Dr. Jessica Venner

Yes, this is Gaius Cuspius Panza.

Again, very well documented in Pompeii.

His name is all over the city in AD 79, literally, because he's in lots and lots of electoral graffiti around the town.

And it appears that they're all really mostly from ordinary people because of what they're saying.

They're saying, I'm a fuller, you know, someone that would do laundry.

So different people are, instead of very posh people calling for his election.

So he was like the sort of the people's man, or at least I think he would have put himself across like that.

Panzer was part of an old family, a bit like Scourus, and he would have had values, Roman male values that we would find problematic today.

And so I wanted to sort of depict those problematic Roman values that wouldn't have seemed problematic at the time.

prejudices about people being lower than him or how he got into office, things like that.

But it's really interesting to see the involvement that he would have had in the city at a direct level, walking around the city and the way he would interact with others.

He's a really, really interesting person.

But yes, problematic character.

And Petronas, the slave in my book, lives in his house.

So we get to see the different perspective that those people would have had in the same house.

It almost looks like a completely different place.

Absolutely.

That was the biggest thing that a Roman male would want to achieve was, yeah, legacy in that sense where their family wouldn't die as long as their name is remembered.

And so he has family members with statues in the Forum.

He has family members with statues in the amphitheater because they were involved in its reconstruction.