The following is an excerpt from The Lost City, authored by Annali Nuytz, translated by Zhu Jingwen, xinsi culture | CITIC Publishing Group, June 2022.
Pompeii was already a disaster-prone place when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. In 62 AD, the Gulf of Naples experienced a powerful earthquake that flattened a large area of the city, and the earthquake also triggered a tsunami that hit the nearby Roman port of Ostia. After the earthquake, many residents chose to leave and never returned, leaving behind many damaged buildings that were uninhabited until 79 AD. In a sense, Pompeii's abandonment began with the earthquake, which led to a sharp decline in the city's population and the fading of the reputation of the resort. However, after the dust settled, many people still decided to stay, eager to renovate and upgrade the city. Nero the Great helped raise funds for the restoration, and we can still see the traces of the restoration on the exposed brick walls. The remains of the temple of Venus, the city's guardian goddess, show that engineers reinforced it with a thick stone wall in 79 AD, which they thought would protect it from earthquakes. Pompeii as we see it today is a city under construction. The owners of the estate were redesigning the premises in the hope of reflecting the more modern Roman perception that trade was not oriented towards military conquest.
In other words, the urban landscape of Pompeii after the earthquake shifted to a greater emphasis on commerce. Freedmen and other non-elite groups converted many of Pompeii's large villas and homes into multi-purpose spaces, and retail began to emerge in the original places of residence. It is also possible that Julia Felix's estate has kept up with the trend at this time, opening a few more doors towards the commercial rich street. The whole city has undergone a change to retail, and the exquisite foyers and gardens of the original large families have disappeared, replaced by laundromats and bakeries. What's more, taverns and restaurants became ubiquitous in Pompeii. Some taverns are only the size of a room that can accommodate the next bar, and some not only have many rooms but also have garden seats. The owner offers hot food, takeaway cold meals, and a variety of drinks. I've seen the remains of quite a few taverns in both julia Felix House and Mosaic Pillar House, and that's just the beginning.
There are many taverns on every main street in Pompeii, which are characterized by L-shaped marble bars, which I learned to identify. The countertops are embedded with ceramic jars about 60 cm deep, and their round mouths are the same height as the bar. There should have been a wooden cover on the mouth, but it is long gone. The inner wall of the ceramic jar is flat, perhaps originally used for dry goods such as grains or nuts. Today, all that remains are these empty, simple round holes. Murals of that year show that the tavern bar counter was piled with things, herbs, fruits and meat strips hanging from the ceiling above the bar, and long-necked amphora ceramic jars for wine, olive oil and other liquids were placed against the wall. The tavern must have amazed the Neolithic Chatahoyuks who produced themselves all the ingredients, utensils and hearths. In Pompeii, a person can get catering services by just going out of the house, and he can also go to a place that specializes in selling pots and pans, oil, meat, and vegetables, and cook at home. If you don't want to boil your own hot water, there are even shops selling hot water for you to choose from.
Stills from BBC: The Survival of Pompeii.
Walk back and forth between taverns
To get a sense of what was going on at the tavern in Pompeii, I sat down with eric Pole of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Steven Ellis of the University of Cincinnati with longtime collaborators over a beer. Ellis wrote The Retail Revolution in Rome, a book about the rise of small business in the Roman Empire. He studied taverns throughout the empire from North Africa to the Middle East, and he said pompeii had more than 160 taverns. "That's a terrible number." He added that the estimate is likely to be low because some cities are still buried under volcanic ash. Bauer made a calculation on the back of the napkin: "If there are 160 taverns in a place where 12,000 people live, then one-tenth of the population will have to eat out to support so many taverns." "Who are these people?" Some of the rich families were slaves who could cook in their fully equipped villa kitchens. Ordinary dwellings in the city do not have kitchens, so taverns seem to be a place for the poor. But this is not consistent with the evidence. Even in small apartments upstairs, where there is no running water, people with little money can make their own food if they have a small oven or hot stove.
Ellis believes that the regular customers who run taverns and enter and leave taverns are so-called "middle-class people" who are not poor or rich. They are all small shopkeepers on the same street from selling onions and fish sauce to selling textiles and perfumes. Ellis said most middle-class people "have the money to have a light meal outside" and make other modest extravagant purchases. They are not what we call the middle class, because the latter is a term associated with modern society. In fact, there were both fairly wealthy and newly liberated freedmen who were barely supporting their families. But they all belonged to a vast economic group between the elite and slaves of the Roman Empire. The biggest difference from others is that their money is earned through business or trade. The elites never got involved in such jobs, although many of the rich in the Roman Empire had money from shops and farms run by their freedmen and slaves. As Anderson points out in the Mosaic Pillar House, the merchants under the villa are the support of the villa, both architectural support and monetary support.
