As we travel to ancient Italy, we discover the wonders of a forgotten city.

The seaside town of Pompeii was one of several that were swallowed by the devastation of Mount Vesuvius. Lost for centuries and then found by accident, Pompeii allowed the modern world a unique insight in the lives of our ancient ancestors.

The calm before the storm

Back in the day, some might call it the Bronze Age, the city of Pompeii was settled at the mouth of the River Sarno. What those earlier Pompeiians didn’t know, was that the escarpment they were building their town on, had been formed when the seemingly unresponsive mountain next door had erupted long before they arrived.

While the eruption wasn’t actively in living memory, there were still stories about it. For example, in Greek mythology, there is a legend about Hercules fighting giants in a field of fire right near where Pompeii was being built. Pompeii’s neighbour, Herculaneum, was even named after this legend. Field Museum geologist, Philip Janney, adds a little more:

Vesuvius is actually inside the exploded skeleton of an older volcano. If you look at an aerial photograph, you can see the remaining ridge of a much larger volcano on the north side.

It’s believed that around the 8th century BC, the Greeks were the main land holders in the Campania region, where Pompeii is located. And it was the Greeks and even some Etruscans that went around settling down in the beautiful landscape. But when the Syracusans came along in 474 BC, the good old Etruscans were defeated at the Battle of Cumae.

The local Samnites wandered down off the mountains and began setting up shop. They were so good at it in fact that they started turning on each other, and when full out war broke out in the 3rd century BC was when the Romans decided they had had enough and started exerting their influence in the region.

Pompeii started seeing the effects of being associated with Rome in the 2nd century BC, when the Bay of Naples became quite the spot for wealthy Romans on vacation. Even back then the rich got fat on beaches while the rest of us slaved away.

Pompeii, and the surrounding region of Campania, wasn’t only popular for its coastline. They had the good fortune to have a beautiful climate, and because of the volcanic soil, great agricultural activity, especially for olives and grapes. So much so, that their wine was considered one of the best and a bottle has even been found as far as England. They were also well known for their fish sauce, or garum. It was basically like Tartare sauce today, just with a whole lot more fermenting.

In the region, Pompeii was a pretty important inland port. They had a good amount of trade and was full of businesses and different industries. Because of this mix, it’s believed that the people who inhabited the town were also a mixture of the elites of society, workers, professionals and, of course, slaves.

Recently some writing tablets from Herculaneum have been deciphered, showing that over half of the population were either slaves or free slaves. And from the plaster casts (we’ll get to those later) and the graffiti inscriptions found, it shows the true extent of not the greatest aspect of Roman society.

Treating Pompeiians as the typical Roman citizen, archaeologists and historians can learn an amazing amount from what’s frozen in time. Surprisingly, the health of Pompeiians weren’t too different to what we go through today. Although, there is significant evidence of poor dental hygiene, which I imagine was quite common back when the years were counted by who was emperor.

The town of Pompeii is about 3 square kilometres, with only one third of this excavated, but we’ll go into more detail about this a little later. While the town itself was densely populated, with scholars estimating about 12 000 living within the city, so too were the surrounding areas, with hundreds of farms and villas in the surrounding countryside.

A wall surrounded Pompeii (we’re not sure why, it didn’t do anything against the lava), and it’s believed to have quite a few gates. The streets were wide and paved, and by looking at the wheel ruts it’s believed that there may have been a universal wheelbase, which is quite the find. Although oddly, there doesn’t appear to be any street names or numbers.

Pompeii has pretty much every building you could ask for in the 1st century. Shops, villas, houses for people who aren’t ridiculously rich, temples, shrines, public fountains, taverns, gyms, baths, latrines, markets, schools, water towers, arenas, fulleries, a basilica, theatres and the all important, brothels. Meaning that we can assume that the town of Pompeii, at the time of eruption at least, was a thriving coastal community.

Throughout the centuries, Mount Vesuvius, the villain in this story, is believed to have erupted over 50 times. But its most famous eruption was in 79 AD, which saw Pompeii and the surrounding region covered by volcanic debris.

The Eruption

The slopes of the volcano were well known for their fertile soil, allowing Pompeii to be renowned for its wine. But the people were not aware of what was brewing underneath, and Vesuvius did nothing but lull the inhabitants of Campania into a false sense of security. After all, how bad could something be if it grows grapes that create a fantastic grape juice.

