Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found
    The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found
    The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found
    Audiobook12 hours

    The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found

    Written by Mary Beard

    Narrated by Phyllida Nash

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Pompeii is the most famous archaeological site in the world, visited by more than two million people each year. Yet it is also one of the most puzzling, with an intriguing and sometimes violent history.

    Destroyed by Vesuvius in 79 CE, the ruins of Pompeii offer the best evidence we have of life in the Roman Empire. But the eruptions are only part of the story. In The Fires of Vesuvius, acclaimed historian Mary Beard makes sense of the remains. She explores what kind of town it was-more like Calcutta or the Costa del Sol?-and what it can tell us about "ordinary" life there. From sex to politics, food to religion, slavery to literacy, Beard offers us the big picture even as she takes us close enough to the past to smell the bad breath and see the intestinal tapeworms of the inhabitants of the lost city. She resurrects the Temple of Isis as a testament to ancient multiculturalism. At the Suburban Baths we go from communal bathing to hygiene to erotica.

    Recently, Pompeii has been a focus of pleasure and loss: from Pink Floyd's memorable rock concert to Primo Levi's elegy on the victims. But Pompeii still does not give up its secrets quite as easily as it may seem. This book shows us how much more and less there is to Pompeii than a city frozen in time as it went about its business on 24 August 79.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJun 18, 2019
    ISBN9781977349965
    The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found
    Author

    Mary Beard

    Mary Beard is one of the most original and best-known classicists working today. She is Professor of Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, and the Classics editor of the TLS. She is a fellow of the British Academy and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her books include the Wolfson Prize-winning Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town (2008) and the best-selling SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015). Her popular TLS blog has been collected in the books It's a Don's Life and All in a Don's Day. Her latest book is Women & Power: A Manifesto (2017).

    More audiobooks from Mary Beard

    Related to The Fires of Vesuvius

    Related audiobooks

    Ancient History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Medieval Life

      Dec 21, 2023

      Medieval Life
      5 min read

    • Article

      Levelling Up Pompeii: Grave Shows How A Former Slave Went Far

      Aug 21, 2021

      The inscription on the gravestone proudly attests to how far Marcus Venerius Secundio, a former slave of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, went in life. In order of importance, he lists his achievements after being liberated. The first was his role

      3 min read

    • Article

      Finders, Keepers

      May 5, 2022

      Finders, Keepers
      3 min read

    • Article

      Room To Imagine

      Apr 1, 2023

      Room To Imagine
      6 min read

    • Article

      Turning Heads

      Jun 17, 2022

      Turning Heads
      4 min read

    • Article

      New Light On The Dark Ages

      Jun 9, 2022

      New Light On The Dark Ages
      8 min read

    • Article

      Strange Decline Of The British Museum

      Apr 3, 2024

      The other day, on the anniversary of my father's death, I paid a trip back to the British Museum to see some of the things we used to enjoy together. The Prints and Drawings Room used to let us both in – child though I was – to leaf through paintings

      3 min read

    • Article

      Women On The Wall

      Jul 7, 2022

      Women On The Wall
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Woman Of Vix

      Aug 4, 2023

      A round the year 480 BC, a woman of some status was buried at the base of the flat-topped hillfort of Mont Lassois, near the upper Seine River. While hers was only one grave in a larger necropolis, the Woman of Vix clearly stood out. The grave goods

      9 min read

    • Article

      From The Foreword To Debths

      Jun 27, 2017

      From The Foreword To Debths
      6 min read

    • Article

      Classical Corner

      Feb 25, 2021

      Classical Corner
      3 min read

    • Article

      Cone Rangers

      Oct 26, 2023

      Cone Rangers
      4 min read

    • Article

      Woman About Town

      Apr 27, 2023

      THE SHOW BY MEXICAN ARTIST Bosco Sodi at the Palazzo Vendramin Grimani divided opinion in Venice last year. What Goes Around Comes Around was described as a reconfiguring of the journey of raw materials which had conventionally flowed just one way in

      3 min read

    • Article

      Renaissance Miracles

      Jun 2, 2021

      Renaissance Miracles
      4 min read

    • Article

      We Gotta Go Now

      Jun 2, 2023

      We Gotta Go Now
      6 min read

    • Article

      History’s Greatest Mysteries

      May 14, 2020

      History’s Greatest Mysteries
      36 min read

    • Article

      Baron Corvo’s Grave

      Jan 6, 2022

      Baron Corvo’s Grave
      3 min read

    • Article

      Q&A YOU ASK, WE ANSWER

      Jun 8, 2023

      Q&A YOU ASK, WE ANSWER
      6 min read

    • Article

      When Eden Rocked

      Jun 7, 2019

      When Eden Rocked
      11 min read

    • Article

      The Tomb Of The Diver

      Jul 6, 2023

      The Tomb Of The Diver
      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Fires of Vesuvius

