Life and death, plus sex

Terentius Neo and his wife

The current exhibition at the British Museum, Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum, has an awful lot going for it in terms of selling points: after all, it’s not only got life and death, but sex too.

But let’s tackle those title elements first.

This is a quite extraordinary exhibition – little wonder that it’s a sell out.

The exhibition area – the old Reading Room – is perhaps a little crowded, but it’s well arranged.

There’s a remarkable amount to see, and ‘armed’ with the knowledge gained from Mary Beard’s excellent Pompeii, which we both read last year, we were able to gain a great deal from it.

Many of the exhibits are in astonishing condition given the cataclysmic force unleashed by Vesuvius in 79CE.

Mosaic of sea creatures

There are vast expanses of frescos, which provide both a real insight into the artistic skill of the era, as well as offering a window onto the social life of the two towns in the period before their destruction.

The subjects include not just the social life of the towns, but also individuals who (presumably) lived there, including the exhibition’s poster couple, the baker Terentius Neo and his wife, together with a mosaic Portrait of a Woman.

Some of the mosaics are utterly incredible: the minute size of the tiles makes you think of pointillism rather than mosaic. The detail is stunning, the skill evident.

The large mosaic of sea creatures is remarkable, as are the small mosaics of theatrical masks.

Lucius Caecilius

There is sculpture too: the marble statue of Eumachia is wonderful, but for me, the humorous Hercules – naked, with a middle-aged paunch and peeing drunkenly – is a particular treat.

But so too is the bronze bust of Lucius Caecilius, which sits on top of a marble herm, complete with large wart on the left cheek: it’s such a lifelike creation.

One of the biggest ‘wows’ of the exhibition is a series of frescos from a garden room in The House of the Orchards. They are wonderful and vibrant. Indeed, you leave the exhibition as a whole with a real sense of colour: the Roman world was no more all white than ancient Greece.

There is jewellery and there are glass bottles; jars for garum, the fermented fish sauce of which the Romans were so fond; wine bottles and bread. That’s right: a carbonated but perfectly preserved loaf of bread. Other carbonated foodstuffs have survived too, such as dates, which would have been imported.

Hercules

The way in which Pompeii and Herculaneum were destroyed was different, so that wooden items in the latter have survived. A cradle is one example.

There are pieces of engineering – for waterworks, for instance – kitchen utensils, garden tools and plant pots, lamps and moulds for lamps, chamber pots and stools (the sort you sit on, not the sort you might have found in the chamber pots).

What we have presents a remarkably full and coherent picture of life in the towns. But the reason that we have so much – the towns have produced more Roman frescos than the rest of the world put together – is precisely because of the natural catastrophe that struck and killed so many.

Cradle from Herculaneum

And so it is entirely fitting that, while there is a reminder of it at the beginning, with the plaster cast of a dog’s body, the exhibition concludes with three displays of casts made of the bodies of people whose deaths, in effect, ensured that we were left with such a treasure trove of evidence of life in the Roman world.

There is the Resin Lady, who was found outside Pompeii, and who – uniquely thus far, given the expense – was preserved with transparent resin, which even reveals her bone structure.

The muleteer is one of the ‘bodies’ that was created by pouring plaster of paris into the space left by the destroyed body. He crouches down, placed against a wall, as he was found, as he died; and many visitors seem to miss him as they pass by.

And then there is a family group of mother and father and two young children, with the youngest on the mother’s lap as she falls back, the infant clawing at the wall next to their place of death.

However much you have heard or read about the bodies and how theses casts were made, to see some of them is incredibly moving.

Plaster coast of the body of a dog

Impressions of people, as they died, in terror, seeing death approach inexorably. Seeing this just two days after the anniversary of 9/11, one

was reminded, again, of the horror of the last moment of the victims there as they too saw inevitable death coming toward them. It’s impossible to imagine.

But before death was life. And life cannot exist without sex – and there’s a fair bit of sex in this exhibition too.

The first hint of this comes with a bronze wind chime. Little bells hang from a male figure with a vast phallus – a good luck symbol in the Roman world – while a lamp hangs below.

There is another, similarly-themed lamp later in the exhibition, plus several frescos showing sexual scenes.

