I spent a week in Naples in January 2020, and on a sunny winter’s day, I took the train to Pompeii, the ancient Roman city that was destroyed by a cataclysmic eruption of the volcanic mountain of Vesuvius in AD 79

The eruption lasted for two days and killed at least 1,150 of the inhabitants because that number of remains have been discovered in the layers of ash that suffocated what had been a prosperous city luxuriating in the beautiful Bay of Naples. We still shudder to see some of the ash-preserved bodies of the victims in their moment of death.

Pliny the Younger, was a young man in AD79 living across the Bay of Naples at Misenum with his mother and his uncle, the famous natural historian, Pliny the older, who was killed when he made an exploratory scientific trip over the water to Pompeii on the first day of the eruption. Pliny the Younger wrote his unique eye-witness account of the catastrophe in a letter to his friend, the young Tacitus, later to become Ancient Rome’s greatest historian.

‘The ashes now began to fall upon us, though in no great quantity. I looked back; a dense dark mist seemed to be following us, spreading itself over the country like a cloud. “Let us turn out of the high-road,” I said, “while we can still see, for fear that, should we fall in the road, we should be pressed to death in the dark, by the crowds that are following us.” We had scarcely sat down when night came upon us, not such as we have when the sky is cloudy, or when there is no moon, but that of a room when it is shut up, and all the lights put out. You might hear the shrieks of women, the screams of children, and the shouts of men; some calling for their children, others for their parents, others for their husbands, and seeking to recognise each other by the voices that replied; one lamenting his own fate, another that of his family; some wishing to die, from the very fear of dying; some lifting their hands to the gods’ (Pliny the Younger, Letter to Tacitus, AD79).

It was a moving experience to stand on the site of Pompeii and to imagine the terrible scenes that occurred here so long ago but, in a quirk of history and archeology, still remains viscerally realistic to us today. I was lucky enough to walk round these empty ruined streets because this was January and there were not many people around what is usually a very crowded tourist destination.

Here the absence of those dead citizens of Pompeii was vividly reflected in the desolation of the ruins that felt all so abandoned still after normal life here ended in two days of horror. I acknowledge the importance of the site for historians and archaeologists, and admire them for their work, but for many of us, a visit to Pompeii is primarily emotional and philosophical.

We don’t know the names of those who survived or those who died but, remarkably, we have more than just the stone remains of the city to show us at least some of the details of who they were, these people of Pompeii, and how they lived and what they thought was beautiful.

The essential other half of a visit to this site, is to go to the Naples Archaeological Museum which is now home to many of the artefacts and works of art found here, preserved in the ashes. In Naples you can see some of the fine interior designs for some of the houses, as well as many works of art and utility objects from Pompeii’s citizens’ domestic lives.

There are also, maybe most interestingly, a number of what are probably portraits of some of the inhabitants of Pompeii. Wonderful images of ordinary people who look just like us, or more of less. These show us that behind the drama and the history, there were always human beings.

The grander houses of Pompeii had elaborately decorated walls in their main living spaces – some showed battle scenes like this one showing the military victories of Alexander the Great.

Other murals depict legendary figures, such as Perseus and Andromeda, or classical gods like Venus and Mars.

There are also more down-to-earth images, such as this troupe of lively actors and musicians.

There are highly realistic studies of animals, like this triumphant lion killing a leopard, or even what appear to be beloved domestic pets, a dog straining on its lead, or a pair of fighting cocks.

Maybe the most famous murals from Pompeii are not gods and goddesses or heroes of legends, but images that were probably displayed in brothels, and these are some of the more discreet ones. They might have been salacious for otherwise prudish brothel clients or, I’d like to think, they show a healthy, untroubled view of sex.

The phallus was a symbol of good health, good luck and prosperity for the people of Pompeii, presumably, the bigger the better, and phallic images were often used as street signs or good luck charms on door lintels to ward off evil.

Here Priapus is not represented as an erotic image, if he was meant to, this comically unrealistic mage might not have worked. Priapus here is a symbol of luck and prosperity but let’s assume, he also shows an unembarrassed and optimistic view of sex.

Actors and musicians often appear in these Pompeii murals and mosaics, and we can only assume Pompeii citizens loved the theatre – the amphitheatre here is well preserved and could have entertained large numbers in the city’s classical theatre-in-the-round.

