Conville & Walsh

A brilliant recreation of the lives of those who died at Pompeii, POMPEII: THE LIVING CITY will plug a glaring gap in the market: thus neither a guidebook for the two million or so people who visit Pompeii every year, nor an academic work but a much-needed, narrative non-fiction title which captures the subjective experience of life in the city; and uses Pompeii as an introduction to the cultural landscape of the Roman empire as a whole over the twenty years between 59 and 79AD. This is an exceptionally rich time-span, falling as it does between the earthquake which overturned so much of Pompeiian society and the volcano which finished it all off: a period in which many of the city’s elite fled only for freedmen to step into the vacuum to set up dynamic new businesses; and, on a larger scale, when Pompeii had begun to lose sea-trade to the newly opened port at Ostia; and Poppea, the Emperor Nero’s wife, fought her home-town’s corner at Rome right up to the moment that she was beaten to death by her husband.

A period of flux and instability, then, brilliantly brought to life.