Posted on 07/12/2006 10:42:50 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Stabiae has been neglected over the years because of its more famous neighbour Pompeii and because, frankly, there wasn't much to see there. But now a key new partnership has been set up to dig the whole area of the ancient 'Gomorrah-on-the-Gulf'. Stabiae was in fact much naughtier than supposedly raunchy Pompeii and things went on there that have would have made a Roman patron - never mind matron - blush. According to Pliny the Elder, who died when Vesuvius belched down its wrath on the Neapolitan resort towns, Pompeii was a place you could safely take your daughters, while Stabiae was strictly for the wild oats sowing set - or wilder stuff yet... The peristyle - under which was found Stabiae's first skeleton, apparently crushed by falling masonry - has merely whet RAS's [Restoring Ancient Stabiae] appetite.
(Excerpt) Read more at ansa.it ...
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"We're very eager to get down there. Who knows what saucy secrets we'll find?"
Yeah, that seems a little macabre.
At least one cat house was excavated in Pompeii. Or maybe it was Herculaneum.
Seriously, though, it just seems a little crude to say that they're digging to uncover 'saucy secrets'. They're going to have to go through lot of corpses to find them.
Or maybe not. The fact that the site has been generally avoided may mean some stunning finds (from an archaeological perspective), but Stabiae (if memory serves, I was pretty young in 79 AD) was farther away from the eruption. Pliny the Elder died on the shore (poison gas from the eruption?) after landing to round up survivors for evacuation. Others in the rescue party survived.
LOL!
Let's hope so! Perhaps the choice of words is just a bid to engage the public and drum up more funding; I understand that archeologists are forced to produce or move on.
(if memory serves, I was pretty young in 79 AD)
Thanks for the chuckle. :-P
Sometimes I wish I were Indiana Jones! Or his real-life contemporary, Richard Halliburton. (One day Hollywood will wise up and do a movie of Halliburton's life.)
Many thanks for the great post!!! It's like taking a vacation without leaving my seat...
*DieHard*
Hmmm. Looks like another example of using sex to get money -- in this case, funding for the dig.
Oh, well, it's for a good cause.
We saw one in Pompeii, or least we were told that was what it was and according to the mosaic on the wall, I believe it.
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