Four Lost Cities

by Annalee Newitz

  We can’t fully appreciate the built environment of Pompeii without understanding how it was shaped by women, and why. Though women couldn’t run for office or vote, they could own property. They could become entrepreneurs or patrons of powerful cults. The outsized footprint occupied by the Temple of Isis and the property of Julia Felix are both testimonies to female power at Pompeii, and how women were reshaping the cityscape.

  Nero actually did a few good things

  By the time Julia Felix was running her own establishment in the city, the Julian Laws had been challenged and modified by at least three generations of young people. The restrictions on women had waxed and waned. Emperor Nero, especially, seemed disinclined to enforce rigid ideas about women’s modesty. Lisa Hughes, a professor of classics at the University of Calgary, studies theaters at Pompeii during this period. When I sat down with her at a café to talk about what she’d discovered, she said something that took me by surprise.

  Tucking an unruly strand of brown hair behind an ear, she gave me a sly smile. “I love Nero!” she enthused.

  I was so startled that I spilled my coffee, narrowly missing the laptop I was using to take notes. “That’s not something you usually hear about Nero,” I laughed, as she helped mop up the mess with a wad of napkins.

  Hughes shrugged, as if she gets that reaction a lot. “He was actually great for women.”

  Nero came from a long line of powerful female icons. His mother Agrippina the Younger became a notorious political figure after writing a popular memoir about the history of her family, including her brother Caligula, her husband Claudius, and her mother Agrippina the Elder, who was very close to the Emperor Augustus and got swept up in early Imperial political violence. As Nero took power, women were moving from the domestic sphere into the public realm. They challenged the Roman tradition that good women stayed at home weaving cloth for their husbands, fathers, and sons.

  Though widely reviled as a decadent tyrant, Nero was also a populist who loved theater and music. He acted in plays, and used theatrical productions to make political arguments that previous leaders would have made in the Forum. It’s not a stretch to compare Nero’s techniques to those of contemporary American politicians, who use social media or television ads to spread their ideas rather than giving formal speeches. During his reign, Hughes explained, Nero poured money into theaters, and the demand for performance troupes reached a fever pitch. As a mostly unintended consequence, “under Nero, the theater is opened up and more women enter the performance space,” Hughes said. Female performers became common, but women also went into the theater business as producers and patrons. Pliny the Younger, a Roman commentator who survived the eruption at Pompeii, wrote somewhat disapprovingly about a wealthy matron named Ummidia Quadratilla,8 who owned her own mime troupe.

  At Pompeii, where there were two public theaters and entertainment was a major lure for visitors, Hughes studies one of the lesser-known trends in first-century Pompeii performance: backyard theaters in private homes. There are 11 known backyard theaters in Pompeii, and Hughes speculates that wealthy people staged special performances in them during al fresco dinners, inviting select groups of friends, business connections, and political allies. Hughes sees this phenomenon as part of a larger shift in public perceptions of women’s roles. It offered business opportunities to women like Ummidia Quadratilla, whose mime troupe probably performed in backyard theaters. But theater also offered women more than economic self-sufficiency; it was a place where Romans reimagined gender roles.

  Hughes told me that in the decades when Julia and Ummidia ran their businesses, there was a surge in popularity of stories about Hercules and Omphale, the Queen of Lydia. At least two houses at Pompeii boast elaborate frescoes showing a key scene from the Hercules and Omphale myth, in which Hercules gets drunk and puts on Omphale’s clothes. The queen, for her part, wears Hercules’ clothing or bears his weapons. In one fresco from the House of the Prince of Montenegro, she sits at the head of the table in a spot normally reserved for male hosts. “She’s assuming the role of the domus, or male patron,” Hughes mused. “It’s a representation of women running the show, and running the house.”

  The Omphale myth reminds her of a real-life woman from Pompeii, Eumachia, who was likely the age of Julia Felix’s mother. Eumachia rose from a nonaristocratic background to lead one branch of a powerful civic organization for freed slaves called the Augustales. She also became a matron of the fullers’ guild, a trade group that represented garment makers who fabricated, dyed, or washed clothes. With her tremendous self-made wealth, Eumachia dedicated a large public building—known today simply as the Building of Eumachia—in a choice spot located next to the Forum in Pompeii’s equivalent of a downtown area. Rome may have been officially a patriarchy, but Eumachia managed to stand in a man’s place and flourish. Perhaps she thought of Omphale as a role model.

  Not only did the Omphale myth challenge ideas about gender, but it also overturned ideas about ethnicity. Omphale was a foreign queen, from a region in what is today western Turkey. Hughes believes that this myth was perfectly suited to the changing values of a town like Pompeii, which was packed with immigrants from all over the Roman Empire—some slaves, some free. “The very fact that these images were created attests to the fact that there was an audience and community that would accept them or enjoy them,” Hughes said. The audiences for frescoes and backyard theater performances weren’t merely public elites—they were the slaves and freed people who worked in these domestic spaces. At a time when former slaves and women were entering the public sphere in growing numbers, Hughes explained, “they’re trying to establish their identities, but they aren’t emulating elites.” Instead, they might be taking inspiration from art and theater they saw in the domestic spaces where they were employed. “Theater is a key venue for promoting social change,” Hughes said. And Pompeii was a theater-loving town.

