7/7 Pompeii

One of the last stops on our summer tour through Europe was at Pompei, a city which has been so well preserved for our edification, but at the cost of so many lives when a volcano erupted in 79AD, burying the city under a level of ash. I pose this question: would you be willing to bury New York City under a layer of ash and preserve it for future generations to come and observe our way of life and learn from it at the sacrifice of 8 million people? It’s a moral dilemma. If we were to know somehow in advance that in 2000 years the Western way of life would be extinct, would we want some kind of metropolis time capsule that could at least give a glimpse into our ‘advanced’ society? I’m sure the Pompeians, at the time of the height of their city, perhaps might not have wanted their city to be remembered as the one wiped out by a volcano. Nevertheless, it’s here for us to study and observe.

Pompeii was organized along a semi-grid pattern with mixed Greek and Etruscan elements found at the heart of the city which are from the 7^th-6^th centuries BCE. The rest of the city is more recent, as it outgrew its original footprint. It was the Samnites that overtook the city in the 5^th and 4^th centuries BCE and expanded the initial core. As with most every other important ancient city, the Romans overtook the Samnites, but left the city relatively alone in terms of overhauling its fabric, but did re-constitute it as a Colonia, making it a proper part of the Roman world.

The 5^th century BCE Temple of Apollo has a definite resemblance to me of the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus in Ostia, as it has a very tall podium with steps leading up to the cella and it houses the same 3 deities: Jupiter, Juno and Minerva. Its Corinthian order is not the odd feature, however; it’s the 1:4 ratio of the metopes to the columns, which gives it very large spans and is evident that the Romans are beginning to experiment with longer spans and more daring structures.

Heading toward the Forum, one of the main buildings adjacent to it is the Roman basilica. Similar to ones found all over the ancient world, this edifice was the law court for the Romans, one of the earliest surviving ones that dates to the 2^nd century BCE. One thing that surprised me about this structure was the remaining columns were made of brick and were FLUTED. I was taken aback by this feature, but soon came to realize that it was probably cheaper and easier to build a fluted column out of brick and cover it with a layer of plaster than to make it out of marble, which was probably more difficult, more expensive, and would have had to come from farther away (more of a logistical headache). It’s interesting to see this development in construction. We think today that construction methods have lost their craftsmanship and that all we care about today is the cheapest and fastest method of construction. Yet, here we have an example of this very same practice from some 2000 years ago. Astonishing. It seems the more things change, the more they do stay the same.

Moving into the proper Forum, the first thing I noticed was that it was delineated from the basilica with a 2-story Hellenistic stoa and is on axis with the Capitolium, or Temple to Jupiter Capitolinus. Around 80BCE, administrative buildings, the curia, meat, fish, and vegetable open air markets, the Eumachia (wool guild), and the Cult of the Emperor all begin to populate the perimeter of the forum. Some of the buildings address its eastern side in a non-orthogonal fashion, a strange feature for a Roman city but one whose explanation could be that it was built on top of the foundations of some older, off-axis building. Pompeii also features a bath complex that takes up nearly an entire city block, whose program is similar to the baths we have seen at Ostia and Rome.

One of the reasons Pompeii is so widely regarded as a model for early Roman life is its well preserved residential areas. While some have undergone heavy restoration, the foundations were such that repair crews probably had enough material with which to work to adequately rebuild the structures. Houses could range anywhere from simple courtyard buildings with a few bedrooms for the middle class to elaborate complexes that would take up nearly an entire city block for some of the wealthier citizens. The House of the Faun and the House of the Vetii were two of these upper-class living facilities that we looked at on this day. The former is famous for its small statue of a dancing faun placed in the center of the courtyard. The sequence of spaces would feature this initial vestibule, followed by a tablenum where the Pater Familias, or head of the household, would host guests and his patrons. Off to the side were located the bedrooms and other storage rooms, but the main features of the house were its two garden spaces. A smaller garden space would be followed in procession by a xystos, or large garden space, which nearly took up an entire city block. This family had to be extremely wealthy to afford this amount of land in such a city. They decorated their floors with mosaics, one in particular being the famous Alexander Mosaic, noted for its life-like and 3D representations of figures in mosaic with accurate shadows and a dynamic, emotional scene. A second copy of this mosaic is located in the Naples National Archaeological Museum.

The House of the Vetii was built 150 years after the House of the Faun and has a notable programmatic change: there is no tablenum for the Pater Familias to receive guests. This says that the people who owned this house were either not aristocratic, did not participate in the tradition of the Pater Familias, or didn’t regard it as an important custom. This further means that the traditional role of the family must have been changing at this time. Perhaps power was shifted away from the family and more toward the aristocracy, or perhaps the collective nature of the community was so strong that individual Pater Familiases were not needed. In any case, it does feature some recognizable features of Roman houses, namely the compluvium (opening in the atrium) and the impluvium (space below on ground which would collect water). The Romans seemed to be green even before it was fashionable, or perhaps it was because there was little running water to spread to the whole community. You could also say they were trying to remain in harmony with nature the same way the Pantheon tried to connect to nature through its oculus. The Roman forum would often feature an umbilicus, which was a figurative connection from the ground to the heavens. In order to carry these traditions to the household, open air courtyards were probably introduced to reinforce these ideals.

As we wrapped up the summer semester, one final presentation was given, this time on language (specifically Latin and Greek). I have always been somewhat interested in the implications of language and what it really is: a barrier between people that stands for the same universal concepts that we all understand in our minds but just come out a little differently through our mouths. Would it help if we all spoke the same language, or are people so attached to their cultural identities that this would be a near impossible feat to accomplish? Could we all speak the same language AND our own regional dialects, or is this too much to ask to add another set of words to our memories? Another aspect that fascinated me while discussing the differences between Greek and Latin, besides the obvious aesthetic ones, was the fact that Greek really hasn’t changed over thousands of years, whereas Latin has died out and been morphed into the Romance languages (and English). Was it that the Greeks had such a strong cultural identity that they were unable or unwilling to relinquish their grasp on their language and let it change into something else? Or was the fact that the Roman Empire collapsed a main impetus for it dying out and mutating? Latin never truly died out, as it was retained in the Middle Ages by those monasteries who were bastions to a great many aspects of western culture; although it is rarely used today but in Catholic mass at the Vatican and for scientific terms (I find us using Latin for naming animals to be sort of a strange and antiquated practice). Language is what binds vast numbers of people together. If we didn’t have a way to communicate through speech or writing, the entirety of my thoughts in this journal would be impossible to explain to someone else. If we didn’t have language, transferring our ideas would be an impossible task; architecture, science, anthropology, medicine, psychology would not exist. It is probably the single greatest tool that our mind can utilize, which is one reason we have come to dominate this planet as a species.