The newer Pompeii houses reflect the fact that even the wealthiest residents have to work to support themselves. The building we call the Stephanus Rinsing Factory appears to have been rebuilt after the earthquake, and what was originally a large mansion with an entrance hall was transformed into a "rinsing plant", a wool processing plant. Stephanus's name was found on an election-related paint plaque at the entrance to the rinse factory on Fertile Street. (While we're not sure if Stephanus is the name of the baker who lives here, let's assume it is for the sake of simplicity.) It seems that Stephanus took a lot of effort to transform the original tile-paved grand foyer into several large rooms, including the dyeing vats and tools necessary for wool processing. But he also leaves considerable room for family life. Miko Flor, an archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands who wrote about ancient rinsing plants, visited the Stephanus rinsing plant and found jewellery, cosmetics, cooking utensils and other signs that it was both a place to work and a place to live. Instead of isolating the work area of the house into a street-facing shop precinct, Stephanus made it part of his home, and there is no doubt that his slaves and freedmen lived with his family. "Basically, this house is where these people live, sleep, eat, and work, and it's likely to be their home," Flor writes. ”
Along Phu Rao Street we also found a similar converted house, known as the "House of the Pure Lover", where the original aristocratic mansion was converted into a spacious and bright bakery with direct access from the doorway. The hidden space where the dignitaries once whispered was now full of ovens and mills. Bakers care more about the health of the donkey pulling the mill than the extravagant pomp and circumstance. The former owner had eaten calmly on the recliner of the dining room under the service of slaves, while the later owner built a house next to it to keep livestock in captivity. Like the Stephanus Rinsing Factory, this bakery is a living and working space. It was connected to the house, but Baule said the owner's priority was the bakery when it was rebuilt, and the bakery was placed before the rest of the construction was taken into account. The owner of the bakery may have been quite wealthy, but was not a member of the upper class of the Roman Empire. They earn money by working, and labor is part of their family business.
Stephanus and the unknown bakers who live in the "House of the Pure Lover" may be the main source of the dizzying number of taverns and restaurants. Ellis called this period the "retail revolution" of Pompeii. The strife within the empire had subsided, and the Romans were enjoying a rare peace. "This was the beginning of the Roman Peace, when trade surged," Ellis said, "and people went through a shift from individual crafts to joining large-scale guilds." "In Pompeii, that means people don't just buy and sell to each other. They became part of a vast economic network that covered the entire Roman Empire all the way to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. On Via Stabia, Ellis discovered taverns that reflected the reality of this new metropolis. The researchers found from storage tanks, sinkholes and menus that one of the taverns only offered locally produced fruits, grains, vegetables, plus cheese and sausages; Another tavern two apart has a much greater variety of food. "There are cumin, pepper and coriander from India," he said, "and the food has a taste of foreign spices." "Middle-class people who go to The Pompeii Tavern can choose between delicious dishes cooked with imported ingredients or local hometown dishes. Food that used to be enjoyable only to the upper classes is now readily available to more people. Even those born into slavery could eventually own their own stores and enjoy the food of high society. Interestingly, data from the modern world shows that the more restaurants in a place, the more prosperous the place becomes. It seems like this a long time ago.
Poehler, who has worked with Ellis in Pompeii for nearly 20 years, says there has been some shift in the view of archaeologists about how middle-class people are changing Pompeii's urban design. A century ago, he said, scholars feared that the appearance of storefronts like the Stephanus rinse factory was a sign of the decline of Roman culture. They hypothesized that the literate aristocrats of Pompeii were squeezed out by a group of low-class, low-quality traders, leading to a deterioration of civilization. There are two reasons for the emergence of this theory: on the one hand, the scholars of the time were influenced by the prejudice of the Victorian era against the working class, especially when most archaeologists were of upper-class origin; On the other hand, it was influenced by the Accounts of the Romans themselves. Petronius's Satire, a novel about the dark side of the Roman Empire during Nero's reign, is a voluminous depiction of the tedious banquets held by the freeman Temacio, who liked to swing and spend as much money as described in The Great Gatsby. Almost all the descriptions we can find of middle-class people are by elites like Petronius, and most language is dismissive and derogatory.