Part of the Garden Room frescos

But the most ‘controversial’ exhibit is on display in the smallest room available, with a small warning notice just outside.

This is Pan and the Goat, a sculpture found at Herculaneum in 1752, of approximately a foot and a half in length, showing the half-man-half-goat god having sex with a goat. They look like they’re both rather enjoying themselves in a really rather tender embrace.

As I’ve mentioned before, this was one of the pieces that was hidden away for years, away from the delicate – and easily corrupted – eyes of women, children and anyone of the lower classes.

The chance to see such a piece was a major motive for me to go to the exhibition.

It is, quite simply, an absolutely outstanding work. It’s interesting to see the faded paint – just as on other sculptures and statues from the ancient world.

This is full of humour too, and was almost certainly not meant to arouse – or offend.

Carbonised loaf of bread

But this is the England and this is the 21st century. The description beneath the exhibit touches on the ‘difficulties’ and the catalogue, having explained it’s known history at length, notes: “The piece is confusing and disorienting and does not correspond to any other, more conventionally ‘naughty’ Roman art. Is it raw eroticism, is it affectionate, or is it simply meant to raise a smile?”

As we walked up to it, a very plummy male voice behind us could be heard: “Oh dear,” it said in a somewhat flustered tone.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” said a similarly plummy female voice in echo.

Then there was a pause.

“Shall we have just a quick look?”

I was biting my tongue not to either burst out laughing or start a best stage voice gush about how utterly magnificent it was.

Not that their discomfort was unique.

The little room, which was otherwise filled with totally ‘innocent’ items, was crowded, as people tried to look without being seen to look, casting glances from the other exhibits.

Well, apart from me (and The Other Half), who both got as up-close as possible and took the time to admire properly.

Pan and the Goat

Oddly, this was one of the areas of the exhibition that didn't have sound effects – the most annoying aspect of an otherwise excellent event.

Unfortunately, the museum had not had reproductions made as souvenirs to buy.

No, you could buy a marble coaster with a reproduction of a beautiful fresco of Terentius Neo and his wife, who might well have perished rather unpleasantly beneath the pyroclastic flow, but not even a postcard with Pan and his beloved (there is a reproduction in the catalogue, thank goodness, but that’s hardly the cheapest item around).

Now, am I alone in finding that a reflection of a rather odd attitude toward the subjects in question?

It reminded me a little of seeing the Barbican’s excellent exhibition, Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now, in 2007. Actually, one of the frescos from Pompeii depicting sex had been in that exhibition too.

Fresco showing a couple having sex

But there, as in the little room with Pan and the Goat, people were pretty much reduced to a silence, wandering around exhibits depicting sex – and as a pleasure – as though they were in a library, albeit with (presumably) somewhat less surprise at what they were seeing, apart from the room containing the display of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe.

The curators of Seduced didn’t bother with any warnings once you were past the door, but they had had the police in before opening to check that they weren’t breaking any laws.

Good for the British Museum for not sticking it behind a curtain and saying ‘over 18s only’, but the nature of the questions about it in the catalogue merely add to the impression that we have to work hard not to offend the easily offended.

It was reminiscent of the ludicrous decision (later rescinded) by the National Trust to add a comment at the Giant’s Causeway visitor centre suggesting that fundamentalist creationists think it only occurred within the last 6,000 years.

Why give credence to idiocy? Why behave in an apologetic manner to those who are likely to be offended by an historic item?

Perversely, we remain, it seems, more confused about sex than we are about death. But then, since we censor violence in entertainment less than we censor sex in entertainment, and given that we still bow to the religious beliefs of parents rather than insisting that every child has a sex education that is factual and open and clear, perhaps it's not really too surprising.

Oh dear, one might say. Oh dear, oh dear.

• Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum is on at the British Museum until 29 September. It has sold out, but there are some on-the-day tickets available. See here for details.

Silence or shouting? The problem of bullying

Since the silence was hardly been deafening, you might have missed the news that last Sunday was Twitter Silence Day.

It was a day when some predominantly middle-class journalists and columnists decided not to tweet as a protest against online abuse of women.

Let’s be clear: the nature and level of some of the abuse is disgusting. There is no excuse for it.

Not that she’s alone, but classicist Mary Beard seems to have become a prime and repeated target.

