Ampliatus

[160] The name Ampliatus belongs to servants and freedmen; it was never used by men of rank, whether pagans or Christians.

Pagan and Christian Rome Rodolfo Amedeo Lanciani 1888

While trying to repair the vital aqueduct that provides drinking water to the towns around the bay, Attilius comes into conflict with a shady property tycoon, the freed slave and self-made man Ampliatus.

Archive 2006-03-01 Carla 2006

While trying to repair the vital aqueduct that provides drinking water to the towns around the bay, Attilius comes into conflict with a shady property tycoon, the freed slave and self-made man Ampliatus.

Pompeii Carla 2006

There certainly are motivations that wouldn't be out of place in a modern thriller - Ampliatus is greedy and ruthless, the local town politicians are corrupt, Attilius the engineer is the honest man who won't take bribes.

Pompeii Carla 2006

It's all work and no play for Attilius until his stoic, spartan lifestyle of "the camp-bed and the cloak" is suddenly disrupted when he falls for a voluptuous beauty named Corelia, soon to be married off by her father, the town's formidable mob-boss millionaire Ampliatus.

Love Among the Ruins 2003

Ampliatus also shares characteristics with Trimalchio, the vulgar nouveau riche of Petronius 'classic The Satyricon, who brandishes his wealth by hosting an outrageously expensive dinner party consisting of such culinary extravagances as sow's udder and wild boar stuffed with live thrushes.

Love Among the Ruins 2003

Pompeii's obligatory Roman banquet scene pays homage to this, with the nauseating addition of man-eating eels fed on the flesh of one of Ampliatus 'own slaves.

Love Among the Ruins 2003

There are other references as well: Harris 'Ampliatus got his start working for Jucundus the banker, a real-life Pompeiian whose business dealings recorded in perfectly preserved wax tablets have shed light on financial activities of the day, and the mottos of "Hail Profit" and "Profit is Joy" that he so readily espouses are from actual floor mosaics found in some of the town's merchant homes.

Love Among the Ruins 2003

Despite one-dimensional characterizations that suffer from the narrative's compressed time frame, and glaring modernisms (Ampliatus remembers how the ceremony "had given him the creeps") inevitably resulting from Harris 'usage of a contemporary idiom, Pompeii is meticulously researched, cinematically vivid entertainment that has the epic backdrop, fast-paced action, and spectacular finale of a Hollywood blockbuster.

Love Among the Ruins 2003

The wealthy freed slave who controls Pompeii's politicians and purse strings is based on inscriptions at the temple of the Egyptian goddess Isis detailing how a certain Ampliatus paid for its entire restoration after the earthquake of A.D. 62 and in return, his son Celsinus (only six years old at the time) was given a place on the town council.

Love Among the Ruins 2003