Roman re-enactment in the Victorian era

[Epictetus]

Cambridge professor Mary Beard recently discussed a lecture she gave which included some information about Victorian-era Roman re-enactments.

I started with the re-enactments of Roman life staged on the site [Pompeii] in 1884 (in aid of the victims of the recent Ischia earthquake, though in truth the whole spectacle made such a loss that the poor victims got nothing).

There were three days of performance -- a staged chariot race, a Roman wedding (that's in the picture) and a funeral, and of course some gladiators in the amphitheatre (with 'Falernian" served from the original bars of the city in genuine fake "antique vases". The British reaction to this was a bit mixed. One of my old friends, Jane Ellen Harrison, was characteristically acerbic: "Some of us,” she wrote in the Magazine of Art, “have perhaps felt that all this, amusing and archaeologically interesting though it is, is just a trifle out of tune. We may study the dead past to our profit, but we need not call it back to life and bid it dance for us.”

Anyway, my point was that the nineteenth-century reaction to Pompeii (like the twenty-first I suspect) was always caught between seeing it as a place of the dead -- and seeing it as a place where the past could come, literally, to life (as in the re-enactments). Earlier in the nineteenth century, there are even weirder stories of idiosyncratic British men actually choosing to "become Roman" for a week or two, living in reconstructed houses in the city.

I thought this was quite interesting. By chance, did anyone happen to see her lecture at the Victorian Conference in Cambridge, or know anything else about it?