Despite the alcoholic reassurance, Vesuvius did give the residents a pretty big warning. About 15 years before the eruption, there was a massive earthquake, which would have measured 7.5 on today’s Richter scale. Understandably, towns were badly damaged, even as far away as Naples, and the death toll was likely 4 figures. The water supply to Pompeii was majorly affected with aqueducts and underground pipes being damaged. But it did appear, that the inhabitants of Pompeii, and wider Campania, decided that they would rebuild. How do we know this? You ask. Well, firstly there are records of repairs being hastily made for the Roman Emperor, Nero’s visit in 64 AD. We also know they were still rebuilding at the time of the volcanic eruption because we can see where a building is still in construction.

While this big warning may have gone unheeded by the people living in the area, Vesuvius did try her best, and smaller earthquakes are believed to have continued in the intervening years. But it was in 79 AD when really weird things started to happen. Water supplies started mysteriously drying up, dead fish were found floating in the river and vines that grew on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius died (not the grape juice), and to top this off, smaller earthquakes and aftershocks started happening more and more frequently.

While the inhabitants may have thought that the gods were angry with them for some human slight. Their gods could do nothing against the power that is nature.

The eruption is believed to have happened on the morning of the 24th August, 79 AD. Although just as a small disclaimer, there is some talk of this initial date being incorrect, as there may have been some graffiti suggesting that the eruption actually happened mid-October. Regardless of when the eruption took place the result was the same. The lives of the inhabitants of Pompeii, as well as surrounding communities like Herculaneum, Oplontis, Stabiae and numerous others, were destroyed.

We know that a guy named Pliny the Elder travelled by boat towards the beaches from his home at Misenum, in an attempt to help the people stranded, desperate to get away from the danger, but supposedly the ash got too much for him and he died at Stabiae, becoming one of the estimated 2000. How do we know this? Well his nephew, conveniently named, Pliny the Younger, wrote about what he saw:

Darkness fell, not the dark of a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp has been put out in a dark room.

Pliny was watching with his mother from across the Bay. And thanks to him jotting down what was happening, has a whole phase of the eruption named after him.

Basically what we now call a ‘Plinean eruption’ is when a massive plume of ash, pumice and rock blasts into the sky so high that you can see it for hundreds of kilometres. Pliny Jr compared the blast to a pine tree:

[A] cloud of unusual size and appearance [that] rose to a great height on a sort of trunk and then split off into branches.

Philip Janney explains Juniors comparison:

As the column cooled, it began to spread out horizontally and drift with the wind, which is why Pliny [the Younger] compared it to a… tree. As it cooled further, solid particles started to rain down. That’s what began to fall on Pompeii.

What fell was fine ash with light chunks of pumice. This wasn’t initially fatal, giving Pompeiians time to flee. But those who thought they could ride it out, were sorely wrong and would unfortunately not survive. The more fine ash that fell, the more it filled the air making it difficult to breathe. There was so much that people were suffocating and buildings were collapsing under the weight.

Pliny Jr gives us an insight into the terror that must have filled the whole region.

I believed I was perishing with the world, and the world with me.

About 14 km to the northwest, Herculaneum was experiencing the eruption in their own way. A pyroclastic surge had come storming down the mountain, pretty much obliterating everything in its path. But what is a pyroclastic surge, you may ask. Basically it’s a surge of superheated poisonous gas that moves ridiculously fast. Here’s Janney telling us just how fast:

Pyroclastic surges move quite rapidly, between 50 and 100 miles per hour. You can’t outrun them. You don’t even get much warning.

And that’s what Herculaneum was dealing with. Some Herculaneums had the time to flee to the beach, most likely in the hope of escaping by boat, but they would not survive. We know this because archaeologists in the 80s found about 300 remains in the boatsheds.

But if you had survived the first surge, there really wasn’t much hope because there were 12 surges over all, which explains why by the end the city was under about 16 metres of volcanic ash and rock.

Pompeii didn’t escape the pyroclastic surges either. They didn’t have as many as Herculaneum, only three, but they came at the worst time. Just as those who had sheltered inside thought it was safe to come out, the pyroclastic surge got them.

Once the eruption had finally ended and Vesuvius once again fell silent, the entire landscape looked different. Pompeii, Herculaneum and other surrounding towns had disappeared. It’s estimated that a total of 16 000 people were killed, 2000 of those being from Pompeii.

Buried under 6 to 7 metres of rock and ash, Pompeii and Herculaneum were abandoned and eventually forgotten.

