Often it is in the most squalid and filthiest of places that we can uncover profound truths about a society that considers itself civilized. In the toilets of the Forum it’s obvious that Roman moral authorities weren’t obsessed with covering up body parts or bodily functions, the way Christians were. Instead, they focused on controlling how people moved through urban spaces. As Koloski-Ostrow put it to me, the Forum toilets weren’t really about modesty. “I’m sure many Romans defecated on the streets, in alleys, and outside the city walls,” she said. “We have graffiti on the edges of the city saying ‘Don’t defecate here,’ and you wouldn’t put that there if people weren’t doing it.” Public toilets, she said, were about controlling behavior. “The elite Romans build [toilets] where they do because they don’t want human excrement on the Forum floor. They don’t care about the streets, but they want a pristine look to the polished imperial Fora. It’s a way of regulating space, of saying, ‘This is where you’re going to do your business.’”
The more I spoke with Pompeii experts, the more I heard comments about how Romans wanted to “regulate” space. From the streets to the tabernas, every public area was caught in a web of formal and informal rules. Even in the lupanar, graffiti reflects a society deeply concerned with the social meaning of sexual positions.
There’s a symbolic link between Roman selfhood and the physical organization of people within cities. Unlike the residents of Çatalhöyük, who were in the early stages of developing emotional and political entanglement with the land, Roman urbanites were born into a world where sedentary life had eclipsed nomadism thousands of years before. Over time, most of the crafts and activities done in the home at Çatalhöyük had exploded outward, becoming public places throughout the city: bakeries, fulleries, cemeteries, temples, jewelers, sculptors, painters, tabernas, and yes, toilets. The city was less an agglomeration of homes than a resplendent, complex public space. People’s homes were largely public, with atriums open to the street and serving as receiving areas for business associates and guests. This trend only intensified as middlers converted their homes into live-work spaces where the line between business and private life was thin at best. You might say that Romans expressed their entanglement with the land by dividing up their cities into specialized public zones devoted to everything from sex and defecation, to amusement, political activity, and bathing. Moving into and between these spaces was a way of being a Pompeiian.
If we pull out for a wide-angle view, we might apply this same notion to the entire Roman Empire. Each city had its own specialized function, or its own role to play in the greater glory of this sprawling civilization that had wrapped its arms around the Mediterranean. Pompeii was a town for revelry, renowned for its beauty and tasty food. It was the naughty but beloved stepdaughter to the stately, powerful city of Rome. When it was lost in a moment of uncontrollable, terrifying violence, it caused an historical trauma that went beyond the horror of losing thousands of lives. Public spaces had been destroyed, and with them a part of Roman identity. Rome’s reaction to the eruption of Vesuvius was therefore not the long, slow detachment we saw at Çatalhöyük. Nobody decided to abandon Pompeii. Its fiery burial was felt as an almost unbearable loss—and the many survivors hastened to rebuild their lives in other cities, devoting themselves to constructing new versions of the public spaces they had lost.
CHAPTER 6
After the Mountain Burned
It started with an earthquake. People living in cities around the Bay of Naples were used to quakes, however, and the shockwaves they felt that day in the autumn of 791 probably didn’t alarm anyone very much. They continued to run their businesses, deal with the harvest, and spout off in the Forum. But then Vesuvius started to smoke. Nobody in the Roman world had recorded stories about volcanic eruptions before, and people writing about Vesuvius in Latin later described the mountain covered in “a black and dreadful cloud, broken with rapid, zigzag flashes, [and] behind it variously shaped masses of flame: these last were like sheet-lightning, but much larger.”2 There were no easy words to describe what must have seemed like an unimaginable disaster. Smoke filled the sky for at least a day, and maybe two, before the mountain began to launch rocks—some as big as the stones that paved Pompeii’s more upscale streets.
The earthquakes continued. At that point, people started to panic and leave the city. In wagons and on foot, people gathered up their valuables and fled north or inland as rocks rained down on rooftops, smashing walls and cracking ceramic shingles. We have only one eyewitness account of escaping the eruption, from Pliny the Younger, who recorded his experiences decades after the events that killed his uncle and thousands of other people in Herculaneum and Pompeii. He describes smoke filling the air as he and his aunt evacuated along with crowds of people, the darkness so profound that they stumbled frequently.