  The people in the kitchen

  If you walk north from Pompeii’s downtown theater district, you’ll eventually pass through the city gates on a road known as the Via Consolare. Wide and well used, Via Consolare cuts through the city grid diagonally, continuing into the suburban countryside, past the enormous villas of Rome’s rich and famous. This was the street that connected Pompeii to nearby Herculaneum, a smaller and more elite seaside town that was also buried in ash by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Some archaeologists believe the famous orator Cicero had an estate on Via Consolare about 150 years before the city was buried. The villas preserved here in 79 were just as fancy as those in Cicero’s time, fit for emperors and elites. Early one morning, I walked Via Consolare, passing the crumbling remains of estates that stretched for city blocks, their once-fine atriums reduced to bare stone. Each atrium had an impluvium, or pool, at its center, now chipped and empty. Impluvia were luxurious water features intended to impress visitors, but they had a pragmatic purpose, too: each would have been filled with rainwater that fell through an open skylight called a compluvium. Nearly every Roman house had some kind of impluvium/compluvium setup, but the ones along this road were enormous, befitting their placement in majestic villas.

  Tombs also stood along Via Consolare, memorials to anyone whose relatives could pay for a monument. Romans put their graves outside city walls partly for spiritual reasons, and partly so that visitors would learn about the city’s most powerful families before passing through its gates. Two thousand years ago this road would have been swarming with pedestrians and carts traveling between Herculaneum and Pompeii, many gaping at the same buildings I could see around me.

  But I was hunting for one particular structure, the House of the Mosaic Columns, where San Francisco State archaeologist Michael Anderson and his team were excavating. Anderson manages the Via Consolare Project,9 a long-running investigation focused on how people used this street. I wandered back and forth, consulting my map, trying to figure out which deserted ruin was the House of the Mosaic Columns. Unlike most buildings in the park, it had
no obvious markings or signage. All I could find was a gate blocking the entrance to an arched tunnel leading to an overgrown garden.

  “Hello?” I called. I couldn’t believe this was the place because there was no sign of anyone. But presently Anderson poked his head around the corner of the tunnel’s far end and waved. After unchaining the gate, he guided me through an entrance guests would have accessed from the street 2,000 years ago. The arched walls would have been covered in elaborate frescoes, and the passageway was wide enough to admit a cart. We emerged into a walled garden so spacious that it contained an entire outdoor archaeology lab. A shade structure covered a makeshift work space with a table, computer, boxes of ceramics, and a very tidy array of hard hats. Students and other researchers passed in and out of the garden on their way to trenches they’d dug inside what was once the villa proper. Out in the garden, they catalogued ceramics and sifted through dirt in the very spot where patricians once enjoyed the intricate mosaic columns that gave the place its name. Now there were four fake columns made of bare concrete, crumbling and leaning at odd angles.

  “The mosaic columns were taken to the Naples Museum and replaced with these bizarre, crappy concrete things,” Anderson explained with a wry grin. He’d been working in the heat all morning, and his dark hair was held back with a bandanna. There was a dollop of sunblock on his ear, as if he’d been applying it distractedly. “I don’t know why they bothered with these fake columns. They’re not the right size, and they’re not in the right place.”

  It was a lesson in the realities of Pompeii archaeology, where researchers often find themselves excavating previous reconstructions of the city as well as the city itself. Anderson said he’s found display cases and fake bits of architecture from the 19th century, as well as the 1910s and the 1950s. He showed me what looked like two rusted metal cages in the grass, roughly the shape of coffins, which are all that remains of a 1950s display of Samnite graves that lie beneath the villa’s Roman incarnation. “There’s this one moment when this villa is a showpiece in the 1950s. We have pictures of it. They repiped the water, and a fountain was running in the garden here. There were trees, and the fake columns. Then it was very quickly forgotten.” When he excavated the doorway to the villa, he found a lintel stone that had been placed in 1910. “You have to be prepared for anything,” he said.

  After 14 years running the Via Consolare Project, Anderson is grappling with two mysteries. What was this villa like during the city’s heyday? And how did previous digs alter its appearance for the sake of 20th-century tourists? Pompeii is a meta-archaeological site, revealing ancient history right alongside the history of archaeology as a field.

  Though earlier generations of archaeologists were fascinated by this villa’s wealthy owners, Anderson is part of a new wave of researchers influenced by Wallace-Hadrill who are interested in the domestic lives of ordinary people. That’s why he immediately took me through a door from the garden into the villa’s kitchen, where slaves, and freed slaves called liberti, would have worked. This was a luxurious space even for such an enormous villa. Anderson was astonished to discover the kitchen had four cooking platforms, which is incredibly rare. Most villas have two at the most. And this kitchen was roomy enough for at least a dozen people to work comfortably, with ample storage rooms adjacent to the central work area. Anderson and his colleagues were especially excited when they realized it had been replumbed with lead pipes during the first century. The pipes fed a fountain installed in the corner of the kitchen, providing endless fresh water for the chefs. This alone would have been an incredibly expensive and unusual feature, and Anderson wondered aloud why the villa owners would have commissioned it. One possibility is that they hosted a lot of feasts for guests. Another possibility is that the kitchen was also being used by the merchants selling food to passersby.

