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Roman holiday: when emperor Hadrian became a tourist of ancient Egypt
As is still the case today, the wonders and landmarks of ancient Egypt drew in the tourists in the Roman era. They would carve their names into statues of pharaohs and take cruises down the Nile. Prof Mary Beard describes what happened when a particular party of elite Roman holidaymakers – led by the emperor Hadrian – descended on Egypt’s tourist hotspots in AD 130...
Roman emperors and aristocrats were great tourists. They were as keen as we are on visiting the famous sights of the Mediterranean world, and they brought home souvenirs by the bucket-load. The best guide we have to the appearance of the lost statue of the goddess Athena inside the Parthenon at Athens, an extraordinary creation in gold and ivory, comes in the stone copies made for travellers and tourists. These range from pricey, high-quality replicas to the ancient equivalent of fridge magnets. The most sought-after destination was Egypt, and the most alluring method of transport there was, as now, a Nile cruise. Julius Caesar holidayed on the river with Cleopatra. Half a century or so later, in AD 19, we know that Prince Germanicus, nephew of the emperor Tiberius, visited the country and took a boat up the Nile south from Alexandria. Read more | In the footsteps of Germanicus - a Roman General’s journey to Egypt No tourist, however, visited Egypt in greater style – or, I suspect, with a larger retinue of support staff – than the emperor Hadrian in AD 130. And no imperial party left quite such a lasting mark of their visit. In fact, you can still see the poems commemorating this trip, written by one of the emperor’s aristocratic fellow-travellers – a woman by the name of Julia Balbilla (more on her later). They are carved into the leg of an ancient Egyptian statue, just outside modern Luxor (ancient Thebes). It might seem like a rather upmarket version of ‘Balbilla (and Hadrian) was here’. But these poems not only document a tourist experience; they shine a light onto one of those hidden women of the Roman world. Balbilla was not an ‘ordinary’ woman, but one of wealth, glamorous connections, and talent. All the same, she usually slips below the radar of modern historians. Hadrian's imperial inspection Hadrian’s Egyptian cruise was only one part of a much longer journey for the emperor and his entourage. He was the most travelled of all the Roman rulers – and sightseeing, in our sense of the word, was no doubt only one side of the story. He was, after all, also inspecting ‘his’ empire and visiting the far-flung troops. By the time they reached Egypt, the imperial party had already been on the road (or at sea) for two years, taking in Sicily, north Africa, Greece and Gaza – in what was more a mammoth royal ‘progress’, or a court on the move, than a quick vacation. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/GettyImages-122221318webready-551406f.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The emperor Hadrian and his wife, Sabina (portrayed here as Mars and Venus in a second-century AD statue) embarked on a years-long tour of his empire (Photo By DEA/G. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini via Getty Images)" title="The emperor Hadrian and his wife, Sabina (portrayed here as Mars and Venus in a second-century AD statue) embarked on a years-long tour of his empire (Photo By DEA/G. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini via Getty Images)" /> There must have been hundreds, if not thousands, of troops, bodyguards and administrators accompanying the Egyptian excursion, travelling on any number of boats, or following on land. (Some surviving ancient papyri record local worries about how on earth they were going to cater for this influx of officials and hangers-on, all needing billeting and feeding.) At the centre of this vast entourage were members of Hadrian’s intimate circle. The holiday from hell? His wife, Sabina, was one of them. Julia Balbilla was another, a celebrity of the Roman international ‘jet set’. The most notorious – and tragic – of them was the emperor’s young boyfriend, Antinoos. In Roman terms, a married man also having a relationship with a young man was not so unusual. But there was something a bit edgier here. Antinoos drowned in mysterious circumstances in the Nile in early October 130. The question of ‘Did he fall or was he pushed?’ has never been resolved. For those in this inner circle, the death of Hadrian’s boyfriend must have blighted the trip (was it ‘the holiday from hell’?). It is all too easy to imagine the atmosphere on the boats: the party tiptoeing around the grieving emperor, who was busy planning memorials to his lost love, and even starting the process of turning him into a god. You might well have thought that they would have called the whole cruise off. But they pressed on south. That was probably because Egypt’s most celebrated tourist high-spot still lay ahead. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/GettyImages-113493755webready-c492d25.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A bust of Antinoos, the emperor Hadrian’s lover. His sudden death in AD 130 cast a long shadow over the imperial tour of Egypt (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)" title="A bust of Antinoos, the emperor Hadrian’s lover. His sudden death in AD 130 cast a long shadow over the imperial tour of Egypt (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)" /> Hadrian’s party had already visited the Great Pyramid. What they were even keener to see was the statue on which the verses of Julia Balbilla would soon be inscribed: one of the so-called ‘Colossi of Memnon’. This 18-metre-high edifice has a long and intriguing history. It was originally constructed around 1350 BC, one of a matching pair representing the pharaoh Amenhotep III. This made it a venerable antique, almost 1,500 years old, by the time Hadrian came to visit. But, by then, its name had been changed and it had been credited with miraculous new characteristics. In a wholesale reinterpretation, the colossus was no longer Pharaoh Amenhotep. It was now believed to represent the mythical Greek hero Memnon, a fighter in the Trojan war, the son of the goddess of the dawn. The singing statue And what is more, it was said sometimes to make a singing noise first thing in the morning, as if greeting its mother. One explanation for this is a natural one. At some point in the first century BC, the top of the statue had been damaged, allowing water to penetrate the stone. As the temperature rose in the morning, the drying out of the water in the cracks of the sculpture might have made a hissing – or a singing – noise. Another explanation suggests that it was more of a scam. At least one ancient writer thought there might have been some boys around the back faking the sound of singing on makeshift musical instruments, to cash in on the tourist trade. Whichever is true, the statue eventually stopped singing. Either the ‘boys around the back’ found better ways to make money. Or (if you follow the natural explanation), a well-meaning repair of the statue blocked up the cracks, prevented the water getting in, and so stopped the singing. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/BAL59238webready-d2de590.