Poller took a sip of his beer and laughed with Ellis. Archaeologists today are skeptical of novels like the Satire because they are more likely to reflect prejudice than facts. Instead, he and Ellis saw this as a period of revival in which the middle class had the opportunity to develop and changed the balance of power.
However, with the ideas of freedmen and other middle-class people barely visible, how can we prove that they are not the demons that destroy the empire? We have not found a strong defense that can overturn the case of Terimacho, who Petronius is ridiculing. Even a symbol of power for middle-class people, such as Yumagia House, is less useful because we know very little about how it is used. To recreate the lives of middle-class people, Ellis and Poehler used a new method of historical research—data archaeology. By looking closely, they brought together information about many buildings—for example, hundreds of taverns—and objects, and managed to understand the habits of ordinary people. This is the best way to explore the public life that has disappeared.
……
Stills from BBC: The Survival of Pompeii.
Queen of pins
Seven streets from the Amarantes Tavern, on a dark path near the city walls, sharp-eyed onlookers can find completely different suggestions as to who to choose. People doodle on the streets, and spelling mistakes are naturally common, such as "Isadorumaed/optimuscunlincet". The translation reads roughly as follows: "I implore Isadoros to be the administrator/ This population is a first-class worker." "At a glance, I know that this is a blatant irony of this person. Perhaps Isadoros would have taken some pride in such a killing, but the Romans generally believed that only slaves and women would do such a despicable thing. But such satirical campaign announcements are not uncommon, and Pompeii is full of graffiti and paintings related to sexual matters. In the 18th and 19th centuries, archaeologists, when excavating the city, were stunned by the spring palace drawings on the walls of a large number of exquisite houses and the unabashed display of phallus on public squares, shop entrances and even sidewalks. Priapus, the god of fertility, and his oversized penises do not appear only in the "Viti House", but their works are particularly memorable. Priapus's images were very popular in Pompeii. The city is both known as an archaeological gem and famous overseas for its yellow images.
However, all these phallus pictures are actually part of the reason why Pompeii has become an archaeological treasure. For modern Westerners, they are perhaps the most extreme example of the intercultural split between Roman culture before the rise of Christianity and those that followed. As soon as the Pompeians saw the Vitti brothers' paintings of Priapus, they knew that it was a mischievous way to show that they had made a fortune. Phallus-shaped wind chimes and carvings are seen as symbols of good fortune, and many stores have such displays, just as many merchants today have cute cats in their windows. Ancient Rome was not too taboo about this kind of phallus image, nor did it think that sex and sexual organs were taboos in speech, which was completely different from the later Christian world. Although in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, attitudes towards sex have been
It has been altered, but the sexual objects found in Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum have been placed in a special "secret display case" area of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. There, curious history students can view a box filled with clay sculptures of phallus, or admire the male root with feet, wings, and their own phallus (yes, because good luck is not too much, so the phallus itself has a phallus). In addition, there are many beautiful sculptures of gods and various animals and people intercourse.
Many tourists specifically visit a brothel in Pompeii called the "She-Wolf's Lair" for this forbidden history. This ordinary-looking triangular, two-story building is located at the intersection of Rich Street near the Amarantes storefront. The she-wolf's lair probably became as famous as it was today 2,000 years ago, but for different reasons. Today, tourists who have been forced to learn Latin in school are stimulated by the idea that the great people who shaped our culture will also have fun in the rooms with Kang on the walls full of Pictures of the Spring Palace. And in the era when Amarantes lived, in what university archaeologist Sarah Levin-Richardson called a "specialized brothel," prostitution was a special kind of entertainment. She used the term "specialized" to describe the brothel to emphasize that it was a "specialty store." The lustful Romans were able to prostitute themselves in almost all entertainment venues, and in general, prostitutes traded in the rooms of the taverns or shops inside the villas. There are also people who solicit business in the more prosperous forum areas and other places. A venue dedicated to the sex trade — like a restaurant that sells only chocolate food — is rare. So this shop is extraordinary. Perhaps this is why archaeologists have so far found only the "She-Wolf's Lair" in Pompeii in the Roman world to open a purposeful brothel.
