Animals in Pompeii & Herculaneum

[Summary of a talk I gave at the British Museum on 27 May 2013]
Animals had lots of different “jobs” in the cities of Hercules.
What do I mean by the cities of Hercules? I mean Herculaneum, traditionally founded by the hero Hercules, and Pompeii, named after a big procession (pompa) mounted by Hercules to celebrate his capture of the Cattle of Geryon.
By the end of this talk, most children and adults in the audience learned all 12 labours or tasks of Hercules and also 13 categories of animals in those Roman cities.
Romans loved memory tricks, like the Roman House Memory system where you place the objects you want to remember around your house. But here’s the twist: you put those objects there in your imagination.

Another memory system the Romans would have liked is the memory-rhyme system. The key is to find an object to stand for one, two, three etc by rhyming it. So two is ‘shoe’ because the ditty goes one, two buckle my shoe. 
So if task number two was for Hercules to kill the snake-headed hydra, imagine he uses a shoe to knock off the hydra’s heads before sealing them with fire, rather than his club or sword. It seems convoluted but not only does it help you remember items on a list backwards, forwards or out of order, but it increases your creativity.

In my talk at the British Museum on Monday 27 May, I took kids and parents through the process of memorizing twelve objects and the twelve tasks. More than that, each task served as a mnemonic for a class of animal. So task two-shoe-hydra reminds us that there is a whole class of animal that are hybrid creatures or mythologlical!
Seen as a list (below) it looks pretty dull, but when you are teasing out answers from imaginative kids, using fun illustrations and throwing in facts like what to do when an owl flies into your house it is a fun learning experience.
1 = bun = lion = entertaining animals
2 = shoe = hydra = mythological animals
3 = tree = hind (deer) = huntable animals
4 = door = boar = sacrificial animals
5 = hive = stables = working animals
6 = sticks = birds = augury animals
7 = heaven = Cretan bull = sacred/symbolic animals
8 = gate = man-eating mares = transport animals
9 = wine = Amazon’s belt = wearable animals
10 = hen = cattle = edible (food) animals
11 = heaven = golden apples = protective animals
12 = delve (to dig) = Cerberus = guard animals

Guard animals lead me to talk about the three dog mosaics found in the cities of Hercules and also the famous plaster cast of the space left by a chained dog who could not flee the eruption.

It was sad he died, but also happy for now he is one of the most famous dogs in the history of the world.
And maybe some of his puppies DID survive and their descendants haunt the ruins of  to this day.
When I went to Italy a few months ago I saw a posh city dog and her scruffy country cousin who could both be descendants of this watchdog from the House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii.

And a cheeky white dog with a pine-cone distracted everybody from our illustrious guide who was telling us about the amphitheatre. Other friends of mine have spoken about being shepherded around the cities of Hercules by the dogs of Vesuvius.

This reminded me of the final category of animals in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Pets! 
Yes, then just as today, children and adults loved animals as pets. They loved dogs, birds, even eels! Perhaps the only animal NOT thought of as a pet that we have today was the cat. 
After my talk, while I was signing copies of my Roman Mysteries books, I tossed a random number from one to twelve at each child and asked them to see if they could remember the accompanying labour. Not all of them could do it, but I’ll wager there are a few who will amaze their parents and teachers over the next few days.