Curses and Smoke

by Vicky Alvear Shecter

  So, against every impulse, he forced himself up to standing, swaying with sorrow and misery. He took a coin from their stash and began to weep again.

  I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I can’t …

  The boy seemed to understand. He took the coin from Tag’s trembling fingers, crawled to his beloved, and placed it between her cold lips as Tag closed her empty eyes.

  “Thank you,” Tag managed.

  He returned to the unwrapped shawl of coins, and with thick, heavy fingers, riffled through it. There. The little votive. He picked up the small clay figure of Turan, the Etruscan goddess of love, and placed it within her curled palm. When he’d first given it to her, he’d said, “You hold my soul in your hands.” It would always be so now.

  He felt her wing votive still in his small bag at his belt. Should he put it in her other hand? No, she’d given the wing — and freedom — to him. He would keep both.

  Unsteadily, Tag straightened her limbs and smoothed her blood-soaked, torn dress. He took the blanket — the one that had connected them back in Pompeii, the one smelling of lemons and pine and her — and placed it over her body, moving it toward her head.

  He paused at her neck, unable to go on. His hands shook so hard he dropped the cloth. For the last time, he touched his lips to her cold mouth. “Te amabo in aeternum,” he whispered against them. I will love you for all eternity.

  Only then did he find the strength to pull the blanket over her face like a shroud.

  He wished he could set her body aflame to release her soul, but he did not have the means nor the strength. So he prayed to Mercury to escort her gently into Pluto’s realm without the funeral pyre.

  He gathered their things and picked up the boy, who lacked the energy to cling to him in his usual manner. Instead, Castor’s limbs hung listlessly, his head flopping on Tag’s shoulder as they set off toward the city she’d promised would lead to their life of freedom.

  Pale beams of light broke through the edges of the thinning but still monstrous cloud as they neared Nuceria. Bits of ash hung in the thick, heavy air like motes swirling in dirty water. Would they ever breathe clean air again?

  As he walked, Tag forced himself to consider what he needed to do next. He would go directly to the poor section of the city, where no one would question him. He would gather what he needed to set off with the boy to Thurii. And there he would follow through on the plan they’d made together. For her.

  “Almost there,” he half whispered, half croaked to the sleeping child.

  But Castor had not been sleeping. He raised his head and looked up at Tag.

  “Are we still free?” he whispered.

  It was a long time before Tag could answer through the jagged rock of grief lodged in his throat. He would never be free of the sorrow and regret of losing her. But he knew that was not what the boy meant.

  “Yes,” he answered finally. “She set us free.”

  The History of Pompeii

  The original founders and inhabitants of Pompeii were a mix of Etruscan, Samnite, and Greek peoples. After Rome conquered Pompeii in 80 BCE, it was considered a colony of Rome. I based Tages’s family history on the supposition that the transition into a Roman city was not necessarily pleasant for all involved, particularly the replaced old guard.

  The Eruption

  It is hard for us to imagine, but locals did not know that Vesuvius was a volcano. Before 79 CE and the events depicted here, it had not erupted in nearly two thousand years. The Greek geographer Strabo conjectured that Vesuvius may have once burned but that it had long ago ceased doing so. The ancient Romans did not even have the word volcano, Strabo called such phenomena “earth-born fires.”

  Vesuvius’s volcanic eruption released a hundred thousand times the thermal energy released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb. It spewed volcanic gas, rock, pumice, and ash in a column that hurtled twenty miles into the air, discharging its contents at the rate of 1.5 million tons per second. This type of explosion is called a plinean explosion, thanks to Pliny the Elder’s description of a massive column that spread out like an umbrella pine. (To us, it would have looked like a mushroom cloud.) The eruption of rock and ash lasted for eighteen hours, with approximately eight feet of pumice stones falling on Pompeii. It was during this period that most inhabitants escaped. The second phase of the explosion buried Pompeii and surrounding cities in avalanches of superheated gases, ash, and dirt called pyroclastic flows. There was little or no lava; instead, people and animals were killed instantly by intensely hot (around 500 or more degrees Fahrenheit) poisonous gas surges. These pyroclastic flows then cooled and hardened over the city, burying it for nearly two thousand years. In the novel, I placed Tag and Lucia on a hill overlooking the city so that we could witness the destruction of the killer pyroclastic flow with them.

