monuments that were connected to one another geographically and

also chronologically, and were also made out of the

same material: concrete faced with opus

incertum.

I remind you of three of those today: of the Sanctuary of

Jupiter Anxur at Terracina; of the Sanctuary of Hercules

Victor at Tivoli, in the center;

and then on the right the Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia

at Palestrina.

We're going to do something entirely different today.

We're going to look at a single city,

one city, in all its aspects: its public and private

architecture, its civic, commercial,

and religious buildings.

We can't do this sort of thing very often,

because too few Roman cities are either well preserved enough

or well-excavated enough to allow such an overview.

But this is no ordinary city.

This is a very special city.

The city we will be concentrating on today is

Pompeii.

Pompeii was located in an area of Italy called Campania.

It was located near Naples; it was located near the

Mediterranean Sea.

It was a small resort town in the late first century B.C.

and into the first century A.D.

And you can see it on this map here, and it's right here.

You can see that this area of Campania is obviously south of

Rome.

It is along, again, the Mediterranean Sea.

And you can see Pompeii here also,

with its sister city of Herculaneum,

and some of the other well-known cities from this

area: Boscoreale, Oplontis, for example,

and Naples itself, ancient Neapolis.

You can see this cluster of these cities that make up

Campania.

This was an area--the town itself again was a small resort

town.

It was a town that obviously had its own population of people

who made their money largely from commerce,

because they were located so close to the sea.

But it was also a spot that was highly favored by the glitterati

of Rome, who used to come down to this

area of Rome, not only to go to Pompeii

itself, but to establish villas, to build villas in the vicinity

of Pompeii.

And we have imperial villas at places like Oplontis and at a

place called Boscotrecase that is located here as well,

and along what is now the Amalfi Coast and on the island

of Capri.

So this was a town again that was noticed and was visited,

even by the most elite in the city of Rome,

in the capital city of Rome itself.

But what's very important for us, from the outset,

is to recognize that although Pompeii,

as we know it today, was essentially a Roman city,

it had a history that was much longer than that,

that went back much further than that.

And I'd like to go over some of the major highlights of the

history of Pompeii, because they will situate us

and will help us to understand the city's architecture.

The history of Pompeii, as I noted, is much longer than

the history of Roman Pompeii.

It goes back as far as Rome itself.

It goes back to the eighth century B.C.--the same Iron Age

period--when Romulus was founding the city of Rome.

Pompeii goes back that far as well.

It was first overseen by an Italic tribe called the Oscans,

but the Oscans were soon taken over by an even more powerful

tribe called the Samnites.

And the Samnites are in fact extremely important for the city

of Pompeii and for the architecture that we'll review

today.

The Samnite period in Pompeii lasted from the fourth through

the third and even into the second centuries B.C.,

up to 80 B.C., because it was in 89 that

Pompeii fell to Rome.

We've talked about Rome colonizing this particular part

of Italy -- not only the area right around

it, but the area south of it -- and

Pompeii fell to Rome in an important military campaign in

89 B.C.

And in 80 B.C.

Sulla made Pompeii a Roman colony.

What happened thereafter was the Samnites,

who had built homes for themselves and public buildings

that we'll study here, the Samnites were essentially

thrown out of their homes.

Their property was confiscated, and that property was given

instead to the Roman veterans.

We've talked about the fact that that was the way the Romans

operated.

They paid back their veterans for loyal service by giving them

land, and they usually gave them land of those that they had

conquered.

So that happens here as well; Samnite property confiscated,

and the Roman veterans settle in their homes and begin to redo

them, settle into using their public

buildings but begin to remake them in the Roman image.

The next century and a half saw the construction of Pompeii's

most famous buildings, but we should not forget,

and we'll concentrate in part on that today,

that some of these buildings had their genesis under the

Samnites.

During this period there was a very high civilization in

Pompeii.

There was trade with Greek cities and especially with the

Greek city of Neapolis, Neapolis being the ancient name

for Naples.

The next very important year in the history of Pompeii was the

year A.D.

62, when the city was literally-- the city of Pompeii

was literally shaken to its foundations by a very

significant earthquake-- a very significant earthquake

indeed.

And to give you some sense of that earthquake,

I show you a frieze that encircles a shrine that was

located in the house, or that was commissioned for

the house, as decoration and as a place to

place the household gods that the owner and his family

worshipped.

The shrine had a frieze around it.

The man himself, by the way, was named Lucius

Caecilius Iucundus.

