Pompeii at the Ashmolean

Last Supper in Pompeii at Ashmolean Museum

The Exhibition’s title is not the most promising. Last Supper in Pompeii is glossed by the Ashmolean’s publicity as “…telling the story of this ancient Roman town’s love affair with food”. Last supper? Love affair with food? Oh really? Clunking metaphor and culinary cliché are not the obvious way to advertise the tragedy of Pompeii, except to a foodie archaeologist.

But the Exhibition works very well. It works because it illuminates the abiding affinity we have with the fated citizens of Pompeii. This has little to do with the gruesome plaster casts of agonised corpses and all to with the presences those citizens left in their art, including graffiti art, their architecture and artefacts. 

What’s the key to this affinity? I think it is broadly two-fold. First, the frescoes, pictures and tiled floors are very naturalistic. They leap across the many centuries as if (in Western Europe) the stylised images of the Middle Ages never happened (not to mention the yawning void of the post Roman Dark Ages). And many of the Roman themes are “convivial” – the term for jolly feasting and drinking sessions. So we have to concede the “food” theme.

There’s dining, and raucous singing, and an all women wine party. It all seems familiar – that “just like us” feeling.

Then there’s the food: the ingredients, the massive vineyards, the consequent massive amounts of wine; the cooking things, glassware, bowls and plates, and spoons and knives (no forks) – “just like us”.

There are the creatures, either to be eaten or admired; especially sea animals and the birds that lived in the gardens and vineyards.  “Just like ours” (at least when we go on Mediterranean holidays).

Is it all an easy illusion? Well, yes, and no.

The effect is partly down to the relative freshness of much of what is preserved, especially the artwork.  It’s ancient but the glowing colours do not seem ancient. It’s also the accuracy of the art. It shows styles and themes that are at home in relatively modern eras – careful portraiture, witty social observation, such as the singing convivium, or the man whom the gods protect on the latrine.

Animals are rendered with careful accuracy, as it may be by an artistic C19 naturalist.

A husband and wife are portrayed as an equal couple, tender for each other and both active in their business.

A complex tangle of plumbing pipes looks exactly like the sort of thing your water company uncovers when digging up a road to find a leak.

These feelings of familiarity are, for me, more direct and moving than thoughts and emotions evoked by much of the art and objects of more “recent”  former times.

Clearly, there’s some superficiality at play in these responses, which are tinged with the horror of what happened to the subjects and makers of Pompeiian art. The more accurate the depictions, the more sympathy we feel. And just because an ancient people and their surroundings seem somewhat familiar, it does not follow that their lives and customs were at all like our own.

Against that caution weighs the fact that Roman civilisation , of itself and through the civilisations it embraced and channelled, was the bedrock of our own, however tenuous, and sometimes lost, the connections have been at times. (The Ashmolean references the long period of Roman presence in Britain- one of those lost links.)

We may note that much of Roman literature from, broadly, the time of the Pompeii catastrophe is also direct and naturalistic in a way that is appealing to the modern mind. Poets such as Catullus and Martial do not trouble very much to censor or prettify their subjects or language. Even more decorous writers, for example Horace, are very accessible to modern taste, with their intimate poems about friendship, transience: embrace the Good Life while one can- “carpe diem”, as the fleeting years pass by.

Horace is a very apt poet for life in Pompeii under the shadow of volcano. Drink up, for Death lurks.

We may cautiously rationalise the felt affinity.

One fundamental aspect of life in Pompeii was slavery, which supported the lifestyles of the super-prosperous citizens. In the Exhibition slaves are presented as inhabitants of the kitchens (and workers therein), where the householders seldom entered and next to which the latrine was to be found – for the use of the slaves and the emptying of the owners’ chamberpots.

Food was prepared and carried to the convivial tables by the slaves. Not something, of course, we are familiar with. Our armies of anonymous van drivers and scooter riders, performing similar functions, are surely a rung or two further up the precarious economic ladder.

Oct 2019