Elodie Harper: «The “wolves” of Pompeii like today’s women. accomplices»

How did she come up with it?
«I have always been fascinated by the classical world and wanted to focus on the lives of those Romans who are not always well represented in fiction: women and slaves. It was my starting point and also the reason why I chose Pompeii, because it is a place where the life of ordinary people is still the subject of discovery, like the recent slave room».

What is the charm of Pompeii in the world today?
“It’s as close to time travel as you can get. There are very few ancient sites where you can truly walk through a Roman city and see so many details of daily life, whether it’s the incredible mosaics that greet you as you enter a grand villa or the marble countertops of the many bars. I find it an extraordinary place. And the Archaeological Museum of Naples has also been useful to me for historical reconstruction».

What struck you the most?
«The numerous sexual images and in particular of phalluses scattered around the city in often non-sexual contexts, such as the one on a bakery with the inscription next to it that says “Here you live in abundance”, therefore it is a representation of good luck. But we know from Martial that some were also seen in a sexual sense: she writes that a decent girl should look away rather than look at a Priapus. This underlines how very macho the images are: Pompeii was largely built by men for men».

How do you get into the minds of women from the past?
«I used a combination of texts to reconstruct the social attitudes of the time, but also emotions and basic human needs which do not tend to change. The desire to be free, to have power over one’s body, to be respected, to be loved: these are fundamental aspects of our humanity”.

Women fighting for independence then?
“Amara and the others may not be feminists because there was no theory of women’s equality in the ancient world, but we know — from contemporary accounts and legal documents — that many women fought hard alone to run their own affairs, whether it was of a business or to choose who to love».

And what do they have to say to our present?
«The slave women of the Lupanare, who could not marry or have a family without the owner’s permission, had to rely on each other as a kind of “family”, which is what slave people did in many houses in the Roman world. Female friendship is still a crucial aspect in the life of most modern women, even if the circumstances are very different. Even in writing the “love story” between Amara and her patron Rufus I thought about how love and financial security are still often connected for women. I wanted to reflect on this in a non-sentimental way.”

You use very casual language: aren’t you afraid that you have betrayed the historical genre?
“It was important to represent the fact that for people of the past it wasn’t a great historical moment, it was their present. I wanted to reproduce the tone of most of the Pompeii inscriptions and even the one used by Roman poets such as Catullus, who do not give up on imprecations».

There is Pliny the Elder as a character. What place does Latin literature occupy in the drafting of the novel?
“She was a great inspiration. Ovid’s cynical attitude in The Art of Love played an important role in the Amara-Rufus relationship, he helped me think about behaviors of the time (especially for his irreverent and playful tone) and also the Satyricon of Petronius. I reinvented Trimalchio’s banquet by trying to look at it from the perspective of Amara or one of the other women.’

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