I was persuaded to make a fool of myself in public – again – by our Neapolitan tour guide, who is also a Pompeii antiquarian, and to whom I had foolishly told that I once studied singing. He suggested that I go down to the centre of the stage and test the acoustics with a burst of song. To an audience of no more than eight or nine tourists, including some members of a young Chinese dance troupe, I did my best at an impromptu chorus of a song. I didn’t have to think long about what to sing – well this is Naples, so it had to be O sole mio. They could hear me at the back, I was told.

The Polish sculptor, Igor Mitoraj (1944 – 21014) was commissioned to make an exhibition of his work with its emphasis on fragmented human bodies. After the exhibition finished, this figure of Daedalus was kept here, now a permanent exhibit. It shows Daedalus, the man who made wings of wax and flew too close to the sun. it dominates the skyline at the entrance to Pompeii in a way that’s entirely appropriate to this inspiring but tragic place.

It deserves to stand here, just as a painting of Vesuvius by Andy Warhol has earned its place in Naples’ Capodimonte Gallery along with Caravaggio and Titian. Pompei and its fall, like Daedalus, will speak to every generation about the impermanence of life.

This visit proved to be the end of my four years of travelling around Italy, because the Covid virus over-took us all. only week after my visit to Pompeii. In Italy I found many new things and also confirmed to myself, the many reasons why I need to keep returning to this wonderful country. One of my earliest Italian enthusiasms, as I have reported here before, was the voice of that great Neapolitan, Enrico Caruso (1873 – 1921). I was thinking of him when I made my well-intentioned rendition of O Sole Mio at Pompeii, so it is only appropriate to end this series of blogs with the great man himself in a recording from 1916, proving, at least to me, amongst all this impermanence, the human spirit, like in Pompeii, is immortal.

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At the beginning of 2020, I spent a week in Naples and visited the fateful ruins at Pompeii where you have to think about the disaster that befell the folks there in in the year 79 AD when the volcano Vesuvius erupted. Little did I know then that the year 2020 too was also going to be an annus horribilis. I walked round the ruins out of season when there are seldom many visitors in this, one of the most visited tourist destinations in the world. The sun shone and I thought of things ancient, mostly Roman and Greek. I thought about those ancient Greeks and Romans knowing that when I returned to England, I was going to a much-praised exhibition at the British Museum, Troy myth and reality.

While in Naples I visited the National Archeological Museum, a giant building that contains, amongst other things, many artefacts from Pompeii. There was also an exhibition of ancient classical statues that had been rescued from the bottom of the sea around Italy and Greece. I thought this guy looked like King Agamemnon, King of Mycenae and leader of the Greek army during the Trojan Wars. Actually, of course, I don’t think anyone knows what Agamemnon looked like – so grizzled and bearded will do

I played King Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks during the Trojan Wars in a student production of a new dramatisation of Chaucer’s epic Trojan War poem, Troilus and Cresyde (written in the mid-1380s). I still have a production shot taken during the rehearsals. Maybe, without the John Lennon glasses and the roll-neck pullover, I was a dead-ringer for the old king, who knows. I got to sit on a throne and make sonorous speeches about battles and warriors – more fun than the real thing, I suspect, and it began a long fascination with the Trojan Wars, a subject, which until I sat on Agamemnon’s throne had, if I am honest, seemed a bit, well, academic. I was fully won over to Homer when I read, on a Greek beach, Alexander Pope’s English translation of The Iliad. So, it was a special pleasure when I went to the British Museum’s Troy exhibition, to see Pope’s handwritten first draft, complete with his diagram of Achilles’ shield. Oddly, perhaps, it was Alexander Pope, Geoffrey Chaucer, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare who first introduced me to their great predecessor, Homer, and the story of the Trojan Wars.

I knew about Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world, and Agamemnon’s sister-in-law, who was either abducted, seduced, or simply fell in love with the young Trojan prince Paris, son of Trojan King Priam, who took her home to Troy, infuriating the Greeks and causing one of the most famous wars, that may never have happened.

