SOME QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

What questions should we be asking of Pompeii?  Come up with at least two questions here yourself, one that you consider to be of fundamental importance and one or more that is perhaps more unexpected and off-beat but still of some significance.

"The past is a foreign country," writes the British novelist L. P. Hartley: "they do things differently there."  What seems strange about ancient Pompeii?  What are some of the ways in which they "did things differently?"  What significance would you attach to these differences?

What is most interesting about the history of the relationship between "moderns" (those who have rediscovered, visited and interpreted Pompeii since 1750) and ancient Pompeii?  To what extent is the Pompeii of today not the Pompeii of 79 CE but instead "our" Pompeii?

What are some of the problems in interpreting Pompeii?

How would you assess Mary Beard as an interpreter of Pompeii?  To what extent did she shift your understanding of the ways in which we should look at and interpret Pompeii and its ruins?

What are the strengths and weaknesses of Fires of Vesuvius?

What can we learn from the streets of Pompeii?  The houses?  The paintings?  The commercial establishments?  The public meeting places?  The graffiti and other written documentation that survives from Pompeii itself?

What did you learn about political history through Fires of Vesuvius?  Who did run the city and how was it run?  How would you compare and contrast the politics of ancient Pompeii with those of today's Canada?

What can we learn about Roman religion through the study of ancient Pompeii?

How would you begin to assess social relations in ancient Pompeii?  What strikes you as of interest here?  What did you learn about slavery?

How would you begin to assess Pompeii gender relations as portrayed in Fires of Vesuvius?

What did you learn about public entertainments through Beard's book?

How would you begin to assess the apparent relationship between the public and the private in ancient Pompeii?

How does our understanding of the Roman Empire look different from the perspective of the provincial town of Pompeii than it does from Rome itself? 

How would you begin to assess the ruins of Pompeii overall as an entry point into learning about everyday life in the Roman Empire?  What is distinctive and particularistic about the history of Pompeii?

If you were able to travel back to the Pompeii of the first half of the first century of the Common Era, what do you think you would find both most appealing and most challenging/off-putting about life there?  If you then returned back to the Comox Valley of contemporary times, how might your understanding of your own society have shifted?  Would you "move" to ancient Pompeii if given the chance?  Why or why not?

SOME EXTRA SOURCES