Ten Discoveries That Rewrote History

by Patrick Hunt

  Eyewitness accounts were written at the time

  The careful records of shocked but literate Romans who were eyewitnesses to the cataclysm were not lost, but rather merely ignored and then forgotten in ensuing centuries. Pliny the Younger, writing almost immediately after Pompeii’s destruction to his friend, the eminent historian Tacitus, about his uncle Pliny the Elder’s death, said this about the panic-stricken city:For several days before there had been earth tremors which were not particularly alarming because they are frequent in Campania, but that night the shocks were so violent that everything felt as if it were not only shaken but overturned . . . You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men; some were calling their parents, others their children or their wives, trying to recognize them by their voices. People bewailed their own fate or that of their relatives, and there were some who prayed for death in their terror of dying. Many besought the aid of the gods, many more imagined there were no gods left and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore.

  For another whole day and a half, the eruption of Vesuvius buried not only Pompeii but the town of Herculaneum, as well as sumptuous villas on the harbor at Oplontis and Stabiae and nearby at Greco del Torre, Boscoreale and Boscotrecase. Three days later the eruption had finally all but subsided, the sea breeze returned and the summer sun shone dimly through the smoke of still-burning houses. But the lovely verdant landscape of the plain sloping to the sea was forever changed. Survivors who had fled returned in small numbers, perhaps to see how total the ruin was or to retrieve what they could; strangers also came from several days’ journey away to see for themselves what had happened, but all were unnerved by the total devastation. The fertile plain was reduced to the aftermath of an inferno.

  Within seventy-two hours of the eruption, word quickly reached Rome by hurried messengers of the official cursus publicus , the official Roman courier network, or by military dispatch from the navy at Misenum. Immediately the new emperor himself, Titus, came down to Campania with an entourage of soldiers and officials to see the smoking devastation and the blank countryside, once green and leafy, now brown and empty. After hearing reports of people—mostly survivors seeking relatives or lost goods—who had inadvertently fallen through the smoldering debris of sagging roofs everywhere and were burned alive in hot ash, the emperor declared the whole region unsafe and that it was to be completely abandoned, and his imperial decree was published on penalty of death for disobedience. Thus Pompeii was left alone as the ash settled and hardened. And the memory was recalled only with a silent shudder.

  What happened to Pompeii after its sudden burial is perhaps not so dramatic until more than a millennium and a half later. Although the plain was gradually resettled long after Emperor Titus’s edict, aided by fast-growing vegetation in the greatly enriched volcanic ash topsoil, it wasn’t until the eighteenth century, in a completely different world, that Pompeii was rediscovered. By then nobody paid much attention to the occasional buried remains coming to light from the entombed city below that had been more populous than the rural surface. One might ask why it took so long, but the truth is rather simple. First, the Roman ruling culture and Titus’s strict law lasted for almost five hundred years, by which time the diminished remnants of Roman Italy had completely forgotten what had happened. Those who knew what was entombed became gradually fewer; those who could read Pliny fewer still. Second, the Romans were a superstitious and religious people who revered their ancestors and would not have dared to disturb the mass entombment for fear of divine reprisals worse than any imperial edict. Furthermore, perhaps many Pompeiians who survived the volcanic conflagration would not have remained in the immediate area out of fear or a healthy respect for what volatile nature had done. After a few generations, after being warned to stay away from a place cursed by the gods or nature, Pompeii was forgotten.

  Initial excavation of Pompeii happened for art, not science

  According to history, Pompeii was discovered by an Italian farmer, as noted at the beginning of this chapter, then was exploited by a Spanish king, promoted by a British cuckold, written about early on by a German who would be brutally murdered in notoriety, and then later excavated under a Fascist dictator.