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The Colossi of Memnon were the ultimate tourist destination of the second century AD. By the time Hadrian visited, they were already almost 1,500 years old (Photo by Bridgeman Images)" title="The Colossi of Memnon were the ultimate tourist destination of the second century AD. By the time Hadrian visited, they were already almost 1,500 years old (Photo by Bridgeman Images)" /> But for several hundred years the singing statue was the biggest attraction in Egypt. Visitors turned up at dawn hoping that Memnon would perform for them. He couldn’t be relied upon, but it was thought a wonderful sign of good luck if he did. Some of those who got lucky had their visit commemorated with an inscription carved into the statue’s leg (presumably they paid local craftsmen to do the actual carving – at, I imagine, a hefty price). In one of the earliest examples, around AD 20, a Roman by the name of Servius Clemens simply recorded in Latin that he “heard the voice of Memnon and gave thanks”. Two centuries later, in one of the latest inscriptions, a philosopher called Falernus gave a more flowery account in Greek verse of his own experiences. “When he saw his mother, Dawn, dressed in her saffron robe,” the statue “made a sound sweeter than clear speech.” It is among this group of 107 inscriptions that we find the four verses, again written in Greek, by Julia Balbilla – as well as a few lines composed by the empress Sabina herself. From these we can reconstruct what happened on the imperial visit in November AD 130. When Balbilla and Sabina first showed up at the statue, it stayed resolutely silent. In her poem entitled ‘When on the first day we did not hear Memnon’, Balbilla made the best of what might have been a PR disaster, suggesting that Memnon had only remained silent “so that lovely Sabina would come back again”. Indeed, they did go back. Then, probably on the next day, as another poem happily records, “I Balbilla heard the divine voice of Memnon”. In a poem headed ‘When the emperor Hadrian heard Memnon’, Balbilla records a successful visit by Hadrian himself, most likely on his own. “Seeing Hadrian the ruler of the world,” she writes, “Memnon greeted him as well as he could, before he had even greeted the rays of the sun.” In other words, Memnon appeared to prefer Hadrian over his own mother. And the statue went on to speak to the emperor twice more, making it “clear to everyone that the gods love him”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/HW3537webready-55867d8.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="For centuries, Roman tourists flocked to one of the Colossi of Memnon to hear it ‘sing’ – and then carved inscriptions into it, like those shown here (Photo by jackie ellis/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="For centuries, Roman tourists flocked to one of the Colossi of Memnon to hear it ‘sing’ – and then carved inscriptions into it, like those shown here (Photo by jackie ellis/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> So, after a rocky start, the visit must finally have seemed like a triumph. In the more than 50 lines of Balbilla’s verses, however, we learn about more than the royal party’s encounter with the singing statue. Although we have little information about Balbilla from almost any other source, we can extract a surprising amount about her life and her world-view from the poems. Balbilla was the descendant on her father’s side of the royal family of the eastern kingdom of Commagene, and on her mother’s side of a Roman governor of the province of Egypt – and is at pains to highlight this elite ancestry within her poetry. She stresses that one grandfather, Antiochus, had been a king and that the other had been a prestigious scholar. She even calls her father and mother ‘king’ and ‘queen’, despite the fact that the effective rule of the royal house of Commagene had ended when her grandfather was ousted by the Roman emperor Vespasian. Poetic skill and antiquarian learning There is a pride, almost a pushiness, in how Balbilla vaunts her rank. And she makes no secret of her own scholarship. Her poems feature learned and slightly pretentious references to byways of ancient myth and history. She spends four lines on the deeds of the Persian king Kambyses, who in the sixth century BC had apparently tried to demolish the statue but paid the price with his life – so providing the foil for Balbilla’s piety towards Memnon. Balbilla’s verses are composed in a style and language that mimics the first Greek female poet, Sappho, who lived around 600 BC on the island of Lesbos. It is almost as if a poet today were to compose perfectly in the manner of Geoffrey Chaucer: a boast of poetic skill, rhetorical sophistication and antiquarian learning. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/05/2T4KAY8webready-2db79d2.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Greek poet Sappho, thought to be the figure with a stylus and wax tablet in this first-century AD image, inspired the verses that Balbilla carved onto the Colossus of Memnon (Photo by Peter Horree/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="Greek poet Sappho, thought to be the figure with a stylus and wax tablet in this first-century AD image, inspired the verses that Balbilla carved onto the Colossus of Memnon (Photo by Peter Horree/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> But there was perhaps even more to it than that. By adopting Sappho’s language, Balbilla was reminding her readers of the very beginning of the tradition of female poetry in which she proudly followed. And, by writing up their visits to the statue in that language, she was maybe also hinting at a closeness between herself and the empress Sabina. For Sappho was also famous for her erotic friendships with young women whom she celebrated in her poetry. (Our term ‘Lesbian’ comes from the name of Sappho’s island.) Read more | From Sappho to It’s a Sin: 9 LGBT+ histories, chosen by experts All this adds vividly to our picture of Hadrian’s tourist party. We can only guess at the precise relationship between Sabina and Balbilla. How close a match it was for that between Hadrian and Antinoos, no one can know. But Balbilla was certainly not some kind of junior companion on the trip, almost a lady-in-waiting to the empress. Her poems give the lie to that, parading her literary skill, scholarly expertise and her royal blood. My hunch is that she felt her own ancestry far outclassed that of the Roman emperor. Hadrian was new to power; he had been adopted by his predecessor, Trajan, from outside the circles of royalty – from a family of no inherited distinction. The blue-blooded Balbilla came from generations of a royal dynasty, which traced its lineage through king after king, back to a right-hand man of Alexander the Great. And, thanks to her grandfather’s service as governor of the province, as well as her own learned study, she probably knew a lot more about Egypt than Hadrian did. Beyond the encounter with Memnon, those were precisely the points she was trying to rub in over the course of her extraordinary poems. This article first appeared in the June 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Reviving Roman voices: Mary Beard on the remarkable life of one woman
The remarkable story of one Roman woman, pieced together from fragments over many centuries, reveals insights into family life more than 2,000 years ago. Mary Beard gives voice to the long-silent Turia
