Last Supper In Pompeii

The Romans’ passion for fine dining is well known – now a mouth-watering new exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum shows how the production, distribution and consumption for food and wine coloured every aspect of Roman life, as its curator Paul Roberts explains

- Paul Roberts

Bon viveurs interested in Roman culture are blessed by a large amount of evidence from Roman writers, who seem to have been particularly interested in food and drink – and all that this involved. Now, in Last Supper in Pompeii, a delicious exhibition about to open at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, new archaeological research on the subject, both from Italy and Britain, is presented, much of it for the first time in a public forum.

To shed light on this fundamental area, the exhibition has drawn heavily on finds from the Roman sites of Pompeii and Oplontis – both buried by Mount Vesuvius in the catastrophic eruption of AD 79. Scholars have rightly pointed out that Pompeii is not, in fact, the ‘undisturbed time capsule’ that it is often portrayed as being.

The city was ransacked immediately after the eruption and over centuries afterward, as people sought valuables, sculpture and recyclable decorative and building materials. Buildings, rooms, and assemblages of material were re-erected, recreated and even on occasion invented. In the past, records were lost, kept badly or not kept at all.

Yet despite all these problems, Pompeii remains the most important gateway to the ancient Roman world, and such a portal is even more important because Pompeii, Herculaneum and other towns were not ‘special’ in the Roman world; they became so only because they were buried by ash from the erupting volcano. Their similarities to other cities and towns mean that we can use them as indicators of life on a much wider scale. This is why these places are so full of information – relevant in particular for understanding the extensive, rich and complex relationships between food, drink, and society.