When the gods left the world

One summer’s day in 79 AD, the earth shook and a huge cloud rose from Vesuvius. Over the next twenty hours, Pompeii would be buried under a deluge of lava, fire and sulphur. Just before this happened, the town on the Campania coast was home to around twenty thousand people; it had shops and luxury homes, brothels and restaurants, slaves, police officers and gladiators. But the fire that rained down from the sky, erupting from the depths of the earth, is perhaps merely the physical destruction of a world which, in some way, was already heading towards a profound decline – spiritual, above all, and consequently social and political – or, at any rate, a major upheaval. Christians already existed, but for many Romans they were still confused with the Jews, and the ancient gods were not faring too well. Of course, the Romans had always been rather liberal when it came to religion; their main concern was that the emperor’s sanctity be respected, and they had always welcomed foreign cults by permitting the construction of temples. Take, for instance, Pompeii itself, and what was found not far from the Great Theatre. Before the advent of the great monotheistic religions, the coexistence of different faiths was natural. And in the houses we see statues of deities now all but forgotten, which have come to resemble little ‘garden gnomes’. ‘Where has Artemis, lady and protector of animals, gone? Everything seems to say: ‘We love her, but we no longer know what to do with her.’ And of dear old Dionysus, what remains? The Maenads who ate raw meat? Is the ‘religion of the slaves’ (that is, Christianity according to Nietzsche) driving Isis out of the Roman streets, or is Christ simply finding his place in a world struggling to find its bearings? When the Gods Left the World is an exploration of an in-between era, straddling paganism and Christianity, in which Pompeii symbolically becomes a biblical Sodom. Man ‘found himself alone’, as Flaubert put it, in that historical moment—‘unique, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius’—in which ‘the gods were no longer there and Christ was not yet here’. As well as being a story of some phenomenal discoveries, this book is also a veritable guide to the city buried beneath the ash and, even today, still being uncovered; it is a guide through the cults practised here, moving amongst the plaster casts of corpses and the wall paintings, between the House of Menander and that of the Moralist. But above all, the book is a love letter to the vocation shared by all of us human beings to seek universal truths by digging beneath the earth, interpreting forgotten artefacts, and empathising with a skeleton huddled on the ground. As the author says at one point, what is archaeology if not ‘a glimpse into ourselves’? (Giulio Silvano)

Gabriel Zuchtriegel

Feltrinelli, 250 pp., 24 euros