ANYONE looking for lessons in the history of censorship and propaganda need look no further than Pompeii.
For the past 200 years the real story of this ancient town, destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79, has been kept from public view. Our image of Roman life has been censored, sanitised and sanctified.
For anyone raised on the white marble and white toga version of Rome, the latest offerings on Roman life will come as a shock.
The idealised world passed on to us by the great writers of classical Latin was largely restricted to the very small minority that represented Rome's scholarly elite.
Forget all those stories about Caligula and his horse, Nero, in Capri's Blue Grotto and the goings-on by other degenerate members of Roman imperial families.
The reality was that plenty of ordinary Roman folk were up to, or at least had no inhibitions about, what gave rise to the term "pornography".
These misunderstandings have arisen because many of Pompeii's artefacts have been spirited, or locked, away for centuries.
Looters, treasure hunters, private collectors, royalty, dictators and others looking for rare objects to decorate palaces, homes, gardens and museums literally have had a field day for hundreds of years at Pompeii.
But many of the treasures that did survive pillage at Pompeii and the nearby ancient Roman resort of Herculaneum were also kept secret.
The real history of Roman life became a smutty secret for "gentlemen's" clubs.
Deemed too shocking for women, children and the lower classes, artefacts that were later labelled pornographic were kept behind locked, and even bricked-up, doors in what became known as the Secret Museum established in 1819 in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples.
There was also a series of secret rooms in London's British Museum.
On occasion, admittance to the Naples secret chamber was permitted to responsible gentlemen of good moral character, including young males of the wealthy elite enjoying a gap year by undertaking the European Grand Tour to complete their "education".
These same gentlemen could also gain access to a series of peep shows kept under lock and key at Pompeii where specially built steel cabinets kept various frescoes and murals from general view.
The Secret Museum was opened only briefly during the social revolution of the 1960s. It was closed again until 2000. Since 2005 the collection has been housed in a special room. Entry is gained by a separate ticket.
Now, at long last, Roman history is being freed from the constrictions of 18th-century paternalism, Victorian prudery and a penchant for raising pedestals.
This has made possible works such as The Complete Pompeii, by historian and archaeologist Joanne Berry.
Described as the "ultimate resource and inspirational guide" to the Pompeii site, The Complete Pompeii is indeed magnificent.
Extensive use of ancient and more modern writings, illustrations old and new, box graphics and maps bring Pompeii and its people into a much fuller focus than ever before.
Berry's writing and stylistic format make this volume fresh, exciting and, above all, vivid.
Berry immerses us in a world that is both strange and at the same time oddly familiar a world to which we can now better relate and better understand.
This is due in no small measure to the fact that Berry's understanding of, and love of and respect for, these ancient victims of a monstrous tragedy shines through her work.
With all their fashions and foibles these were real people not idealised actors on a grand classical stage.
What we find in the newly accessible Pompeii is not always elegant or sophisticated.
Most buildings and statues were not the white marble wonders we see today.
Rather, they were heavily made up and often painted in what today's taste would regard as garish colours.
It is by no means certain that all these statues were naked. There is evidence that some were lavishly clothed; a lovely figure of Venus sported a gold bikini which was carefully, and quite beautifully, painted on the naked statue.
By and large, however, by the first century ordinary Romans were a gaudy, tawdry and often crude lot with a fondness for graffiti that they did not restrict to public facilities.
Graffiti, both political and personal, is found all over the exterior of Pompeii's walls, shops, houses and public places.
Nor did Romans, who usually bathed together, have any inhibitions about the human body.
In old Pompeii, having a lifelike over-sized phallus at the front door was relatively commonplace as apparently were phallus-shaped oil lamps. The phallus was a symbol of good luck, used in much the same way that some place horseshoes over their doorways today.
Behind closed doors things could be a lot more graphic. Some residents had a fondness for sexually explicit representations of gods and mortals.
Brightly coloured wall paintings, which included naked or partially naked figures, were common even in relatively modest houses.
Pompeii raises issues that still occupy minds today, including the debate about pornography.
American literary scholar Walter Kendrick argued in 1996 that the concept of pornography did not exist before the rediscovery of Pompeii.
Rather, pornography largely owed its origins to the response generated by the erotic artefacts found there during the 18th and 19th centuries.