During the civil wars that tore the Roman Republic in the middle of the first century BC, leading to the birth of the empire, one Roman woman was facing her own crises – both public and private. Usually known to us as ‘Turia’, she was born into a high-ranking family and by the late 50s BC had become engaged to be married. It was obviously a ‘good match’ with a man of prospects. But before the wedding could take place, not only had her fiancé suddenly quit Rome to fight under Pompey the Great – in other words, on the losing side in the war against Julius Caesar – but, tragically, her mother and father had also been murdered in their remote house in the country. Turia moved in with her future mother-in-law, but seems to have been largely left to cope with her problems alone, or with the help of just her sister. She managed to take vengeance on her parents’ murderers and successfully fought off some of her own relations who contested her inheritance. At the same time, she sent supplies to her absent fiancé, selling off some of her own jewellery to do so. Things looked up, albeit briefly. Although Julius Caesar was victorious in the war against Pompey, he pardoned his enemies and allowed them to return to Rome, so Turia and her fiancé were eventually able to get married. But worse was to come. Just a few years later, after Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC, the junta who ruled the city put a price on her husband’s head, and he was forced to leave the city again. It was only thanks to Turia’s intervention on his behalf with Lepidus, one of Rome’s so-called ‘ruling three’ (alongside Mark Antony and Octavian, the future emperor Augustus), that he was allowed back – but not before she had been horribly insulted and beaten black and blue by some of the regime’s apparatchiks. Peace finally came to Rome more than a decade later, under its first emperor, Augustus – who by then had cannily reinvented himself as a responsible elder statesman. The marriage of Turia and her husband lasted 41 years, with only one major disappointment: they did not have any children. Eventually, in despair, Turia suggested that her husband divorce her, so that she herself could find him another wife who might be able to produce an heir. Her idea seems to have been for a curious ménage à trois in which all their property remained jointly held, managed by her, and they would share the children of the new wife between the three of them. But the husband would hear nothing of this scheme. Turia, after all, had remained faithful to him when he was in exile – why would he forsake her now? Pieces of the puzzle This is a rare story of a real woman’s life in ancient Rome. We know of it only thanks to the speech of praise given by the husband at Turia’s funeral, which he then had inscribed on two marble panels, almost certainly displayed on the facade of what must have been a vast tomb. All we can say about her comes from there. We do not know exactly where the monument originally stood, because it was later broken up and the material recycled into other buildings. Fragments of the inscription have been discovered over the past few centuries all across the city: a couple of pieces in a Christian catacomb, one in an abbey wall, another unearthed during works on the sewers near modern Trastevere, yet another languishing unrecognised in a museum storeroom. Other parts have come down to us only in manuscript copies made in the 17th century, recording fragments of the inscrip- tion that were then known but have since been lost again. Reconstructing the text and, thus, the story of Turia’s life has been like doing a giant jigsaw puzzle. We have so far – there may be more pieces to come, if we are lucky – discovered slightly more than half of what was once written. The original text ran to almost 200 lines, covering the panels that were originally 2.5 metres tall and just under 1 metre wide – making it the longest Latin inscription created by a private individual to have survived anywhere in the Roman world. Sadly, missing elements include the actual names of the couple, both husband and wife. ‘Turia’ is a conjecture by an 18th-century antiquarian. It is almost certainly wrong, but the name has stuck – and the whole document is generally known as the Laudatio Turiae, or Praise of Turia. Of course, none of this gives us the woman’s own view of her life. What we have is what the husband chose to say about Turia at her funeral, and how he chose to have her permanently commemorated on the tomb, which he no doubt paid for. It was almost bound to be laudatory: funeral speeches, then as now, are not the place for criticism and complaint. As well as the more striking and unusual episodes in her life mentioned above, there is plenty of praise for the stereotypical qualities that were the clichés of Roman womanhood – the kind of thing that almost any Roman husband would have wanted to be said about his wife. “Why should I list your private qualities?” he remarks at one point: “Your modesty, your obedience, your kindness, your good nature, your devotion to weaving, your honouring of the gods without a trace of superstition, your inconspicuous dress, your restrained appearance.” Taking the initiative All this is very much in line with another famous Roman tombstone made a few hundred years earlier, which summed up the qualities of another dead woman more succinctly: “She was charming in her conversation, elegant in her bearing. She kept house; she wove wool.” The same sentiments can be found on many more memorials erected from one end of the Roman empire to the other. But even if the Praise of Turia doesn’t give us Turia’s own perspective, some parts of it do challenge the standard view of how a woman in ancient Rome was supposed to behave. The scheming exploits of such larger-than-life characters as Augustus’s wife Livia are one thing, memorably reimagined in Robert Graves’ 1934 novel I, Claudius and probably fictional. But here is a rich but relatively ordinary woman who is actually praised for taking the initiative, in the public world, to bring the murderers of her parents to justice. (That crime alone is a chilling glimpse of the lawlessness of Italy at the period – though, to be fair, we don’t know anything of the circumstances of the crime or of its perpetrators: gangland brigands, exploited servants or those with a private grudge?) And she receives even more praise for taking on her own relatives in the inher- itance dispute, then pleading in person for her own husband’s return before one of the junta – even getting beaten up in the process. How typical was this? We cannot be sure. In one famous case, a female orator of the same period, Hortensia, is said to have addressed the junta publicly to protest against a tax imposed on women’s wealth during the civil wars after Caesar’s assassination. She was partially successful, and the number of women liable to the tax was reduced. In these cases involving Hortensia and Turia, though, such an act was probably very much a wartime phenomenon. It is quite common, even in societies where women are usually confined to the home, for women to take the initiative or be forced into the limelight in periods of crisis, especially when men are absent on campaign. That power does not usually last: for example, most of the women in Britain who found jobs driving buses or lorries during the Second World War lost them again in peacetime. So too, Turia – after filling the power vacuum while her husband was fighting overseas or was in exile – almost certainly returned to domes- ticity when ‘normality’ was restored. And there are all kinds of puzzles about the story told in the Praise of Turia that go far beyond the tantalising anonymity of the couple concerned. It is not clear, for example, how she took ‘vengeance’ (or secured ‘justice’ – the exact word is lost from the stone) for the murder of her parents. It is hard to imagine, bearing in mind Roman rules, that she stood up and publicly pleaded in a courtroom – though that is close to what Hortensia did. Maybe it was something much closer to paying a private hit squad: that was probably how, in practice, most Roman disputes and vendettas were settled. Despite the fame of Roman law, such ‘self-help’, as it might euphemistically be called, would have been more common. For me the most puzzling and memorable part of the Praise is the section on the couple’s infertility. It is no surprise that the husband puts that down entirely to his wife. Most Roman men assumed that, if a couple failed to have a baby, it was due to some deficiency in the