The Destruction of Pompeii: Life and Death in a Roman City

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Mycena 79 AD

0:54The date is August 24th, in the year 79 A.D. The location is a coastal town called Mycena. An 18-year-old boy looks up from his studies. He's sitting in a beautiful villa near the water where he lives with his mother and his uncle. It's his mother who notices the cloud first. It has appeared suddenly over a nearby mountain, shaped like a pine tree. The cloud is sometimes bright and sometimes

1:28dark and spotted. There are also minor tremors that they can feel in the ground beneath them. They are not alarmed. Tremors are fairly common in this area. The cloud is something new, though. The boy's uncle, who's a bit of a natural history enthusiast, decides that he wants to get into a boat and row out into the bay to get a better look at the mysterious cloud. As he's preparing to do this, he gets a message from a woman he knows. She lives in a villa even closer to the mountain,

2:04right at the base, and she's sending him an urgent message, begging him to come and help her evacuate. The boy's uncle happens to be the commander of the resident naval fleet, so getting a large boat

Naval Commander's Voyage

2:17isn't an issue. He puts out into the bay in a large galley, heading toward the mountain itself. As the ship nears the shore, there's far more than a mysterious cloud to attract their attention. Things begin falling from the sky. At first, it's cinders and pumice stones falling down onto the deck of the boat. Large boulders are visible, crashing down from the mountain along the slopes down toward

2:47the coast. It's a very dramatic sight. As they get closer to the beach, the commander notices that the ocean itself seems to be in retreat from the shore, as though it were low tide, so that the boat can't even approach the place where they normally dock. There is just not enough water. The naval commander turns to his pilot and says, should we turn around? But the pilot says, fortune favors the brave. Let's head over to another bay, to where your friend Pompeianus lives. And so they turn the boat

Alternate Dock

3:23and head to another dock. When the boat finally lands in the alternate dock, the naval commander's friend Pompeianus and many others are very eager to evacuate. There's just one problem. The wind is blowing hard toward the shore. The boat isn't going to get very far, heading directly against that wind. So the naval commander says, let's take our time. Let's have dinner. In fact, I think I'd like to have a bath. Now, this seems like a bizarre thing to do. The naval commander must have known, as everyone

3:59else did, that something very dramatic and very dangerous was unfolding. Perhaps this idea of taking a bath was a calculated gesture designed to tell everyone else to stay calm, because there was nothing else to do. The naval commander enjoys his bath before sitting down to dinner with his friend

Dinner and Nap

4:19Pompeianus. Having enjoyed his food and realizing that the wind hasn't shifted at all, the naval commander decides he's going to have a little nap while he waits for the wind to change. His snores are audible to the worried servants gathered around in the courtyard outside the door. They're witnessing an increasing frequency of pumice and other stones falling out of the sky into the courtyard around them. Very soon they decide they'd better wake the naval commander and curtail his nap. Otherwise,

4:51there'll be so much detritus on the ground outside the door that he might not be able to exit the room. The situation had clearly become much worse. They discussed whether it was better to stay in the house, which was now rocked with tremors and threatening to collapse, or head out into the open

Open Fields

5:10fields, although the sky was raining with ash and pebbles. Tying pillows over their heads in an attempt to shield themselves from falling projectiles, they decided to head for the open fields, but on their way, they stopped by the shore to see if the wind had changed to allow them to evacuate by boat. The water was far too rough, so they had to abandon this idea. The naval commander collapsed after the mountain belched a burst of flame and a sulfurous cloud. He was never seen alive again. Meanwhile,

5:45back at the villa in Mycenaum, our young man and his mother are staring worriedly at the mountain on the opposite shore, to which their uncle has sailed. They can see the flickering flames in the cloud over the mountain, and they can feel the ground rocking beneath their feet. As afternoon rolls into evening,

Uncle's Fate

6:07the boy also takes a bath and enjoys supper with his mother before lying down for an uneasy sleep. He's awakened by a violent earthquake. His mother rushes into his room just as he's getting up, heading over to find her. The two of them sit down in the open courtyard in front of their house, facing the mountain across the water. They're watching the dramatic scene unfold in front of them. The boy, imitating the unflappable models of Roman manhood that he's been urged to emulate,

6:40opens his book and pretends to continue with his studies as though nothing very remarkable is going on. He's attempting to display cool disregard for the alarming explosions, perhaps the same way that his uncle did when he drew a bath some hours earlier. But this may be a moment when that is exactly the wrong approach. This may be the moment when panic is exactly the right reaction. As the sky lightens toward morning, a friend stops by the house and asks the boy and their mother

7:13what they're waiting for. They decide to join the panicked group of people who are fleeing Mycenae toward the countryside to get as far away from the mountain as they possibly can.

