Tuesday 12 May 2009

On the 24th day of August in the year of our Lord 79 ...

Before the first week of our holidays had passed, I had managed to fulfil another of my long-standing ambitions. Since I was in my early teens I had always wanted to be an archaeologist. Unfortunately for me there were a couple of obstacles in my that I was unable to overcome. In order to study archaeology in the olden days, you had to have A levels in 'The Classics' and I was at a comprehensive school that had thrown the baby out with the bathwater and had renounced as the work of the devil anything that smacked of the old grammar school system.

So. I ended up with poor A levels in French and German (Ds) and an O level in Latin (a C) that the head had very graciously allowed a few of us to do. Not enough to get me in to University College London to study archaeology though. No Greek. No qualifications on the works of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Gaius Julius Caesar or Gaius Valerius Catullus. No view on the ideas of Aristotle or Plato or the histories of Herodotus.

Anyway, the dream (if it could be said to be a dream any longer rather than simply an interest) continued and, in that October in 1999, I finally got to Pompeii. Amazing. Haunting. Evocative. Chaotic ... and full to the brim of American and Japanese tourists. Still, I loved it and could have wandered its streets aimlessly for days, trying to imagine the people who had lived, and died, there; imagining talking to them in my imperfect Latin.

We went to the theatres, the arena, the gymnasium, the gladiator barracks, the public baths (loads of them), the posh houses and the hovels, the bakeries, the take-aways and the shops ... and the brothel. The lupanara. Amazing. Stunning. And all in the awesome shadow of that mountain. The workshop of Hephaestus and Vulcan - the blacksmith of the Gods. Vesuvius.

This was where my roots lie. This is what my people came from even if it's not where my people came from. Where was H G Wells when you needed him?

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