Pompeii, by Robert Harris

Pompeii by Robert Harris

While it is always fascinating to read historical novels, I can't help but wonder just how much of it is accurate and how much of it is fabrication. Of course, even if someone had been present at the time doesn't mean the person's account is dependable.

As for this book, it is full of details which Harris must have done painstaking research to obtain. Here is a good quote at the end of the book regarding the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius:

"Men mistook measurement for understanding. And they always had to put themselves at the center of everything. That was their greatest conceit. The earth is becoming warmer -- it must be our fault! The mountain is destroying us -- we have not propitiated the gods! It rains too much, it rains too little -- a comfort to think that these things are somehow connected to our behaviour, that if only we lived a little better, a little more frugally, our virtue would be rewarded. But here was nature, sweeping toward him -- unknowable, all-conquering, indifferent -- and he saw in her fires the futility of human pretensions."