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British Museum's Pompeii exhibition has its emphasis firmly on life
Pompeii and Herculaneum are bywords for sudden death, but the British
Museum's major new exhibition will conjure up Roman cities bustling
with life

Pompeii – and to a much lesser extent, Herculaneum, the less visited,
and so more rewarding, destination for modern tourists – are bywords
for death. The big moment in exhibitions devoted to Pompeii is usually
courtesy of one of those eternally poignant casts of figures – images
in plaster of the voids once filled by the human form, flesh decayed
to nothingness after the superheated debris and ash hardened into a
solid mass around them. (There are no such figures from Herculaneum.
Nearer Vesuvius, the town was engulfed by even hotter pyroclastic
surges than those that poured over Pompeii. Humans were immediately
pulverised to the bone, brains boiling in their skulls.) The British
Museum's forthcoming exhibition, Life and Death in Pompeii and
Herculaneum, does contain some of these casts; but it has its emphasis
firmly on life. The first image in the show is the famous "cave canem"
mosaic; its last a reminder of the living people of the cities, before
the catastrophe of 24 August AD79: a set of characterful sculpted
portrait heads, the sort of warts-and-all Roman busts that make you
gasp at the familiarity and ordinariness of these long-gone
Campanians.