woman, not the man. But why did he make such an issue of it in his speech, with all the details of the proposed divorce and ménage à trois? Rather than sheer clumsiness, it was very likely a sign of the times. Augustus was still on the throne when Turia died. As part of his personal reinvention from bellicose warlord to elder states- man, he placed enormous emphasis on promoting the family and the Roman birth rate, and gave specific financial and legal privileges to those with at least three children. Augustus, in other words, made this ‘private’ aspect of domestic life part of ‘public’ business. And that is what we see reflected here – as well as the husband’s implication, in refusing the divorce, that his love for Turia surpassed any such state pressure. Being Roman Turia is just one of the characters we spotlight in a series of six BBC Radio 4 programmes and podcasts that explore what it was to be Roman. In them, we look far beyond the standard image of upper-class men in togas or battledress spouting Latin. To be fair, we do include one of those – the emperor Marcus Aurelius (reigned AD 161–180). But we give more time to the little-known surviving letters between him and his tutor, Marcus Cornelius Fronto, than to his better-known Meditations – still bestsellers among well-being handbooks after almost 2,000 years. However, we range much more widely across the population of the Roman empire. In one programme we meet Galen, a celebrity doctor of the second century AD. He’s not really a household name today, yet we can still read more than 3 million words he wrote on medicine, philosophy and himself. Another introduces a young boy by the name of Quintus Sulpicius Maximus, who died when he was only 11 years old – though not before he had won a ‘highly commended’ prize in an international poetry competition. His parents had his poem inscribed alongside his portrait on his tombstone. Then there is Regina (‘Queenie’), a girl who was originally from somewhere near St Albans. Enslaved and later freed, she then married her former master, who was a Syrian from Palymra. The pair lived and died near Hadrian’s Wall in a textbook example of diversity, Roman-style – one of many that reveal how people from all across the Roman world mingled and interacted. But perhaps my favourite of the six is a long-suffering and slightly bad-tempered middle manager from Roman Egypt. He usually refers to himself only by his job title: strategos (assistant governor). But a series of his letters, preserved on papyrus, allows us to trace the problems he encountered while attempting to organise a visit to Egypt by the emperor Diocletian in the late third century AD. Local mayors proved decidedly uncooperative: “I have told you two or three times,” he writes to one of them, “to get the bakery repaired so we can feed his majesty’s soldiers.” He also had to cover his back with his own superiors, reporting that: “I have told them that they have to get the bakery repaired.” His letters provide a wonderful glimpse into a Roman office and a Roman filing cabinet over a couple of weeks in AD 298 – and into the burden placed on the locals ahead of “the auspiciously impending visit of our ruler”, as the strategos puts it in his formal bureaucratese. It all makes a visit from King Charles and Queen Camilla look quite low maintenance. Scattered evidence One of our aims in the series is to show just how varied the ‘Romans’ were. But we also look to lift the lid on some of the surprising stories of rediscovery that have allowed us to get to know these ancient characters. The tombstone of little Quintus Sulpicius Maximus, for instance, was discovered only after Garibaldi’s forces destroyed Rome’s ancient wall after capturing the city in 1870: it had been recycled as a building block in the defences just a couple of hundred years after the boy’s death. Some of Galen’s works, meanwhile, are known only in Arabic versions: his medical writings were influential in the Arab world, and some translations have been preserved in Arabic long after the original Greek texts were lost. The letters between Fronto and Marcus Aurelius were rediscovered in even stranger circumstances. The parchment on which a copy of them had once been transcribed was later washed down and, for the sake of economy, reused by some monks in the seventh century to record the minutes of an early Christian council. The more ancient correspondence would have disappeared forever, had an ingenious 19th-century scholar not realised that an earlier text lay underneath the Christian minutes, and used a chemical compound to reveal the traces. The fate of the stone on which the Praise of Turia was inscribed – smashed up and scattered across Rome, only to be rediscovered in sewerage works and abbey walls, then pieced together again – is therefore not as unusual as it might at first seem. It is a perfect reminder not only of how fragile the evidence from the Roman past can be, but also of how chance and serendipity can sometimes still bring that past back to us, with all those stories of real Romans and their real lives. Long may that serendipity continue. On the podcast | How brutal were Roman emperors? Mary Beard is honorary fellow at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, and an author and broadcaster. Her new book, Emperor of Rome, is out now from Profile Books.
Mary Beard on how to live like a Roman emperor
Popular historian Mary Beard tackles some of the biggest questions about life as a Roman emperor, from what they actually did all day to whether they were really as bloodthirsty as legend suggests
What did Roman emperors actually do all day? Were they really as bloodthirsty as legend would suggest? And why was food so important? Speaking to Matt Elton, popular historian, author and broadcaster Mary Beard tackles some of the big questions about life as a Roman emperor, profiling some extraordinary figures along the way. View Green Video on the source website Articles by Mary Beard What was life like in ancient Pompeii? An A-Z guide Why Rome ruled the world Why Rome still matters Mary Beard is the author of Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World (Profile Books, 2023)
“The Roman empire cannot have been governed by a series of psychopaths. It would not have survived”: Mary Beard on Roman Emperors
Mary Beard tells Matt Elton what life would have been like for Rome’s emperors – from the path to the top to the almost inevitable sticky end
Your new book covers a swathe of the history of ancient Rome, from Julius Caesar to Septimius Severus and beyond, but starts by introducing a less familiar figure. Who is he, and why did you lead with him? The book kicks off with the story of a teenager from Syria who came to the Roman throne in AD 218 and who was assassinated in 222. Known as Elagabalus [officially Marcus Aurelius Antoninus], he certainly wasn’t one of Rome’s greatest hits, but he is an emperor around whom the most extravagant stories have collected. If you think Nero or Caligula were over the top, you ain’t seen nothing until you’ve looked at Elagabalus! We’re told that when he invited people to dinner, he showered them with rose petals – with so many petals that his guests were smothered and died. He is said to have been the earliest known user of the whoopee cushion in western history: he would have his slaves go around and let the air out of dinner guests’ cushions so that they ended up on the floor. He’s also reputed to have married a Vestal Virgin [a priestess sworn to chastity] and made a human sacrifice. In short, Nero was a pussycat in comparison. I start the book with Elagabalus because the point about such stories isn’t whether or not they’re true. (My guess is that they’re not, but were invented after Elagabalus’s time to besmirch his memory.) My pitch is that, in