Pompeii - by Robert Harris

For me, this is an almost ideal book. It has a good, page-turning story, which kept me going right until the last page. The characters a well drawn. And I feel I learned something about the events at that time and about Roman culture and lifestyle.

The basis for the story is the fact that there has been an interruption in the water supply to one of the towns near to Pompeii. The main character is the newly-appointed "Aquarius", who is in charge of maintaining the aqueducts. He investigates the problem and gets wrapped up in local politics and the odd disappearance of his predecessor.

The approach of telling the story almost exclusively from the viewpoint of one character gives it a very personal quality. I am left wondering whether this guy actually existed and whether there really was an interruption in the water supply, which was a portent that they did not understand.

My confidence in the author's integrity means that I know I learned a lot. I am also very interested in the Romans - maybe it's because I have spent quite a lot of my life living in places that they founded. I love some of the details, like the way being Greek was almost a term of derogation. Why exactly was that? The relationship with slaves is very unfamiliar to us today and I felt it was summed up in one short passage:

... a slave carried over a small silver bowl. He dunked his hands and dried them on the slave's tunic.

I also liked the factual snippets at the beginning of each chapter - I must do some research to put the power dissipation of the eruption into an everyday context. It was interesting to note that the Romans did not know the height of clouds; a minority thought 5 miles [about right], but the majority thought that they were 111 miles up.

I would recommend this book to anyone. A great read.