Kids’ Violent Pompeii Drawings Provide a Teaching Moment

But please read the column anyway

By Ed Goldman

Compared to what Pompeiian kids were allowed to watch pre-Vesuvius—the volcano that wiped out the city and its suburbs, killing 16,000 people and no doubt interrupting garbage collection service for a few years—the violent video games today’s kids play may be as tame as “My Little Pony.” Or at least “My Little Pony: This Time It’s Personal.”

According to a recent report on CNN (suggested new tagline: “We don’t miss Don Lemon, either”), these children had ringside, street-side and probably sword-side seats to gladiators slaughtering not only one another, but also spectators and hapless panini vendors who got too close to the action.

What’s shakin’

CNN reporter Barbie Latza Nadeau writes, “Children’s sketches depicting violent scenes of gladiators and hunters battling animals have been uncovered at the archaeological park of Pompeii…The drawings, thought to be made by children between the ages of five and seven sometime before Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, were found on the walls of a back room in the residential sector of the archaeological park. They show that even children in ancient times were exposed to extreme violence.”

“’It does not seem to be a problem only of today, between video games and social media,’ (park) superintendent Gabriel Zuchtriegel said in a statement about the latest discovery. ‘The difference is that, in ancient times, the bloodshed in the arena was real and that few saw it as a problem with all the possible repercussions on the psycho-mental development of Pompeian children.” Some of the drawings show two gladiators facing off wild boars. “Nearby lies the head of a bird of prey archaeologists say could have been an eagle.” This was so long ago that I’m assuming the eagle hadn’t gone bald yet.

I think it’s worth mentioning that since we know what the kids saw because of the drawings they made, at least they had art in the schools. So kudos to the Pompeiian PTA! Yet sadly, we’ll never really know if the kids would have grown up to be philanthropists or Unabombers. They perished along with everyone else in one of nature’s largest, non-permitted redevelopment projects.

Now, then: How did the spectator sports of kids in pre-79 A.D. stack up against what our 21st century gamers are doing?

The names of today’s most violent video games offer distinctive hints that they’re not teen musicals: DOOM, Splatterhouse, MadWorld, Manhunt and Mortal Kombat X. Another violent one’s called Harvester but because that’s also the name of a John Deere line of farm machinery—and I live and work in the Farm-To-Fork Capital of the galaxy—calling it out would almost seem to be unpatriotic.

When I grew up, the most popular TV shows featured cowboys or private investigators. Every week, the shows’ heroes killed a few dozen perps, while the heroes suffered nothing more than creased skulls from being knocked unconscious by gun butts or sore arms from the occasional skin-grazing bullet. Rarely did anyone bleed, even if you saw the hero pump twelve bullets into a villain—and, oddly, from the same, single six-shooter.

And because all of the deceased perps came back as living perps in other shows sometimes airing the same week, the consequences of violence didn’t seep into my blissfully unconscious mind. So my little pals and I continued to play good-guys and bad-guys, brandishing our toy pistols and sometimes, for added thrills, fastening a roll of caps onto them so we could produce what we thought were realistic sound effects. They would have been, too—had we been engaged in combat in the actual 1800s, when gun discharges sounded a lot like caps being hammered, according to historians whose hearing can ostensibly travel through time.

My point (which I’m sure required a posse to locate) is that my generation and at least two or three others that ensued grew up reasonably okay. We seemed to be able to separate TV violence from real-life responses. Those who couldn’t adapt were doomed not only to a life of frequent run-ins with the law but also the ongoing prospect of being thrown into volcanoes.

Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).