I was Naples leading Professor Ewell's class on Roman and Etruscan art and archaeology through the ruins at Pompeii, Herculaneum, Villa Oplontis, and other sites. The trip was successful, despite the fact that Dr. Ewell, who was suffering from the flu and a poisonous spider bite, was not able to join us. Another TA and I led the group of forty-one students along with a guest lecturer and friend of Charles, Giulia, who is an excellent professor and one of the nicest Florentines that I have met.
The sites we visited were destroyed on August 24th, 79 AD (a Thursday) when Mount Vesuvius erupted and dumped thousands of tons of ash, pumice, and earth on Pompeii and Herculaneum. The larger city of the two with a population of roughly six thousand, Pompeii features an excavated forum and early amphitheater. Herculaneum is a smaller site and is not fully excavated; it was a resort town that was submerged in hot mud rather than ash. The mud carbonized and preserved much of the organic material in the city, and as a result, Herculaneum is in better shaped and offers unique examples of Roman woodwork and furniture. Despite the differences between the two cities, they both boast beautiful homes, baths, and wall paintings.
Villa Oplontis is a stand-alone excavation of a large villa that archaeologists speculate belonged to Nero's wife, poor woman. The earthquake in 62 AD that left Pompeii's forum in such a mess damaged Villa Oplontis, and neither site was fully repaired at the time of the eruption. Nonetheless, Oplontis's grandeur and frescoes, offer examples of all four orders of Roman wall painting, are extraordinarily impressive and beautiful. The paintings cover ever wall surface save those in the servant and working quarters, and the rich saturation of the blacks, reds, and ochres is stunning. Digital photography cannot capture these colors nor the varied tones in illusionistic scenes of architecture and landscapes; it leaves them looking washed out and rather kitsch. Nor can digital means capture the experience of walking through the villa, room to room, and realizing the connections not only between the villa's architecture and paintings but also the relationship between your body and its space. Consider the difference between seeing a masterpiece on Google Images versus that same masterpiece in the Louvre.
Since this was my second trip to these sites, rather than listening attentively to the lectures, I let my mind wander through the ruins, imaging living in those cities then they were still alive.
Early morning streets filled with birdsong and hazy golden light filtering down through umbrella pines. The smell of warm bread baking, as women gather at the public fountains to draw the day's water, merchants sweeping the sidewalks and kicking up dust in front of their shops. Afternoons on terraces overlooking the shining sea and the full sails of vessels traveling between ports, the wind whipping through your tunic and hair. Trekking to deserted beaches and diving naked into clear, rich waters alone. Nights traveling between cities on horseback, torch held aloft, firelight dancing through the crypts and funerary monuments that flank the road outside the citygates, and the animal's hooves clapping on the cobblestones, sounding through the tombs. Perfect stars hanging in perfect dark. In August, the heat and emptiness and silence of blue hills buzzing with cicadas, and afternoons in January sweating and laughing in the caldarium of the public baths. That our modern rhythms were more just to our natures.
Rome's loss was posterity's gain. The eruption of Vesuvius would be similar to a volcano suddenly popping up off the coast of Massachusetts, erupting, and burying -- yet preserving -- the posh towns of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, which would then be discovered seventeen hundred years later. However, the Romans likely never chalked Vesuvius's eruption up to global warming, corporate greed, the coming Apocalypse, or any other conspiracy. Many probably did attribute the eruption to an irate Vulcan, the god of fire who lived and smithed in forges beneath the mountains, believing that he was angry about something humankind did, whether humankind recognized it or not. How interestingly ancient religion parallels modern secular thought. Replace the pantheon of the gods with the ecosystem of the planet, and the similar patterns of capriciously punishing man for transgressions, justly and not, emerge from the dominions both of the gods and of nature. Replace the wrath of Poseidon with global warming, and you have yet another anthropocentric and dubious explanation of the sublime and often dangerous engines of nature. Regretfully, the latter is much less poetic.
Humankind's need for control and understand leads us to conjure such illusions in order to find psychological comfort in the face of the unfathomable. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed in gods that embodied both the forces of nature and the nature of the human psychology, knowing that the two can never be divorced nor fully explained. It should not be terribly surprising that many modern secularists follow similar patterns as their counterparts in ancient Rome, who claimed secret knowledge through exclusive, Hellenistic cults that gave them a privileged vantage over the affairs of humankind and the workings of the universe.
A more tenable approach would be the one taken Pliny the Elder, who observed and recorded Vesuvius's eruption in a letter to his nephew, Pliny the Younger. While sailing into the cloud of ash to save one of his friends, he described the eruption in such detail that similar eruptions are now called Plinian. He died during the rescue, but his account of the event, as well those that he included in his masterwork, Natural History, demonstrated his empirical approach to individual natural phenomena. Pliny's approach and many of his conclusions, although not all, have endured, much longer than the writings of cultists that attempted to attribute natural phenomena to grand, simplified causes.