  Most Pompeians escaped to Napoli (Naples), Nola, and Nuceria; we know this because we have letters from officials of those cities, asking the Roman Senate for money for help in taking care of Pompeian refugees. The Roman cities of Herculaneum, Stabiae, and Oplontis were also destroyed by Vesuvius. Scholars believe that most of the people who died in Pompeii were those who did not have the means to escape — no horses or carriages, nor anywhere to go. As in modern disasters, it was likely the poor who suffered the most; indeed, most of the bones found are of women, children, and the elderly (Resurrecting Pompeii by E. Lazer).

  In the nineteenth century, archaeologists made haunting plaster casts of over a hundred of the bodies of those who died in Pompeii. Close to 1,200 bodies have been discovered in total. Many bodies of animals were preserved in plaster as well, including casts of dogs, horses, pigs, and donkeys. I based Lucia’s dog, Minos, on the heartbreaking cast of a dog who died still chained to his post. But in my version, I made sure the dog was released and ran to safety — the benefits of fiction!

  The Date of Eruption

  Many readers may notice that I set the date of Vesuvius’s eruption not on the traditional date of August 24, 79 CE, but in early October of that same year. Why? Because many leading archaeologists and scholars now believe the August 24 date is incorrect.

  Despite what some textbooks may say, there has never been a clear consensus on the date of the explosion. In fact, at the turn of the twentieth century, most believed the volcano exploded in November. The confusion can be traced back to monks who translated (or mistranslated) Pliny the Younger’s letters in the Middle Ages. Pliny the Younger was the nephew of the naturalist Pliny the Elder, who died in the eruption in the midst of commanding the Roman navy to rescue as many people from the coast as possible. Pliny the Younger, seventeen at the time, witnessed the event from across the bay and recorded his observations decades later.

  Today, most archaeologists believe Vesuvius exploded in the fall of 79 CE. They point to strong physical evidence in support of this claim, including:

  • Harvested autumnal fruits have been found in the correct archaeological strata in villas near Pompeii. Pomegranates, in particular, point to an autumn eruption, since, in Italy, they tend to ripen in late September or early October. Dried figs and grapes (both of which would have been harvested in late summer) were also discovered.

  • A number of victims appeared to be wearing heavier clothing more appropriate to cooler weather. One skeleton in Herculaneum was discovered wearing a fur cap. To be fair, people may have donned layers of clothing to protect themselves from the rain of rocks, but the fact that so many individuals were dressed this way leads many archaeologists to think the eruption was later in the year.

  • According to classicist Professor Mary Beard, a Roman coin that could only have been printed after September 7 or 8 of the year 79 CE was “found in a context where it could not have been dropped by looters” (Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town).

  • Mario Grimaldi, archaeologist and professor at the University of Naples, Suor Orsola Benincasa, was generous enough to give me a personal tour of Pompeii’s ruins. He asserts that most Pompei
i specialists believe that the explosion occurred in the fall. In addition, Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, author and director of the Herculaneum Conservation Project, is also convinced the eruption took place in late September/early October.

  Given so much scholarly consensus on the revised time frame, I could not bring myself to write the story based on the incorrect date.

  The Characters

  All of the characters in this novel are purely fictional. For greater latitude, I placed the Titurius Gladiatorial School in an as-yet-unexcavated region of Pompeii — called “Regio V” — near the Vesuvian gate. Only the naturalist Pliny the Elder is a real person in history. He and his nephew, Pliny the Younger, lived across the bay in Misenum. Everything we know about the volcano’s explosion and the fate of the region, as mentioned above, comes from the letters of Pliny the Younger.