Despite the obvious danger, we know that thousands of people stayed behind. Free people remained by choice, while slaves remained under orders from their masters. As a meter of ash and rocks accumulated in the streets, even the holdouts must have realized it was time to go. Sophie Hay, who told the story of Amarantus, said that the Pompeii we find beneath the ash is a city in disarray. People had packed up their valuables, and moved their possessions into more protected places. “Nothing is where it’s supposed to be,” Hay said. And everyone was moving. More than half of the city’s population died in the streets3 fleeing through the city’s southern neighborhoods as ash and mud flowed in from the north.
Perhaps the most poignant record of people’s last minutes can be found outside Pompeii, on the docks at the wealthy enclave of Herculaneum. There, in the warehouse rooms typically used for loading and unloading cargo, archaeologists uncovered dozens of bodies. Herculaneum was located much closer to Vesuvius, to the north of the volcano, and death came more swiftly there. Skeletons are pressed together in tangled heaps at the back of the warehouses, many clutching sacks of valuables. These are the charred remains of people who waited for rescue boats that never came. It’s easy to imagine the horror they endured, cowering from liquid flames erupting from the beautiful, green mountain that had formed the backdrop for so many of their garden parties and festivals. These people may have lived in linens, and ate reclining while servants brought them wine, but they died in lowly storehouses like slaves. Their would-be rescuers died too; Pliny the Younger says his uncle perished after piloting his ship to help with rescue efforts.
In all, 1,150 bodies have been found in Pompeii. Given the likelihood that more bodies will be found in non-excavated portions of the city, archaeologists generally estimate that a tenth of the city’s population of 12,000 perished.
The final blow at Pompeii came not from the rain of rocks and ash, but from what geologists call a pyroclastic flow, or several blasts of superheated gas that instantly cooked every living thing in their paths for up to ten kilometers around Vesuvius. After this scouring surge, ash continued to pour from the sky, burying Pompeii beneath six meters of hot, toxic material. As the bodies of humans, horses, dogs, and other animals decayed beneath the ash, they left hollows behind. In the 1860s, archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli was able to pump plaster inside those hollows to re-create the positions and even facial expressions of the volcano’s victims. Visitors to Pompeii today pass through two massive display cases of these plaster bodies as they enter the park next to the amphitheater. They’re grisly and affecting—it’s hard not to think of them as corpses, rather than the casts of bodies reduced to dust long ago. Some people anticipated death, with arms raised defensively over their heads, while others slept peacefully. It made me think about the afterlife of Çatalhöyük. Centuries after Çatalhöyük’s abandonment, people living on the Konya Plain used the place as a burial ground for their dead, and considered the land holy.
Pompeii, too, has become a monument to the dead. Though we find signs of life everywhere in its streets and shops, there is no way to visit this city without confronting how horrifically it was extinguished. For the
Romans who lived through 79, this feeling was far more intense. The disaster shook the entire empire, and its refugees poured into nearby cities, forever haunted by the violent loss of their home. Perhaps because it was so terrifying, the eruption became an event that people seemed to want to erase from history. When I asked street expert Eric Poehler about it, he marveled at how almost nothing is said about such a major event in the Roman world. But he said it became less mysterious to him after he learned about the idea, taken from 20th-century history, of a “generation of silence” that comes in the wake of disaster. A similar kind of cultural silence followed the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1919, which slaughtered over 675,000 Americans in a matter of months—more than had died during all of World War I. Despite the widespread devastation caused by the disease, governments and media downplayed its severity. And after the pandemic was over, almost nobody wrote about it.4
The Romans’ silence about the destruction of Pompeii can be read as a measure of how traumatizing the eruption was. Unlike the many fires that devastated Rome, and the wars that had pummeled the Republic, this was a disaster that could not be solved with money or manpower.