    4/5

    218 ratings16 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      An excellent well-illustrated history, written in a non-formal style, by the well-known scholar (According to the book cover it was associated with a BBC TV production). Dame Beard gives you both the scholarly views and her opinion of them.
    • 3/5
      [Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town] by [[Mary Beard]] is a current state of the research art of findings and careful educated speculations about one of the most remarkable places on earth. The book does not attempt to confirm our own popular assumptions but rather is based on verifiable findings. You may find that there are amazing pieces of evidence of life in this ancient Roman city. I so wish that I could have received my copy before I recently walked in Pompeii. The book is a valued companion for anyone wanting to walk this city ruins actually or in imagination. It even gives tips for visitors on transportation to the site.Mary Beard makes wonderful use of her specialized academic training and conveys information in a critical but friendly manner.I read the beautiful Folio Society Edition containing supporting illustrations and a useful map on the endpapers.
    • 5/5
      I've been meaning to get hold of and read this since my visit to Pompeii last September. I was worried it might be quite dry and spoil the fun, since it's billed as being very sceptical and as cutting things down to the facts, but I needn't have worried. It's an easy enough read despite all the detail, and Mary Beard's speculations are as interesting as anything she refutes.

      I actually recommend you read it before visiting Pompeii, because you'll have a much clearer understanding of what you're seeing. (And you won't need a tour guide, which considering the urban myths they propagate, is all to the good.) It might even be useful to carry around Pompeii with you to help identify and understand some of what you're seeing -- it's not a guide book, it is a narrative, but if you've read it already, you could flip through to refresh your memory on details.

      But reading it after a visit to Pompeii works, too, or even if you don't plan to go to Pompeii at all. Remembering or imagining the hot and dusty streets is easy: Mary Beard is always careful to keep in touch with what Pompeii looks like now (even if that is sometimes disenchanting, for example when she points out that some of the paintings have been totally restored, not always perfectly accurately, by modern work), as well as trying to imagine a time when it was a living town.

      Actually, that's the part I find hardest: imagining Pompeii as a living town. Maybe it's partially because my memories of Pompeii are often without context: a random house with tumbled-down walls, grass growing in the remains of an oven, the partial remains of mosaics and paintings. I'm not a visual person anyway, so the images of Pompeii that stay in my head are the ones I saw myself. Pompeii is a hushed town, in my mind, with wind and hot sun and pumice sand in your shoes.

      Mary Beard does very well at speculating what it might really have been like, nonetheless, and I definitely recommend this if you have any interest in the site.
    • 3/5
      Was my bedtime audiobook so I certainly missed some of it. Interesting though.
    • 4/5
      Lots of detail about Pompeii, focusing on life in the town before it being engulfed by Vesuvius. Nicely illustrated. A few pointers at the end about visiting the site.The author's writing style is interesting. She is very candid about our lack of certainty of many things, and casts a skeptical eye over many 'established facts'.
    • 5/5
      In Pompeii: Life of a Roman Town, Cambridge Don Mary Beard presents exactly that - a description of what life was (probably) like in a provincial seaside town in the Roman Empire.

      Using archaeological evidence, both from Pompeii and from the wider Empire, along with written sources from contemporary (including the town's own signwriters) and modern authors, Beard builds up a picture of how the town's inhabitants went about their daily lives. Everything is covered, from what, how and where they ate and drank, slept, washed, to how the town was governed, from the bars, brothels and gaming to religion. This is achieved through discussion both of individuals - the garum maker, or the banker, for instance, and also through a wider view, not just of Pompeii but of similar towns elsewhere in the Roman Empire.

      Beard's style of writing is very similar to her television presenting style - conversational, informative, engaging and inclusive. Unlike other works (Time Team, I'm looking at you), Beard does not make the assumption that her audience will accept things at face value - dar I say that some works seem to assume their audience is ignorant? Where there is doubt over an interpretation of evidence, she presents this, making it clear that while there is much we can glean about the way of life in a Roman Town, we can never be 100% certain.

      In essence, Pompeii: Life in a Roman Town is an excellent guide to both Pompeii and an informative presentation on current academic thinking on Roman life, presented in a highly readable format.

