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Pompeians — they’re just like us!
They eat take-out!
They hit wine bars after work, drink too much and puke!
They sleep with the barmaids!
The Roman port city Pompeii — called the “lost city” after it was buried under volcanic ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD — was a business center and melting pot, where graffiti in six different languages littered the walls. The more experts study it, the more they liken it to a 2,000-year-old version of the Big Apple.
It’s not surprising that Pompeii’s legacy is one place that the Christian Right, the Mayans and the climate alarmists may all agree. In Pompeii they see the perfect metaphor: Mess with God or Mother Nature, and all will turn to dust. We may have dodged hurricane Irene, but these people would argue another Vesuvius-type disaster is just around the corner.
Yet many historians argue that Pompeii was not uniquely debauched. One Roman researcher told The Post it was equally as sordid as London was in the 19th century (or for that matter the United States is now). It’s just that we know more about it than other cities. What if everything that happened in New York at this very moment was preserved?
Perhaps because of our similarities to a city that had such a grisly demise, Pompeii still looms large in the collective imagination.
Tomorrow, Discovery Times Square’s “Pompeii the Exhibit” will be closing after six months, where body casts, a brothel and loaded dice are on display.
Also this year, the book “Rediscovering Antiquity,” about the original excavation of Pompeii in the 1700s, has been reissued, and a new academic book tracing Pompeii’s influence on art and culture called “Pompeii in the Public Imagination” will be published in October. In 2012, “Resident Evil” director Paul W.S. Anderson will start shooting a big budget movie based on Pompeii, dubbed ancient Rome’s response to “Titanic.”
Discovery Times Square curatorial consultant and trained underwater archeologist Kristin Romey gave The Post a raunch-filled look at the world of Pompeii with sex, drugs and, well, more sex:
Pompeii was a river port city, where wheat and cotton were sold, farmers worked and “where everyone was looking to make a buck,” Romey says. Romans had slaves — but there was the hope of upward mobility as some were eventually freed.
Unlike our Hollywood-ized perception of Roman times, Pompeii was actually a garishly colored, graffiti-covered and filthy city.
Like New York in August, Pompeii was hot, foul smelling and noisy. Stone paths were installed so that people could bypass the urine-covered streets. Just this June, a tunnel filled with human excrement was discovered near Pompeii in a ritzy suburb, Herculaneum.
Only the mega-rich had houses, while everyone else lived in cramped apartments. Renting was common and because space was limited, prices were inflated.
Since the city had limited room for development, a lot of the building went skyward (like New York). Often the first floors were rented out as shops, “much like living above a bodega,” Romey says.
The most desirable apartments were on the lowest floors because of the heat and the fire hazards. In wealthy homes, slaves lived on the upper floors.
Most houses were the size of small “Midtown apartments,” said Romey. Though it’s hard to say how much a typical Pompeian spent on rent, one very high figure was 10,001 sesterces (estimated to be between $3,000 to $10,000) a year, which was 10 times the annual salary of a day laborer during that period.
Pompeii, a town of around 25,000, had nearly 40 takeout places for food because few people had kitchens in their tiny apartments (sound familiar?). The menu included “Cheese balls, pickled fish, dried figs, bread, wine laced with honey (not quite Coca-Cola), breads,” said Judith Harris, author of the book “Pompeii Awakened” and Rome-based consultant for the Discovery Times Square exhibit.
The Discovery exhibit even boasts a clay pot that a Pompeian would have used as a doggie bag tray or a Chinese takeout carton.
Pompeians, like New Yorkers, loved their dogs, devoting mosaics and statues to man’s best friend.
There was even a mosaic discovered — which would have been placed at the entranceway of a house — that said “Carne Carnem” or “Beware of Dog!”
Perhaps what is most striking about the Pompeians (and what damned them in some people’s eyes) was their frankness about sex.
Children wore phallus pendants as a sign of good luck and people hung pictures of male genitalia above their doors (much like horseshoes today).
They even made the equivalent of porn parodies. One jokester riffs on Julius Caesar’s “I came, I saw, I conquered” — on the door of a brothel reads: “HIC HGO CVM VIINI FVTVI DIIIDII RIIDIII DOIIII,” which roughly translates to, “Here I came, I f – – – ed and then I went home.”