But there was one good thing that came out of the eruption. With both the towns hidden from the world, the life that was lived at the time of the eruption was preserved allowing those in the future, like us, to peak into the past. The German poet, Goethe, had the great insight to say when he was visiting Pompeii in the 1780s:

Many disasters have befallen the world, but few have brought prosperity so much joy.

The Aftermath

It was the poet, Statius, who, not too long after the eruption, said:

When this wasteland regains its green, will men believe that cities and peoples lie beneath?

And as the decades and centuries rolled by, the covered cities were forgotten from living memory. For those who came across the covered Pompeii, it was a time for treasure hunters who fancied themselves archaeologists. But Pompeii has indeed survived through it all, allowing our modern eyes to feast upon the everyday of Roman life.

It was an Italian architect, Domenico Fontana in the late 16th century who stumbled upon the Pompeiian ruins when he was digging a canal. But not much really came of his discovery. It wouldn’t be until 150 years down the track before the city was actively excavated.

1748 was when a group of explorers came upon the site and rediscovered it. Finding Pompeii surprisingly intact under the ash and debris. But alas, these early ‘archaeologists’ were not interested in preserving the site of Pompeii. They were more interested in taking home the treasures and general shiny things they found around the place, meaning that records are pretty much non-existent, not great news for a modern historian. It wasn’t until the 1860s when Giuseppe Fiorelli strolled onto the scene, blessingly bringing some order to carnage. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

It’s believed by numerous scholars that Pompeii’s excavation played an establishing role of the neo-classical revival throughout the 18th century. The wealthiest families of Europe had a knack of displaying art and objects found at Pompeii, and drawings of the buildings even influenced architectural designs of the century.

The extreme preservation of Pompeii has been invaluable in terms of our insight into the ancient Roman world. Meaning that Pompeii can even be classified as the richest archaeological site in the world.

Director of the British School at Rome, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, discusses ancient cities that weren’t as lucky on the preservation side of things:

If an ancient city survives to become a modern city, like Naples, its readability in archaeological terms is enormously reduced. It’s a paradox of archaeology: you read the past best in its moments of trauma.

The first phase of the excavation was pretty destructive. Paintings and frescoes were stripped from the walls and framed or damaged beyond repair through shoddy work. Most of the artefacts went to the private collection of the Bourbon King Charles III. Today this collection lives at the National Museum in Naples.

Some buildings that were uncovered and stripped were actually backfilled with the removed ash and debris. Scholars famous at the time, were horrified at this and with this added pressure, a lot of the destructive practices were stopped, but the wall paintings continued to be stripped.

By the end of the 18th century, there were two major areas that had been excavated by Karl Weber and Francesco La Vega. Even though practices were pretty lax back then, they both kept detailed records of what was going on and even made precise drawings of what had been uncovered.

When the French came to Naples at the beginning of the 19th century, the methodology of the excavation changed. They focused on excavating the town in a more systematic manner, mainly starting in the west and moving to the east. The French sorted stuff out and organised everything, even creating itineraries for visiting scholars and very important peoples.

With the French rule over and the return of the Bourbon King Ferdinand I, surprisingly the French method continued, but without French money funding started drying up. But by the time 1860 rolled around almost all of the western section of the town had been excavated.

The continued discovery

Pompeii has been the focus of archaeological digging from its discovery in 1748. That’s over 250 years having random people poking you with trowels. You’d reckon there wasn’t a whole lot left to learn and discover. But that’s what’s surprising about Pompeii and the other forgotten cities. We still don’t know about every aspect of how these ancient people went about their day.

Pompeii as an archaeological site is the longest continually excavated site in the world.

This is Steven Ellis, who is a classics professor at the University of Cincinnati and the co-Director of the Pompeii Archaeological Research Project at Port Stabia.

Because of this, what we find in Pompeii is that every step in the development in the science of archaeology was tested out in Pompeii – with mixed results.

It was the director Giuseppe Fiorelli who created an entirely new system for the excavation from 1863 to 1875.

Previously excavators would start with excavating the street and then uncover a house from the ground up. But Fiorelli thought it would be better to start at the top and work down. Meaning that it would be easier to preserve everything that they came across. And they could effectively figure out how to restore the buildings and their interiors. Unfortunately during this time, the stripped frescoes and mosaics continued to be sent to Naples.