I had seen Elizabeth Taylor as Helen of Troy in the imperfect 1967 film of Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus (1592), and, at that time, it was Elizabeth Taylor’s turn to be the most beautiful woman in the world. Marlowe’s Helen was the ultimate erotic temptation, a role she has taken through the centuries.

The Chaucer poem, Troilus and Cresyde, was based on a relatively minor character in Homer’s The Iliad , the earliest and, for most, the greatest account of Troy. Troilus, another young prince of Troy, son of King Priam, brother of Paris and Hector gets embroiled in the war between Trojan and Greek when he grows jealous of his betrothed, the Trojan princess, Creseyde , who is flirting with a Greek warrior. Shakespeare knew the Chaucer poem and wrote a play using the same plot line, Troilus and Cressida. I came to the Shakespeare by way of Chaucer on my way to Homer. A roundabout journey I know. Just like this blog where I am on my way to the Museum’s Troy exhibition that finished just before the UK pandemic lockdown in March 2020.

To give you a taste of the Shakespeare and also a brief catch up on the Trojan Wars, here’s the prologue to the play – rousing stuff.

Shakespeare rushes through the famous names from the Trojan Wars, we’ve heard of most of them even if we don’t know all their stories – Helen and Paris, poor old Menelaus, king of Sparta, Helen’s deserted husband, and his brother King Agamemnon, and the two superhero warriors Trojan Hector and Greek Achilles,

Most of what we know about these characters comes from three sources – Homer’s The Iliad and its post-fall of Troy sequel The Odyssey.

The Odyssey describes the various journeys of Odysseus (latin name Ulysses) who was another of the Greek warriors at Troy.

Odysseus tries to get home to his famously patient wife Penelope but the journey takes years and he has to endure many ordeals inflicted on him by the gods and by sorceresses, monsters, giants and seductive nymphs like the Sirens. When he finally gets home to Penelope he has many a good story to tell her about his odyssey.

The third important book on the aftermath of the Trojan Wars is the Roman epic poem Virgil’s The Aeniad (29 – 19 BC) which takes another famous Trojan hero, Aeneas on his escape from Troy to his destiny in Italy where he has to build a second Troy – Rome.

But, maybe after Helen, the famous famous figure from these books is the ultimate warrior, the almost invulnerable Greek hero, Achilles. the son of Peleus, the King of Phthia and a Nereid (a sea nymph), Thetis, who was said to have dipped her baby into the River Styx to make his body invincible, only to forget the heel that she was holding, the legendary Achilles’ heel, and thus laying him open to the fatal arrow shot by Paris, Hector’s brother and Helen’s lover.

Achilles’ other vulnerability was his love for his friend Patroclus and his grief and rage when Patroclus was killed by Hector.

We all know Achilles, Londoners see his 18 foot statue every time they take a bus round Hyde Park. Brad Pitt fans too, are familiar with Achilles’ particular type of masculinity

If The Iliad ends with blood, death and war, it begins with love and sex, Aphrodite (Latin name Venus), the goddess of love, taking part in a beauty contest with two rival goddesses, Hera and Athena, to find out who is the most beautiful of all the immortals. The judge is to be Paris, son of the Trojan King Priam, and the prize will be the most beautiful mortal woman in the world who is, or course, Helen of Troy who is already married to the King of Sparta, Menelaus, brother of King Agamemnon, the Greek leader. Paris takes his prize, Helen, back home to Troy. and the Greeks go in swift persuade to win her back. The result is, as we know, the Trojan War.

The heroes, heroines, victims and villains from Troy were all in London for the British Museum’s extraordinary exhibition, Troy myth and reality, their stories retold in works of art from four thousand years until modern times, and still retaining their fascination for us today.

Here’s the great man himself – well we don’t know that for sure any ore than we know what Agamemnon looked like – here’s the blind poet, Homer, another grizzled bearded one, who may not have been blind, who may never have existed or who might have been at least two different people, one the author or The Iliad and the other of The Odyssey. Whoever wrote these two epic poems probably did so between the years 800 and 750 BC – a very long time ago but several hundred years after the Trojan Wars that, sorry about this, might not have happened either, but if they did, it was some time between 1260 and 1180 BC. The City of Troy may or may not have existed either, but, since the late 19th century most archeologists believe that it did and that it was situated in a place known as Hissarlik in Asia Minor.

