Mary Beard skilfully dispels many of the myths that have built up around the destruction of the city, and casts a shrewd eye on how the surviving evidence may have been corrupted by restoration attempts.  For example, there is the famous example of the bodies of a family found trapped in a house, one of whom was a heavily pregnant woman: one of the bodies had its lower premolars incorrectly glued into the sockets of its upper incisors during restoration, which other observers could have mistaken as botched Latin dentistry.  Skeletons found on the site may well have been later looters trying to break into buried houses, rather than their owners perishing in an attempt to escape.  The fact that there was so much decorating going on the city at the time of the eruption may have been due to tremors in the days leading up to the volcanic explosion, rather than a hangover from the large earthquake recorded in Pompeii 17 years earlier. Even the actual date of the eruption, and the closeness of Pompeii to the sea at the time still seem to be up for debate.   There’s also the fact that much of the site was devastated by Allied bombing in 1943, so many of the ‘remains’ we see today have effectively been rebuilt.  Indeed, many of the remains originally discovered in the mid 18th century have now given way to entropy, so what’s left is gradually being lost.  A lot of the houses were named after their supposed inhabitants, but some of the evidence, such as the discovery of signet rings inside them, forms quite flimsy evidence.

One thing is for sure though: that Mary Beard has brilliantly brought the city and its inhabitants back to life.  Pompeii is also superbly presented by Profile:  there are many lavish colour plates along with grayscale illustrations of art and artefacts from the city.  Mary Beard’s Pompeii is undoubtedly one of the best books of this or any other year.