Fiorelli could almost have been French. He was into organisation. He divided the topography of the town into a system of ‘regions’, ‘insulae’ and ‘domus’. And what he is most famous for, he’s the one who developed the plaster casts. Those casts we’ve all seen in images were created when volcanic ash settled on top of the deceased and then hardened. Once the organic material had decomposed, a void was left in the shape of the Pompeiian. Fiorelli created a small hole to access the void. He then poured in plaster, which, when hardened and extracted, was in the shape of the plant or person that had been covered by the ash.

Fiorelli allows modern scholars, archaeologists, historians and tourists to see the form of more than just victims of Vesuvius. There are plaster casts of all kinds of organic materials, humans and animals, doors, window frames and even furniture.

In 1882, August May stepped in and created a system that allowed easy categorisation of the decorative styles of Pompeiian houses. Moving further than just Pompeii, his work is still used today as the standard framework for ancient roman paintings.

When he turned up in 1910, Vittorio Spinazzola uncovered a whole heap of villas and what is believed to be the main road of the town, Via dell’Abbondanza, which spans the length of Pompeii.

Spinazzola got started on reconstructing the facades of houses, including upper floors, roofs and even balconies. And through this, proved that by using the correct excavation techniques, archaeologists can understand how the buildings were destroyed and constructed.

The next director was a Amedeo Maiuri, who turned out to be one of the most controversial archaeologists working at Pompeii in modern times.

Maiuri excavated the city walls and even found a necropolis. He also excavated two regions and a major road. He also started doing some research on the layers before the eruption, looking for the origins of Pompeii. But his discoveries were overshadowed by an inaccurate methodology, incorrect instruments and serious underfunding. So nothing was restored all that well and Maiuri’s work was eventually abandoned.

In 1964, we start to see another change in the methodology of excavation. The director of excavations at this time was Alfonso de Franciscis and his main focus was on restoration. It was important that he start with the buildings that had already been uncovered. It shows how hard his stance was on conservation that only one building was uncovered under his directorship.

It’s been discovered that major parts of Pompeii that weren’t filled with buildings were actually very green, they think about a fifth of the town. There were many gardens, both kitchen and formal, orchards and vineyards throughout the town, and the water works was nothing to turn your nose up at. Pools and fountains can be found commonly spread throughout the main walkways. Archaeologists can even tell you the kinds of trees, flowers, herbs, cereals and veggies that were grown in Pompeii, as well as the kinds of pollens and seeds that would have activated the ancient hayfever.

When Fiorelli made the body casts famous, he didn’t think much about the skeletons, that could have been because the study of the skeletal system was in its infancy. These days, we are able to gain much more information from the skeletons.

While some of the skeletons were removed from the voids before the plaster was poured, most of the skeletons were left in the voids with the plaster. Medical scanning of the casts have shown that it wasn’t just the old and weak that couldn’t escape the eruption. The remains of healthy people have been found as well. Scanning has also shown that Pompeiians had particularly bad teeth most likely caused by the wear and tear of eating bread with hard grains.

Australian Archaeologist, Estelle Lazer, has done extensive research when studying the put aside skeletons of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Cast aside, it was only when Lazer showed up with modern techniques that the study of the skeletons really took off. But the work wasn’t easy, as Lazer describes having to wade through the incorrect techniques of those who had come before her:

The human bones were not discarded, but stored in piles, along with other finds from Pompeii, in ancient buildings on the site that are not accessible to the public. The bones became mixed up and were left largely unstudied for centuries.

Moving away from the deceased and towards their written words that remain. Written records have been found in the form of electoral notices, wax tablets, signs, seals and even graffiti. Some people would carve their names like modern graffitists, but some were used to display insults. My favourite is:

Chios, I hope your piles irritate you so they burn like they’ve never burned before!

Preservation and Conservation

Only about 44 of the 66 hectares of Pompeii have been excavated. The remaining 22 have been left covered on purpose in an attempt to preserve the hidden treasures for future generations and advanced technologies.

A consolation to future archaeologists should be that because of the extra pyroclastic surges, Herculaneum is actually better preserved than Pompeii. Pompeiian buildings collapsed under the sudden weight of the falling ash, but the pyroclastic surge at Herculaneum preserved the whole building, double stories included.

The last time Mount Vesuvius was active was only in 1944. But because of the location of the surrounding towns, it remains one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world. Supposedly a catastrophic eruption is due any day now, but they’ve been saying that for a couple of decades. Which just shows our lack of knowledge in the why of eruptions. But another eruption would be absolutely devastating to the 3 million who live within the 32 kms of the volcano.

