Word: herculaneum
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...became fashionable. From the many Hellenistic and Roman busts of marble that have survived we know how the ancients saw and depicted themselves. But the moist climates of Greece and Italy have long since sent most classical paintings (except those buried under the ashes and lava at Pompeii and Herculaneum) crumbling into dust...
...HERCULANEUM by Joseph Jay Deiss. 174 pages. Thomas Y. Crowell...
Time to Flee. To see such sights today in Herculaneum, writes Joseph Deiss, an amateur archaeologist and vice-director of the American Academy in Rome, is to "walk 2,000 years into the past." The world is more familiar with what happened to neighboring Pompeii on the same day that Herculaneum died; erupting on Aug. 24, A.D. 79, Vesuvius buried Pompeii in a sudden fiery rain of stone and ash, entombing nearly one-tenth of its 20,000 citizens and inflicting terrible damage on the city. Herculaneum, however, was more fortunate. Granted time by the wind, which blew west toward...
Hardening into rock, the lava became Herculaneum's unmarked tomb. The town's very location was lost until 1709, when monks in Resina, a city superimposed by chance on Herculaneum's grave, uncovered some marble theater seats while sinking a well. Other diggers plundered Herculaneum of everything their tunnels exposed. "It is one of the tragic ironies of human endeavor," writes Deiss, "that the suffocating mud did less damage to Herculaneum than the earliest excavators...
Only the Chin. Deiss's book discloses another archaeological irony. "Of the whole face of Herculaneum," he writes, "we have seen thus far only the chin." Systematic excavation has been halted since before the war. Most of Herculaneum still sleeps beneath millions of tons of volcanic stone; all of the forum, for instance, the heart of every Roman town, is completely enshrouded. "It seems incredible," Deiss concludes, "to discover a buried treasure...