And we're very lucky--you don't have to remember his name,

but Lucius Caecilius Iucundus--and Iucundus,

fortunately we have a portrait preserved of Iucundus.

So we can get a good sense of what he looked like,

literally warts and all, because you can see that he had

a huge wart on the lower left side of his face.

And he was willing to have himself memorialized,

and here we are sitting and looking at him today in this

classroom in New Haven, as he was really was,

with this large wart on the lower left side of his face.

But a wonderful portrait of Iucundus,

the owner of this particular house,

who was obviously so struck, and probably so effected in his

own life by the earthquake, that he decided to have a

relief commissioned that would depict the event of 62 A.D.

And you see exactly -- you see what is happening here.

You can see, in fact, the great Temple of

Jupiter, the Capitolium of Pompeii, which we'll talk about

today, literally collapsing.

And you can see that in front of that temple were two tall

bases with equestrian statues honoring important people of the

city.

Those look also like they are shaking in their boots,

so to speak, and about to fall over.

If you look down here, you see the city wall.

And note, your ashlar masonry, your opus quadratum,

and the use of headers and stretchers in this wall,

the wall of the city of Pompeii.

But you can see the gate is not doing too well;

it also seems to be tottering and about to fall down.

So this is a graphic depiction of what happened then,

and you can--it gives you some sense of the significance of

this for the people of Pompeii.

Now at the end of this, like in so many natural

disasters--obviously these people loved living where they

did; it's a beautiful part of the

world-- and they essentially stood up

and dusted themselves off and began to remake their city,

to restore their city to what it was.

And we have, from this point on,

from 62 on, almost immediately seventeen

years of frenzied building activity in which the Pompeians

tried to bring their city back from the dead,

so to speak, to bring it back to what it had

once been.

But you know the punch line here, you know the end of the

story.

You know that all of this work, all of this seventeen years of

hard work was all for naught, because on that fateful day of

August 24^(th) in 79 A.D.

the long dormant volcano of Vesuvius--

which you see looming up behind the Temple of Jupiter in Pompeii

today-- the long dormant volcano of

Vesuvius erupted, covering the city of Pompeii

and all of its sister cities in a mass,

or in a blanket of ash and lava.

Covering it forever?

Well not quite forever; almost forever.

Because as you also know, the city was rediscovered in

the eighteenth century, and when it was rediscovered

what happened there first was a period of treasure hunting.

Well-to-do individuals, primarily from Europe,

made a beeline for Pompeii, once it was rediscovered,

and began to build their own personal collections of art from

what lay around.

They took jewelry; they took metal items,

precious metal items.

They even did the unspeakable by cutting portrait paintings

and other paintings out of the walls and taking them back to

decorate their own palaces and villas in other parts of the

world.

That went on for a while, but fortunately not too long.

The archaeologists gained the upper hand and we begin to see

not long after that a period of scientific excavation.

And I show you two images here, which show that scientific

excavation, which show some of the houses of Pompeii being

revealed by archaeologists.

And, of course, it was all--the good work that

they have done, and work continues apace at

Pompeii excavations still go on in parts of the city,

that have allowed most of the city,

as far as we can tell, to be revealed to us today.

Now this tragedy that befell Pompeii, in August of 79,

was indeed a tragedy for them, for the people who lived there

obviously.

It was also a tragedy for the reigning emperor,

a man by the name of Titus, T-i-t-u-s, who's honored in the

famous Arch of Titus in Rome.

We'll talk about him and his architecture in Rome later in

the semester.

But it was a disaster for him, and he had to contend with a

plague and a fire in Rome also at the same time.

It was very difficult for him, and poor man,

even though he was quite young, died of natural causes after

only three years in office.

And I think it was in part this catastrophe that had happened,

in the Bay of Naples area, that led in part to his--

the stress of it led in part to his demise.

So this was a great tragedy for him, a great tragedy for the

people of Pompeii, a great tragedy for Rome.

But it was a stroke of good luck for archaeologists,

and in a sense for us as well, because of course what happened

to Pompeii is something very different than what happened to

Rome.

What happened to Pompeii is that it was--its life was

snuffed out all at once, it came to an end all at once.

Compare this to Rome, which has been inhabited over

millennia.

In Rome buildings have been redone, rethought,

remade over time.

That never happened in Pompeii because Pompeii again died

essentially in August of 79, and everything that was there

was preserved, just as it was,