  We walked back out through the garden archaeology lab to get to Via Consolare, where Anderson described what the street would have looked like in 79 CE. As he talked, his fingers hovered in the air as if he were drawing an architectural diagram. The House of the Mosaic Columns stood at least three stories above the street, partly thanks to landscaping that propped it up with an artificial hill behind the garden. An open-air peristyle dominated the top floor, boasting a beautiful ocean view. This topmost level was built with a slight overhang, providing shade for the colonnaded sidewalk below. Anderson noted that the overhang also had the effect of blotting out the street view for people inside the peristyle, so they could enjoy the ocean view without seeing the dirty scene below.

  Like Julia Felix’s property, this villa was built with shops facing the street on the ground floor. From Via Consolare, the House of the Mosaic Columns would have looked like a long row of retail outlets, kind of like a strip mall, with a couple of entrances between the storefronts leading to the villa’s hidden garden and kitchens. Anderson showed me where a bronze metalworker’s shop once stood, alongside food stalls, bars, and more. “This is the longest single block of shops in the city other than the Via dell’Abbondanza itself,” he said. “That’s why I was drawn to this place.” He paused, lost in thought, and I imagined the shops around us filled with life, the sidewalk hazy with smoke from the blacksmith’s fire and spiked with the smell of cumin and coriander sizzling with fish in olive oil. “The villa is supported by these businesses monetarily, but also supported literally. It is its own metaphor,” he mused. “I don’t think that’s an association that would have been lost in antiquity.”

  “Certainly not to the people living on the bottom, propping it up,” I replied.

  Anderson chuckled and nodded. “For me, this isn’t about the Julius Caesars and emperors who we know too much about already—it’s the people we don’t know anything about. Even if we never know their names, we can manage to reconstruct a bit of their lives.”

  So who were the people who rented these shops from the villa’s owners? Most likely they were liberti whose lives were joined to their former owners by Roman law. Once a slave was freed, his or her master became known as a patron, and patrons generally took on the role of adoptive fathers to their former slaves.10 A libertus (or, if female, liberta) would usually remain with the family that had once enslaved him or her, running independent businesses or helping to manage the patron’s estate. Cicero wrote that his beloved libertus Tiro managed all the politician’s business affairs. By most estimates, Roman cities were thronging with slaves and liberti, partly because the patronage system made freeing slaves an economically appealing proposition. The villa’s owners would lose a piece of human property, but they would gain a loyal worker whose fortunes were tied to that of the household. Roman manumission was often slavery with benefits.

  King’s College historian Henrik Mouritsen, author of The Freedman in the Roman World, estimates that the typical Roman household would have been roughly half slaves, and a quarter to a third liberti.11 Anderson agrees. He speculates that the people running the shops “could all be slaves, or former slaves, or distant family relations.” Probably all of the above. Family connections were key to Roman life, and a household that required four cooking surfaces was probably quite large, full of many relationship permutations. Someone born a slave at Pompeii could climb nearly to the top of the social hierarchy, if he were lucky enough to be freed and given a nice position by his patron.

  Still, the growing liberti class was blocked from holding positions of political power. They had to content themselves with gaining status through civic organizations like the Augustales, a group created by Emperor Augustus for liberti who wanted to gain business and political connections. A libertus might hope that his children could vote, but he never would. Social hierarchy was under reconstruction, but the power gap between male elites and everyone else still smarted like an infected wound.

  There were also more subtle signs of class warfare. University of Reading classics professor Annalisa Marzano has uncovered evidence of what seems like a peculiarly modern conflict between the haves and have-
nots over access to the beaches on the Bay of Naples. Rich vacationers built enormous villas on the shoreline. Instead of building tabernas into their lower floors, they constructed aquaculture tanks that stretched into the sea.12 Marzano believes the idea was to lure even more fish into their artificial ponds. Presumably, slaves and liberti were in charge of managing these tanks, selling fish that their patrons didn’t eat at local markets in Pompeii, Herculaneum, and elsewhere along the coast. As this kind of villa became more popular, local fishers found their access to the beaches blocked. The families inside were stealing their livelihoods.

  Tensions came to a head a few decades after Vesuvius had blotted out Pompeii. Legal documents show two fishers petitioned the emperor Antoninus Pius to intervene on their behalf because villa owners were preventing them from fishing off the coast of their hometowns. Pius declared that anyone could have access to the sea, with one exception: nobody would be allowed to fish near the villas. Pompeii’s demise came right in the middle of an ongoing conflict between rich and poor, men and women, immigrant and Roman and indigenous. We may not know the names of individuals involved in these conflicts, but they left their marks on a city where Romans built with Africanum, female entrepreneurs funded the Augustales, and elite villas rested atop the tabernas of freed slaves.