This isn’t just a spot of name-calling, even with the sort of added Anglo-Saxon words that renowned ‘double-cunter’ Paul Dacre would be in admiration of, but goes into explicit and sexual terms, and has reached the level of rape threats and bomb threats.

You have to wonder at the mentality of those who come out with this sort of thing. What do they think they’re doing?

Beard has taken to ‘outing’ some of the abusers by retweeting them. Only last week, one such episode turned darkly hilarious when another woman tweeted back, telling the professor that she knew the address of the abuser’s mother and, if she wanted, she’d forward it.

They don’t all hide behind anonymity and are clearly not all uneducated illiterates. It’s not a class thing or a race thing, because the abusers come from a wide range of backgrounds.

And it’s not something that can be blamed on the internet, social media in general of Twitter specifically.

I’ve had a taste of it online – the imbecile who disagrees with you, runs off to look at any picture of you on Twitter, and then comes back to declare that you’re an ‘ugly cunt’ who is clearly single etc.

I’ve had it in other online places over the years: comments about being a Nazi who had a home decorated in lampshades made of human skin. Which was all the more amusing since the abusive little sod was himself at least sympathetic with the far right.

I’ve had emails with the old fascist tactic of ‘we know who you are and where you live’.

I’ve had abuse in the street: just one example being “Oi! You’re a big fat cunt!” Self-awareness was not his strong point: he was an extremely big, fat slob standing around outside a pub trying to see if his brain cell could come up with something to entertain him.

And some of this was deeply upsetting at the time.

But let’s be clear, so too were all the incidents, over many years and involving more than one female boss, of being put down at every opportunity, often on the basis of how I looked or dressed.

Oh, the language might not be as blatant, but the intent is no less negative.

So let’s not pretend that bullying and abuse are one-way streets.

However, to come back to the point about precisely what is going on with some of these Twitter abusers.

It’s all about power and attempts to exert it. And it isn’t remotely new.

As Libby Purves delightfully explains: “Years ago, when I was the first woman presenter on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme in the days of green-ink letters, I amused myself, unbeknownst to my employers, with a standard reply to any correspondence that was couched in rudely misogynistic terms (many men gave their real address, so secure were they in the patriarchy). I’d write:

“Thank you for your interesting letter. I am sure you will not mind my passing it on to Professor (Fictional name) of the Cambridge University Institute of Psychosexual Medicine, who has a research study about men who write strongly-worded letters to women in public life.”

I had several panicky replies forbidding me to pass on their name and even apologising. Nothing scares a nasty bloke more than the thought of someone knowing all about him. Digital technology doesn’t change that.”

In the days before the internet – or prehistory, as it sometimes known to today’s youngsters – I was bullied at school, too, but in some ways my parents seemed to regard it as quite normal (both of them had, apparently, suffered it too) and believed that teaching the old ‘sticks and stones’ rhyme would have power over bullies, together with the knowledge that a kick to the shins would sort out problems where that didn't.

There was an irony here in that constant put-downs were my father’s chosen oevre.

But while my fists eventually sorted out two particular situations of long-term persistent bullying (both were in all-girl schools, incidentally), one nearly got me into a real jam, while in the first, I apparently nearly broke the ring-leader's nose.

Interestingly, in both cases, the culprits were younger. Both also taught me that ignoring it is far from guaranteed to actually work.

But then again, that’s easier said than done, as I later found it in the workplace, where a boss bullying is a rather different matter, since it is based on very specific and quite real, economic power.

At least these days we take bullying more seriously.

And the kind of harassment that Beard and others have been faced with is prosecutable – as harassment. In other words, there are real, existing legal solutions to such issues.

I remain convinced that censorship is to be avoided at all. And the idea of a Twitter report button concerns me, as it’s easy enough to see how it could be abused (for want of a better phrase) against people who have done absolutely nothing wrong.

If there is to be any such system, it needs very serious and good moderation.

In the same vein, I reserve the right to call a politician, for instance, a choice name, just as I don’t go bleating to anyone if I get called something similar. These days, I’m old enough, ugly enough and thick-skinned enough to realise that if I want to play hardball, I have no right to expect to be treated with kid gloves myself.