      A thoroughly recommended book
    • 4/5
      Like much of Mary Beard's work, this points out almost as much about what we don't know - or what we think we know but have in fact constructed for ourselves - as what we do know about Pompeii. It is an enjoyable and enlightening stroll through the archaeology and social history of Pompeii, and although it is not organised as a companion to a visit it would make a good preface or coda to one. It captures highlights rather than being a systematic survey, and is written for the generalist who already has some classical background but is not an expert.
    • 5/5
      A fascinating "insider" look on the real Pompeii by Mary Beard, a Professor of Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, that unwraps some of the mysteries of the city covered in ash in 79 CE. (I confess I only picked it up from a library shelf because it was at the height of the Icelandic volcano explosion that is spewing ash over Europe, and I thought it might be an interesting book to read -- much like I re-read Camus' The Plague at the height of the SARS epidemic, but anyway....) This book de-myths Pompeii and tells the story of the city as you've probably not read or heard it before. It is full of fascinating facts and stories, often illustrated by the graffiti of the city, or other telling remnants. It strips bare some of the nonsense local guides like to tell of Pompeii; informs us that the days of previous tremors had already caused many of its inhabitants to flee; that it is likely that a lot of the missing goods of the city were long ago pried from their hiding places by early looters; and that frankly, much we've been told has been pure conjecture or mythologizing. Fifteen pages in, I simply couldn't put it down. (Also fascinating in terms of how much the science of archaeology has improved over the past few decades.)
    • 4/5
      I listened to this rather than reading it and I really enjoyed it. I thought the reader did a really good job and delivered the writer's work very well.
      As for the book itself I liked the fact that for the most part the writer did not claim that she knew for certain that this was what life in Pompeii was like, instead she wrote that this is what she believed or what she thought had happened based on her interpretation of the evidence found during the many digs that have occured at Pompeii.
    • 4/5
      Mary Beard takes a careful look at Pompeii, being sure to make statements based on the archaeological evidence. Very good overview of what the evidence tells us about life in this Roman town.
    • 5/5
      This book was excellent. Beard breathes life into the long dead city of Pompeii. This is definitly a general historical intestest book - but is even better as a tourist book. I think this is a must read before a visit to Pompeii. I've been twice now and Beard's book enhanced my trip more than I can say.
    • 4/5
      This is this generation's best book on Pompeii; it's impossible to imagine visiting the site without having read it, and although it's not a guidebook, it does have a helpful appendix called "Making a Visit" that covers what to wear, how best to arrive, and which houses you'll probably be most interested in seeing. Mary Beard is a distinguished professor of classics at Cambridge, and she writes about Pompeii as though it were her life's work. What I appreciated most about the book were the complete lack of prudishness about the town's ubiquitous, licentious artwork—the frontispiece of my Folio Society edition is a detail of a mosaic showing a slave with genitals as big as his forearms—and the way Beard always takes pains, in a graceful way, to explain what we know, what we don't know, and the various ideas about what the truth might be. A lot of the stories the guidebooks tell you are probably wrong. She sets it straight.The book is written very casually, without footnotes or unnecessary scholarly trappings. Occasionally it has a dashed-off quality that comes from quick writing (the same word repeated too soon, and the like), but that's a quibble. This is like getting a verbal tour of the site from a very smart friend who's lived a few miles away from it for twenty years. However, it's not a tour of the buildings and monuments so much as a peek into what the people were like, what they did for work and fun and what they seemed to care about. If you've visited the site, as I did a long time ago, this will explain a lot about what you saw (did you know that the ruined state of some of the buildings is due not to age but to Allied bombing in World War II?) and if you haven't been there yet, this will certainly make you want to go.
    • 4/5
      An engaging and detailed look at what we know of Roman era life in Pompeii--things like what people ate, literacy and so forth.
    • 3/5
       Pompeii, that fascinating archaeological ruin of incredible magnitude, is discussed in great detail in Mary Beard's The Fires of Vesuvius. In 79 CE (which in my day was AD), Mount Vesuvius erupted engulfing Pompeii in flames and preserving the city for posterity. Years and looting later, Pompeii still retains a number of artifacts and architectural wonders to be a major tourist attraction in Italy. Plodding at times, the overall information is good and does point out that a lot of what is stated as fact about Pompeii is nothing more than conjecture.
    • 4/5
      An excellent introduction to the excavations at Pompeii, this book uses both the latest archaeological finds and a fair measure of common sense to tell the story of Pompeii. Rather than re-hash the shopworn story of the eruption, Professor Beard delves into the daily life of this provincial town and its surrounding countryside. Chapters cover such topics as street life, religion, the economy, and even the inevitable food, wine, sex, and baths.This book is aimed at the well-informed general reader and is suitable for anyone who wants to imagine life in an ancient town. Professor Beard is most judicious about her conclusions, carefully setting out the facts and rendering non-judgments where the data is insufficient for a conclusion.In addition, the book has suggestions for making a visit to Pompeii and a long section in the back for suggested additional readings in various topics.
    • 4/5
      Wonderfully researched. Pompeii is so much more than a town caught in suspended animation by the eruption of a volcano! There is so much detail, some of which gives a clear picture of life at the time, and also leaves a good deal of puzzles to mull over as well.