Last time, we talked about a number of 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 these 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 it's 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 execu-, 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 early and into the first century A.D. And you can see it on this map here and it's, it's it's right here you can see that this area 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. And you can see this cluster of these cities that make up Campania. This was an area amid this, 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, to go 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, was noticed and was visited, even by the most elite in the city of Rome, in, in Rome itself, in the city, in the center, in the capital city of Rome itself. But, what's very important for us from the outside to recognize that although Pompeii, as we know it today, was essentially a Roman city. It had a history that went much longer than that. That went 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 8th century BC, 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 BC up to AD, BC, 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 BC and in 80 BC Sulla made Pompeii a Roman colony. What happened thereafter was the Samnites who had built homes for themselves in public building 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 Roman's 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 properly confiscated and the Roman verterans 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 or 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 Pomepii 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, a frieze that, 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 worshiped. The shrine had a frieze around it. The man himself, by the way, was named, Lucius Caecilius Lucundus, and we're very lucky even to remember his name. But Lucius Caecilius Lucundus. And Lucundus, fortunately, we have a portrait preserved of Lucundus, 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 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 affected in his own life by the earthquake that he decided to 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, that Capitolium of Pompeii, which we'll talk about today, literally collapsing. And you can see that in front of that temple with 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 is also seems to be tottering and about to fall down. So this is a, a, a graphic depiction of what happened then and you can, it, it gives you some sense of, 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 17 years of frenzied building activity in which the Pompeians try 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 punchline, here, you know the end of the story. You know that all of this work, all of this 17 years of hard work, was all for naught because on that fateful day of August 24th in 79 AD, 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 of. >> [COUGH] >> Or in a blanket of of ash and lava. Covering it forever. >> [COUGH] >> Well, not quite forever. Almost forever. Because as you also know, the city was rediscovered in the 18th 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 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, did the unspeakable by cutting portrait paintings of 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 archaeologist 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 shows some of the houses of Pompeii being revealed by archaeologists. and of course it was all of that the good work that they have done, and work continues to pace at Pompeii's excavation still goes on in parts of the city that have allowed most of the city as far as we can tell, to be revealed to us, to us today.
