How to party like a Pompeiian

others for their partners, trying to make out their voices. Some wept for their own fate, others for those of their relations. There were some who prayed for death through fear of death. Many raised their hands to the gods; more reasoned that there were now no gods anywhere and that night would last forever and ever across the universe.”

Two millennia on from the eruption of Vesuvius, the enormity of this suffering continues to haunt us: over three million people a year descend upon this mass grave. The riches of this portal to the ancient world – 30 per cent of which remains unexcavated – are legendary. To take the area’s astonishing frescoes alone, more survive here than in the rest of the Roman empire put together.

In Last Supper at Pompeii, the city and its environs will be installed in the Ashmolean for six months – unprecedented, given the importance of the loans being exhibited. There will be Greekstyle sculptures in marble and rare bronze, silver tableware, a plastercast piglet, rarely-seen carbonised food, miraculously intact glass wine jugs, kitchen equipment, a heater for mulled wine, elaborate mosaics, and several of those frescoes. Almost half of these 400 objects have never left the Bay of Naples before; others – the Resin Lady, not least – are unlikely ever to travel again, given their fragility. All of which means that Last

Supper in Pompeii is that rare thing: a bona fide blockbuster outside of London.

The subject of food and drink has been strategically chosen to get to the heart of Pompeiians’ everyday existence, meaning this is less the story of emperors and generals than of shopkeepers, cooks and slaves – plus the odd florid drunk. For Roberts, who grew up in the restaurant business, it is the exhibition he always dreamt of creating, even though he was responsible for the British Museum’s 2013 hit Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum.

“I wouldn’t have done this if it were just going to be another Pompeii retelling,” he tells me. “There’s great power in food: power through money, power through influence. But, ultimately, food is never without its social aspect: it’s about people, family, friends. I feel quite emotional about this show. This is what I planned to do at the British Museum. That exhibition was a dream come true, but it grew ever bigger and gained a different focus. I hope audiences will see themselves in this exhibition. Few things connect us more than eating and drinking – even sex doesn’t qualify. It’s something we all do.”

Before the eruption, “Campania Felix,” happy Campania, was celebrated for the verdancy of its rich, vine-covered landscape, beloved by the deities Bacchus, Hercules and Venus, securers of fertility and harvest. A beautiful marble Bacchus plays host at the entrance to the exhibition, emphasising that only under divine

A FEAST FOR THE EYES Among the exhibits in Oxford are the above mosaic, c 100 BC, from Pompeii’s House of the Geometric Mosaics and, below, the ‘Resin Lady’