The day I visited the she-wolf's den, the number was the highest. Tourists continue to fish through the front door of the street, hurried through a corridor with kang single rooms on both sides, and then quickly turn from another door into another street. Led by a guide who can speak Italian, Japanese and English, they look at the spring palace at the top of the door frame: men and women playing in groups, in different poses. These Spring Palace diagrams look a bit like a brick-and-mortar version of the homepage of an adult website. Growing up, I had a certain familiarity with obscene images on the Internet, and I think the blurry image of semi-nude figures appearing in the murals on a bed full of pillows is pretty convergent. Although it is quite breathable and open today, in the era of prosperous business, many rooms must have been crowded and dark.
There were many free people engaged in sex work, but there were also slaves who were forced into the profession. Still, Levine-Richardson discovered that the experiences of women working in the she-wolf's den were not as poignant as the ones depicted in The Handmaid's Tale. Many people are also quite proud of their work. She spent years researching the "boutique" in the city, looking for clues about employees. The answer was found in the midst of obscene graffiti, just as the spoof campaign poster about "oral sex" provides information. While it has long been believed that many of the graffiti in the she-wolf's lair were done by men, Levine-Richardson points out that many of them are also made by women. Many women in Pompeii were literate, and literate slaves could help keep accounts for their masters' homes, as exemplified by the portrait of the mistress of the "House of Trentius Neo". At least a few sex workers were certainly literate because she had spotted a graffiti man claiming to be a woman. There is a sentence on the wall of the she-wolf's lair, "fututasumhic", to the effect that "I (the woman) have intercourse here".
There are also some graffiti about women bragging about their sexual kung fu. Several women also called themselves "Pin zhen ren" or "pin zhen queen". Of particular interest is a phrase written in the corridors of the brothel— "Murtis Ferratris." Felatris）。 The font is neat, with a dot in the middle, which is imitating the way the names and titles of men with a certain status on the "forum" wall are written. When Murtis, the queen of pinches, wrote her name as if she were a Roman governor, she raised marginal figures such as prostitutes to the height of the viceroy. There are also women who call themselves "fututrix", which means the active party in sexual affairs. Women who call themselves like this don't just want to joke about a political title like Muldis, they also express their desire to play a dominant social role. Roman culture had a strong distinction between the active and passive parties to intercourse; The passive side, like women and slaves, has a lower status. If a woman calls herself "fututrix", she is the active party, and her customers are the passive party that belongs to her.
I stepped out of the flow of people going in and out of the she-wolf's lair and into a small room with a low kang. Around 70 A.D., there were supposed to be many blankets and pillows piled up here, there were lights in the house, and the walls were full of fresh murals, declaring that the guests here were just as elite as the host's family. Moving beyond the writings of the rich, looking into the gloomy streets and the dwellings of slaves, we find a society that reshuffled the rigid roles of Roman society from the bottom up. Former slaves like Amarantes and the Vitti brothers later gained wealth and influence, women like Julia Felix already had property rights, sex workers like Murtis would not be forgotten for thousands of years, and the names of her customers had long since vanished.
Although researchers have been excavating in Pompeii for two centuries, it is only recently that anyone understands the world in which Murtius and Amarantes lived. This is partly because data archaeology offers us new ways of exploring the lives of non-elites, and on the other hand, there are fundamental problems with our approach to studying history. Although people in the 19th and 20th centuries cherished Pompeii and returned many times for further excavations, they also wanted to forget a certain part of Pompeii's culture. When they saw genital sculptures or obscene graffiti, they locked them in the "secret display case" area because it was difficult for them to think outside their Christian values and look at these artifacts through the eyes of the ancient Romans. It was not until 2000 that the "secret display case" of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples was opened to the public. The Romans' concept of sex was very different from the perceptual cognition of modern people in the West, making it almost incomprehensible to modern people. Over the past few centuries, the curator of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples has treated the phallus as a lucky charm as pornography, and historians do not consider prostitutes to be worthy of study.
But without understanding this part of Roman culture, they cannot fully understand the social structure of a place like Pompeii, where privacy is also very public.
Stills from BBC: The Survival of Pompeii.
