Blog Tour Guest Post: Three Things You Didn't Know About Pompeii by Vicky Alvear Shecter, Author of Curses and Smoke

Please join me in welcoming author Vicky Alvear Shecter to Let Them Read Books! Vicky is touring the blogosphere with her newest young adult historical, Curses and Smoke: A Novel of Pompeii. (I loved it, btw; click here to read my review.) I'm thrilled to have her here today with a guest post about the darker side of Pompeii, and choosing which historical details don't necessarily belong in a love story.

Read on if you dare, and enter to win your own copy of Curses and Smoke!

Three Things About Pompeii You May Not Have Known

By Vicky Alvear Shecter

Because Curses and Smoke: A Novel of Pompeii is essentially a love story, there were some interesting historical details I could not include because they were either unrelated to the characters or (worse) could potentially pull the reader out of the story. Still, I can share them with you here! J

1. Just because there were lots of…erm, “male members” on display everywhere, the city was
not overrun with brothels. The ancient Romans considered the engorged male member as apotropaic, which means they believed it warded off evil. That’s why you saw penises (penii?) everywhere—as wind chimes, statues, oil lamps and all manner of street carvings and statuary. Early excavators didn’t realize the meaning behind the phalluses and assumed they pointed the way toward “services rendered.” The fact that the baker had a phallus over his shop didn’t mean a man could get his own loaf raised, just that the baker was hoping evil would pass him by!

This phallus with a lion’s back-end and a phallus tail of its own
was supposed to ward off evil. Didn’t seem like it worked
too great for Pompeiians, unfortunately…

2. It was expected for men to use female slaves for sex. Slaves were considered “human property,” so consent was irrelevant. But this only applied to the men. Gods forgive them if a woman “got busy” with a male slave! The slave could be killed (crucified) for such an outrage and the woman terribly dishonored. A husband had the right to kill his wife for the “crime.” This is why I wanted to switch it up and have a female fall in love with a male slave. It made the stakes higher—death or love, love or death. What will they choose before the mountain chooses for them?

3. There seemed to a public defecation problem in Pompeii. While I allude to this in passing in the novel, I didn’t detail it because I didn’t want the reader to worry about whether my characters might “step in it” whenever they went out. Graffiti throughout the city, however, indicates that this was an issue. From one regular guy who posted “Secundus defecated here” three times on one wall to a formal notice from a government official that read, “Pooper, make sure you keep it in until you pass this spot!”—it seemed an ongoing problem, despite the availability of public latrines. But you can see why I avoided this detail—it’s just too gross!

Fortunately, there were plenty of other interesting details about ancient Pompeii that I could focus on, including a belief in a mysterious goddess of “poisonous vapors” forgotten within the Temple of Venus complex. The Romans had ignored this ancient Samnite goddess of poison gas—the irony being, of course, that it was a mixture of superheated mud and toxic gas that killed everyone and buried the city.

Curses and Smoke, in the end, is a love story. As such, there were ugly or weird details that I needed to avoid in order to not distract the reader from the central focus—the growing relationship between a pair of unlikely young lovers. Still, I snuck them in whenever I could because—for me anyway—that’s what makes historical fiction so fascinating. I hope readers enjoy discovering those small details of what life was really life in ancient Pompeii.

Fascinating! Thanks for sharing, Vicky!

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Vicky Alvear Shecter is the author of the young adult novel, CLEOPATRA’S MOON (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic, 2011), based on the life of Cleopatra’s only daughter. She is also the author of two award-winning biographies for kids on Alexander the Great and Cleopatra. She is a docent at the Michael C. Carlos Museum of Antiquities at Emory University in Atlanta. Connect with Vicky on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, and her blog.