a way, it doesn’t matter if they are literally true, because they’re true in another sense: they represent Roman fears about what the worst kind of emperor would be like. They’re saying that you never know where you are with a bad emperor – that emperors are never what they seem, and that some of what lies at the heart of Roman imperial power is deceit, deception and fakery. In the orbit of the emperor, you can never believe your eyes. Even nature might be corrupted. Elagabalus’s alleged tricks included only eating fish when he was inland, and having snow brought to his summer gardens. Again, these stories paint a picture of a mad, capricious emperor – but what they’re actually saying is that the problem at the root of imperial power is its subversion of nature. You can learn a lot about what people thought about emperors from these tales, even if they are true only at the level of ideology. You write that Rome was an empire before it had an emperor. Could you elaborate on that point? People sometimes think that the Roman empire was acquired and governed by a Roman emperor. It was absolutely the reverse: though it’s completely counter-intuitive, the Roman emperor inherited an empire. The previous political system, generally known as the Republic, ended with Julius Caesar’s dictatorship. It was a sort of – and I mean sort of – democracy, with very ‘sort-of’ elections: it wasn’t exactly one-man, one-vote equality. One of the things about the Republic that forever marked out Rome from almost any other early western power is that it was stunningly successful in conquest. People have always wondered why: some argue that it’s because the Romans were simply nastier than everyone else, though I think that everyone was nasty, really. But certainly the Romans were hugely successful at defeating their neighbours and expanding their territory. By the second century BC – long before Rome had an emperor – it had acquired a huge land-based empire stretching around the Mediterranean from what’s now Portugal and Spain to Greece and Turkey. Read more | Cheese, angry gods and shoddy surgeons: the unlikely deaths of Roman emperors The key point here is that it was the enormous size of this empire that destroyed Roman democracy. The Republic was based on notional equality among the elite, and on the basic rule that nobody held any political office for more than a year, and that any such office was always shared with someone else. But although that system helped the Romans acquire that vast swathe of territory, it proved unworkable as a means to govern or keep it. Long before there was an emperor, unprecedented power ended up being handed to individuals, in order to put down rebellions or clear the sea of pirates or whatever the problem was in that moment. At the same time, the notional equality of the elite was being destroyed because so much wealth was being acquired from the empire, and some people were making themselves so much bigger than others. So, from the second century BC, a series of civil wars erupted, with kind-of prequels to emperors taking power. Out of all of that, one-man rule was established. That change in system did help solve practical problems of governing the empire. Some provinces lay several months’ travel from Rome, and if you held office for only one year, you could barely get out to such distant realms and back again during that time. Ultimately, Julius Caesar cut through all of this bureaucracy to be made dictator – and, eventually, dictator for life. As a single ruler, he founded the political system we know as the empire. But it really was a case of the empire producing emperors, not emperors producing the empire. After Caesar’s assassination, someone you’ve described as “a particularly nasty young man” rose to power: Octavian. Why was he so very nasty, and how did he become Rome’s first emperor? Caesar was assassinated in the name of ‘liberty’ – ha ha – by some privileged aristocrats whom William Shakespeare glorified. A decade of civil war followed, during which Caesar’s supporters – notably Mark Antony and Octavian – defeated his killers, then turned on each other. Octavian eventually emerged victorious and became the first emperor proper, changing his name to Augustus [and reigning 27 BC to AD 14]. But he was a thug, at least in the first instance. He illegally raised his own private militia and joined forces with Mark Antony. He was then part and parcel of some extremely nasty civil violence and lawless killing. He is well known as being a violent young bloke: one story tells how he tore out the eyes of one of his enemies with his bare hands. One of the great mysteries of Roman history is how, after starting out in that way, Augustus was able to rebrand himself as a founding father and elder statesman. Some of that early violence might have been a bit exaggerated by his enemies, but some of it certainly wasn’t. There are plenty of other terrorists and radicals who, after winning the fight for power – pretty nastily, sometimes – turned themselves into revered elder statesmen, but Augustus’s must count as one of the biggest and most unexplained turnarounds. He ruled for 40 years, making him the longest-serving Roman emperor – and yet, if you’d encountered him in the 30s BC, you’d have steered well clear. Not only did Octavian rule for a long time, but he also established principles of emperorship that endured for centuries. Why were they so successful, and how did he change what rule meant? Quite how much of a ready-made plan he had, when he’d just been fighting a civil war, I don’t know. No doubt his most pressing aim was to not get a dagger in the back. Though ancient writers suggest he was working to a template that he already had in mind, I think he improvised a set of measures that lasted, and which are relatively clear. Read more | Everything you wanted to know about Roman emperors One that was absolutely crucial was nationalising the army. Part of the problem that had emerged in Rome in the first century BC was that a whole series of ambitious men were raising their own private legions that were loyal to them, not to the state. That’s how Augustus had operated during the civil war, and he must have seen that was a big problem. So he jettisoned the notion of temporary armies built by leading men, and replaced it with a professional army, with limited terms of service and a retirement package at the end. That broke the link between ambitious and powerful generals and their troops, and was very successful – but also hugely expensive. It’s reckoned that paying the troops, plus retirement packages, cost around half the entire revenue of the Roman empire. But I think that’s an indication of just how important Augustus regarded making the army the force of the state, not of individual generals. He also continued the traditional Roman conquests. With the money that was left, he was phenomenally generous to the Roman people – not only in terms of cash handouts and providing shows and spectacles, but also of rebuilding the ceremonial centre of Rome, which had been rather higgledy-piggledy and not very well planned. He erected new buildings, many with decorations featuring Augustus himself. He flooded the Roman world with his image, both on coins and in marble. It’s reckoned that there were between 25,000 and 50,000 depictions of him across the world. Though immortalised in these sculptures, eventually Augustus’s rule – like all others – had to end. How did succession work? Could anyone become an emperor if they wanted it enough? You could say that Augustus was successful and lucky in everything apart from succession planning. That’s where you see the big fault-lines in the system. Part of the problem was that he and his wife, Livia, had no living children of their own. They each had children from