Beach Scene

7:25When they look toward the beach, they see that the water has receded alarmingly, leaving several marine animals stranded on the shore. The chariots, which they would normally have climbed into for a more rapid escape, they can't even board. The ground is rocking so violently beneath them that it's impossible to ride a cart. They have to flee on foot. And the mountain, the mountain is now spouting a dark and terrifying cloud, flashing with what looks at times like

7:58lightning, but is actually fire. As they watch, the cloud over the mountain begins to drop alarmingly, pushing low across the water towards them like a menacing gray fog. The boy and his mother flee

Fleeing Inhabitants

8:14inland with the crowd of other panicked inhabitants moving as fast as they can. The mother begs her son to leave her behind, knowing that she's slowing his progress and perhaps reducing his chances of survival. But the boy won't leave his mother. Grabbing her arm, he drags her along behind him as fast as he can. Ashes begin to fall all around them. Let's get off the main road, the boy says to his mother, it's becoming dark so fast. Let's get off the main highway while we can still see. Otherwise,

8:49we may be trampled to death in the dark by other people fleeing along this road. And then the boy gives us these words, and I quote, night came upon us, not such as we have when the sky is cloudy, or when there is no moon, but the kind of night of a room when it is shut up and all the lights put out. You could hear the shrieks of women, the screams of children, the shouts of men, some calling for

9:20their children, others for their parents, others for their husbands, and seeking to recognize each other by the voices that replied. One lamenting his own fate, another that of his family, some wishing to die from the very fear of dying, some lifting their hands to the gods, but the greater part convinced that there were now no gods at all, and that the final endless night of which we have heard had now

9:51come upon the world. Unquote. You are listening to Villains and Virgins podcast, and this is the

Pompeii Introduction

9:59story of Pompeii. In today's episode, we're going to cover what life looked like in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, and then the details of the spectacular explosion that has memorialized it for generations after. But before we get into all of that, I need to say a special word of thanks to those people who are supporting this podcast on Patreon. In particular, those very special people who support the podcast at the highest level, and they are Craig Davis, John LeCasse, Stephen Skorick, Charles Vigneron,

10:37Kenneth Jones, Tim Williams, Rick Kane, Anthony Farnbach, Gordon Carl, Agnes Viner, and Aaron Silverstein. On Patreon, you get access to regular bonus history episodes every month. We've had episodes on people like William the Troubadour Duke of Aquitaine, whose notorious sex life was a scandal of the Middle Ages, as well as heroes of the First Crusade like Raymond of Antioch, who lived a life of risk,

11:09adventure, and deception long before he shows up in the official annals of the Crusade. So if you're interested in exclusive stories like this, which are only available on Patreon, as well as live history conversations that I host only for Patreon supporters, head on over to patreon.com slash Eva Schubert and become a member of the Villains and Virgins podcast community. One more quick but very important announcement, if you're a history fan like I am, is that in the

11:40spring of 2027, I will be leading a history tour to London and Canterbury, and I'm doing it with an incredible organizing company called Geek Nation Tours. If you want more information on that, head over to Geek Nation Tours, or check out the link in the episode description. Now, the story that I related, this eyewitness account of the explosion of Mount Vesuvius, is really quite a remarkable document. Today, when a volcano explodes, we can see very frequently

12:14live-streamed video footage on the internet moments after the eruption begins. But to have such a detailed eyewitness account of one of the most spectacular explosions of ancient times, is really quite amazing. And this document comes to us through a letter that was written by a young man called Pliny the Younger. So, who was Pliny, and why does this letter exist? Pliny is writing this letter to a guy called Tacitus, whose name might sound familiar to you because he's really quite a famous Roman historian,

12:50and many of his writings have survived to this day. So, Tacitus was quite naturally very interested in a first-hand account of one of the most spectacular natural disasters of his lifetime. Pliny is writing to Tacitus about his uncle, known to us as Pliny the Elder, and he's the naval commander who went sailing off toward the mountain in this account. Pliny the Elder was also a very significant figure in his own right. He was a Roman naval commander, but he was also a very educated man

13:26with a strong interest in natural history and military history. Pliny the Elder wrote many volumes on both of these subjects, some of which have survived even to this day. Pliny the Elder, the naval commander, died bravely while trying to evacuate people who were located even closer to the volcano. And the details of his life, as well as his death, were clearly a subject of much admiration to his nephew, Pliny the Younger, as they were to many of his contemporaries. Now, obviously, Pliny the Younger

14:01wasn't standing next to his uncle when he died, so that part of the account that Pliny is relating is very likely pieced together from other eyewitnesses who accompanied his uncle. There were many survivors of this catastrophe, but few of them have left us an account as detailed as this letter. When Tacitus, the historian, first gets young Pliny's account of the disaster, he then asks him even more questions, and this leads Pliny the Younger to write further details of his own experience of the catastrophe as

14:37well. While Tacitus goes on to have a career as a distinguished author, penning both the Annals and the histories of the Roman Empire. At this time, he's a very young man of only 23 years old. And Pliny the Younger is a schoolboy, about 18 years old. So you have these two very young men engaging in a correspondence about one of the most spectacular disasters of their age. Pompey is located 23 kilometers, or 14 miles away, from Mount Vesuvius.