  Pregnancy and Exposure

  According to Roman law, a newborn child was placed at its father’s feet. If the father picked up the child, he claimed it as his own. If he refused to pick it up and walked away, the baby was then exposed (left outside the city walls to die). The mother had no say in the matter. No one knows how often exposure was actually practiced.

  The novel’s exposure story line was inspired by a letter from a Roman traveling in Alexandria to his pregnant wife, sometime in the second century CE. It is a lovely, chatty letter until he writes this about her pregnancy: “If it is a male, let it live; if it is a female, expose it” (Oxyrhynchus papyrus 744. G). The utter casualness and callousness with which that instruction was given struck me hard. It set me to wondering: Had he given that command before? How would the mother react to such a command — one she was duty- and legally-bound to obey? What if the command came every time she bore a daughter?

  The rate of infant mortality in ancient Rome was very high. Around 25 percent of babies in the first century CE died within their first year, and up to half of all children died before the age of ten. Many young women also died in childbirth.

  The character of Cornelia was inspired by a skeleton of a heavily pregnant woman who died beside her husband and family. The family appeared to be wealthy, and it is conjectured that they did not attempt to escape, as so many did, because of her condition.

  Slavery

  Slaves accounted for as much as 30 percent of the population in ancient Rome’s slave-labor economy. According to Keith Bradley, professor of classics at the University of Notre Dame and an expert on ancient slavery, “The reality was that, in the highly status-conscious world of historical Rome, no one could imagine a society without [slaves] … Slavery in Rome was not regarded as a moral evil that had to be suppressed, and it produced no abolitionist advocates of the sort prominent in the modern history of slavery.”

  As a result, while it is hard for us to imagine this, no one in the ancient world had any moral problem with slavery, including early Christians. It was only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that people began to frame the question of slavery in moral terms. Until then, owning other human beings was accepted as either the natural order or fated by the gods. There were, of course, slave revolts — Spartacus’s is undoubtedly the most famous of the ancient period — but in those cases, the revolts were against abusive slave owners and not against the practice itself. Given that ethos, I had the character of Tag focus on finding his own personal freedom rather than on trying to dismantle slavery in general, since attempting to do the latter would have been inconceivable to the ancients.

  Household slaves were considered part of the Roman familia. It would have been common to have the master’s children and slave children grow up as playmates and to have them educated together. Most Romans advocated treating slaves decently. According to Dr. Bradley, “it was recognized that slave-owning could have injurious moral effects on slave-owners if personal restraint were not exercised.” In other words, restraint was advised lest the slave owners suffer unduly from guilt!

  Curses, Superstition, and Religion

  • Curse tablets are real objects of perceived dark magic in the ancient world. The ancient Greeks and Romans used the tablets to inflict pain or misery on those who angered or hurt them. They were made by scratching a curse onto a thin rectangular sheet of lead, using a stylus or pointed tool. Sometimes hair from the intended victim was bent or rolled into the tablet to make the magic stronger. According to the Getty Museum, the folded lead “could be pierced with nails to pin down the target, giving [the tablets] the Latin name defixio. The curse tablet was then thrown into a sacred pit at a sanctuary, a watery chasm, or a spring or pool … ensuring its delivery to the Gods of the Underworld, who would carry out the punishment.” I integrated commonly used curse-tablet language in creating the fictitious curse tablets in the novel.

  • I based the headless chicken scene on the life of a famous rooster called “Mike the Headless Chicken.” In 1945, Mike was meant to be dinner, but his owner accidentally cut his neck in the wrong spot. The ax missed the jugular vein and left the brain stem — the part that controls reflexive actions — and an ear intact. The bird staggered around like most newly beheaded poultry — only, amazingly, he didn’t fall over and die. In fact, the chicken continued to live for an additional eighteen months. His owner learned to feed Mike with an eyedropper containing water and grain. Scientists at the University of Utah verified Mike’s continued robustness. I imagine that superstitious Romans would have been greatly alarmed if something similar happened during a sacrifice, especially if it occurred during earth tremors. They would have seen it as a rejection by the gods and a terrible, frightening omen. You can read more about Mike the headless chicken at www.miketheheadlesschicken.org/history.