Thankfully, modern science and archaeology have moved away from the treasure hunting of the old times and those buildings still left to be excavated have remained that way. But there are still researchers from about 20 nations at Pompeii, whose job it is to record and analyse the excavations made by those that came before them. They introduce new science into the discoveries and use modern methods to preserve what has been uncovered.

But the biggest threat to Pompeii now is exposure to the elements. While under all that ash, the town was protected from the sunlight, humidity and rain. But now they are open to the world, they not only have to contend with nature, but also with the feet and natural skin oils of the millions of tourists that wander through. Conservation is becoming the most important issue, more so even than the restoration of the uncovered buildings, with the

Current administration of Pompeii [under Pietro Giovanni Guzzo, being] incredibly diligent in focusing on preservation.

Modern science methods are now almost entirely digital. These techniques have the advantage of being cost-effective, producing more effective results with less harm to the subject. This is all done by the American Pompeii Quadriporticus Project. The team of archaeologists that make up this project have unveiled their own discoveries through the use of 3D laser scanning, producing a lifesized 3D image of a space. This helps scientists to study the site and is a great non-destructive way that tourists can experience the town of Pompeii. Not to mention the archive opportunities, this form of digital conservation allows the town to be preserved for far longer than the physical town. And don’t even get me started on the 3D printing possibilities.

The project’s co-director and Stanford University’s Gary Devore goes on to say:

As an archaeologist, I’m part of that process in the way that I document what gets dug out of the ground. Since archaeology is destruction, we destroy bits of Pompeii as we go along. So it’s incredibly important that we record in great detail, with the ability to recreate what we’ve taken away afterward. That’s how we’re part of the conservation of Pompeii.

The Influence of Pompeii

The discoveries of treasure from Pompeii had a massive influence on the Enlightenment age, providing a lot more to talk about. This was helped by several books written on the effects of the eruption, such as The Antiquities of Herculaneum Exposed.

Soon a new Neo-classical influence emerged among philosophers. Artists and makers of all kinds took influence from Pompeii and Herculaneum. It also increased a new sense of education. Almost every country in Europe opened an academy in nearby Naples or a bit further north in Rome, for those studying the towns.

It was also during this time that Pompeii and Herculaneum were included in the ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill even says:

From the 1760s onward, the grand tour through Italy was considered by the aristocracy of Europe to be a necessary part of growing up.

As people gallivanted across Europe, they kept quite detailed diaries, and some of the diaries led to what is now modern archaeology and the discovery of other lost towns throughout what used to be the ancient world, particularly in Italy and Greece.

The discovery of Pompeii is massively important to how we view the ancient Roman world today. This is because the buildings left behind only offer a glimpse into a popular part of the culture, think the Colosseum. And those texts that have survived fail to explain the nuances of what their talking about. And this isn’t anything new, everything you read today comes with an amount of assumed knowledge. But Pompeii and Herculaneum show a peak into the past and what daily life was like in ancient Roman society. Not just in the stuff that have survived centuries, or exciting stuff like treasure, but for the little things that one has to do everyday.

The cities today

After the eruption and the seismic activity that followed in the centuries since, Pompeii is now actually 2 km inland. Back in the day it would have been much closer to the mouth of the Sarno river.

Today, you can pop into Pompeii at any time of the year. At the moment the main focus is conservation and preservation. Which means that the increased numbers of tourists every year are not helping with that endeavour. Pompeii and Herculaneum are effectively open-air museums, but when tourists walk, touch and in the worst cases deface these ancient buildings, they are obstructing our contact with the ancient Roman world. Thankfully, there is still a significant portion of Pompeii and Herculaneum that is yet to be excavated, meaning that the future will hold many more discoveries when it comes to these two towns.

It was in 1997 that both Pompeii and Herculaneum were collectively made a UNESCO World Heritage site.

While we mainly focused on Pompeii in this episode and only touched on Herculaneum, I highly recommend reading into it. Because while its story is similar to that of Pompeii, it has some distinct and interesting differences, especially in terms of how the town was buried, rediscovered, excavated and the conservation techniques that are happening today.

If you want to learn more about the individual villas, houses, public places, taverns, streets and brothels, head over to the Pompeii site website, I’ve chucked a link in the show notes and you can also find one on our website, they have an interactive map and some cool information on what the town is all about.

For those in the UK - click here

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