There may be, however, some cases where some forums need either to be closed altogether or where some very strict and serious moderation needs to come into play.

Such an example is ask.fm, a social networking Q&A site that has featured in a number of cyber bullying cases, up to and including ones where young people have taken their own lives, apparently as a direct response to serious online bullying.

The latest to die in such an horrifically tragic way was 14-year-old Hannah Smith.

Prime Minister David Cameron has called for people to “boycott” such sites. Yes, because that’s what teenagers are going to do, isn’t it? And instead of putting all the responsibility on young people who could become abused, how about acting at government level to demand that such sites be closed down or better regulated?

Is it hysterical to ask how many more young people have to die before it ceases to be their responsibility alone?

The onus so often seems to be on the bullied.

And here I’m also wary of the words. I deeply dislike the promotion of any ideas of inherent victimhood. My own personal experience is that the key is confidence.

Since getting some, I’ve never had a repeat of any of the verbal assaults I was on the receiving end of in the street. It’s a cliché for a reason, to say that bullies themselves are basically cowards. They don’t pick on someone they realistically think will fight back. But they seem to be able to easily spot those who will not; those who are low on confidence.

I do also wonder whether part of the targeting of Beard and other high-profile women is not so much just about sex as also about a very British dislike and distrust of intellectualism. It could also be suggested that it’s about a dislike or even fear of those who don’t conform, and we Brits do, in so many ways, remain wedded to conformity.

Beard most certainly doesn’t conform – in her case, on the grounds of how she has chosen to allow herself to be seen, without kowtowing to conventional and mainstream views on make-up, hair etc.

I wonder too what other issues are at play. Does a society that is, of itself, so troubled with massive job insecurity, for instance, also help to create a climate where some feeling need to target those who appear to have success?

In a country where politicians regularly demonise those who cannot easily make their own voices heard – the disabled, for instance – is it then easier to start targeting all manner of other groups?

Does such a level of abuse exist in other Western European nations?

A good friend, who was a young adult in Germany in the 1960s and had a very libertarian attitude toward anything that occurs between consenting adults, once observed to me that he was also shocked (and he was pretty unshockable) at the way in which he overheard British men talking openly about women.

There are real questions about bullying and about the wider culture, but they seem to get lost – perhaps because they’re difficult.

What we don’t need is some really poor new legislation or scheme, but education and a system whereby real offences can be easily reported and are properly followed up and, where applicable, the law is brought to bear.

What benefits nobody is gestures. And while I sympathise with anyone – male or female – who has been harassed and abused online, the Twitter silence was just that. If anything, there’s a danger that it will have given encouragement to the trolls: ‘oh look – if we do it more, maybe they’ll fuck off altogether and we’ll have won’.

That Beard was subsequently berated by Giles Coren for ‘breaking’ the silence by using Twitter to highlight yet more abuse should perhaps tell us something about the rather elitist nature of this protest.

Now, on one hand, good for Giles for considering the abuse unacceptable and for supporting those (or some of those) facing it. But frankly, outing these bastards is actually far better. Let them be seen for their attitudes. Don’t hide them – and certainly don’t hide from them.

The abuse is not acceptable. But in terms of social media, boycotting it is tantamount to giving in.

Many, many women (and supportive men) chose not to be silent. They used the day, instead, to go about their normal social media business, or to #ShoutOut against sexist behaviour and, even more positively, list #InspiringWomen – a hashtag that was both educational and full of surprises, and precisely because of that, genuinely inspiring.

The underlying roots and causes are complex – and the last thing this issue needs is simple answers that will merely wallpaper those real roots and causes. And treating it as though it's essentially a matter of sexism will also get in the way of finding real and lasting ways of dealing with bullying as a whole.

The book's the thing

It landed this morning; as classy a cover as could be, at once invoking worthy tomes of the past, but managing also to suggest, with one very clever design twist, something rather sassier.

There was perhaps no better way to celebrate the advent of World Books Day than with the arrival of Mary Beard’s new work, Confronting the Classics.

Is there anything quite like the pleasure of a good book – not least the feeling of a new one in your hands?

No, no: I don’t meaning ones displayed on a backlit screen, but the real, old-fashioned paper ones; the ones you want for company as you curl up on the sofa with the cat and a cup of camomile on a grey and grizzly day.

