Society within a society

One of these societies consists of virtuous Romans who reject luxury in favour of pious living, whilst the others, the impious Romans, try to escape the sanctions of their fellow citizens in order to indulge their desire for foreign opulence. Various texts are called upon to support this duality, a primary example being the text in which Cicero accuses Verres of trying to emulate the lifestyle of foreign potentates (p.138). However, when the xenophobic card is played and everything non-Roman is considered corrupting, one needs to examine the motives of the accuser, because many of them were uncompromisingly antagonistic to all forms of contact with foreign ideas, and those from Greece in particular. Cato the Elder is a much-cited example. Cicero on the other hand, having been educated in Greece, had no such antagonism to Greek culture. However, as a lawyer, politician and scholar he fully realised the type of accusations that would severely damage Verres’ reputation. His ploy was successful, but also somewhat hypocritical, because Cicero owned several villas and was therefore hardly the model pious Roman.

The importance of the house or villa in terms of ancestral lineage is surprisingly absent from this book. Perhaps this is not surprising given that its thesis concerns the aspiring but ‘tasteless’ middle-classes, who are presumably looking to the future rather than the past. After spending the first half of the book describing the object of their desire as villas owned by foreign potentates, the author then goes on to inform the reader that equally palatial houses also existed in Pompeii. These were built a century before the nouveau riche ‘middle-class’ Pompeian’s supposedly started building or redesigning theirs following the 62AD earthquake. This begs the question, what is more likely to have influenced the aspiring Pompeian: mythical royal villas or the palatial house-villas owned by their neighbours? The logical answer would be the latter, but since the former encapsulates the ‘exotic’ other in the book’s thesis, it takes precedent over the more pedestrian model afforded by the next-door neighbour.

Having created a society within a society, the book then goes on to refer to two types of living space (p.142). However, only the would-be palatial type is discussed and illustrated, whilst the other, presumably belonging to the virtuous home owner, is only vaguely referred to in order to signify the pious datum against which the impious hedonists can be measured. In this instance the latter are the Samnite Pompeians, who we are told had no traditional aversion to displaying their wealth (fig1). This seems at odds with the fact that much of the so-called hedonistic displays that are highlighted in the book occurred whilst Pompeii was under direct Roman rule.

Imitation

Much of the sociological interrogation of middle-class Pompeian taste pivots around the word ‘imitation’. This is particularly true in the chapter ‘The Domestic Arts in Pompeii’ where it is used numerous times. Although used in a variety of contexts it is invariably pejoratively, for example, if a house displays some of the characteristics of a villa it is described as a house imitating a villa and the accompanying text leaves the reader in no doubt that ‘imitation’ in this context means pretentious fakery.