  • Throughout ancient Europe, clay votives of body parts were offered to various gods as requests for healing or in thanks for recovery. Some scholars believe that the Greeks, who colonized the area in the fifth century BCE, introduced the practice to the Etruscans in central Italy. Most often, votives were made of terra-cotta clay, though ivory or bronze examples have also been found.

  • Mephistis was a Samnite goddess of poisonous vapors. There is indeed a small altar to the goddess in the old part of Pompeii near the Temple of Venus complex.

  • The Romans believed in many gods, and their religious life was integrated into everyday ritual. Each home had a household shrine for the family gods, where prayers and libations were offered daily. Separate shrines existed for specialty concerns like healing or fertility. Additionally, shrines existed throughout the city and in nature — in neighborhoods, alcoves, crossroads, graveyards, and at sacred places such as springs, groves, and rivers.

  Gladiators

  The enormous amphitheater that we know as the Colosseum in Rome was about a year away from completion when Vesuvius exploded. The ancient Romans called it the Flavian Amphitheater in honor of Vespasian, the head of the Flavian dynasty, who initiated the project. Based on the sheer size of the Colosseum, I imagined that many gladiatorial school owners would have been trying to build up their schools and stables of fighters in anticipation of the greater demand for gladiators. Pompeii had a gladiatorial stadium of its own, but it was small and provincial in comparison to the Colosseum.

  Many scholars believe that gladiatorial combat originated from Etruscan funeral rites that later became integrated into Roman culture as entertainment. Despite the popularity of gladiatorial combat, Romans were utterly dismissive of gladiatorial school owners, calling them “Butchers of Men.”

  The bones of gladiators still shackled in their cells have also been found in Pompeii. Most gladiators were slaves, and they could indeed earn their freedom in the arena — if they survived long enough. Deaths in the arena were not as common as Hollywood movies want to make us think. Gladiators represented a huge investment, and school owners expected to be compensated accordingly if their fighter was killed.

  Free men sometimes “sold” themselves into gladiatorial slavery as a way to get out of debt or to gain fame or notoriety. Occasionall
y, rich Romans also trained and fought as gladiators, though it was rare. Those who did were reviled by the upper classes.

  Graffiti

  The graffiti quoted in the novel is real and pulled from walls on streets I imagined Lucia traveled on the way to the market. Pompeii’s graffiti provides a rich and often entertaining look at life in the city. Many of the scrawls are bawdy, and many were aimed at influencing votes in elections. Apparently, public defecation was a problem in some areas of town, as several inscriptions either bragged about it or warned against it. Near one city gate, there is even a formal notice posted by the local government that says: “[Defecator] — make sure you keep it in until you pass this spot!” I was fascinated too that in between all of the earthy sayings and the political mudslinging, the occasional philosopher carved his or her observation about the nature of life and the inevitability of death.

  A big thank-you to my wonderful editor, Cheryl Klein, for pushing, pulling, and cajoling me into making this story better, even when I thought I couldn’t. Thanks too to my brother, Michael Alvear, for taking me by the lapels and shaking the fear out of me on numerous occasions. Bruce, Matthew, and Aliya — thanks for listening to my endless ruminations as I worked out the story in the car or at the dinner table. And, of course, a huge thank-you to my mother, who swept me off to Pompeii when the project became a reality.

  Thanks also to my readers, Elizabeth O. Dulemba, Kara Levy Beitz, and Stephanie Dray, as well as my terrific agent, Courtney Miller-Callahan. What would I do without you guys?

  Many other people helped with this project, including ancient Roman experts Caroline Lawrence and Irene Hahn. I am indebted to both of them for their kind attention to the work as they searched for anachronisms and errors. Fellow docent and Latin teacher Conway Bracket checked the Latin usage as did Latin teacher Ginger Emshoff. Hank and Kim Siegelson provided medical insight in regard to the sword injury. Thank you all! Any mistakes or errors in the book are completely my own.