15:10When I was in Naples, the site of Mount Vesuvius was difficult to avoid. It looms over that city as it does over Pompey. Its silhouette has been reproduced on t-shirts sold to tourists. The area has an evacuation plan in case Mount Vesuvius ever erupts again, because that mountain burned itself permanently into the popular imagination 2,000 years ago. Pliny the Younger, the author of our eyewitness account, was sitting in the town of Mycenum.

15:45It's a port town, located some 55 kilometers, or 34 miles, away from the city of Pompey. You can see Mycenum on a map. It's across a bay from Pompey and Mount Vesuvius. Mycenum, being a port city, was the site of a Roman naval base, with a fleet that was under the command of Pliny's uncle, Pliny the Elder. The city of Naples didn't exist in 79 AD, but the three settlements closest to Mount Vesuvius

16:16were all significantly affected. The city of Pompey, the city of Herculaneum, and the town of Mycenum. We're not going to talk extensively about Herculaneum. It's a much smaller city than Pompey, and it was located on the western base of Mount Vesuvius, and home to some 4,000 to 5,000 people. Herculaneum was a richer, though a smaller, city than Pompey, and is also a place that you can visit today, because archaeologists are able to comb through its ruins and learn a lot about what life

16:49was like at the time. The disaster of Pompey produced a horrifying death for many people, but the way the volcano buried the city also preserved many of its details intact, allowing us a rare window into life in the early Roman Empire. We'll talk in more detail about exactly how Pompey was preserved, but for now, suffice it to say that there are very few places that are preserved in such minute detail, almost like a time capsule of the city at the moment it

17:21was destroyed. So let's orient ourselves on the timeline of Roman history. Mount Vesuvius erupts and buries Pompey in the year 79 AD, but where does that fall on the history of the Roman Empire?

Roman Empire Timeline

17:37Rome had officially become an empire rather than a republic with its first official emperor, originally called Octavian, but known to us as Caesar Augustus, the nephew of Julius Caesar. So Rome has been an empire for almost a century by the time this volcano explodes. The first hundred years have been a very tumultuous period. Some of the worst emperors on the list, Caligula and Nero, have already come and gone. Then there was a period of civil war and the year of

18:12four emperors in 69 AD. From these four emperors, one of them, a guy called Vespasian, survives as the sole emperor from the year 69 AD onwards, and he's able to stabilize what had been a chaotic period of civil war. Vespasian brought order and stability to the Roman Empire for about a decade. Unfortunately, he died about two months before Mount Vesuvius erupted. So the guy on the imperial throne right

18:48now is Vespasian's son, Titus. Titus, like his father, had an extensive career in the Roman military, and he'd already served in places like Britain, Germania, and Judea, no doubt presiding over his own series of bloodbaths before he wore the imperial title. But let's zoom in and take a look at what life was like in Pompeii itself in the months before the mountain erupted. The Roman Empire,

19:18like all empires, was a mix of people from many places. By the first century AD, the Roman Empire includes most of Western Europe, all of Greece, and parts of North Africa, including Egypt. There is considerable mobility across the empire, as legionaries are recruited from one province and then travel to serve in other provinces. There's also a lot of movement of other non-military people. There are merchants and traders, including slave traders, who are transporting prisoners of war

19:53that the legionaries have taken in their various campaigns for sale to other markets across the empire. This meant that even on the streets of Pompeii, which was a city that scholars estimate was home to between 10 and 20,000 people, you could find a mix of inhabitants from very different places. This is clear even from the preserved remains of the city itself. DNA analysis is now confirming this beyond a doubt, but the diversity of the people who lived in Pompeii is evident even on the art on its

20:28walls. For example, they found a statue of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi in Pompeii, as well as the remains of a temple dedicated to the Egyptian goddess Isis. So there's very clear evidence here of people who looked different and brought very different religions with them. The statue of the goddess Lakshmi, for example, could have been a souvenir brought back by a trader, or it could have been the property of someone who was devoted to Lakshmi herself. Some of the more erotic art, and there was quite a lot of that, that's been

21:02recovered from Pompeii, and is now on display in what's called the Secret Museum in Naples, makes the genetic diversity very clear, because a lot of these scenes very clearly depict people with different skin colors and ethnicities engaged in various activities. So Pompeii is a mix of cultural, religious, and genetic influences. It's not at all a homogenous place. In addition to the local inhabitants, because Pompeii was located on the coast, you have to imagine a good influx of transient

21:36people, merchants, sailors, and others who are coming through the city and staying temporarily on their way to other places. So it was a vibrant city full of people from around the world. We learned a great deal about life in Pompeii from how it's depicted in the art on the walls, and fortunately for us, this has been preserved in great detail. Some of these erotic art scenes were on the walls of brothels in the city, and they functioned a lot like menus, where customers could simply point to the picture

