ROBERTS · LAST SUPPER IN POMPEII
Paul Roberts is the Keeper of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford University. He studied at the Universities of Cambridge, Sheffield and Oxford and lived in Italy for several years. He has excavated in Britain, Greece, Libya, Turkey and in particular Italy. His research focuses on the day-today lives of ordinary people in the Greek and Roman worlds. From 1994 to 2014 he was Roman Curator in the Department of Greece and Rome at the British Museum, where he curated the exhibition Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum (2013).
L A ST SUPPER IN POMPEII
LAST SUPPER IN
POMPEII
When the ash from Mount Vesuvius began raining down on Pompeii and its countryside in AD 79, people were engaged in typical daily activities. Many of these revolved around food and drink – farming, buying and selling wine and foodstuffs and consuming them, in many different places and different ways. Located in the sunny paradise of southern Italy, Pompeii was sandwiched between the lush vineyard-covered slopes of Vesuvius and fertile plains to one side and the bountiful waters of the Bay of Naples to the other. The city produced more wine, fish-sauce and other goods than it could consume and exported its products across the Mediterranean. Those interested in Roman culture are blessed by the large amount of evidence from Roman writers, who seem to have been particularly interested in food and drink. But to gain a true idea of what this meant to every level of society we must turn also to archaeology, and the results of new research in Italy and Britain are presented here, much of it for the first time in a public forum. Pompeii gives an unparalleled glimpse of how life was lived in the Roman Empire and is an incredible portal to the ancient Roman World: everything from the exquisite mosaics found in the villas of the wealthy to the remains sieved from kitchen drains reveals what the people of Pompeii loved to eat and drink, and how they did so. This book will tell the story of the Roman love affair with food and wine and how their production, consumption and distribution coloured every aspect of Roman life and art.
Front cover: Marble statue of Bacchus with a wine cup. Naples Museum, MANN 6316 Mosaic panel from a dining room showing Death as a grinning skeleton holding wine jugs. Naples Museum, MANN 9978 Back cover: Mosaic panel, showing marine creatures. Pompeii, VIII 2, 16. Naples Museum, MANN 120177, photo © The Trustees of the British Museum