Contents - Musée Maillol

2. Presentation of the exhibition
by Stefano De Caro, Honorary Director General of Archeological Heritage, professor
at the University of Federico II in Naples
A civilisation’s fall often leads to its oblivion. From this point of view the Roman Empire is
unusual to say the least. Thanks to the precious work of the copyists in mediaeval
monasteries, a large number of written sources by historians, poets, rhetoricians, architects
and lawyers have come down to us. We can thus reconstruct, almost year by year, the
history, political life and conquests of Rome, that little village of shepherds on the Palatine Hill
that became the capital of the Mediterranean world, the centre of an empire stretching
westwards and eastwards from the Atlantic to the borders of Mesopotamia, and to the north
and south from Hadrian’s Wall to the Sudan.
However this written knowledge is mainly about public events: battles, victories, or about the
principles of law and major public building works. The ancient sources give us relatively little
information about the private lives of ordinary people in the cities of the Empire, and where
they do, it is glimpsed between the lines of a life of Caesar or within the exaggerated
adventures of a Trimalchio. And the records don’t give us much more. Even when they are
about private events such as death, their nature is essentially public.
To tell the truth, most of what we know of the daily life of the Ancient Romans, and what
forms the basis of our image of this civilisation – the image in films like Gladiator or in the
novels of Lindsey Davis – is owed to the excavations started more than two and a half
centuries ago in the coastal towns of the Gulf of Naples that were buried by Vesuvius in 79
AD after the terrible eruption that in a few short hours put an end to all life there. Very few
other events in the history of humanity can be compared to the magnitude of such
destruction – probably only the ocean tsunamis in Asia or the atomic bombs of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. Yet, as Goethe realised, such a terrible event was destined to become a
source of joy for posterity. Each new archeological discovery revealed by the excavations
made people realise that this crystallisation had resulted in outstanding historical evidence.
Even today, in an age when archeology has made huge progress right across the expanse
that was the Roman Empire, and now that we know so much more about so many ancient
sites, Pompeii has kept its value as a landmark, both as a precise, datable moment and also
as a point of cultural comparison with all the discoveries that are made in the field of Roman
antiquity.
At the moment of their destruction, Pompeii and Herculaneum were towns that already had
several centuries of history behind them, just like most Italian cities of the time. Yet politically
they weren’t particularly important. And it’s exactly that “ordinary” nature that is worth
highlighting, for these two towns constituted a representative sample of Roman civilisation,
far from the distortions that the status of capital inevitably gave to Rome.
That is why, right from the first archeological discoveries in the middle of the 18 th century,
attention was drawn to the numerous traces of daily life. In Rome, or in the ancient
European cities of Roman origin, you could certainly see great monuments, amphitheatres,
temples, aqueducts, even roads, or impressive tombs that had survived the collapse of the
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