22:11that depicted the sort of service they wanted to pay for. Now this wouldn't have been necessary if everyone spoke the same language, but Pompeii was host to people from all kinds of places, and so sometimes a picture menu made negotiations a lot easier. Most of the people who worked in the brothels were slaves, and that meant that what they earned was largely handed over to the brothel owner, although there likely were some sex workers who were former slaves that had been freed and some who had

22:42never been slaves at all. Nevertheless, the majority of sex workers tended to be slaves for obvious reasons. The brothels that have survived in Pompeii have individual rooms with small stone beds in them that would have been covered by pallets and a door that could be closed for privacy. Walking into these rooms, as I did when I visited Pompeii not long ago, is not a very inviting experience. There's no natural light, they're small, they're dingy, and there's an unavoidable sense of grimness that comes over you when you step

23:17in. They look a lot more like cells than anything else. The men who visited these brothels would have been ordinary working men, like shopkeepers or sailors. Wealthier men had no need to visit brothels because they had their own slaves. There's evidence, though, that brothels weren't the only place where sex was bought and sold, and that there were many other more casual and informal places, such as taverns and bars, where these kinds of exchanges might be made. But sexual art and sexual

23:51references weren't limited to the pictures on the walls of brothels. In fact, they were everywhere, including on the walls of private houses and even the public bath. If you visit Pompeii, the one thing that you notice almost immediately is the presence of phallic symbols absolutely everywhere. You can find them engraved over doorways, over bread ovens. There are little bronze wind chimes that involve male figures with enormous oversized phalluses, and even ridiculous comical

24:28phalluses with wings and dangling bronze bells that were hung up as wind chimes everywhere. And phallic symbols weren't limited to crudely carved signs over doors and bread ovens and comical bronze wind chimes either. I found myself staring in disbelief at a very expensive statue of the Roman god Priapus with an enormous oversized member, and he was stationed in a courtyard of a very wealthy house.

25:00So everywhere you went in Pompeii, whether it was a lowbrow, cheap establishment, or a very expensive upper-class villa, you can't escape the presence of phallic depictions. So if you thought that teenage boys with magic markers in bathroom stalls were the sole perpetrators of phallic depictions, you fail to realize that they're following in a very ancient and venerable tradition which was practiced by no less than the classical Romans themselves everywhere. The city of Pompeii was

25:31surrounded by rolling vineyards, thriving on the rich and fertile volcanic soil, and the city was famous for its wine exports, even though Pliny the Younger thinks that they weren't the best quality of alcohol that you could get. It was also famous for the production of a very popular Roman condiment, a fish sauce called garum. Garum was a wildly popular Roman condiment. They took it with them wherever they went. We found remnants of garum containers even in Roman colonies in Britain.

26:06So everywhere there were Romans, they took the sauce with them. But what was it made of? Well, it was fermented fish sauce. It would have been extremely pungent and very salty. And some of the descriptions of what went into garum don't sound very appetizing. But clearly the Romans thought it was because they put it on everything. Some sources speak about letting fish ferment in containers for as much as three months under the Mediterranean sun before turning it into this sauce. Some versions of it were

26:42made with fish blood and viscera, which doesn't sound very appetizing to me. But more recently, scholars found some garum containers with some of the original substance inside in Pompeii itself, and they've tried to recreate this elusive and wildly popular Roman condiment. The recipe they came up with involves fermenting small fish with a lot of salt and a bunch of herbs, things like fennel and coriander, in a container for

27:16about a week. What happens is the digestive flora inside the fish basically explodes in the fermenting fish and causes the fish body to digest. So the fish body is being digested by its own digestive bacteria. And this ends up softening all the bones and difficult parts, and you end up with an extremely fishy, extremely salty smelling paste. I personally would like to try this garum recreation. Apparently it's on

27:47sale in Spain. Would you be willing to do it? People who have tried it say it tastes a lot like Japanese umami. And the famous Roman Stoic Seneca leaves us this comment about garum. He says, Do you not realize that garum sociorum, that expensive bloody mass of decayed fish, consumes the stomach with its salted putrefaction. Mmm, sounds delicious, right? The biological anthropologist Piers Mitchell

28:20suggests that garum, being transported all over the Roman Empire, may actually have contributed to the spread of fish tapeworms, which clearly survived the digestive process because they live in the digestive tract anyway, and were then ingested by these Romans who were eating garum with everything. But since we're on the topic of things that are very pungent, let's move on to the streets of Pompeii itself. When I visited the city, one of the things I noticed immediately were the very raised sidewalks.