previous marriages, but didn’t have children between them to take over the throne. What happened instead was a series of adoptions, and failed attempts to marry off Augustus’s daughter to potential heirs – none of whom lived long enough to succeed as emperor. Eventually, Augustus was left with only Livia’s son from her first marriage, Tiberius, whom he adopted and who took over the throne. It’s not hard to see why some historians imagined that Livia was angling for her son’s succession all along, and had a hand in the premature deaths of the other potential candidates – though there’s no evidence for that, only gossip. So succession was a mess from the very beginning. As to whether anyone could become emperor: in theory, yes – but what really happened was that successors were chosen via adoption, first from the wider family of the emperor and then, from the second century AD, from a wider range of the elite. So it certainly wasn’t like the way any American can dream of inhabiting the White House. Did that expanding pool lead to more diverse figures becoming emperor? And is some of that diversity obscured by the fact that statues of emperors now seem to us to be universally white? One feature of the Roman empire, right from its origins, was that Rome gradually allowed people from its empire into full citizenship and power. And, as the elite of the Roman empire became more diverse, so the diversity of the people on the throne also increased. Trajan came from Spain, for instance, while Elagabalus was from a Syrian family. I think you’re right: the fact that visitors to museums now see loads and loads of white marble statues can give us a misleading impression of the kinds of people who were Roman emperors. The exact ethnicity of Septimius Severus has been much debated, for instance, but he certainly wasn’t what we might now term ‘pale, male and stale’. And of course those statues might have looked different when they were painted to reflect a range of skin tones and facial characteristics. So yes: looking at ancient statues, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that all emperors were white. You’ve mentioned Elagabalus again there. In your book, you make the point that it’s vital to see these individuals not just as characters in macabre stories but as hard-working bureaucrats. What tasks did they perform, and just how hard-working were they? Some rulers must have been more hard-working than others. A key point of my book, though, is that, despite our tendency to see Roman emperors as a series of psychopaths, it just doesn’t make sense to understand the Roman empire in these terms. The empire cannot have been governed by a series of psychopaths, because in that case it just would not have survived. As to what emperors actually did, I think the job description would probably have been the same in AD 210 as it was in 10 BC – though some would have been better at doing it than others. As the emperor Marcus Aurelius put it in the second century AD, when he was looking back at his predecessors: Roman imperial power, and imperial power more generally, is “the same play, just a different cast”. Read more | The 8 bloodiest Roman emperors in history Some jobs would always have had to be done, regardless of who was emperor – and one of those was dealing with correspondence. The emperor’s postbag must have been enormous, crammed full of petitions, begging letters, and reports from leaders and governors. Some missives would have been about matters of great geopolitical import, while others would have been about lost cows. There is no doubt that somebody in the royal palace was looking at those questions and signing them off. We don’t know how many letters were actually dealt with by the emperor himself – just as we know that if we write to the prime minister now and get a reply, it wasn’t actually written by the PM. But when Romans imagined the emperor, they imagined him with his red boxes adjudicating legal cases just as much as they pictured him having sex in the swimming pool. We talked earlier about Caesar’s assassination, a fate that also befell plenty of his successors. Was there a link between meeting that fate and an emperor’s posthumous reputation? It certainly made an enormous difference. I think that modern readers of Roman history, me included, have tended to be a bit naive about this. We’ve assumed, for instance, that Domitian [ruled AD 81–96] was very nasty, and that’s why he was assassinated, to be succeeded by the elderly but steady Nerva. Well, you could spin that: you could say that because Domitian was assassinated in a palace coup – with most of the conspirators coming from inside the palace – it was in the interests of Nerva and others to spread vile stories about Domitian. Now, we don’t know which story is right, and I think it’s always a bit too simple to somehow pretend that these monsters were really nice. None of them were nice in our terms, but it’s still useful to remember that good men and bad men alike are assassinated. You end the book by writing that researching and writing it has opened your eyes to aspects of modern politics. Without naming any specific present-day politicians, in what ways do you mean that? On the one hand, writing the book made me hate autocracy more. It’s a system in which everybody is engaged in a fiction, a fake – even the emperor. He’s the one person to whom no one will ever tell the truth. So I felt more distaste for autocratic power. At the same time, I felt a bit more sympathy on an individual basis for the probably very ordinary person on the throne. How do you live in a culture in which there is no truth? But I sympathised also with all those others caught up in that culture, right down to the bottom of the pile. I suppose it’s also made me think slightly differently about modern politics in this country and elsewhere. I could do an analysis of the hypocrisy of the British political system – its preponderance of soundbites, its lies and systematic untruths – but I have sympathy for the men and women caught up in that system, too. Most of them probably didn’t go into politics to be part of a sham facade of untruthfulness, but instead to try to make things better. And in a sense, we’re all implicated in their problems, because we don’t ever let them off the hook – we don’t ever let them make a mistake. We’re there on social media – me included – trying to out them and to cancel them. I felt a little more sympathy for them as people, while decrying some of the deplorable structural aspects of British or American politics – indeed, probably any big political system in the modern world. The one thing you can say, however – and this has got to make us pleased – is that we’ve got the ballot boxes and general elections, and we can vote the buggers out, whoever they may be. If we choose not to, that’s our problem. No one could vote out an emperor, though, and of course one of the reasons why that world looks so bloody from our perspective is that there was only one way of solving a problem in the ancient world – which was death. So we’re in a better position, and we should perhaps use our democratic rights more enthusiastically. You can listen to Mary Beard talk to Matt Elton on the HistoryExtra podcast here. This article was first published in the November 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
What was life like in ancient Pompeii? Mary Beard shares an A-Z guide
Buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, and gradually disinterred from the middle of the 18th century, Pompeii is probably the world's most famous archaeological site. But what was life like for the Romans who lived there, pre-eruption? Not that different from our own, as Mary Beard reveals in her A to Z of the ancient town, complete with yob culture, nightlife and plonk...