“An absolute nightmare”
When I first began researching the abandonment of Pompeii, I was perplexed by how suddenly people gave up on the city. In 79, the Roman Empire was at the height of its wealth and influence. Why didn’t Emperor Titus send a bunch of slaves down to dig Pompeii and Herculaneum out from under the ash? Certainly it would be a huge job, I thought, but the city of Rome was famous for rebuilding itself after multiple devastating fires. That was an enormous undertaking, and so was building the aqueducts. It wasn’t like Titus was afraid to spend money. During his father Vespasian’s reign, he poured an enormous amount of resources into the sacking of Judea. Then he spent his first year as emperor finishing construction of the insanely expensive Colosseum project his father had started. Engineers constructed the Colosseum to hold water so that Romans could witness mock naval battles. Given how complicated it was to build something like that, why wouldn’t Titus want to show his power by rebuilding Pompeii, too?
One standard answer to this question is that people were afraid to go back to Pompeii, terrified of supernatural forces that caused the earth to spit fire. But Romans were a lot more pragmatic than that. People who had survived the devastating earthquake in 62 returned to their homes to rebuild, and middlers took the opportunity to transform abandoned villas into shops. So it wasn’t as if disasters emanating from the earth had stopped Pompeiians before. This only deepened the mystery for me. I started to wonder whether this wasn’t simply a case of Pompeii being a low priority for the Roman elites. Though it was a treasured resort town a century before, the empire had expanded so much that pleasure-seekers could plan beach vacations along the coasts of Spain and Portugal. Cities in North Africa were gentrifying, with Roman-style urban grids in Carthage and neighboring Utica blotting out traditional Punic layouts.5 This also meant better sources for garum, the local fish sauce delicacy that was one of Pompeii’s major exports. Maybe Pompeii had simply fallen out of fashion, or had become a political annoyance? It seemed to me that Titus and the Roman elites had made a calculated decision that Pompeii simply wasn’t important enough to merit a concerted recovery effort.
And then I talked to Janine Krippner, an expert in pyroclastic flows, who teaches geology at Concordia University in New Zealand. She’s studied the eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington firsthand, and has also visited other regions after disastrous volcanic eruptions that are similar to the one that wrecked Pompeii. When I asked her by phone what would have happened after the Vesuvius eruption, she was emphatic. “It would have been a living hell, and it would have gone on for years,” she said. “Rehabilitation would take generations. It would have been an absolute nightmare.” She quickly answered my main question, which was why people couldn’t have dug Pompeii out. “New snow has the density of 50–70 kilograms per meter cubed. Ash has the density of 700–3,200 kilograms per meter cubed. The sheer work to dig that city out without bulldozers would have been enormous.” She paused, thinking. “On top of that, the flows would have been hot for a long time.” The temperature of the mud and ash flows started out at 340°C, and would have retained that heat thanks to the insulating layers of rock and ash above them. Plus, the ash itself would have emitted toxic fumes and particulates. Anyone working in those conditions would suffer from the extreme heat while inhaling volcanic ash that rapidly made them sick.
The disaster went beyond the city’s walls, however. This was an environmental catastrophe that affected the entire Naples Bay region. Krippner pointed out that the waterways feeding Pompeii would have been clogged with mounds of toxic ash, cutting off freshwater supplies and the transit network that linked the coastal city with its neighbors. And then there were the long-term effects to the land. Krippner compared the Vesuvius aftermath to the Mount St. Helens eruption, where there is almost nothing growing nearby even after 40 years. When the wind blows, ash still swirls into the air, creating noxious gusts. Pompeii was known for its fertile farmland and delicious food, and Vesuvius would have snuffed that out in an instant—even if people were able to remove the ash after things cooled down. “That amount of volcanic ash can prevent soil from getting oxygen, and it can cause acidity in the soil, too,” Krippner explained. “That reduces the availability of nutrients for crops, so now you’re struggling to get anything to grow afterwards.” The eruption that killed thousands at Pompeii and Herculaneum had also sterilized the soil for kilometers around. It had literally poisoned the land.