28:55They were more than a foot elevated off the surface of the street, and there were raised stones, like stepping stones, that functioned as crosswalks so that pedestrians could cross from one side of the street to the other without actually setting their feet down onto the surface of the road itself. Why would the roads of Pompeii be constructed this way? The stepping stones were high enough for people to step on, but low enough that carts could ride over them, and the

29:27stones of the road itself are still rutted with the tracks of carts that rolled over them almost two millennia before. So, to answer the question of why the streets of Pompeii are constructed this way, I'm going to give you the words of the Roman poet Juvenal, who was speaking about Rome. Now, obviously, Rome was a far more densely populated place than Pompeii, and it had apartments that were multiple stories in height, so it's a little bit different in the density, but many of the conditions will be shared.

30:00This is what Juvenal says, quote, There are various other nocturnal perils to be considered. It's a long way up to the rooftops, and a falling tile can brain you. He means as you pass beside these buildings at night. Think of all those cracked or leaky vessels tossed out of windows, the way they smash, their weight, the damage they do to the sidewalk. You'll be thought most improvident, a catastrophe-happy fool,

30:33if you don't make your will before venturing out to dinner. Each upper casement, or window, along your route at night may prove a death trap. So pray and hope, poor you, that the local housewives drop nothing worse on your head than a pail full of slops, unquote. What Juvenal is talking about here is the risk that people would be emptying their waste, and this is not just food waste, it's human waste,

31:03that would be deposited into chamber pots, and then thrown out the window, where it would land on the street below, or perhaps on the head of an unlucky passerby. Unlike Heraculum, a richer place than Pompeii which had sewers, Pompeii had none, which basically meant that waste got emptied into the street there to be mixed with other waste products. Because you have to imagine that the street is constantly populated by carts that are drawn by animals, donkeys, horses, oxen, and those animals

31:39drop waste wherever they go. So the surface of the street itself would be a very smelly mix of food waste, animal dung, and human excrement, with all of the smell and the flies that you would expect to accompany that. No wonder that the residents of Pompeii crossed that on stepping stones and didn't want to put their sandal-clad feet down into the street itself. However, Pompeii had another unique feature. It was built on a slope without much natural drainage, which meant that when it rained,

32:16the water flowed down the street in torrents. This was another reason why you didn't want to be standing in the street itself, but somewhat above it. But this geographical feature did have the benefit of having occasional torrents of water cleanse the street and wash the accumulated filth of it down and away. There were also likely other city street cleaning services. We know that this was a feature in many Roman cities and towns, but how frequently this happened and how reliably is a matter of

32:50some debate. Some Roman administrators got into trouble, for example, because they hadn't kept the streets very clean. So fortunately, Pompeii had some naturally occurring street cleaning in addition to whatever municipal organization they'd arranged. The center of Pompeii had several places which served as regular meeting areas. The most important of them was the Forum. Now the Forum in Pompeii, as in Rome and other Roman settlements, was very much a central hub. It was a place where the tribunal was located,

33:27where legal rulings were dispensed, but it was also a place where people met to discuss business agreements and formalize contracts. It was also the location where the annual election of magistrates was held. In addition to law and business, the Forum was also a center of religious activity, and in Pompeii it housed several temples. There was a temple to Apollo on one side, as well as a temple to Juno, Jupiter, and Minerva. In addition to these classic Roman deities, there was also a temple to the

34:03emperors, because the cult of deifying dead emperors was already well established at this point. So the temple to the emperor celebrated past emperors who were dead, as well as the genius of the current reigning emperor. And genius here is a term the Romans themselves used. So you can imagine the buzz of activity in the center of the city in this Forum all day long. People are coming and going from the tribunal, businessmen are standing and haggling over contracts, there are religious activities going on,

34:37there's incense being burned, and all along the edges there are snack cellars and food stalls set up so that people are purchasing food and having these conversations as they go about the business of their day. But the Forum wasn't the only place where people gathered together and socialized. Another main hub of activity in Pompeii was the amphitheater, and it housed one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the Roman world. Those were the gladiatorial games. The presence of gladiators in

35:11Pompeii is attested everywhere. They are depicted on the walls, they show up in written records, and there are pieces of their armor and helmets that have survived. In 59 AD, 20 years before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, there was a notorious gladiator match in Pompeii that ended very badly. The match was being watched by the residents of Pompeii as well as residents of a nearby place called Nuceria. And these fans watching the gladiatorial combat were behaving very much like fans of rival

35:49sports teams. They were heckling each other, they were mocking each other, and eventually they began throwing stones at each other. At this point something dramatic happens. The combat moves from the center of the amphitheater where the gladiators are fighting each other into the stands where these two rival teams of fans begin fighting each other. And it's not just fisticuffs. People pulled out their swords and began behaving like gladiators. So a large number of people, especially from Nuceria,

36:25were badly injured in this scrum. Some of them were mutilated, others were killed. And we know this because some of the Nucerian survivors went all the way to Rome to complain about what had happened in Pompeii. And as punishment, Pompeii was banned from holding any gladiatorial contests for a decade after. Fortunately, gladiator matches weren't the only source of entertainment in Pompeii. People watched