A... is for artists at work House makeovers? Style gurus? Des res? Painters and decorators did a roaring trade in Pompeii, transforming dark and often pokey interiors with a lavish coat of paint much as they do today. And we now have a precious glimpse of how the painters operated. In one house, recently uncovered, a team of three or four decorators were interrupted by the eruption almost in mid-brush stroke, scarpering as the ash fell and abandoning their tools, 50 pots of paints, and a bucket of fresh plaster precariously balanced up a ladder. The assistants had been busy slapping on the plaster and the broad washes of colour, while the masters had drawn out the design in rough sketches and were painting the figures and the fiddly bits. View oEmbed on the source website B… is for banking The Romans didn’t have cheques or credit cards, but there were money lenders, the banks of the day. The most famous Pompeian banker is Lucius Caecilius Jucundus (now best known as the hero of the early parts of the Cambridge Latin Course). Some of his records and receipts, stashed away in the attic of his house, give an idea of his business activities. Banker is actually a bit of a euphemism – he was mainly an auctioneer profiting on both sides of the transaction, charging the seller a commission and then lending money to the buyer at a healthy rate of interest. Read more about Pompeii: how much of Pompeii was preserved after the devastation? When was Pompeii first excavated? C... is for cafe culture The latest estimate reckons that there were about 200 cafes and bars in the town altogether – about one for every 60 residents. A counter usually ran along the street to catch the passing trade, selling cheap takeaway food from large jars. Wine was stacked up behind it and there were tables in a back room for sit-down eating and drinking. It was the reverse of today’s society, where the rich eat out and the poor cook up at home. In Pompeii, the poor, living in tiny quarters with no facilities, relied on cafe food. Visiting Pompeii The highlight of Pompeii is walking the streets. Try to find a deserted side street – it’s still possible even with the crowds of visitors – and, clichéd as it is, you’ll feel as if you’re back in the Roman world. Otherwise don’t miss the Villa of the Mysteries, just outside the town walls, for really impressive painting (though touched up in the early 20th century rather more than is usually admitted). The brothel still does a roaring trade and is worth a look. www.pompeiisites.org D… is for diet (and dormice) Rich Pompeians did occasionally eat dormice. Or so a couple of strange pottery containers – identified, thanks to descriptions by ancient writers, as dormouse cages – suggest. But elaborate banquets were a rarity and just for the rich. The staples were bread, olives, beans, eggs, cheese, fruit and veg (Pompeian cabbages were particularly prized), plus some tasty fish. Meat was less in evidence, and was mainly pork. This was a relatively healthy diet. In fact, the ancient Pompeians were on average slightly taller than modern Neapolitans. Read more about the surprising foods eaten in ancient Rome… E… is for education, education, education One of the puzzles of Pompeii is where the kids went to school. No obvious school buildings or classrooms have been found. The likely answer is that teachers took their class of boys (and almost certainly only boys) to some convenient shady portico and did their teaching there. A wonderful series of paintings of scenes of life in the Forum seems to show exactly that happening – with one poor miscreant being given a nasty beating in front of his classmates. And the curriculum? To judge from the large number of quotes from Virgil’s Aeneid scrawled on Pompeian walls, the young were well drilled in the national epic. Listen | Daisy Dunn revisits the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and considers the history that was preserved at Pompeii and Herculaneum F… is for faith The official religion of the town sponsored solemn sacrifices and raucous festivals celebrating Jupiter, Apollo, Venus and the Roman emperor, who was to all intents and purposes a god himself. But alongside this, happily co-existing so far as we can tell, were all kinds of other religions. One of the most impressive sights at Pompeii is the little temple of the Egyptian goddess Isis, once tended by its white-clad, shaven-headed priests. We have evidence, too, for Jews and worshippers of Cybele, known as the Great Mother. There is no clear sign of any Christians, but in one house an ivory statuette of the Indian goddess Lakshmi has turned up. Souvenir, curiosity or object of devotion? Nobody knows. Read more about religion in ancient Rome… G... is for garum No Roman cooking was complete without garum – a disgusting concoction of rotten fish. A more generous interpretation sees it as a version of the spicy fish sauces that are part of modern Thai cooking, and it was popular in Pompeii, which had at least one garum shop. One of its richest families made its fortune in the trade – and advertised the fact by decorating their front hall with a design of garum jars in mosaic. Garum traders were canny businessmen, with an eye on different markets. A kosher version (guaranteed to contain no shellfish) was produced for the local Jewish community. H... is for hygiene Pompeii boasted at least six public bathing complexes – some owned by the city council, some by private enterprise operations. Only a few of the very richest houses had their own facilities. The vast majority of the population would have exercised, scraped down, sweated and taken a dip in one of the communal establishments. As you might imagine, they were hotbeds of germs and infection. The plunge pools had limited water circulation, no chlorination and must have been full of the usual sort of human effluent. Ancient doctors recommended not going to the baths with an open wound – it could lead to gangrene. I... is for illness Illness struck the young hard. Over half of Pompeii’s children were dead by the age of ten. And the telltale marks left by childhood infectious diseases are clearly visible on the teeth of many of the victims of the eruption. But the good news was that if they survived into adolescence, ancient Pompeians could expect a life not much shorter than our own. For those who fell sick, the doctors would try out a diagnosis and cure – equipped with many of the same instruments, everything from tweezers to gynaecological specula, that you find in a modern medical surgery. J... is for job seekers Dozens of trades and professions are found at Pompeii: carpenters, actors, surveyors, gem-workers, architects, inn keepers, perfume-sellers, laundry men. There is even a “public pig keeper” by the name of Nigella. Occasionally there was big money to be made, but mostly these were low profit margin occupations, and many of those involved were ex-slaves. One of Pompeii’s heated baths. There were at least six in the ancient town or slaves still working to add to the fortunes of their masters. If you didn’t have a job, what then? One of the paintings of Forum life shows a beggar (plus dog) taking hand-outs from a grand lady. Mostly, though, the poor did not exist. In a world without social care, those without means of support simply died. K... is for kitchens Even in the grandest houses, Pompeian kitchens could hardly have cooked up a banquet. They are mostly small, dark, and equipped with just a hearth and a cauldrons to mousse-moulds and industrial-scale sieves. For those occasional banquets, we must imagine preparations extending well beyond the kitchen. One ancient novel talks about a slave shelling peas on the front step, while doubling as hall porter. Large joints of meat would have sizzled away on portable braziers, perhaps in front of the guests. L... is for lavatories The usual place for a Pompeian lavatory was in the kitchen. Hygiene aside, it presumably functioned as a convenient waste-disposal unit, in addition to its more familiar function. A few had shafts that dropped down into a running water supply, though the truth is that rich Pompeians were more interested in using piped water to run ornamental fountains than to make their ablutions more efficient. Many