Or the ones you open on the bus and find yourself unexpectedly chuckling out loud at.

The ones that have a smell, a sound – go on: rustle some pages and listen; that have age and texture and gloss or the bruised look of something thumbed many, many times.

The big ones and the small ones; the glossy art ones, full of black and white photography, and the antique ones with yellowed edges and a slightly musty smell and the mystical sense of passing through hands down the years.

The graphic novels and the ones full of dense type; the politics and the economics, the sci-fi and the crime fiction: what’s a nice dame like you doing in a place like this?

Musical scores in uniform yellow, like the ones we poured over in school; classic books hated when young but gradually appreciated with the passage of time – Hardy and Brönte and Golding and, goodness, even the poems of Keats.

Books about art and history and film, about gardening and cookery, about language and about science, about cats and philosophy – not together, you understand, although Akif Pirinçci’s marvellous Felidae, a novel of cats and murder (and not a little philosophical musing), comes close.

Books and books and yet more books. I am addicted. They are piled high throughout the flat – only the bathroom doesn’t have a shelf weighed down with them.

And then there are the books of childhood that have such a very special place in ourt memories.

Oh my – that’s an whole different ball game.

My mother guarded the reading matter of me and my sister fiercely. It was also a different time, with a clumsy gap between what children read and what adults read – little market for teens.

It’s extraordinary now to think that I was allowed to read books – fiction and non-fiction – about war (Biggles was a favourite) but, when I returned home from the library in my teens one day with a copy of Airport, having seen the film, I was sent straight back to return it, as it was not considered ‘suitable’.

It was some years later that I realised that this meant that S.E.X. was involved.

Oh yes – violence is fine for young people: sex is not.

Indeed, my teen reading was generally pretty dire: Agatha Christie was acceptable, as (as previously intimated) was anything from a biography of Douglas Bader to anything by Alistair MacLean.

Violence okay – sex not.

But when I think of children’s books I also hold very fond memories too.

Enid Blyton gave me many, many a happy hour. And here’s an easy segue from the school stories and the Secret Seven and the Famous Five – because perhaps one of the Blyton books that lives most in my memory (it was a church prize, incidentally) was Shadow the Sheepdog.

Because it took place in a setting that I genuinely could recognise.

Since we moved away from Westmoreland when I was just three, my memories of the place were formed later, when we stayed with an honorary uncle and aunt on their fell farm at the fabulously named Weasdale Beck.

And to be honest, I think those times were the happiest of my childhood.

So even though the Eden Valley is bleak – and oh, it is – I certainly feel that it is a very deep part of who I am.

And when my mother gave me Marjorie Lloyd’s Fell Farm series of books, it was something that I genuinely recognised. Indeed, I find myself, right now, on the cusp of buying copies again – it’s not in print, so you can get them cheaply.

So too, I hold Swallows and Amazons in great fondness. It wasn’t that far away, after all. And there is that sense of recognising the landscape.

There was much other childhood literature, but these things these things … well, perhaps it’s a slight exaggeration to say that they haunt me, but they are a part of me, and thus one of the very few constants of my life.

I must admit that the idea of dressing up as literary characters at school for World Book Day makes me squirm; as I do when I read of schools going all American and having a ‘prom’.

To someone who grew up from the 1960s to the early 1980s, it is utterly alien.

And recalling my own dreadful gaucheness and inability to relate to most of my peers, I shiver at such ideas.

It’s precisely the sort of thing that would have been mortifying.

For god’s sake, it was bad enough in the sixth form when we wore civvies – my mother sent this timid mouse to school in cast-offs from elderly maiden aunts; Edinburgh Wool Mill skirts and blouses with big ties at the neck à la Angela Lansbury in Murder, She Wrote.

What literary figure would she have decided she could find the appropriate clothing for – Miss Marple?

I shudder to think.

Books are liberating and magnificent. And, when I think about it, they’ve formed an enormously important part of my life over its half century.

I’m sure everyone reading this will have similar stories and sentiments.

So tonight, treasure your own connection with books – and switch off the telly and pick a book up instead. They are still utterly magical!

And it doesn't matter whether you read Proust or Agatha Christie – just read!

Remember too – love your libraries.