The Guzzo years: an extraordinary period at Pompei of international collaboration in archaeological research of the highest importance, research master-minded by Piero Guzzo, research then promptly and beautifully published with the enlightened help of L'Erma, all at well under one Euro a page. What follows is a reaction of one person to some of the riches in these volumes, in the certainty that every reader will have their own list of articles that have opened their eyes.
No. 24 makes available superb reproductions of superb original paintings and drawings, very many being of works of art long disappeared, with a helpful ‘topographisches Register’: it is striking that monumental inscriptions hardly caught the eye of these artists, the tombstone of the Augustalis Caluentius Quietus forming a striking exception. In No. 25, I draw attention to the two articles by E. Curti and M. Carroll, both on the archaeology of the Temple of Venus, with my money on the former; by F. Coarelli on the whole process of the urban development of Pompei from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period; and by R. Cassetta and C. Costantino, ‘Vivere sulle mura’, a remarkable integration of the different types of evidence for a house and its owners: it is a pity that they adopt the less likely translation of eksuk amvíannud, ‘by this road’, rather than ‘from this quartier’. The same theme occupies the whole of No. 26, which reconstructs as far as possible the complexes of sculptural material house by house, against the horrifying background that a third of the items now in the Museo Nazionale have no known context.
No comment is needed on No. 27, the theme an obvious attraction to contemporary tourists among others: the volume was in any case the only one of the group of books borrowed from the Joint Library as I was writing this review. But I should like to single out and draw attention in No. 28 to pp. 42–7, ‘Il sistema economico-sociale’, on the use of paintings to (help to) create a hierarchy of rooms in a house: the order in which one now visits the rooms of some houses sometimes obscures this. No. 29, because CIL IV in fact included some Oscan inscriptions, reproduces a selection of these, a useful reminder of the written language of Pompei, probably down to the Sullan colony, though the choice of early drawings is idiosyncratic and unhelpful: IV, 1176 = p. 529, fig. 7 = Imagines Italicae, Pompei 49, with a much better picture from Fiorelli's great Monumenta Epigraphica Pompeiana; IV, 105 = p. 530, fig. 14 = Pompei 2, again from Fiorelli; IV, 830 = p. 532, fig. 39 = Pompei 30, from three separate sources; IV, 1175, c = p. 532, fig. 42 = Pompei 31, four sources; the inscription identified as Vetter 30 is in fact Vetter 32, b = Pompei 32; Vetter 24 = Pompei 3, 27 = 6, and 34 = 55 are now all much deteriorated, and again remind us how much we owe to Fiorelli; Vetter 28 has four pictures, as against a mere two with Pompei 7, outstandingly useful.
Reg. VI, 13, is conspicuous for a doctor's surgery and a textile workshop, and pp. 430–3 contain an important up-date on amphorae from Pompei, an area where the imprecision of nineteenth-century descriptions is an ongoing source of confusion, which these pages do much to reduce; but the authors have forgotten the Oscan period of Pompei in claiming on p. 275 that Ouius is a ‘praenomen poco comune’. No. 31 has useful photographs of Vetter 32, c = Pompei 58, though only of the inscription and not of the rather engaging tree growing out of the upright hasta of the K; and of Vetter 64, much better than with Pompei 65.
These are volumes of extraordinary immediacy and depth, united of course in their intellectual quality and commitment, unified perhaps even more in the number and diversity of the fields that they advance.