The Europe of the Enlightenment was changing. The spread of literacy was widening the availability of materials previously available only to the educated upper, and thus supposedly responsible, governing classes who began a vigorous debate about protecting the masses from obscenity.
One outcome in Britain was the 1857 Obscene Publications Act.
The other significant consideration was that Pompeii simply was not fulfilling the promise of the magnificent classical vision that was the popular vision of Roman life.
The excavations, begun in 1748, were uncovering some uncomfortable surprises that simply did not fit the popular model of Roman society.
As Joanne Berry observes in The Complete Pompeii, even 21st-century visitors are apt to be surprised by what they see.
For centuries the public's view of Roman life has been sanitised by royal rulers, governments, archaeologists and some historians.
In the 20th century the greatest exponents of the great white vision of Rome were Hitler and Mussolini.
While Hitler's architect Albert Speer tried to build fatally flawed monuments for a 1000-year Reich, filmmaker Lennie Riefenstahl was busy creating idealised, but modestly covered, Olympian heroes.
In Italy a tubby Mussolini was doling out considerable largesse to archaeologist Amedeo Maiuri to speed up excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii.
Italian Fascists saw the past as evidence of future greatness and were anxious that the public see for themselves the Fascist vision of the Nuovi Scavi, or new excavations at Pompeii, in situ without, of course, any item which might offend family values.
The result of centuries of such tampering has been some hideous and utterly ridiculous misrepresentations of Rome in which Hollywood and novelists have long revelled.
Unfortunately, these have badly distorted much of our understanding of this ancient society.
Romans had actors, sports stars, sports stadium hooligans, subversives, "new-age" religions, pubs, brothels, graffitists and plenty of politicians.
They ate takeaways (including pies), bought prepared ingredients for their meals and were fond of wine.
Pompeii also had its fair share of moral matrons, doctors, lawyers, teachers, stockbrokers, real estate agents and small businessmen and women.
These people, and others around Rome, are brought to life in art historian John R. Clarke's Roman Life 100BC to AD200.
Clarke has created a series of compelling vignettes that take us through a day in the life of both real and imaginary people representing a cross-section of ordinary Romans.
From these one of the first things we learn is that it was possible for slaves to not only earn their freedom but also to rise through society to positions of wealth and power.
Clarke also provides an interactive CD tour, from the different perspectives of family, slaves, business clients and guests, of Pompeii's most visited site, the House of the Vettii.
This large and impressive house was owned and restored by one of these wealthy freedmen who clearly held, and was anxious to cement, an important role in Pompeii business and social circles.
Clarke underscores the fact that Romans were a deeply religious or superstitious people depending on your interpretation who sought status and wealth.
Their homes were often busy, fussy, crowded places painted in bright colours particularly red and filled with brightly coloured paintings, furniture and statuary. Rest and recreation usually went hand-in-hand with business. The most explicit images and graffiti appear to have been confined to the walls of brothels, baths and bars.
The majority is no worse, and in most cases a great deal more refined and artistic, than the pop-up barrels, ashtrays, female silhouettes and magazines available from souvenir shops and fuel stations.
Pompeii, like so many other towns and cities across post-Republican Roman Italy, was enjoying an unprecedented period of prosperity.
The wealth of Empire was flooding into the Roman heartland giving rise to greater consumerism and upward mobility. Here was a time in a place where even former slaves could genuinely aspire to, and achieve, wealth and status.
Suddenly the grumblings of the some of the ancients of the post-Republican era begin to make a great deal more sense.
This was a time of great change in politics and society. Julius Caesar had ensured that the old Republic was gone forever and had spread the right to Roman citizenship far and wide.
Ongoing conquests had brought fabulous wealth which not only secured the Imperial system but also eventually trickled down and out across society.
From Pompeii's ancient graffiti, replete with spelling and grammar errors, we also learn that not every Roman was a paragon of literacy, manners or morals.
Classical Latin, from which the Western elite learnt the art of refined letter writing, was largely restricted to Rome's scholarly elite.
As Clarke so engagingly demonstrates in Roman Lives, not everyone adhered to state-sanctioned and sponsored religions.