Natural disaster tore the city out of its residents’ hands without warning. They desperately wanted to go back, but couldn’t. Emperor Titus himself toured the city’s smoking ruins, looking for ways to mitigate the damage.6 There was no way to do it. Even with modern technology, the task would have been insurmountable. But they managed to survive, and bring Pompeii’s memory with them into their new lives. The fate of Pompeii gives us a chance to see what happens when people are forced to abandon a city against their wishes. In the last few years, scholars have found evidence for massive resettlement of refugees throughout the region, as well as new building projects in nearby cities like Naples and Cumae, where the streets filled with former Pompeiians trying to start again.
The luck of Gaius Sulpicius Faustus
Naples is a noisy city, full of narrow cobblestone streets that roar with cars and motorcycles careening uphill from the Bay of Naples at terrifying speeds. These downtown roads were built for the kinds of mule-drawn carts that dominated the ancient and medieval Roman worlds, but now pedestrians fight for space alongside metal machines that Murtis and her friends at the lupanar could only dream of. Still, a lot hasn’t changed. The walls are covered in epic amounts of graffiti, and the bars are off the hook.
Back in 79 CE, when this city was called Neapolis and its sidewalks swirled with ash from the volcano, refugees from Pompeii began to trickle in. Some brought carts and sacks full of valuables; others arrived with nothing but soot in the folds of their robes. Many would have been sick from inhaling the volcanic particles that Krippner described, coughing and vomiting and weak from walking the long road from Pompeii for a couple of days. Some fled here because they had family who could take them in, and others because it was the only nearby town they knew. We can’t be certain what happened in the immediate days after the disaster, but it’s likely that refugees would have overwhelmed the city’s inns. New arrivals might have slept outside. Temples and amphitheaters would have opened their doors to shelter terrified people who had lost everything. It would have been a scene familiar to anyone who has seen the aftermath of hurricanes and wildfires today.
What might surprise us is how similar the Roman government’s response was to what we hope for in Western democracies of the early 21st century. Emperor Titus toured the disaster sites, and subsequently offered survivors financial support to rebuild their lives. Suetonius, who published a biography of
Titus in the early 120s, explains: “Immediately [Titus] chose commissioners by lot from among the ex-consuls for the restoration of Campania; the property of those extinguished by Vesuvius, and who had no surviving heirs, he donated to the restoration of the affected cities.” Miami University classics scholar Steven Tuck, who has conducted groundbreaking research on the survivors of Pompeii, said that the “restoration of Campania” referred to building what appear to be entirely new neighborhoods for refugees in several coastal cities, including new temples dedicated to popular Pompeii gods like Venus, Isis, and Vulcan, as well as baths and amphitheaters. Partly this money would have come out of Rome’s coffers, but Suetonius also says that it came from the “property of those extinguished by Vesuvius.” Given how many exceptionally wealthy people had vacation homes at Herculaneum and Pompeii, we have to assume that this was quite a windfall.
Tuck tracked the pathways of survivors to Neapolis, Cumae, Puteoli (now Pozzuoli), and Ostia, using some of the same techniques that scholars have used to identify liberti: he examined grave markers. When last names and tribal names exclusive to Pompeii start appearing on grave markers in other cities, that indicates a refugee population. Thanks to Tuck’s sleuthing, we know that survivors in Neapolis included the Vettii, whose Pompeii shop was decorated with that memorable painting of Priapus weighing a phallus as big as his entire body. We can’t be sure the brothers who owned that shop were the survivors, as they were likely just two of the many liberti connected with the family. But at least some of the extended Vettii clan made it to Neapolis, and tried to stick by other disaster survivors. Intermarriage between refugee families was quite common, suggesting that survivors probably lived alongside each other and continued to share many things in common. L. Vettius Sabinus, a Vettii, commemorated his wife, Calidia Nominanta, on a tomb inscription—her name, too, is one that was found exclusively at Pompeii before the eruption. Another tomb at Neapolis commemorates Vettia Sabina, whose husband left an inscription that contains an Oscan word from the original language of Pompeii.
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