The life and Death of objects in Pompeii and Herculaneum

An extraordinary death makes ordinary life visible. This is the simple, nicely split message of the British Museum’s current blockbuster show Life and Death: Pompeii and Herculaneum. The sudden, catastrophic eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 destroyed these two Roman cities almost instantly, leaving an unparalleled record of their citizens’ daily lives. Their lives and deaths in this setting are the subject of the exhibition.

I have never been to Pompeii or Herculaneum – although now want to more than ever – but this brilliant exhibition made me feel that I almost have. Laid out as a typical Roman house, it outlines the types of urban life lived in every room, and the everyday objects used in each, which have been preserved at Pompeii and Herculaneum but would otherwise have been lost to us. Readers of this blog will be unsurprised that I was excited by the simple silver spoons in the ‘culina’ (next to a tray no less!), but I was also struck by the glass drinking horns, the carbonised wooden furniture and the surprisingly modern portraits. Most astounding, to me, however, were the frescoes. These were so fresh and delicate, nothing like the classic Roman mosaics that we used to get in textbooks at school. They had a real quality of Italian Primitive fresco painting to them, despite some wear and tear, seeming unchanged from their heyday.

If those were the ‘life’ aspect of the show for me, equally powerful were the objects that showed the impact of the catastrophe that brought death to their owners. The exhibition includes a particularly poignant carbonised wooden crib, whose tiny inhabitant was still inside it when excavated. There are also seeds, fruits, and loaves of bread from half-finished meals, as well as the cast left by a dog curled at the entrance to his master’s house. This comes from the same house which featured the well-known ‘door mat’ mosaic of a prancing dog on a leash. These objects are almost more poignant than the famous casts of the people caught in the extreme heat and volcanic flows that engulfed the towns. They are quietly emotional.

What most struck me, however, was both how like and unlike ‘us’ the Romans seem from this show. The message seems to be that their ordinary life was little different from ours, and yet the use of rooms, the love of phallic symbolism, the gender roles, kitchen hygiene, furnishing styles, and so much more mark them out as very different people, as much as they might seem familiar. Actually, they seemed very like eighteenth-century people to me. So, I left wondering how much the towns’ discovery in the eighteenth century informed our ongoing understanding of their objects, their life and death?