The upwardly mobile and freeman classes paid for public shrines dedicated to the state and emperor but private devotions could encompass anything and everything derived from ancient traditions such as household Lares (deities) and the cult of Bacchus to newer imports from Egypt and the Middle East.
Likewise, there is evidence that some Romans could be equally brazen in their contempt for authority in the matter of sport and inter-city rivalries.
As the scholar Tacitus records, a riot broke out in the Amphitheatre in AD59 between residents of Pompeii and the neighbouring town of Nuceria.
The fighting was so vicious and the death and injury toll so high that the Senate and Emperor Nero banned Pompeii from holding any similar gladiatorial games for 10 years.
None of that, however, stopped one triumphant, and clearly subversive, fan from having the riot recorded in all its glory on one wall of the enclosed garden inside his Pompeii house.
Scholars such as Clarke and Berry are giving us is a picture of a people and their society that is more interesting and exciting than ever before.
Past debate about Rome has, in one sense, been hopelessly out of context and kept beyond the understanding of the vast majority who have a real interest in what came before.
The story of the 21st-century rediscovery of Pompeii underlines the importance of truth, and democracy, in history and the dangers of state censorship.
For the ultimate example of state censorship and propaganda we need look no further than Ancient Egypt.
Over thousands of years Egyptian rulers raised these arcane practices to, literally, high art.
What we see in the remarkable remains of stone and paint are in reality propaganda sheets on a magnificent scale. If one or other new ruler did not like the pharaoh who came before, his or her name was simply chiselled out of the stone record.
Thus, for no fault of his own, what we see and read in Toby Wilkinson's Lives of the Ancient Egyptians is not so much a record of ancient Egyptians as one of their rulers, leaders and conquerors.
As Wilkinson observes: "Ancient Egyptian art presents a perfectly ordered view of the world in which people go about their daily lives in peace and contentment, families are loving and close-knit, and the social hierarchy is universally respected."
Historians must look to other sources "for insights into the grittier realities of life".
Unfortunately, given the perishable nature of these other sources, the lengths of time involved and past preoccupations with grandeur, thus far nothing on the scale of Pompeii has come to light in Egypt.
For this reason most of Wilkinson's Lives deals with the upper echelons of ancient society.
Nonetheless, this is a valuable contribution which certainly underscores the changeable, and sometimes very messy, political conditions to which Egypt was subject.
Far from being ruled by a continuum of Egyptian pharaohs drawn from one great lineage, this great civilisation was subject to relatively frequent dynastic change as one usurper after another, including those who rose from obscurity and/or relative poverty, grasped power.
Ancient Egypt's vast agricultural and mineral wealth also ensured that the avaricious eyes of its neighbours rarely strayed far from any opportunity to invade.
As with Clarke, Wilkinson has chosen to tell what is an enormously complex and long-running history through the lives of individual Egyptians.
By so doing he likewise brings alive people who have often been too remote and inaccessible for those not familiar with the chapter and verse of ancient Egyptian history.
Berry, Clarke and Wilkinson share with readers their great gift for careful and considered scholarship.
They also all have a rare gift for good writing and, thus, good storytelling.
While none of these new volumes could be described as cheap, they are a wonderful revelation and a thoroughly enjoyable investment for anyone with an interest in peoples to whom we owe so much.
Dr Jacqui Murray is a journalist, author and historian with a special interest in the politics of history.
quote: The idealised world passed on to us by the great writers of classical Latin was largely restricted to the very small minority that represented Rome's scholarly elite.
Surprise, surprise; hasn't that always been the case - I mean, ever since human communities grew into bigger and more socially complex societies?! History that is passed down, is almost always done so according to the approval of the narrow elite layers of the society, and as expected, such history almost always tends to look upon kindly on the legacy of the powers that be and otherwise on that of their enemies. Multitude of evidence against a multidisciplinary backdrop on the subjects described, their objectives and their respective societies, not to mention any other clues about living conditions of the general societies, is what can allow one to see a relatively broader picture than what texts produced at the state-level tell us, and to look past the potential biases inherent in those texts.
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^ To be honest, I am in no way surprised either-- not of this Roman life kept hidden, nor of the fact that prudent Europeans had it hidden in the first place.
Again, we have a perfect example of Eurocentrics distorting views on history and culture to their liking, albeit their own European history and culture. Posts: 26249 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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