36:55other types of athletic competitions, things like foot races and discus throwing. They also enjoyed watching wrestling and boxing. In fact, there's a mosaic that has survived in Pompeii that clearly depicts a boxer. His well-muscled arms and torso are clearly visible, and his hands and forearms are wrapped in protective leather strips. These leather strips were designed to protect his knuckles, of course, not the faces of his opponents. When people weren't watching races or humans fighting,

37:28they were very interested in another type of spectacle, cockfighting. This is something that has still survived in parts of the world today and involves roosters, often with sharp razors on their claws who attack each other for the entertainment of spectators. But not all of the entertainment in Pompeii was athletic or bloody. People also enjoyed the theater, and they frequently watched plays. Some of them were tragic, some of them were comic. And the actors in Pompeii would often have worn masks

38:03and been accompanied by musicians. The spot in town where you could watch these theatrical performances was a semi-circular theater space called the Odeon, a word which has survived in some modern theaters even today. And there were benches arranged around a central performance space in the middle. When I was doing my research and reading about the types of plays that people were watching in Pompeii and other Roman cities at this time, there was a fascinating type of story that seems to have recurred

38:35in quite a number of different plays. And this is a story about a young Roman aristocrat who falls in love with a prostitute. But he's in despair because even if he can raise the money to buy her freedom, he knows that his father will never permit him to marry a low-born slave. But this story has a happy ending because, as it turns out, the prostitute actually happens to come from a very respectable Roman family. And she's been kidnapped and forced into prostitution. So our young aristocrat is able to

39:11marry her after all. It's a fascinating story because it seems to be a kind of a theme. This story, the Roman Cinderella story, if you like, occurs not just in one play, but in several of them. And it's interesting to us because it blurs the line over who's respectable and who's not. It is perhaps surprising that the accident of birth should be the feature that decides whether the young man can marry a woman who's working as a prostitute. The other main hub of social activity in Pompeii were the

39:46baths. Now, the public bath was a tradition that the Romans inherited from the Greeks, and they adopted it with great enthusiasm and built public baths wherever they went. Pompeii is no exception. You have to imagine the ancient public bath houses as a combination of a gym and a spa. They were about so much more than hygiene. And they were also very necessary because the majority of houses didn't have running water. Pompeii offers us a particularly well-preserved example of one of these public bath

40:22houses. It was divided into separate sections for men and women, and it had facilities for heating water and controlling the temperature of various rooms. Bathers would cycle between hot and cold rooms, steam baths and frigidariums. So if you've ever enjoyed a sauna followed by a cold plunge, you are indulging in a sensation that the ancient Romans themselves very much enjoyed. Many Roman baths, including the ones at Pompeii, even included a swimming pool. And that wasn't all you could get up to at the

40:56baths. In addition to washing, bathers might indulge in a form of exfoliation or cleaning off dead skin that involved lathering themselves with olive oil and being scraped down with a strigil. A strigil is a bronze hand tool, usually bronze, although sometimes they've been made of glass or silver, but the majority of them are bronze and they feature a dull curved blade, which is essentially used to scrape off the oil, the dead skin and any other dirt or residue that might remain on the skin. This practice was

41:31particularly popular after a workout and was very commonly done in the public baths. Wealthier men brought their own slaves to the bath houses with them to perform this service. Patrons of the bath house might also have a massage. They could get a shave or even a haircut. You could buy snacks and you could even get in a workout. And everybody, rich or not, socialized at the bath house. It would have been a continuous babble of voices as people cycled in and out of rooms and engaged in all of these activities.

42:06People went to the baths on a daily basis. It was a very regular activity. This particular aspect of life in Pompeii, the public bath house where you could get a workout, a snack, a steam, a scrub. This sounds like a really good idea and it's the sort of facility that I wish we had more of today. The sorts of facilities that have survived where this kind of thing are possible for people in the 21st century would tend to be very expensive, but in Pompeii they weren't. The entry cost was very low, so very rich

42:39people and very poor people alike used the baths and they often used them together. In fact, it was even a tactic for politicians trying to garner votes to say that they would have the honor of paying the entry fee of all bathers for a certain number of days. This was a form of ancient advertising and a way for politicians to try and gain favor and to buy votes. Public bath houses in the Roman period as well as well as subsequently have often raised a quizzical eyebrow amongst some people who wonder with all this

43:15nakedness and steam rooms and scrubbing if there might not have been some other perhaps less savory activities going on in the bath house as well. And the answer is probably yes. Amongst the many other services that you could buy in a public bath house in addition to a massage or a scrub, it is very likely that in some places you could also purchase sexual services as well, at least if you were a man. The concept of going out to a restaurant to eat and socialize is very much a regular feature of life

43:48for many people in the 21st century, but it wasn't so much of a regular thing for people in Pompeii and other Roman cities like it. Most people took their main meals at home, and if you were wealthy, you might host dinner parties to invite your friends over to your villa and enjoy excellent food and wine and entertainment and many hours of socializing. Ordinary people would eat at home, although there were places that you could purchase food outside, but these tended to be smaller and more

