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The Fires of Vesuvius

The Fires of Vesuvius

Pompeii Lost and Found

by Mary Beard
Downloadable audio file
Publication Date: 18/06/2019

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Pompeii is the most famous archaeological site in the world, visited by more than two million people each year. Yet it is also one of the most puzzling, with an intriguing and sometimes violent history.Destroyed by Vesuvius in 79 CE, the ruins of Pompeii offer the best evidence we have of life in the Roman Empire. But the eruptions are only part of the story. In The Fires of Vesuvius, acclaimed historian Mary Beard makes sense of the remains. She explores what kind of town it was-more like Calcutta or the Costa del Sol?-and what it can tell us about "ordinary" life there. From sex to politics, food to religion, slavery to literacy, Beard offers us the big picture even as she takes us close enough to the past to smell the bad breath and see the intestinal tapeworms of the inhabitants of the lost city. She resurrects the Temple of Isis as a testament to ancient multiculturalism. At the Suburban Baths we go from communal bathing to hygiene to erotica.Recently, Pompeii has been a focus of pleasure and loss: from Pink Floyd's memorable rock concert to Primo Levi's elegy on the victims. But Pompeii still does not give up its secrets quite as easily as it may seem. This book shows us how much more and less there is to Pompeii than a city frozen in time as it went about its business on 24 August 79.
ISBN:
9781977349965
9781977349965
Category:
Uncategorized
Format:
Downloadable audio file
Publication Date:
18-06-2019
Language:
English
Publisher:
Tantor Media, Incorporated
Country of origin:
United States
Mary Beard

Mary Beard is a professor of classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, and the Classics editor of the TLS. She has world-wide academic acclaim, and is a fellow of the British Academy and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Her previous books include most recently SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, and the bestselling, Wolfson Prize-winning Pompeii, The Roman Triumph, also The Parthenon and Confronting the Classics. Her blog has been collected in the books It's a Don's Life and All in a Don's Day.

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