To an untutored eye, one ruined city looks much like another, so after Pompeii, I have to take the experts’ word on whether this is, or was, the ancient city Troy, four miles from the Aegean sea and four miles from the narrow waterway known as the Dardanelles, or in ancient times, as the Hellespont. Homer, whoever he was, had started something – ever since his time, people have craved to know where Troy was and what it was like. Maybe it wasn’t unlike that terrible battle also fought there in 1915.

It was also, maybe, the beach where Hector died.

The most famous archeologist involved in establishing the site of Troy, was also the most smooth-tongued and entrepreneurial, of the several Troy hunters roaming Asia Minor in the second half of the 19th century. the German Heinrich Schliemann, no beard this time, and not at all grizzled. He betted his, er, moustache, on Hissarlik being the place and, we now know that he was right.

Schliemann dug and he dug and, amazingly, in 1871, he started to find stuff. Artefacts, sometimes called plunder, known in his sensational language as The Treasures of Priam, most of which is now in a museum in Berlin – and some of it was exhibited at the British museum’s Troy, myth and reality.

The exhibition looked fantastic there in the museum, the lighting and design, in particular, but the captions, low down near the ground, caused a few problems for the crowds that were milling round each exhibit. Captions are a bit of a bore in general at block-buster exhibitions because it encourages clustering round the notices and blocking the view of the artworks. That is a mild complain, minuscule when compared to the battle that was going on outside.

In front of the building and sometimes inside, too, heroic warriors and a spectacular Trojan Horse, were fighting their own war. This time it was against the British Museum’s sponsors, those controversial oil-spillers, BP. I hear that the next exhibition, the global-warming conscious Arctic, will no longer have BP as a sponsor. Hurrah.

And then there were those pots! Grecian Urns, a veritable sideboard of ancient crockery.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
    Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
    Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold pastoral!
    When old age shall this generation waste,
        Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
    “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is all
        Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

I knew Keats’ poem Ode on a Grecian Urn and I had certainly seen many red-figure and black-figure pots in various museums, but somehow I was unprepared for the glory, originality, minimalism and weirdness of these Trojan paintings. Sorry, if I offend, but I thought these two thousand year old pots upstaged all the other artworks in the exhibition. Judge for yourselves as you scroll down and look at the Trojan stories in these amazingly powerful paintings .

The Achilles stories were memorably displayed too, in three-dimensions First on an ancient silver cup, and then with various impressive and movingly carved sarcophaguses (sarcophagi) where the tragedies of The Iliad were recreated with an emphasis on grief.

Moving too were these carvings of the patient Penelope waiting mournfully for Odysseus.

I have tried to show some of my favourite exhibits and to do justice to the post classical period where possible and without giving the impression that nothing good happened in the arts after the year 100 AD. I have to say though that I was overwhelmed by the power of those works of art dating back thousands of years.

Achilles, Helen, Ulysses and the others live on, of course, in the work of modern artists in many genres – I am tempted to define modern as sometime the end of the 18th century, but forget I said that. Here are some of my favourites. Cy Twombly’s 1962 savage reduction of Achilles to a bloody arrowhead seething with anger was especially memorable.

I was intrigued too by Romare Bearden’s 1977 collage with its New World irony.

I also liked Eleanor Antin’s 2007 picture of the Judgement of Paris for its cunning mix of politics, wit and kitsch.

It was impressive how so many modern genres have found something new to say about those Greek heroes, whether it was graphic novels, Manga comics or the wonderful Shield of Achilles by Spencer Finch, built around lighting readings made at the beach were so many Trojans and Greeks fell,

Troy myth and reality was a comprehensive survey of so much art that has been inspired by Homer and Virgil in these four thousand years that I resist leaving out one of my passions – opera. Two Trojan French operas from the mid-10th century, one Offenbach’s classic send-up of the whole Trojan epic, La Belle Hélène, and the other Berlioz’s sublime and gigantic Virgil opera Les Troyens, where the catastrophe of Troy is powerfully caught when Cassandra and the women of Troy commit mass suicide at the end of act two. Try them, you might be surprised.

The amazing thing about writing this blog is just how much I have had to leave out….well that’s epics for you.

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