THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021 43
face—handsome, with deep-set eyes
and a long, straight nose—looked out
from a wall. Perhaps it was a portrait
of the lady of the house. During the
excavation of the mansion, a horrify-
ing scene had been found: the skele-
tons of men, women, and children who
had sought refuge in an inner room of
the house, trying to shield themselves
from the ash, the heat, and the gases
spewed by the volcano. In the same
building, archeologists discovered a
box filled with amulets: figurines, phal-
luses, and engraved beads. In announc-
ing the find, Massimo Osanna, ever
the showman, had called it a “sorcer-
ers’ treasure trove,” noting that the
items contained no gold and therefore
might have belonged to a servant or
an enslaved person. Such items were
commonly associated with women,
Osanna had noted, and might have
been worn as charms against bad luck.
Other scholars have warned that
the suggestion of a sorcerer, or sorcer-
ess, verges on embellishment, given
the paucity of material evidence. The
contents of the box are now displayed
in the Pompeii museum, with no men-
tion of a sorcerer in the accompany-
ing text. Yet, as the daylight dwindled
in Pompeii, it was tempting to follow
Osanna’s lead and imagine the scene:
terrified members of the household
clutching one another, their social dif-
ferences levelled by disaster, as a Pom-
peiian who believed in dark magic
made unavailing imprecations against
unrelenting gods. My mystical vision
evaporated, however, after the man-
sion’s custodian showed me another
inscription, which had been scratched
into the lintel of the house’s external
doorway. It read “Leporis fellas”: “Lep-
oris sucks dick.”
W
hen Zuchtriegel, the current
Pompeii director, was over-
seeing the site at Paestum, where
three Greek temples have stood since
the fifth and sixth centuries B.C., he
made a number of innovations. Vis-
itors were invited to watch ongoing
excavations, and the storerooms in-
side the site’s museum were opened
for public perusal.
Zuchtriegel told me that, in his
leadership role at Pompeii, he intends
to continue embracing new approaches.
As we walked along the Via Stabiana,
with its narrow, elevated sidewalks
that helped Pompeii’s residents skirt
the muck of its streets, he emphasized
that archeology “is a field that is very
much evolving, thanks to new dis-
coveries and methodologies, but also
thanks to new questions.” He went
on, “Today, we have a much broader
view of ancient society. Archeology
started as a field dominated by male,
upper-class, European, white schol-
ars, and noblemen and
connoisseurs, and this very
much conditioned arche-
ological research, and what
people were interested in.
Now, thanks to new per-
spectives—post-colonial
studies, and gender stud-
ies, and feminism—we
have a really different per-
spective on antiquity.”
Among the discoveries
being examined through these new in-
terpretative lenses was the first sig-
nificant find announced under Zuch-
triegel’s tenure: the remains of a man
identified as Marcus Venerius Secundio.
The tomb was found not in Regio V
but east of Pompeii, where a necrop-
olis had been unearthed close to one
of the city gates. Unusually for an adult
burial, the deceased had been embalmed
rather than cremated, and the body
was so well preserved that hair and
even part of an ear were intact.
Secundio, Zuchtriegel explained,
was a freedman, having formerly been
a public slave—essentially, a muni-
cipal worker owned by the city. “Of
course, nobody wanted to be a slave—
it was very humiliating to be the prop-
erty of someone,” Zuchtriegel said.
“On the other hand, if you were a very
poor freedman you were less well
off than a household slave, some of
whom were educators of the children
of rich people, or secretaries who were
part of the team that carried on the
business of the owner.” It is unknown
how Secundio gained his freedom,
but historical records indicate that a
public slave could raise funds to buy
himself out of servitude. Evidently,
Secundio ascended within Pompei-
ian society, becoming an augustalis,
or a priest in the imperial cult—one
of the few high-ranking positionsopen to men who were not freeborn.
According to the funerary inscription
on his tomb, Secundio was a patron
of the arts, paying for ludi—musical
or theatrical events that were per-
formed in Latin and, significantly, in
Greek. “This is the first time we have
this direct evidence of Greek plays
in Pompeii,” Zuchtriegel told me.
Scholars had hypothesized, based on
evidence in wall paintings and graf-
fiti, that such events took place, but
the inscription provides
exciting confirmation.
In the decades before
the eruption of Vesuvius,
Zuchtriegel went on, there
was a fashion in the Ro-
man Empire for Greek-
language performance,
which was established by
the emperor Nero, who
ruled from 54 to 68 A.D.,
and who fancied himself
not just an aficionado of Greek drama
and song but also a performer. (Ac-
cording to the historian Suetonius,
Nero “made his début” as a singer in
Naples, so enjoying himself onstage
that he ignored the rumblings of an
earthquake in order to finish his per-
formance.) Nero’s reputation as a ty-
rant has lately been reconsidered by
scholars, and the evidence of Greek-
language ludi in Pompeii buttresses the
revised image of the Emperor as a pop-
ular leader; it also underscores the ex-
tent to which even a provincial city
like Pompeii was influenced by the cul-
tural fashions of the capital. “Pompeii
and Campania had this really multi-
cultural environment,” Zuchtriegel said.
“People came from the Eastern Med-
iterranean, and there were the old
Greek colonies at Naples and Paestum.
We have evidence of Jewish people
here at Pompeii.” (Graffiti found in the
city cite individuals with the names
Sarah, Martha, and Ephraim.)
Zuchtriegel told me that, as direc-
tor, he intended to build on Osanna’s
work, a decade after the rescue oper-
ation of the Great Pompeii Project was
initiated. Other damaged fringes of
Regio V are to be shored up, and new,
limited excavations are to take place
in another district, Regio IX. Simi-
larly, work is continuing to protect
areas outside the gates of Pompeii