Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum - The Book

Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum

Paul Roberts

Cost:
British Museum: £25 (With free copy of 'Art in Pompeii and Herculaneum')
British Museum Website: £25
Amazon (UK): £16

In this final post on the British Museum's 'Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum' exhibition, we turn to look at the accompanying book of the same name.  This hefty volume, written by the exhibition curator, Paul Roberts, is a work of art well worth the asking price.  Over the course of 320 glossy pages, Roberts reconstructs the daily lives of the people who once inhabited Pompeii and Herculaneum.  The objects of the exhibition feature heavily in the form of 400 photographs and figures, used to great effect to illustrate points and support arguments.  For the academic and the intrigued, footnotes are used extensively, allowing you to follow up on Roberts' assertions and get into the nitty gritty of Roman history.  For this reason, the book is a must-have for both casual readers and academics alike.

After beginning with a brief introduction of the Vesuvian sites, we are taken inside the city walls and dropped off outside a Roman house.  Throughout the course of the book, Roberts acts as our guide, starting first with the shops, then the atrium, the bedroom, the garden, the dining room, the kitchens, toilets, and baths.  The book's real emphasis is on life inside the Roman household - sure, we're told about how the rooms were decorated, but we're also told how people might dress or do their hair, or who did the cooking and how they did it.  Everybody gets a look in, from the slaves and urban poor to the merchants and magistrates who ruled the towns.  We finish, as might be expected, with a chapter on the eruption, meeting some of those unfortunate souls who fell victim to the volcano's blast.

Benefiting from beautiful pictures, a wealth of scholarship, and the most up-to-date research, 'Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum' provides one of the best introductions to both the Vesuvian sites and day-to-day Roman life I've yet encountered.  If you can visit the exhibition, this book builds beautifully upon what you've already seen.  For those who can't, it's a worthy alternative to trekking to London, showing you the best that the exhibition has to offer without the hustle and bustle of the crowds.  With so much on offer, it's all too easy to lose a few hours turning page after page after page.

Cooking Apicius

Review of Sally Grainger's Cooking Apicius, (Totnes, 2006) - This can be bought on Amazon.

Perhaps the name most often associated with Roman cooking is Apicius, the Roman gourmand who dined with emperors and set sail in search of the finest of foods (or so the stories go).¹ Our only surviving Roman recipe book, known variously as Apicius and de re coquinaria, is attributed to this lover of luxury, but as Sally Grainger argues, this is not the case.

Grainger's book, Cooking Apicius, is not a translation of the aforementioned Roman recipe book - she does this elsewhere.  Rather, Grainger has assembled some of the best and most readily accessible recipes from that volume, omitting the overly lavish and the downright complicated.  As mentioned elsewhere, Roman recipes are often very vague and include neither measurements nor timings; here the author has, through experimentation, arrived at what she considers to be the quantities and methods most likely to work.  Some of these recipes require rather unusual ingredients such as liquamen (a variety of Roman fish sauce), defrutum (a grape must syrup), asafoetida (a resin found in Afghanistan and India), and rue, the bitter herb which we saw in the moretum recipe.  Grainger provides excellent information on procuring or making these ingredients for yourself.

My favourite bit about the book is the introduction Grainger gives on Roman cooking, and on the Apicius of the title.  She argues very convincingly that this was not the same Apicius as the gourmand mentioned above.  Roman food writers liked to talk about the origin, status, and quality of foods - they remain detached from the actual preparation, something suited to slaves and freedmen.  Grainger believes that the Apicius collection was compiled over time by cooks in the elite households - it is a text for fellow cooks.  Because the person called Apicius was renowned as a gourmand, so his name came to represent fine dining, and became attached to the recipe collection he is incorrectly assumed to have written.

This is a book I am looking to delve into, and I cannot wait to see what recipes it has in store for me.

Footnotes

1)  Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 1.7