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We tend to think of Pompeii mostly in terms of its ending. Before lava smothered the city, though, Pompeii was a bustling seaside metropolis—an intersection, essentially, of an empire. Today, its remains still host the ancient objects that serve as evidence of its place in the world.

Since 2005, in a long-ignored area inside the Porta Stabia, one of Pompeii's busiest gates, a team of archaeologists has been examining evidence of the city as it once was—evidence that may date as far back as the 6th century BC. The team, from the University of Cincinnati, is examining a plot that encompasses 20 different shop fronts from the old city. Most of those establishments, it seems, served food and drink. Which means that their remains offer—via trash collections, kitchens with food remnants, drains, cesspits, and latrines—a record of the kind of meals that ancient residents of the city would have enjoyed.

So what did the Pompeiians eat? The stuff you'd probably expect ... but also some stuff you probably wouldn't. On the one hand, the team discovered evidence of food that would have been both inexpensive and widely available to ancient Romans—stuff like grains, fruits, nuts, olives, lentils, fish, and (chicken) eggs. They also found some evidence of butchered meat.

In other words, the ancient Pompeiians ate in similar ways to modern-day Italians ... and to non-Italians who are trying to do the whole Mediterranean Diet thing. But the average Pompeiian, it seems, rounded out the staples with a more exotic diet. The Cincinnati team found, in the remnants even of businesses that would have served the lower classes, evidence of salted fish that would have come from Spain. Via a drain from a property in the center of the plot, they also discovered evidence of shellfish not native to Italy. They found mineralized remnants, as well, of sea urchin. And also! The butchered leg joint of a giraffe.

"That the bone represents the height of exotic food," Steven Ellis, an associate professor of classics who led the research, told Heritage Daily, "is underscored by the fact that this is thought to be the only giraffe bone ever recorded from an archaeological excavation in Roman Italy."

It's a mystery how the bone found its resting place in the middle of Pompeii. In the larger sense, though, it's not a mystery at all. As Ellis puts it: "How part of the animal, butchered, came to be a kitchen scrap in a seemingly standard Pompeian restaurant not only speaks to long-distance trade in exotic and wild animals, but also something of the richness, variety and range of a non-elite diet."

Ellis and his co-authors will present their findings tomorrow at the joint annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America and American Philological Association in Chicago. Despite their residence in the relatively globalized world of 2014, however, they will likely not celebrate their presentation by dining on giraffe.

LadyTevar wrote:Now, they have been doing studies on bones, testing to see what the individual ate for the majority of his life. There are still several individuals from obviously low-income areas who had a much simpler diet that was mostly Millet and other early easily grown grains and lentils/beans. Fish, while plentiful along the coasts, was much harder to ship inland, and meat seems to be rare.

Also, Pompeii and Herculum were Resort Cities, where people came to get away from it all. Just like modern resorts, fancy dining is a part of that. The followers of Epicurius were very into food, fun, and enjoying themselves, as you recall. (Of course, the 'tomorrow we die' did get them in the end....)

rhoenix wrote:I can't even be mad at people in Pompeii, considering that we see behavior like this from people now. "Oh, something terrible might be happening here? Eh, it'll wait until I leave, because the world revolves around me. PARTAAAAY!"

General Havoc wrote:

rhoenix wrote:I can't even be mad at people in Pompeii, considering that we see behavior like this from people now. "Oh, something terrible might be happening here? Eh, it'll wait until I leave, because the world revolves around me. PARTAAAAY!"

So... what? Self-indulgent and self-centered living caused the Volcano to erupt? Did it also cause the Indonesian Earthquake or something?

General Havoc wrote:This was a little bit before Vulcanology was an exact science. The reason you can't be mad at the people in Pompeii is the same reason you can't be mad at the people who died in the Szechuan Earthquake. Because getting mad at them for some perceived moral sin would make you a colossal asshole.

rhoenix wrote:I can't even be mad at people in Pompeii, considering that we see behavior like this from people now. "Oh, something terrible might be happening here? Eh, it'll wait until I leave, because the world revolves around me. PARTAAAAY!"

rhoenix wrote:Those moral degenerates in Pompeii deserved to burn in pain, terror, and fiery ash for their MORALLY BANKRUPT LIFESTYLE.

rhoenix wrote:...No. I wasn't implying that self-indulgent behavior caused the volcanic eruption, I was implying that self-indulgent behavior helped people take any and all warning signs less seriously.

Rhoenix wrote:So you seriously interpreted my post from:

I can't even be mad at people in Pompeii, considering that we see behavior like this from people now. "Oh, something terrible might be happening here? Eh, it'll wait until I leave, because the world revolves around me. PARTAAAAY!"

to:

Those moral degenerates in Pompeii deserved to burn in pain, terror, and fiery ash for their MORALLY BANKRUPT LIFESTYLE.

General Havoc wrote:What warning signs? Tremors and smoke? This was the ancient world. Living memory had forgotten that Vesuvius was a volcano at all. Spartacus made it his base of operations during his revolt a hundred and fifty years earlier. Mariners set up shrines to Vesuvia Occulate, Far-sighted Vesuvius, for guiding them home to the bay of Naples. People thought volcanic eruptions were the acts of angry gods, not geologic forces. The very reason they're called "volcanos" is because they were supposedly the work of Vulcan detonating a mountain to express extreme displeasure. Campagna has always been susceptible to minor earthquakes, and nobody had any reason to associate those with the mountain. Hedonism did not cause the Romans to ignore the warning signs. A complete lack of any modern vulcanology did. Vesuvius could have been one of the seven hills of Rome itself, and nobody would have been prepared for it.

Pliny the Younger, one of the foremost natural philosophers of the early Roman Republic, was on-hand in the area for the eruption, and had not the slightest conception that anything was brewing until the volcano blew up. Neither did his father, commander of a naval squadron based in Naples, who died of a heart attack (or something) in the midst of the eruption. Hell, Nero had made a tour of Campagna not ten years before, performing as an actor, and had his theater on the slopes of the mountain destroyed mid-performance by an Earthquake. Nobody interpreted that as anything but the Gods being acting critics.

General Havoc wrote:No, I rather interpreted it as "I can't even be mad at the people who died horribly in a massive volcanic eruption they had no means of predicting, because after all, self-centered hedonistic assholes exist today too."

If you're going to "just casually" bring up the fact that the victims of a massive natural disaster were self-centered, hedonistic assholes, you've kind of got to expect people will take your meaning as there being a link between these two facts. This is like me "just saying" that there's an area in Arizona that looks awful like the photos of the moon from Apollo 11 and the shadows in the photos look fake and the footage of the original landing was "conveniently" lost, and then acting horrified when someone accuses me of being a moon landing hoax conspiracy theorist.

You don't get to disguise your point and then get snippy when people take what you're saying at face value.