The Last Days of Pompeii
The 1834 novel that built a whole imagined city on top of the ruins, and shaped how the modern world pictures Pompeii.
Bulwer-Lytton visited the excavations and then wrote the city back up out of them: a melodrama of Christians, a scheming priest of Isis, gladiators and a blind flower-girl, ending under the ash. It is not a good guide to Roman life, but it is the reason the modern imagination pictures Pompeii the way it does. The novel fed straight into paintings, operas and a century of films.
Recommended by 1 Person
Mary Beard
When he went to Pompeii it was a ruin. These days they’ve done a lot of work on it. What Lytton did was build it up layer by layer. And what you get is a fantastic reconstruction of the ancient world. Christians who are going to escape, the nasty priest of Isis, the sacrifices and the gladiators. The cultural backwash that came out of it was extraordinary. The characters, statues, movies.
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