Pompeii’s last meal: wine, pomegranates and dormice
Last Supper in Pompeii Ashmolean Museum, Oxford ★★★★★
Stuffed dormice. Flamingos and parrots. Live birds sewn up inside a pig. Today, when we think of the ancient Romans dining, we imagine semi-robed sybarites gorging themselves on extravagant “delicacies” such as these. We picture luxury and excess during the last days of Rome.
Last Supper in Pompeii, a brilliant new exhibition featuring 400 objects at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, seeks to interrogate the myths surrounding the dining habits of the ancient Romans, and set the record straight – though, it turns out, snacking on dormice really was an ancient Roman thing. (In a moment of frivolity bordering on silliness, curator Paul Roberts embellishes a terracotta
glirarium, or dormouse jar, used to fatten up vermin in town, with a model of a plump, furry rodent, seemingly leaping to freedom.)
More than anything, though, the inhabitants of Pompeii – perfectly preserved under falling ash following the cataclysmic eruption of Vesuvius in AD79 – craved a fermented fish sauce known as garum. This was a condiment as ubiquitous as, say, Lea & Perrins today, and they added it to everything, including pudding. Indeed, in ancient times, demand for garum around the Mediterranean was
so high that people got filthy rich exporting the stuff in amphorae. One such trader, Aulus Umbricius Scaurus, once described as the “ketchup king of Campania”, owned a sprawling villa to the west of Pompeii, and makes a memorable cameo in the show.
Last Supper in Pompeii is a superb title for an exhibition, and Roberts delivers on its promise with panache. Six years ago, he curated the British Museum’s blockbuster Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum – but this, he says, is the show he has always wanted to stage, ever since a colleague gave him a book about Roman food a decade ago.
Inevitably, there is overlap with the British Museum exhibition, such as a spectacular mosaic panel, from Naples, which once graced the floor of a well-appointed triclinium or dining room. Executed using fine tesserae, or cubes, it features a panoply of highly naturalistic sea creatures, including an octopus with a hypnotist’s wide-eyed, intense stare, and an eel rippling its body like a sine wave, all teeming together as though captive in a tank.
The mosaic’s microscopic observation is impressive; its evocation of movement, as all the slimy, scaly fishy bodies seem to flicker and twist through water, even more so. On the left, a solitary kingfisher peers into the black waters from a rock.
Thanks to the exhibition’s focused theme, though, as well as the quality of the many loans from Italian museums, the Ashmolean’s show is far from the reheated leftovers of the banquet at the British Museum.
It begins by examining where the dining customs of the ancient Romans came from. A tomb from Paestum, dating from around 370BC, reveals what the pre-roman Italic peoples hoped to snack on in the afterlife: inside, archaeologists found a dish bearing terracotta models of food, including one morsel that looks uncannily like a custard cream. Focaccia bread and pomegranates, almonds and grapes: all were staples of the Roman diet.
After a section establishing the industrial scale of Roman vineyards on the slopes of Vesuvius (think of the fertile countryside surrounding Pompeii as the Napa Valley of its day), we are plunged into a narrow space evoking the town’s busy, doublestoreyed streets. Here, we get a taste of everyday Roman fare. A carbonised loaf of bread, divided into eight bulging wedges, sits beside a silver sweet tray borne by a bronze statuette of a comically well-endowed street hawker.
We are reminded of both the proximity and remoteness of the ancient Roman world. A frescoed advertisement for a bar, decorated with an enormous golden phoenix – a pub sign, essentially – feels familiar. A good-luck tintinnabulum or wind chime, in the form of a man fighting his own huge phallus, which once “protected” customers in a bar, does not.
At this point, things go upmarket, as we step inside a wealthy Roman’s house – through the atrium and past a “garden” decorated with statuary, before arriving at the setting for a smart dinner party: the climax of the exhibition. Beautiful artworks and finely wrought objects, including that marine mosaic, greet us on every side. A candelabrum held by a classical bronze youth – surely one of the smartest lamp stands ever conceived – stands before a magical fresco, from Pompeii’s so-called House of the Golden Bracelet, offering a fantastical view onto a garden, with songbirds and exotic Egyptian figures half-hidden among the greenery.
There are silver cups for guests, including a delicate strainer for fishing out the herbs and spices that the Romans added to wine, along with honey and hot water; bronze vessels that would have been handled only by slaves; and a stunning array of intact Roman glass, including a beautiful blue ribbed bowl, speckled with flashes of white. Dining-obsessed Instagrammers, eat your hearts out.
At the far end, we spy one of the most memorable artworks in the exhibition: a black-and-white mosaic panel depicting a grinning skeleton clutching two askoi or wine jugs. Carpe diem, this deathly vision seems to urge, since this banquet isn’t going to last forever. You can almost hear Vesuvius rumbling ominously in the distance.
A small section follows devoted to the Roman kitchen (a hot, dirty, back-of-house area, where, surprisingly, the latrine was also located), before the final room, which explores dining customs in Roman Britain – an era unlike our own, seemingly, in that people gladly followed continental Europe.
Except in what they drank. On these shores, beer, not wine, was the most popular tipple: there is evidence of a beer industry thriving in Britain as early as the first century AD, swiftly up and running again in London, after the city had been razed to the ground during Boadicea’s revolt.
As Roberts says, Pompeii has always been a “portal” to the ancient Roman world. Still, it requires skill and imagination to stage an exhibition this absorbing and dramatic. Throughout, the mise-en-scène is deftly designed, without ever feeling naff, while the variety of exhibits stimulates a compelling sense of the granular textures and complexity of daily life in Pompeii. Always, it is the little details that fascinate the most.
Finally, there’s a moving coda: a resin cast preserving the remains of one of Vesuvius’s victims, a wealthy woman who attempted to flee with five gold rings, her toothy grimace locked in a pain-stricken scream worthy of Francis Bacon.
By providing so many human touches, the Ashmolean’s show reminds us that this lady wasn’t some distant ancestor, so remote she may as well have been from another species. Rather, she’s one of us.
From Thursday until Jan 12. Tickets and details: ashmolean.org
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