Pompeii

This history reconstructs daily life in the Roman town of Pompeii from streets, houses, graffiti, shops, baths, and the amphitheatre rather than from a disaster narrative. Beard follows how people ate, voted, worshipped, bathed, and made a living in the decades before Vesuvius buried the city, and she tests tourist myths against archaeology: who occupied the houses, how elections worked, and what bakeries, bars, and brothels show about work and sex. The eruption appears as the event that froze the site, not as the book's subject. The work is a social history of one Roman town, not a novel of 79 CE and not a catalogue of wall paintings.

Bound in brown cloth with colour illustrated paper front cover. Map of Pompeii endpapers printed black on lioght brown. Plain green slipcase.