44:20modest. You could buy some bread or a snack at a bakery that you passed as you walked through the streets during the day, or perhaps a snack from one of the food stalls at the forum. And if you were a man, there were bars that you might go out to. The preserved remains of Pompeii show that there were many bars that men went out to on a regular basis to drink and to gamble. There's even graffiti from Pompeii that depicts bar life, and it shows men getting rowdy inside a bar, wanting to brawl and having the

44:53bar owner kick them out, or making passes at barmaids that they hoped they might be able to sleep with. The major activity in the bars was of course drinking, mostly wine, and playing games with dice. But these were games where you gambled on the outcome, and they were wildly popular with men of all social classes, because the gambling part, the risk of winning or losing money, is what kept them coming back. And men played these dice games and gambling in regular bars and wealthy houses alike.

45:29But what did people eat in bars? This is an interesting answer. It seems that bars sold beans and vegetables. There were actually emperors who legislated to limit bars from serving anything more extensive. The emperors Nero and Vespasian both passed legislation to try to restrict bars from serving more extensive menus and keep them limited to legumes and vegetables, although why they did this, and what exactly they were hoping to improve, is unclear. And we also don't

46:04know how rigorously these regulations were enforced. So this was Pompeii, a small coastal city, a place full of sailors and sailors and merchants, landowners and slaves, a city where the wealthy bought their summer houses to come and sit by the seaside when things got hot in the city, where ordinary people went about their everyday lives, until life as they knew it was going to be shattered by a mountain on a hot August afternoon.

46:36It all began with tremors, little minor earthquakes. And these were minor and intermittent, and at first

Eruption Aftermath

46:44they didn't attract much attention. After all, Pompeii and the surrounding area had been experiencing minor earthquakes on a regular basis for the last 17 years. So the fact that the ground shook a little bit from time to time wasn't something anyone paid particular attention to. What they didn't know was that these little earthquakes over the last 17 years were actually symptoms of the magma chambers underneath the volcano gradually inflating. These little tremors were signs of something quite

47:17spectacular that was about to arrive. The next sign was an ominous cloud that began to form above Mount Vesuvius in the early afternoon of August 24th. Mount Vesuvius is one of an arc of volcanoes that were formed when the Eurasian tectonic plate collided with the African tectonic plate, riding up above it. And in this process, magma or molten rock underneath the earth's mantle began to surge upwards, forming these volcanoes. And Mount Vesuvius is one of them. This particular

47:54volcano had actually started forming some 25,000 years earlier, and it was originally much larger. It had also erupted before. Some 1900 years earlier, Mount Vesuvius had another spectacular eruption that buried a number of Bronze Age villages as well. But the explosion that buried the city of Pompeii in 79 AD took about 32 hours in total, and it can be divided into two phases. In the middle of the

48:28day, on August 24th, there was a massive explosion from Mount Vesuvius that started the process. The mountain expelled a plume of hot ash, gas, and pumice, which shot upwards, some scientists say, as much as 30 kilometers above the mountain itself. That altitude is three times higher than the cruising altitude of a commercial airliner. Once this material has been shot so far up into the sky, it then begins to descend,

49:01falling like a rain of ash and small stones over the surrounding area, including Pompeii. There was no lava in this eruption, but it was just as deadly. The reason for that is because these bits of rock, especially pumice, are now falling from a very high altitude, so they're able to gain an enormous amount of velocity before crashing into buildings, trees, and people on the ground below. The force of

49:32this impact is incredible, and it begins to cause buildings and trees to collapse. Obviously, having any of this hit you in the head is likely to cause severe injury. This explains why our eyewitness account involves people fleeing with pillows clutched over their heads. Some people are struck by these falling projectiles. They end up collapsing on the ground and are then crushed to death by subsequent rocks falling on them in this phase. The amount of volcanic matter that fell on the city

50:06during this phase is estimated to be three meters deep, a level that would have effectively buried many bodies. This phase went on from about 1pm to 7pm on August 24th. Then phase 2 arrives. If you thought phase 1 was alarming, phase 2 is far, far worse, and nobody who was left in the city survived it. Because after 7pm, the first of 17 pyroclastic surges begins. Now what's a pyroclastic surge? It's quite different

50:46from simply falling ash and pumice. A pyroclastic surge is a billowing wave of super hot gas, ash, and rock, which races down the side of a mountain at a speed comparable to that of a commercial airliner. And it moves so quickly because it's cushioned by a pillow of hot air. And that means that the moving material doesn't have to contend with friction on the way down. It essentially floats or glides

51:18on this hot air cushion, which allows it to move with astonishing speed. Now I've watched video footage of other pyroclastic flows from much more recent volcanic events, and it looks like an avalanche. An absolutely terrifying landslide of grey ash and rock, which brings death to everything it touches. This surge absolutely flattened buildings. If you weren't killed by one of the buildings collapsing

