Up Pompeii
The Resident Geek and I thoroughly enjoyed our children-free day in London yesterday...
We'd booked some weeks ago (since it's been sold out for months) to go and see Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum at the British Museum.
We had time, once we'd walked down from Paddington, to go and see our old friend Hoa Hakananai'a, to whom I said Hello on behalf of just_ann_now and curiouswombat (remember when we had our London Meetup and met at his feet?) and also to have a brief mooch in the North American galleries, looking at the Mayan stone carvings and discussing how completely alien that civilisation feels to us, with its blood sacrifices and shamanic visions.
Then after a swift but very tasty soup-and-sandwich lunch, it was off to Pompeii...
The exhibition was, I think, very well put together; it used all sorts of small, domestic objects to convey the very ordinariness of daily life in Pompeii and Herculaneum in AD 79, making for a very poignant contrast with the extraordinary and overwhelming destruction that was suddenly visited upon both cities. There's a wall-painting of Bacchus (probably from a wine-merchant's house or shop) showing the vines growing on the slopes of Vesuvius in the background - making the painful point that while Romans knew what a volcano was, they had no idea that Vesuvius was one, or at least that it was anything other than utterly extinct - and they didn't know that the increasingly frequent earthquakes in the area in the preceding months presaged an eruption.
There are, of course, the pots and the pieces of jewellery, the tools and the cooking utensils - many of which you would recognise and could easily imagine using (a square roasting dish, a bun tin...) - and even the food! A loaf of bread, carbonised by the pyroclastic flow that incinerated Herculaneum in seconds, but perfectly recognisable (because there was heat but no oxygen, so things couldn't burn to ashes), even down to the stamp showing the name of the slave who had shaped the dough (probably because the bread itself would have been baked in a communal street oven, so the baker had to know whose loaves were whose).
There were wonderful mosaics and wall-paintings - I was very pleased to see this little dog, because I remember him with great affection from my Latin textbooks at school; but also this absolutely stunning mosaic of fish and crustaceans, all of them beautifully rendered actual species which could (and still can) be found in the Bay of Naples.
There couldn't have been a greater contrast to the otherworldly weirdness of the Mayan sculpture - to a modern European, this all felt completely familiar and recognisable. As the Resident Geek said, you felt absolutely confident that (had you the Latin) you could be transported back to first-century Pompeii or Herculaneum and happily go shopping, accept an invitation to these people's dinner parties (all right, perhaps I'd jib a little at the stuffed dormice and the fish sauce!) or buy them a drink in the pub. Admittedly, some of their taste in garden sculpture, given their extremely unprudish attitude to sex, is a little eye-watering (warning, this image may be NSFW, depending on your workplace - I was quite glad I didn't have the Small People with me to have to explain "but what is that man doing to the goat, Mummy?"!!)
This ordinariness was well used, I think, as the lead-up to showing you the awful consequences of the eruption. I got a bit choked up at the cradle, especially since the accompanying text tells you that yes, the baby was found in it, under a woollen blanket. But not as choked up as I did at the very end of the exhibition - which consists of the plaster casts of the bodies of a family, found in their death throes at Herculaneum at the moment the pyroclastic flow hit them; father, mother, child, and toddler on the mother's lap. We don't know who they were, and yet after two-and-a-half hours of wandering around their town, they were so real that their deaths were devastating. It was a genuinely moving end to the exhibition, and one we didn't feel we wanted to dwell on...
After all that, we needed to decompress! Fortunately we were able to drop in at short notice on friends who live in West London, take them a bottle of wine and scrounge some dinner in exchange. It was lovely to see them and have a good chat, after which we staggered merrily onto one of the last trains back to Oxford and finally got in at about half past midnight! So my getting in to work this morning by 9 am was by the skin of my teeth, and wading through my 300-plus post-holiday emails was appropriately purgatorial. But entirely worth it - a Grand Day Out.
We'd booked some weeks ago (since it's been sold out for months) to go and see Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum at the British Museum.
We had time, once we'd walked down from Paddington, to go and see our old friend Hoa Hakananai'a, to whom I said Hello on behalf of just_ann_now and curiouswombat (remember when we had our London Meetup and met at his feet?) and also to have a brief mooch in the North American galleries, looking at the Mayan stone carvings and discussing how completely alien that civilisation feels to us, with its blood sacrifices and shamanic visions.
Then after a swift but very tasty soup-and-sandwich lunch, it was off to Pompeii...
The exhibition was, I think, very well put together; it used all sorts of small, domestic objects to convey the very ordinariness of daily life in Pompeii and Herculaneum in AD 79, making for a very poignant contrast with the extraordinary and overwhelming destruction that was suddenly visited upon both cities. There's a wall-painting of Bacchus (probably from a wine-merchant's house or shop) showing the vines growing on the slopes of Vesuvius in the background - making the painful point that while Romans knew what a volcano was, they had no idea that Vesuvius was one, or at least that it was anything other than utterly extinct - and they didn't know that the increasingly frequent earthquakes in the area in the preceding months presaged an eruption.
There are, of course, the pots and the pieces of jewellery, the tools and the cooking utensils - many of which you would recognise and could easily imagine using (a square roasting dish, a bun tin...) - and even the food! A loaf of bread, carbonised by the pyroclastic flow that incinerated Herculaneum in seconds, but perfectly recognisable (because there was heat but no oxygen, so things couldn't burn to ashes), even down to the stamp showing the name of the slave who had shaped the dough (probably because the bread itself would have been baked in a communal street oven, so the baker had to know whose loaves were whose).
There were wonderful mosaics and wall-paintings - I was very pleased to see this little dog, because I remember him with great affection from my Latin textbooks at school; but also this absolutely stunning mosaic of fish and crustaceans, all of them beautifully rendered actual species which could (and still can) be found in the Bay of Naples.
There couldn't have been a greater contrast to the otherworldly weirdness of the Mayan sculpture - to a modern European, this all felt completely familiar and recognisable. As the Resident Geek said, you felt absolutely confident that (had you the Latin) you could be transported back to first-century Pompeii or Herculaneum and happily go shopping, accept an invitation to these people's dinner parties (all right, perhaps I'd jib a little at the stuffed dormice and the fish sauce!) or buy them a drink in the pub. Admittedly, some of their taste in garden sculpture, given their extremely unprudish attitude to sex, is a little eye-watering (warning, this image may be NSFW, depending on your workplace - I was quite glad I didn't have the Small People with me to have to explain "but what is that man doing to the goat, Mummy?"!!)
This ordinariness was well used, I think, as the lead-up to showing you the awful consequences of the eruption. I got a bit choked up at the cradle, especially since the accompanying text tells you that yes, the baby was found in it, under a woollen blanket. But not as choked up as I did at the very end of the exhibition - which consists of the plaster casts of the bodies of a family, found in their death throes at Herculaneum at the moment the pyroclastic flow hit them; father, mother, child, and toddler on the mother's lap. We don't know who they were, and yet after two-and-a-half hours of wandering around their town, they were so real that their deaths were devastating. It was a genuinely moving end to the exhibition, and one we didn't feel we wanted to dwell on...
After all that, we needed to decompress! Fortunately we were able to drop in at short notice on friends who live in West London, take them a bottle of wine and scrounge some dinner in exchange. It was lovely to see them and have a good chat, after which we staggered merrily onto one of the last trains back to Oxford and finally got in at about half past midnight! So my getting in to work this morning by 9 am was by the skin of my teeth, and wading through my 300-plus post-holiday emails was appropriately purgatorial. But entirely worth it - a Grand Day Out.