This is an interesting read that shows what life was like for a number of the inhabitants of Pompeii in the days leading up to the eruption that made the city so infamous. Lytton uses his characters to cover all the main cultures and peoples that make up this colourful city, from the Greeks (represented by Glaucus) and the Egyptians (represented by Arbaces) to the new religion of Christianity (represented by Olinthus) and the older religions and belief in the occult (represented by the Witch). The only people not well represented are the Italians themselves but then again Pompeii is very much a Greek stronghold thanks to its coastal location and fertile lands. The vibrancy of the people and the city is portrayed well and even though you know how it all ends there is still a sense of hope as well as a sense of dread that keeps things moving well. Personally I would've liked more about the eruption itself and how each of the main characters faired and where they ended up afterwards but this may have taken away from the feeling of finality that the book ends with so maybe its for the best.

i read this as a teenager and have not picked it up since then, but at least then i really enjoyed the historical setting and the storyline.

I cannot judge this book as a novel because it reads so beautifully that I consider it poetry.

It's a great book to use for bibliomancy and it's so old that you can get great antique copies of it.

PS. I once read that no one practices bibliomancy anymore and I divined from the text that the author is wrong.

This is a hilarious 19th century account of the final days of Pompeii before the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. It was charming but the characters were a little lacking.

"...the showers and winds extinguished them, and the sudden darkness into which their sudden birth was converted had something in it doubly terrible and doubly impressing on the impotence of human hopes, the lesson of despair."

Choose your own review: for those of you interested in all the weird coincidences and parallels between this and Game of Thrones, skip to the next paragraph. All others, read on. This Victorian-era historical fiction has some great moments, but much of it is melodramatic and preachy. The heroes are almost as obvious as the villains, and non-essential characters are killed off before the end seemingly for simplicity's sake. I had a (paradoxical) pessimistic hope that ALL the characters would perish in the disaster foreshadowed throughout the book-- understandable given the last chapter's title: All Things Cease. Alas, some may make it out alive. This could have done with a little moral ambiguity, but maybe that's an unrealistic expectation considering the time in which it was written. Gray area? What gray area?

Okay, now for all the overlap with George R. R. Martin's stuff, which convinced me that he's read this and borrowed from it:

•There's mention of a "Lord of Light"
•The worship of Isis figures prominently, and she's called "Mother" and "Maiden"
•There's conflict between the "old gods," the Roman pantheon, and "the new," Isis and Christ
•There's a character named Pansa (=Sansa)
•There's an architectural adjective, Tyrian (=Tyrion)
•There's a term of gladiator training, Lanista (=Lannister)
•There's a character who tries to kill another by locking him in a treasure vault (Daenerys entombing Xaro and that woman who betrayed her)
•There's a resourceful blind girl named Nydia (=Arya)

There are more that I probably missed or that I'm forgetting, or deemed too much of a stretch (all the songs written in? people fighting lions / tigers / bears / oh my?) but still, safe to say, there's a crazy amount of coincidences. Martin may have been inspired by The Iron King, for his story, but I maintain that he took a lot of elements from this, too.

The books is... complicated. On one hand it's a really good book and you get really much informations about the life in that time. On the other Hand some sentences are so complicated that you don't understand them. Sentences go over a half page and the writing style is horrible! Okay it's an old book but there are really better ones.

In the end it got too long-winded and boring, although I did enjoy the first 100 pages or so

Good read. The movies that supposedly follow this novel - do not! The reader gets to understand the motives of the personalities in a typical Roman city of the 1st century. Entertaining.

This is another tangent off of my current Dickens kick. It was a fictionalized account of, obviously, the last days of Pompeii. There was love, romance, heartbreak, heroes and villains, betrayals and last-minute rescues. Really, what more could you ask? It reminded me of reading Dickens but with fewer memorable characters with quirky traits. I do, however, recommend it.

This was just an adventure book with a historical setting. I think it had no blatant historical mistakes (I don't know much about Rome or Pompeii), and it was entertaining enough, but it didn't have me hooked, as I expected. I also expected more drama from the Vesubius eruption, but it had just a mild effect on the main characters' lives.
What made me give this book just two stars was:
1. Flat characters. Good ones were really good ones. Bad ones were evil. Good ones win without much effort and just in time and bad ones die because of God's Wrath.
2. I don't agree with Christian views most of the time. And this author introduced too much of them. It felt like being a child scolded for not loving and appreciating Christ enough. And everyone who was good was converted to the true religion (as they said in the book) and pagans were dead.

However, it was still entertaining. I need some fluff books from time to time.

Flowery, but well worth a read.

Dar viena lengvo pasiskaitymo istorinio romano žanrui priklausanti knyga apie paskutines Pompėjos dienas. Autorius stengėsi parodyti kasdieninį miesto gyvenimą sukurdamas visą eilę personažų, įkūnijančių visas gyventojų grupes - turtuolius, gladiatorius, politikus, mvergus, žynius ir netgi mistikos ir juodosios magijos atstovus. Kaip ir dauguma meilės istorijų - daug kančių ir nelaimių, bet pabaiga "gyveno ilgai ir laimingai".