51:50during this phase, then your lungs would be scorched by air superheated to hundreds of degrees Celsius. This air wasn't only super hot, it was also a noxious brew of sulfur dioxide and other poisonous gases that would have been lethal to inhale. This is very likely what killed Pliny the Elder, the naval commander, who collapsed at a point in the explosion that sounds a lot like phase two. But this surge didn't just

52:21happen once. It happened again and again, about 17 times. Scientists now estimate that these surges were punctuated by periods of pause, about 80 minutes in duration, before they recurred again and again. The hot air and gases released during this phase killed everybody. The prostitutes, the brothel owners, the masters, the slaves, the sailors, anybody who was left in the city, including animals, trees,

52:54and anything that breathed. Many died with their garments over their faces, vainly trying to avoid breathing in the poisonous fumes that surrounded them. Some people survived the initial explosion that rained down small bits of pumice and ash on Pompeii and the surrounding area. They then attempted to wade through the rubble to escape. But for many of these people, the ash cloud and surge in phase two killed them. The worst surge happened after about 7 a.m. on the following morning of August 25th,

53:30and this was the one witnessed by Pliny the Younger and his mother from across the bay as they sat in the courtyard in front of their villa. It was this surge that caused the sky to go dark as the terrifying cloud began to descend from the height to which it had been expelled and to expand over the water towards them in Mycenaeum. For the next nine hours, scalding hot debris blanketed an area of 25 kilometers radius around the volcano. Waves of hot gas and ash rolled over fallen bodies, burning clothing and

54:16flesh and leaving only the charred bones. Scientists estimate that the total amount of volcanic content emitted by Mount Vesuvius in this eruption was something like eight cubic kilometers. In other words, enough to bury all of Manhattan under 130 meters of debris. The cloud of gas and ash spewing from the top of the mountain may have reached something like 34 kilometers in height, generating a mushroom cloud

54:47or a very peculiarly shaped plume which is described by our source Pliny the Younger as the pine tree shaped cloud of such peculiar appearance. The three meters of ash that buried so many of the bodies at Pompeii and the city itself is actually the same substance that has preserved them so well. The ash itself is actually what has allowed us to see some of the victims. The calcified ash filled in the spaces

55:19around the fallen bodies and so even as the bodies themselves decomposed the ash remained rigid in the shape that the body had occupied. Many centuries later archaeologists were able to pour plaster into these body shaped cavities preserved in the ash and these plaster casts suddenly make visible the bodies that used to inhabit those spaces in the ash. The victims suddenly become visible in their last moments and the detail

55:54and the level of pathos is incredible. The preserved shapes of these bodies reveal scenes that could have happened anywhere. There's a pet dog who dies chained to his post writhing in panic. There are adults clutching children or each other as they are thrown to the ground in their last moments. Some people holding their hands over their faces or bringing their garments over their noses and mouths. There are expressions of fear

56:24and agony everywhere and it's impossible to look at these perfectly preserved shapes of human beings in their last moments and not feel some measure of the terror and the sadness that they had. In addition to Pompeii, the nearby city of Herculaneum was also destroyed. The town of Mycenaum, inhabited by Pliny the Younger and his mother, experienced a great deal of ashfall and pumice but wasn't completely buried the

56:55way the other two cities were. This is fortunate for us because it means that Pliny survived and was able to give us his eyewitness account. But he wasn't the only survivor. Pompeii was home to an estimated 10 or 20,000 people. And many of them fled the city during phase one. Many of them went on to do other things with their lives. Their names survive in historical records. They're written down as former inhabitants of Pompeii. And some of these survivors even returned to the rubble-covered ruins, trying to carve out some

57:33existence for themselves in the ruins of what had once been their homes. In 472 and 1631, ash from Mount Vesuvius fell on a city some 1,200 kilometers away. That city was variously called Constantinople in 472 and Istanbul by 1631. That is an enormous distance for the ash from the volcano to reach.

58:03Mount Vesuvius has erupted as many as 39 times since Pompeii, although these eruptions have been much more minor and far less destructive so far. At some point in the future, Mount Vesuvius could erupt again. While the eruption in 79 AD was catastrophic for the residents of Pompeii and Herculaneum, it did preserve in astonishing detail a slice of ordinary life in Roman cities that we would

58:34otherwise not have access to. And it reveals that the inhabitants of these cities were far more similar to you and I than you might imagine. I hope you've enjoyed this episode on disaster, destruction, and death on Villains and Virgins podcast. If you're not already subscribed, make sure you do so that you don't miss the next episode, which may be somewhat less disastrous, but no less interesting. And if you're not already a subscriber on Patreon, please consider heading

59:06over to patreon.com slash Eva Schubert for even more historical content. Thank you so much for being here with me, and I'll see you in the next episode.

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