went directly into cesspits, and the remains still lingering in them today are a favourite target of archaeologists wanting to find out what really went in and out of Pompeian stomachs. Find out more about ancient toilets with our historical A-Z… M... is for mains drains Why are there so many stepping stones in Pompeii’s streets? The answer is simple. There were hardly any public drains to take rainwater and sewage out of the city. Most water, and a lot else, no doubt, flowed out through the streets, which must have become rather unsavoury rivers in a downpour. There were no such features at the nearby town of Herculaneum, where there was a developed system of underground drainage. N... is for nightlife When the night fell in Pompeii, it was very dark indeed. The thousands of oil lamps discovered can hardly have made much impact on the gloom. All the same, the bars kept on serving. Some hung welcoming lamps over their front doors. One striking example is in the shape of a pygmy with an enormous phallus, lights dangling from every extremity. And a group of mates signing themselves ‘the late drinkers’ left their message on a Pompeian wall. Sign writers too were busy in the dark. A man called Celer posted up an advertisement for a gladiator show,“written,” it says,“by the light of the moon”. Add to this the noise of all the guard dogs barking, the horses bellowing and the odd wakeful, honking pig: it was probably noisy as well as dark after hours in Pompeii. O... is for one-way streets How did two carts pass in a Pompeian street? A few of the major thoroughfares were wide enough for two-way traffic, but the vast majority were definitely single track. Reversing would be next to impossible with a horse-drawn cart, never mind all the stepping stones in the way. One solution was to ring a loud warning bell, or send a boy ahead to make sure the way was clear. P... is for plonk One of the best-known products of the land surrounding Pompeii was wine. The excellent Roman premier cru, Falernian, came from nearby. And one amphora of Pompeian wine was prized enough by someone that it found its way to England, probably as a gift or a souvenir, rather than evidence for a flourishing wine trade with the northern provinces. But much of the really local wine was bottom of the range. One Roman writer complained that it gave you a hangover till midday. Q... is for quality of life Life was comfortable for the wealthy, living in large – albeit often rather dark – houses, with gardens and shady colonnades. One house in the centre of the town was as big as some of the palaces occupied by the kings of the ancient world, and a few spectacular multi-storey properties on the western side of the town enjoyed marvellous views over the Mediterranean. For the slaves and the poor, however, things were bleak. They lived in cramped service quarters or in single rooms above their shop or workshop – with not much more space than a family would need to sleep. Hence, in part, the attraction of cafes and bars where there was room to stretch out. R... is for real estate Despite the occasional fortune made in the garum trade, land was the main source of wealth in Pompeii. Every owner of a grand house in Pompeii would have had a country property too, growing vines or olives, or grazing sheep. Not many of these properties have been found – unlike the town itself, it’s harder to know where to look for them. But the country burial ground of one well-known Pompeian family has been discovered, next to what is presumed to be their country house. And a magnificent estate, which may have belonged to the family of Nero’s wife Poppaea, survives at Oplontis, a few miles from the town. S... is for sex workers The ancient brothel – a rather grim corner property, with five cubicles, a series of erotic paintings and a lavatory – is now one of the most visited sites in the town. Ironically, it is more frequented now than it was in the Roman world. That said, hundreds of bits of graffiti from satisfied Roman customers survive on its walls, as well as a learned post-coital quotation from Virgil. But sex was almost certainly for sale in all kinds of other parts of town, in bars or seedy one-room lodgings. For the rich, sex was a service provided by slaves. T... is for theatre-goers Pompeii had two theatres and one amphitheatre. The amphitheatre (the earliest to survive anywhere in the world) featured occasional gladiator shows and wild beast hunts, with boars and goats rather than lions. No less popular were the heatrical performances – plays, mimes and ancient pantomime, a combination of music and dance that is the ancestor of modern ballet, rather than our traditional Christmas entertainment. Fan clubs supported particular artistes, proclaiming their enthusiasm on the walls of the town: “Come back soon, Anicetus”. U... is for upstairs, downstairs What happened upstairs is another big Pompeian puzzle. Many houses had upper floors, but most were destroyed by the force of the eruption. The telltale surviving stairways, leading up from the ground floor, give away their presence even when all other trace has gone. There are all kinds of guesses about how these quarters were used – perhaps storage, slave dormitories or rental apartments for lodgers. V... is for voting Pompeian men went to the polls each year to vote for four officials to take charge of town business: a senior pair called ‘the two men for delivering justice’, and a junior pair of aediles, officials who took care of markets, city property and streets. Painted slogans indicate where support lay, for example “The bakers are supporting Caius Julius Polybius”. Negative campaigning (“Don’t vote for…”) was not the custom. But slogans like “The slackers say vote for Polybius” probably amounted to much the same. W... is for writing on the wall Pompeian walls, outside and sometimes inside, were covered with notices and graffiti. These included adverts for shows, electoral campaign posters, as well as personal messages of every sort: “Please, no shitting here”,“Successus the weaver’s in love with Iris and she doesn’t give a toss”,“A bronze jar has gone from this shop – reward for its return”. How far the ability to read and write spread through Pompeian society is a matter of dispute. Some historians put it as low as 20 per cent of the adult males, but the sheer prevalence of writing and the simple everyday information conveyed by it (including price lists) suggests that it was considerably higher. X... is for xenophobia Pompeii was a surprisingly cosmopolitan town. With graffi ti in Hebrew, ivories from the Far East, Egyptian statues, and traces of exotic spices, interaction with other nationalities clearly took place. That did not necessarily mean that the locals embraced foreign cultures with easy-going tolerance. One favourite theme in painting was the imaginary life of pygmies on the Nile: these strange diminutive creatures were depicted getting up to all kinds of weird practices, from cannibalism to group sex. Y... is for yob culture Antisocial behaviour was a feature of ancient life as much as our own – not to mention binge-drinking and sports hooliganism. The most infamous case of this occurred in AD 59, when a riot broke out in the amphitheatre between Pompeians and visitors from nearby Nuceria. In part this was a clash between home and away supporters. But Tacitus, the Roman historian who describes it, refers darkly to “illegal gangs”. The upshot was a complete ban on gladiatorial games in the town for ten years. Z... is for Zanker and other books on Pompeii I have read a book, Pompeii: The Life Of A Roman Town (Profile Books, September 2008), which focuses, as the title suggests, on its daily life. I can also recommend Paul Zanker’s Pompeii: Public and Private Life (Harvard UP, 1998) for the development of the town and its architecture, and Alison E Cooley and MGL Cooley, Pompeii: A Sourcebook (Routledge, 2004). The latter, among other things, collects together and translates some of the most evocative of the Pompeian graffiti. Mary Beard is professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge and author of Pompeii: The Life Of A Roman Town (Profile Books, 2008) This article was first published in the September 2008 issue of BBC History Magazine