A Review: The Fires of Vesuvius by Mary Beard

4/5 stars.
This is the last book in my years-long quest to read ten books about Pompeii in the order they were written. Since The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found, from 2008, is the most recent of the books, perhaps it is impossible for it not to be the best. It contains the most up-to-date information about the site and there is no old fashioned wording or style issues which slowed down my reading of some of the other books. It is not just these elements, however, which made this into one of the best in my series. Firstly, there is just more to the book. I learned about specific finds and whole parts of the town no other author had mentioned. The main thing I liked was the approach the author took to the material. She is an archaeologist and she talks about Pompeii and the finds from the city in strongly archaeological terms. I have always had a love of science writing which lays out the evidence in the form; “We know this, because we found this.” Beard brings more of those kind of references per page count into her book than any of the other nine books in my series.

To mention only a couple examples; we know the town was still populated by speakers of (the Italian but not Latin language) Oscan right up to almost the end of the city because there are street signs in Oscan which were painted over only during the post-earthquake renovations of 62 CE. The history of Pompeii as a town of Italians (but not Latins) which was punished for opposition to Rome by being forced to take on a bunch of Roman veterans is revealed right in those painted layers. We know the town was re-entered after the eruption, for hundreds of years, by looters looking for things left behind because coins minted up to 200 years later have been uncovered in the ruins. There are layers upon layers upon layers of history on display in Pompeii when you know what to look for and Beard does a fantastic job of taking the reader through them.

Having read Harris' novel Pompeii not too long ago and enjoying how lively he made the town seem, I was struck by how much more lively Beard made the town seem with her non-fiction. Unlike most of the other non-fiction I have read about Pompeii, Beard does not make the buildings and the objects they hold her focus. She uses the information from the physical remains to illuminate what the people were doing in the spaces they inhabited. Millstones, donkey bones and perfectly preserved loaves of bread are one thing, but Beard paints instead a picture of a middle-class family doing a tidy business in bread and catering. What kind of people were the Romans? Beard answers the question from several angles. She covers business, politics, religion, leisure, death and a few other things. She does this while keeping the people themselves, a good number of whom we know by name, her main focus.

Another element of her approach to the story of Pompeii is an aspect of her training as a scientist. I have read works on the past by journalists and historians who draw from many sources then present the “best fit” of what happened. Beard prefers to speak about ranges of possibility. She pulls from competing historical interpretations, and interjects her own opinions, but leaves things at that. There were over 600 brothels in Pompeii, or only one, depending on how one defines what makes a certain building a brothel. Romans where either deeply pious, with household gods and statues of their divine emperors at major crossroads, or they were merely traditionalists who hated to see the old ways fade away and maintained their shrines long after they had any personal meaning. Sometimes we can't be certain what particular stones, statues, gouges, reconstruction projects or painted slogans mean. By offering the range of possibility then focusing on what can be known for certain within that range, Beard offers the reader both a stunning picture of ancient life as the sort of messy, complicated life we can recognize and proof of the solid results which can be achieved by the exacting science of archaeology.

Simply because of its massive scope, Mommsen's tome on the history of the Roman Republic is still the best book I read is this Pompeii series. However, Beard's Fires is a close second and is certainly the best book specifically about Pompeii I have ever read.