Last Days of Pompeii

The mountain has been rumbling for days. The animals are restless. And in the streets of Pompeii, beneath the elegant colonnades and behind the villa doors, the citizens of a doomed city go about their lives of passion and intrigue, oblivious to the catastrophe hurtling toward them. Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1834 masterpiece imagines the last hours of Pompeii through Glaucus, a Greek aesthete whose elegant world is threatened by the cunning Egyptian priest Arbaces, and through Olinthus, a Christian convert whose emerging faith offers something beyond the decadent paganism surrounding him. The novel uses these characters to stage a collision of cultures: Greece against Rome, Egypt against the new Christian faith, old worlds against what comes after. Then Vesuvius erupts, and everything burns. This was once among the most famous novels in the English language, shaping how generations imagined ancient Rome. It remains a sweeping, theatrical, deeply romantic epic about what we choose to love before the lights go out.