Number of toilet rituals in Rome
I just casually glanced at the arches and pedestals of the forum. I was looking for a small, humble room in the northeast corner of the Hall of The Sacred Hall in the eyes of the political elite. Finally found, it was a window on the high wall that was far above the horizon that exposed the location of the room. But inside there was a row of troughs full of dirt and weeds next to the wall. This is one of the few public toilets in Pompeii, and its design is so eye-catching that it feels as incongruous as seeing a bare phallus drawing next to a store door. Today it is difficult to determine the specific shape of this toilet, but it is certain that it was a dark and closed place, emitting a bad smell from that high window. Olga Koloski-Ostrov, a professor of classics at Brandeis University, who had done in-depth research and published articles on Pompeii's sewer system, finally had a general understanding with her assistance. Next to the wall there is a deep ditch with continuous water flowing, and the sewage in the ditch leads directly to the city's sewage pipes. There are several protruding stones along the wall, on which there was originally a bench, and several U-shaped openings were cut at equal distance on the bench for the convenience of the political sages to lift the toga robe. "Each seat is about 30 centimeters apart," Koloski-Ostrov told me, "which was the standard size at the time." Unless you are fat, you will not touch the thighs of the person next to you. ”
However, the public toilets at that time did not have the privacy partitions that are found in toilets today. People were sitting almost one by one. As for how to use toilet paper, personal space is even more limited. When forum visitors finish their big business—these public toilets are largely for men only—he picks up a long stick with a sponge, wets it in the shallow pool of water beneath his feet, and uses it to wipe his ass through a round hole under his seat. Whether it is a public toilet or a private toilet, sponge sticks are common.
In fact, to understand a society that thinks it is civilized, we often have to dig out the truth from its most chaotic and dirty places. Judging from the forum's toilets, it is clear that the moral models of Rome did not insist, as Christians do, that people must cover up parts of the body or cover up the physiological activities of the body. They are concerned with having control over how people move through urban spaces. As Koloski Ostrov said, forum toilets have nothing to do with shyness. "I'm sure many Romans were convenient on the streets, alleys and outside the walls," she said, "and we saw graffiti on the walls on the edge of the city that 'it is forbidden to defecate here,' and if no one had done it at all, there would have been no such warning." "She said public toilets are built to curb people's uncivilized behavior." The Roman elite set up public toilets here because they did not want to see human feces on the forum floor. They don't care about the streets, but they want the glamorous forum to be a pure land. It can be said that this is their spatial management method, which is equivalent to telling everyone, 'You have to get to get there'. ”
The more I talked to the Pompeii experts, the more I could hear them talk about how the Romans wanted to "manage" space. From streets to taverns, every public area has a set of formal and informal rules to follow. Even in the she-wolf's lair, the graffiti in it reflects that this is a society that cares a lot about the social significance of sexual intercourse postures.
Stills from BBC: The Survival of Pompeii, pictured here is The Classicist Mary Beard, an expert in Pompeii studies.
There is a symbolic connection between the Roman self and the physical organization of the inhabitants of the city. Unlike the inhabitants of Chatahoyuk, who were in the early stages of emotional and political entanglement with the land, Roman city dwellers were born in a world of settled life thousands of years away from nomadic life. Over time, various handicrafts and other activities carried out in the homes of Theahoyuks have expanded outwards to form the city
Public places: bakeries, rinse shops, cemeteries, temples, jewelry shops, sculpture shops, painting shops, taverns, and toilets. Cities are not so much gathering places of housing as they are of glitzy, complex public spaces. People's residences are also basically open, and the front hall faces the street and is where business partners and guests are received. This trend is exacerbated by the conversion of housing by middle-class people into commercial and residential spaces, further blurring the boundaries between commercial and private life. Or it can be said that the Entanglement of the Romans with the land was manifested in the fact that they divided the city into specialized public areas, with places dedicated to sexual work and convenience, places for recreation, places for political activities, places for bathing, each with its own uses. Flowing back and forth in these spaces was a way of life for the Pompeians.
If we take a few steps back and look at it with a wide-angle lens, the same concept may apply to the entire Roman Empire. Each city has its own full-time job, playing its part in this vast ancient civilization that surrounds the whole of the Mediterranean. Pompeii is a fun-seeking city known for its beauty and gastronomy. It was the stepdaughter of the majestic center of power in the city of Rome, mischievous but favored. When it was destroyed by natural disasters, the historical trauma it caused far exceeded the loss of thousands of lives. Public spaces were destroyed, and with them parts of the identity of the Roman Empire. Thus, Rome's response to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius was also different from the gradual, prolonged distancing we see in Chhatahoyuk. No one decided to abandon Pompeii. For people, it was almost unbearable to bury it under the scorching ash, and many survivors rushed to other cities to rebuild their lives and commit to recreating new versions of their lost public spaces.
Original author/Annali Niuitz
Editor/Lee Yong-bo
Introduction Proofreading/Jia Ning