specialized brothel. But when we find paintings of a naked woman on top of a man in the colonnade round a central peristyle garden or numbered paintings of oral sex between men and women, including foursomes, in the changing-room of a set of public baths, we cannot explain them somehow as paintings to avert the ‘evil eye’ and assure good fortune.
⁷
They are simply sexy. The changing-room scenes, above the clothes-lockers, might even (like the mirrors) have been seen by women.

Pompeian values, then, were not ‘Victorian values’. But was the most blatantly coarse or erotic art in the 60s and 70s mostly displayed by a particular social class? In this era, the big House of the Vettii is famous for its painting of a man weighing an enormous penis on scales against gold coins: the Vettii were evidently freedmen. The painting of a woman having sex on top of a man in the garden colonnade was installed by the son of a moneylender who was himself the son of a freeman. Perhaps these newly rich patrons liked to show off this sort of thing, like modern bankers who buy female nudes. The vulgarity of freedmen in the Naples area is immortalized in the most remarkable prose work of this era, the
Satyricon
, written by Nero’s witty and elegant courtier, Petronius. Only a fragment survives, but it tells of the adventures of three Greek companions, self-styled homosexual ‘brothers’ in their various sexual interrelationships. The most remarkable adventure is their dinner with the flamboyant Trimalchio and his freedmen-guests in his vulgar villa in a town which is surely the harbour-town Puteoli, also on the Bay of Naples. Petronius characterizes the freedmen-speakers by a distinctive Latin style, rich in proverbs (the mark of the uneducated) and cultural howlers. They are exaggerated characters and are only seen through his fictitious narrator, but Trimalchio’s dinner artfully conjures up a showy vulgarity, a coarse love of money and extremely bad taste. The episode is a highly civilized man’s satire on preposterous freedmen at large. The excruciating music, the theatricality and stage effects, the hilariously common wives (who compete over the weight of their gold bracelets) are easily imagined in embryo at an evening with Pompeii’s Vettii or with fellow freedmen in the town, people like Fabius Eupor or Cornelius Tages. Some of Trimalchio’s instructions for the decoration of his tomb actually match details of a known tomb
which was built at Pompeii by a wife, Naevoleia Tycho, for her dead husband.

In the 60s and 70s then, freedmen were among those who were active in redecorating big houses in Pompeii. Yet they were still socially excluded from civic office (as freedmen) and the older, more restrained families at Pompeii had certainly not all vanished from the town just because the ground had started to quake. In this period, we also find the well-planned
trompe l’
œ
il
painting of a nude ‘marine Venus’ in the so-called House of Venus: it was installed for the Lucretii Valentes, important citizens under Nero. The ‘House of the Tragic Poet’ was also redecorated for the colony’s ‘first citizen’ (although he did then rent it out). It was not, then, that Venus and profit were attractive only to freedmen. But perhaps (a guess) it took men on the make to flaunt sex-scenes more openly on their house walls. For people in the earlier Pompeii had echoed the steadier patriotic values of Augustus’ new age. The east side of its central forum had been transformed in the age of emperors: temples to their cult had been built, while the statues outside one big civic building, paid for by the prominent priestess Eumachia, showed heroes like Romulus and father Aeneas. They evoked the moral sculptures in Augustus’ new programmatic Forum in Rome.

‘Thrift’ and ‘restraint’ are relative terms. To the new intake of Italians into the Roman Senate of the 70s, they meant that they were not extravagant Julio-Claudians or those senators (often provincials) who had the very biggest fortunes. By 70 there had certainly been families in Pompeii who would have adapted well to the prodigal theatricalityof Nero’s court. But nobodygave them the chance: none of the excavated houses belonged to someone who rose anywhere near as high as the Roman Senate. The only possible exception is Nero’s beautiful Poppaea, who probably did own the huge villa at nearby Oplontis, though perhaps not the Pompeian houses which have sometimes been ascribed to her too.
⁸
When given scope, Pompeii’s Poppaea was as luxurious as the best of them. But the trophy-wife of an emperor was exceptional. In the 60s and 70s there were plenty of others in Pompeii, perhaps the majority, who still saw themselves upholding ‘traditional’ values. The freedmen were only part of the story. In the colonnade of one garden-space for dining outside, verses
told guests to ‘divert your lascivious looks and sweet little eyes from somebody else’s wife’.
⁹
On the Street of Abundance, the big letters of one inscription do proclaim ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’, perhaps as a biblical warning to Pompeians of the perils of sexual misbehaviour. But Pompeii did not collapse in a final torrent of orgies.

A New Man in Action

It is extraordinary how an account can be given (or seem to be given) of single days spent at Rome, but none of several days put together… It all seems essential on the actual day on which you did it, but if you reflect that you have done the same things every day, it seems pointless, much more so when you retreat from it all. This always happens to me when I am down at my Laurentum and I’m reading or writing something… The sea, the shore, they’re a true and private ‘seat of the Muses’; how much they inspire, how much they dictate to me
…