If your history courses in high school were like mine, you spent a lot of time learning about kings and queens, generals, battles, and wars, and not much about everyday life. I didn't find that very interesting at the time, and I don't now. Much more interesting is the kind of history you can learn from studying the day-to-day life of common people in a society, as this article from Annalee Newitz points out.
Pompeii was a resort town for the rich and pleasure-seeking people of the Roman Empire at the turn of the first millennium CE. Women were integral to its economy and cultural life -- indeed, one of the city’s most sumptuous temples was dedicated to the African goddess Isis, whose cult leaders were all women. Venus was the city’s patron deity; her temple looked out over the beaches that made this place so attractive to tourists.
And yet before starting my research on Pompeii, I knew almost nothing about what women did in ancient Rome. In my college Latin class, we learned about only one real-life Roman woman: Clodia, a major figure in Cicero’s Pro Caelio, where the famous orator accuses her at great length of being a slut. Cicero, a reactionary politician, often opined about the nasty lifestyles of young people who preferred sex to war and he remains a conservative icon to this day. He had a huge vacation house in the suburbs of Pompeii, more than a century before Murtis lived there, but nobody is certain exactly where it was. Still, archaeologists talk about Cicero’s absent house more than they talk about Murtis’ visible signature on the walls of a still-standing lupanar.
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