Forever Today

There is something utterly amazing about walking down streets that are millennia old. Your feet are stepping on the same stones that someone more or less just like you stepped on thousands of years earlier, hurrying to work, or out for an evening stroll, perhaps stopping into some restaurant, some shop, some market, some temple.

I’ve been fortunate enough to wander such streets in several places, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Teotihuacán in Mexico City and now Pompeii here in Italy. What’s remarkable about the experience is not the age, but the gap between then and now, which feels simultaneously immense and yet very small at the same time.

It feels small because when you wander around places like Pompeii you realize that human beings have changed very little over what seems like, to us anyway, vast expanses of time. Pompeii had the same elements of cities today, a central square, markets, temples, government offices, even fast food. Not much has changed over the years, though togas aren’t much in vogue these days.

Fast food, Pompeii style.

At the same time you can’t help but notice the chariot ruts in the stones, the smooth polish of well-worn streets that obviously saw centuries of use even before they were buried.

Chariot ruts. That was a long time ago. So close, and yet so very far away.

There are two remarkable things about Pompeii that make it different from the crumbling ruins of other civilizations I’ve been to. The first is that Pompeii was not some religious site, not a sacred place at all. It was just a town. Something of a resort town, but still a commercial center. People made and sold wine and garum. Government offices kept track of grain and fish and people frequented fast food joints and brothels. In a word, Pompeii was ordinary, and when it comes to archeological sites open to the public, that’s unusual.

The other reason Pompeii is different is of course that it was preserved by the very thing that destroyed it. Pompeii lay buried under ash for nearly 2000 years, preserved just as it was on the morning of August 24, 79 AD when Mount Vesuvius erupted.

The vast majority of the some 20,000 people that once lived in the city were able to escape the blast. Around 2,000 people, for whatever reason, did not run away and were killed by poisonous gases from the eruption. When the ash descended it buried them where they lay, under twenty five feet of debris.

Thanks to an ingenious idea by an Italian archaeologist in the mid 19th century, their final poses have been preserved in plaster. When the bodies at Pompeii were buried they decayed, eventually turning to mostly dust, as all of us will, but that left empty spaces in the hardening ash. Archaeologists found those empty spaces, poured in plaster, let it set, and then excavated around it — a perfect mold of the dead body.

The creepy thing about the plaster casts is how perfectly they capture the expressions of terror, horror, and sometimes, what looks like resignation, on people’s faces. It’s yet another bizarre way that Pompeii manages to both bridge time and remind you how vast that bridge between then and now really is. The casts are people, nearly 2000 year old people, but they could easily have been formed in some disaster today.

Sadly, the perfectly perserved version of Pompeii that archeologists found in 1748 has been in steady decline ever since. The minute they began excavating it, Pompeii began to fall victim to the forces of time that it had so neatly avoided under all that ash. Weathering, erosion, light exposure, water damage, poor methods of excavation and reconstruction and introduced plants and animals have all taken their toll, to say nothing of tourism, vandalism and theft.

Italy being Italy, Pompeii is in a steady state of decline. Just last year an entire house — admittedly, not one open to the public — collapsed thanks to water seeping under it.

That’s why, at this point, Pompeii is largely just walls, stone roads and a handful of marble structures. The frescos, statues and even most of the plaster death molds have long since been carted off to the archeological museum in Naples where you can see elaborate mosaics and the ever-popular “Gabinetto Segreto”, otherwise known as the erotic art of Pompeii.

Some of the erotic frescos and sculptures were pulled out of the brothels, while others were in private homes and baths. To say the ancient Romans were a sex-obsessed bunch would be to, as most guides at Pompeii seem to do, apply current sexual mores to ancient times. There were brothels in Pompeii, that much is indisputable. But beyond that, to suggest, as many guides I overheard did, that the more (currently) taboo frescos of gay and lesbian sex (or the sculpture of a man having sex with a goat) were jokes intended to make brothel patrons chuckle, seems a stretch — pure conjecture really. Who knows what they were for?

It’s all guess work at this point. Even if you turn to writing from the time, well now you have one more opinion, one author’s take on the times, but still no real sense of what the culture thought. It is a long way from here to there, there’s just no getting around that.

Yet, maybe it isn’t. Beliefs change, morals change, but people, they seem to stay basically the same. Suppose Charleston or even New York were buried under ash tomorrow, left as they are today for an eternity. Would people 2000 years from now accurately reconstruct our way of life?

They might get the gist of it — we lived in buildings, we had other buildings for worshiping gods and still others for buying kebabs, but they would miss the finer points. Yet, even without the subtleties they would know one thing for sure: these were people, human beings, and they lived more or less like us.

Whether you drive chariots or scooters doesn’t matter, something is always marking our passing, something is always making ruts in the road. And sometimes that’s all you need to know.