2000-07-16 - 20:08:13

It's a little odd, but after seeing hardly any movies all year, I saw another one today, Gladiator starring Russell Crowe. I know, I know, I am a little behind the curve on this one. I told you that I don't get out much!

I enjoyed the movie very much, except for one little, niggling detail: I had already seen it! A whole lot of the plot for the movie was taken directly from another film that I had seen a few years ago: "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," starring Alec Guinness as Marcus Aurelius.

I guess it must be really hard to come up with an original idea for a movie these days. No wonder Hollywood is now looting and pillaging comic book properties, desperately looking for film ideas.

This minor quibble aside, I found the movie thrilling, especially its spectacular re-creation of the Roman world, mainly done with CGI effects.

I have always been a big fan of ancient history, especially Roman history. I got hooked on it in high school, and have maintained an interest in it ever since. This may sound odd, but there is something just so American about the ancient Romans. They were terrible cultural imperialists, incredibly arrogant, and they thought that money was the measure of everything. Sound familiar, guys?

History seems to be out of vogue these days, but I really love visiting historical sites. There is something strangely compelling about feeling a direct human kinship with people that lived 2,000 years ago. Although sometimes this can go too far...

I mentioned earlier that I went on a school trip to Italy some 25 years ago. The main focus of this trip was sites of the ancient world. There were many reasons that this voyage was memorable for me, but in terms of my love of Roman history, the most significant place we visited was Pompeii.

For those of you unfamiliar with the name, Pompeii was a Roman resort town in northern Italy (near modern Naples) that was buried by a spectacular eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79 AD. What was a horrible disaster for the luckless people living there turned out to be a stroke of luck for 20th Century archeologists. Underneath all that lava and ash was a first-century Roman town, almost perfectly preserved.

With schoolboy enthusiasm, I had done a lot of reading on Roman history and Roman life, but I was unprepared for the way I felt transported back into ancient times by this excavation.

Just walking the streets of Pompeii, one gets the impression that it was a thriving resort community, mainly catering to the well-to-do. Wealthy and fashionable Romans would escape the summer heat of the city by travelling up to their villa in the rolling countryside. In spite of the damage that time and the volcano have done to the buildings, one gets the feeling of the ancient equivalent of a prosperous vacation community.

And then, there was the sexual aspect of the town.

The Romans may have been a lot like Americans, but they didn't seem to share our prudery about sex.

One of the first things I noticed when I was in the central marketplace, were these arrows carved in the stone streets. Upon closer examination, the arrows turned out to be penises! Actually, they were arrows AND penises.

What they were meant to do was point the interested visitor toward the town's red-light district, so to speak. This was done with symbols because many Romans could not read. Perhaps they were also catering to foreign visitors that didn't understand Latin.

We were shown the inside of a Roman bordello. The main room was separated off into various cubicles, each with an illustration above the door indicating what sort of carnal delights might go on behind the curtain. Again, the lack of literacy among the general population caused them to resort to pictures rather than signs.

We were also shown a marriage chamber, a small windowless room with a small stone bed in it. Its only decorative feature: a small statue of a man with an enormous erection - the Roman male god of fertility.

Wandering through the houses of Pompeii gave me quite a different view of Roman life than I got from books and movies. I had sort of naively assumed that for the Romans everything was stone and white marble, but this was not the case at all.

The Romans liked color and they adored decoration. Bright, colorful murals decorated many of the house walls, and beautiful tile patterns adorned many of the floors.

Also, the flair for Roman ingenuity was evident everywhere, from the drainage system of the streets, to the clever use of light, shadow and open spaces in their interior gardens.

However, there was one particular incident that brought the ancient Romans closer to me, perhaps too close for comfort.

At one point I got separated from the rest of the group and wandered into a large house of some sort. Rounding a corner, I came across a glass case with what seemed to be a crude, life-size statue of a man inside it.

Except, it wasn't a statue. It was one of the original inhabitants of the house, forever preserved in volcanic ash.

He appeared to be a man of about average height, wearing a tunic and sandals. This probably meant that he was a slave of some sort.

His body was pulled up tight in a rictus of pain, and his head was thrown back in agony. Looking in his mouth, I could still see the teeth of his skeleton. This poor man, his last few moments on earth must have been supremely painful.

Looking at his craggy, tortured visage I felt what his last day on earth must have been like. It had probably started out as an ordinary sunny day. Then, without warning, the earth shook. The sky grew dark and the sun was blotted out by a towering column of smoke and ash from the volcano. Then came the horrible, deadly rain of hot ash, burning and suffocating.

Standing there in my tourist clothes, with my tourist camera around my neck, I no longer felt like an innocent bystander to ancient history. I felt like a desecrator, an invader of this man's private suffering. I felt like a dark voyeur in a place where I was not welcome.

I turned around and walked quickly out of the room and back onto the streets of Pompeii to join the rest of my group, a bunch of ordinary, modern-day American high school students.