Pompeii

1 comment on Hacker News

1. Positivehilbert42Aug 21, 2021

   There are two people who I've never met but who I would have loved to have had as my teachers, one is Mary Beard and the other is Andrew Wallace-Hadrill. What's amazing is that both of these remarkable teachers are from Cambridge University's Faculty of Classics. The Faculty and its students are indeed very lucky. Whenever they're on TV I'm always glued to my seat.

   Beard's Pompeii and Wallace-Hadrill's Life and Death in Herculaneum are two of the best documentaries I've seen in many a year as they bring history to life in exciting ways that I've never seen before, Ancient Roman society is presented with such feeling, exuberance and authority that one can almost imagine being there.

   I was thinking how truly exciting history has become in the hands of these consummate professionals in comparison to my own rather dull introduction to the subject many decades ago as school. Not that it was bad or lightweight, one of my history textbooks, A Brief History of Ancient Times — a rather nondescript book with a mustard/yellow colored cover, which incidentally I still have—was by the Univ. of Chicago's influential historian/archaeologist James Henry Breasted†. By the time I had to study it Breasted had been dead for many decades so its style was rather heavy and stodgy which didn't inspire much. Beard and Wallace-Hadrill's enthusiasm changes all that and they make a subject that has a potential to be boring to really sparkle.

   Both are really engaging individuals but in some ways, they're very different. Wallace-Hadrill is polite and I'd reckon he'd go out of his way to never offend anyone, Beard calls a spade a spade and if you don't like what she's saying then it's tough titty. With the shambles the world's presently in, it seems to me we need many more people of Beard's caliber and outspokenness to put things into perspective.

   † https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Henry_Breasted