Resurrecting Pompeii by Estelle Lazer Read Free Book Online Page A

Arria Marcella. He keeps returning to Pompeii for moonlight visits but is never able to relive his previous experience, though he goes with a heart filled with hope. Despite his wishes and desires, ‘Arria Marcella obstinately remained dust’. 73
    Finally he marries a young English girl who is madly in love with him. She feels that despite being a good husband, he displays evidence of being in love with another. She investigates to the best of her ability but can never find evidence of a rival, but who would imagine that her rival is a long-dead corpse?
    Part soft-core pornography, part travelogue, this work was too idiosyncratic to have the impact of The Last Days of Pompeii . Like Bulwer-Lytton, Gautier provided detailed, almost didactic, descriptions of the site. He also employed the same human remains as those used by Bulwer-Lytton as inspiration for the characters of Julia and Diomed, though in Gautier’s story they are imbued with different personalities and are called Arria Marcella and Arrius Diomedes. These same skeletons were also used for the characters in Ferdinand Gregorovius’ poem Euphorion: eine Dichtung aus Pompeji , which was published in 1858. In his tale, the skeletons retain the relationship of father and daughter. The father is still Diomedes but the daughter is now called Ione. They vary from the reconstructed individuals in the other works in that Diomedes is portrayed as an entrepreneur and Ione is much more gentle than either Julia or the siren portrayed in Arria Marcella . 74
    The skeletons found in the so-called Villa of Diomedes were found over the course of two years and had all the appropriate attributes for inclusion in Pompeian literature; they were numerous and they were found in interesting contexts with valuable and evocative associated artefacts. In 1771, the skeleton routinely interpreted as Diomedes, the dominus or master of the house was, as described above, found in the portico surrounding the garden, holding a key and accompanied by one of the most impressive collections of coins found in Pompeii. The remains of another individual were discovered near this skeleton, and were interpreted as being those of a slave. A large group of skeletons was discovered a year later in the cryptoporticus corridor. 75 A clearly female form could be discerned, impressed in the ash around the bones of one of the skeletons (see Chapter 10). 76 This became the ever-changing daughter of Diomedes. There is no compelling reason, apart from the circumstantial evidence of the key and the coins, for the interpretation of the skeleton as the dominus , and there is even less evidence to support the assumption that the skeleton whose form was preserved was this person’s daughter.
Impact of popular literature on academic research in Pompeii and other Campanian sites
Possibly as a result of the history of the Campanian excavations, especially with respect to the problems associated with the documentation of the sites, the distinction between popular and academic literature on Pompeii and Herculaneum tends to be somewhat blurred. As stated above, it was often only through popular writing, like that of William Gell, that information was made available at all in the early periods of excavation. Much of the information for these years was recorded and disseminated by gentleman scholars, like Hamilton and Gell, who observed the progress of the excavations. This perhaps created a precedent for a popular rather than a scientific approach to these sites. The legacy of this can be clearly seen in the tremendous influence that popular culture has exerted on the perception of the sites. It can be demonstrated through an examination of the influence of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Last Days of Pompeii on the interpretation of the skeletal evidence from Pompeii and Herculaneum.
    It can be argued that The Last Days of Pompeii has been the single most influential work in relation to how the site and, more specifically, the