Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
in Pompeiana (1817-19) that excavations had revealed a human skeleton still grasping a lance, probably a
sentinel 'who preferred dying at his post to quitting it for the more ignominious death which, in conformity
with the severe discipline of his country, would have awaited him'. In The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) Bulwer
Lytton picked up on this, observing that: The skeletons of more than one sentry were found at their posts.'
"Gell's account establishes some critical distance from the 'severe discipline of his country' and there is a
distinctly ironic edge to Bulwer Lytton's account of sentries too well drilled to be independently sensible, but
this did not survive into Poynter's sombrely heroic painting, the Indian Mutiny of 1857 which had intervened
demonstrated the need for duty and self-sacrifice in extreme conditions at the limits of empire, so the sentinel
at Pompeii became a celebrity in the 1860s, an honorary Briton, represented by Poynter as standing
unflinching at his post with lava cascading round him. He also appeared at the beginning of Charlotte Mary
Yonge's remorselessly improving Book of Golden Deeds (1864) as one whose bones 'have remained even till
our own times to show how a Roman soldier did his duty' (242).
Bibliography
Bulwer-Lytton, Sir Edward. The Last Days of Pompeii. 1834. Full text (in Victorian Web).
Vance, Norman. The Victorians and Ancient Rome. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.
Wood, Christopher. Olympian Dreamers: Victorian Classical Painters. London: Constable, 1983. 131-53.