Antonio Varone, author of “Eroticism in Pompeii,” describes how many slaves would perform stripteases and erotic scenes similar to modern day porn flicks.
Pompeians were also known to partake in cannabis and magic mushrooms. There were brothels, baths near ports with dirty pictures above the doors, and taverns where young women were available for the “equivalent of a cup of coffee and a doughnut,” Romey says.
Only freed slaves or the working poor attended these lupinaras, or brothels, because the rich had slaves to do with what they wanted. Most of the prostitutes were slaves or prisoners of war. The Discovery Times Square exhibit recreates a lower-class lupinara. It’s an 8-by-6-foot room with a small bed and a dirty picture above the door (at the exhibit, the fresco is of a woman with two pygmies).
Some of the frescos are so raunchy that they can’t be discussed in a family newspaper. In fact, the word “pornography” is thought to have come from Pompeian excavations in the early 1900s, when German excavators called the dirty pictures “pornographia,” Greek for writings about lewdness and sex.
There’s evidence that the relationship between master and slave was also rife for sexual intrigue. In the Discovery exhibit, there is an opulent armband in the shape of a snake (which looks like something Cleopatra would have donned) that is inscribed with: “From a Master to His Slave.” It seems that love was just as complicated then as it is now.
“Pompeii is covered with graffiti and artwork depicting people who were madly in love, people who were nursing broken hearts, people breaking up marriages and lovelorn singles. All of the messy and wonderful elements of love were wildly alive for thousands of years before we believe we ‘invented’ them,” Romey says.
The Pompeians not only knew how to have love affairs; they were expert in drinking and gambling.
Pompeii had many bars where people would imbibe to excess. They didn’t do beer (that was for the Egyptians), and they hadn’t yet learned how to distill liquors. But they were such big wine drinkers that they would sit in a overheated bath then drink large vessels of wine as quickly as possible, throw it up, then drink more to get as drunk as possible.
Graffiti around the city pointed people in the direction of places to get the cheapest wine. Men boasted on walls: “I screwed the barmaid.”
They also loved to gamble. Technically, playing dice was illegal; yet everyone, even the emperors who decreed it illegal were borderline gambling addicts.
Emperor Claudius was so addicted to dice that he had a special table designed in his carriage so his dice board wouldn’t tilt when he rode down the street.
As long as there was gambling, there was cheating to go along with it. The Discovery exhibit’s most fascinating piece is a pair of loaded dice.
And with displays of wealth, there will be someone there to knock-it-off.
A sure sign of opulence was to own high-end ceramics from Gaul called terra sigillata. The rich paid a high sum to have these.
Archeologists found a ceramic that looked lackluster. When they examined it further, they saw it was inscribed with the name of a freed slave. He had it knocked off, like a Chinatown handbag. “Even then they had a fake it until you make it like we have now,” Romey says.
So if Pompeii was so similar to New York, does it deserve its particularly perverted reputation? Roman scholar Judith Harris says no.
“Was Pompeii uniquely debauched?” Harris asks. “Because it was discovered intact, buried beneath a thick crust of volcanic matter, we know more about its underside than about Rome’s.”
Still, some religious figures see the destruction of Pompeii as divine punishment — and warn that a similar fate will befall New York today. While on the scientific side, others say by ignoring nature — in our case, global warming — we are, like the Pompeians who did not flee Vesuvius, headed for disaster.
Whether or not any of that’s true, not even Pompeii learned the lesson of the volcano. Today, 3 million people live in Vesuvius’ shadow — defiantly.
The Italian government has offered to pay to evacuate many who live there, but they refuse to move, responding with “we are the people of Vesuvius, if they destroy, we rebuild,” according to one documentary.
Romey says one thing is certain: “We’re overdue for another eruption.”’
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Just as today, Pompeii graffiti ran the gamut from lewd to political. Some of the highlights:
* “Satura was here on September 3rd” drawn on the exterior of a house.
* “Amplicatus, I know that Icarus is buggering you. Salvius wrote this,” written above a drawing of a man with a large nose on a house.
* “To the one defecating here. Beware of the curse. If you look down on this curse, may you have an angry Jupiter for an enemy,” written on a house to the left of the door.
* “Marcus loves Spendusa,” written near the gate of Vesuvius.
* “I screwed a lot of girls here,” written on a brothel.