Aliena, Jake, Orientis oppidum…

Well, my Latin’s a little rusty, but I tried. Anyway, I was up last night reading Pompeii, another one of my Christmas presents. Robert Harris has come up with a great historical potboiler. The parallels between Ampliatus, the main “villain” of the novel, and modern-day figures like Donald Trump or Michael Milken are a bit heavyhanded (“Lucrum gaudium!” or “Profit is joy!” is a particularly amusing version of “Greed is good!”), but it’s all great fun, and the level of detail on ancient Roman aqueduct engineering seems quite rich indeed. So rich that the care Harris put into getting the volcanological details right might not be obvious at first glance…

For those who are interested in making the comparison, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii is available through Project Gutenberg.

2 January 2004 | read this |