  The Spanish king ruling over Naples in 1748 was the Bourbon king Charles III, who sent many priceless Pompeiian sculptures to Spain. The British cuckold was the diplomat Sir William Hamilton, who helped put Pompeii on the antiquities map for collectors and on the Grand Tour, and whose wife, Emma, had an infamous affair with Lord Nelson, vaunted admiral of the Napoleonic era. The German scholar who published Pompeiian art was Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the “Father of Classical Archaeology,” but his brilliant career ended when he was murdered in an inn by one of his male lovers in a secret tryst gone bad. The great Italian archaeologist Amedeo Maiuri in the 1930s was not necessarily happy that his boss was Il Duce, the demagogue dictator Mussolini who wanted to revive Rome’s glory, but Maiuri achieved remarkable results excavating at Pompeii, and those who followed him have hailed from many countries, since Pompeii is seen to belong not just to Italy but to the world.

  The initial story of the anonymous Italian farmer accidentally discovering Pompeii in 1748 while digging a well may only be anecdotal because his name is not recorded or verifiable. Pompeii’s rediscovery may not have been as dramatic as its destruction, but it is certainly a vital historic saga by itself. The first glimmers of what antiquities lay under the surface of the Campanian region came about under foreign domination, as Spain ruled the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies from the capital of Naples. To the immediate north of the Bay of Naples were the Phlegrean Fields, the infamous “Fields of Fire,” land of sulfuric smoking fumaroles and mythical world of the Cumaean Sibyl, an oracle indigenous to Italy whom Michelangelo had painted on the Sistine Chapel. As early as 1613, some artifacts of the AD 79 Vesuvian destruction of the Campanian region began to surface, but it would be years before these sporadic discoveries were connected to the same event.

  In 1734, the Spanish Bourbon Charles III came to the throne in Naples, quickly following his mother’s Farnese family instincts for collecting antiquities. In 1748 excavations seeking buried sculpture began at Pompeii, probably on the heels of similar reports like the farmer digging a well. The news eventually came to the ears of the king himself. King Charles appointed Rocco Gioacchino de Alcubierre, a Spanish survey engineer, to dig up and supply the court with ancient statuary extracted from the plain in known rich sites. The engineer dug up material from a spot in Pompeii close to the Temple of Fortuna Augusta, but soon moved his efforts to Herculaneum because it was perceived as having more buried treasure. A year later in Gragnano, the king’s workers began to exploit the buried town of Stabiae along the bay. Pompeii itself was excavated again in 1754 and in 1763. The inscription with the name of Pompeii finally located the city of Pliny’s description. Unearthing the name was such a significant event that the great engraver and restorer Giovanni Battista Piranesi records the rediscovered name Pompeii in his dramatic art.

  Pompeii was a magnet for travelers from the 1750s onward

  As its buried structures began to yield enormous numbers of artifacts, Pompeii soon became the most important stop on the Grand Tour of Europe by the nobility and other wealthy collectors; thus Pompeii became a magnet for travelers. Many would make special trips to Italy on the reputation of Pompeii alone and Europeans from Paris, London, Berlin, Copenhagen, St. Petersburg and many other cities all made Naples and Pompeii necessary stops on their travel itineraries.

  The findings were so rich, with scores of separate supervised teams soon digging all over the Pompeiian landscape, that the Spanish king was careful to control everything personally, setting up royal franchises for archaeological excavations on a scale never before seen. The importance of these artifacts was not seen at first, when the royal agenda was originally planned just for sculpture and monuments. But then whole buildings began to appear skeletally, one b
y one, from under the soft tufa at Pompeii. Tufa is a generic geological term for old volcanic ash consolidated to a rock not much harder than chalk in many places. Reports spread quickly to Rome and then beyond Italy along eighteenth-century channels via correspondence and diplomatic pouch as well as word of mouth. The whole of educated Europe with its proud universities soon woke up to a world lost for almost two millennia. The Grand Tour was born, a travel itinerary leading from Rome and various ancient Italian sites to Naples in order to view these new proceedings with wonder. Never before had an ancient buried city been discovered so complete, down to table settings and bedposts. Add to that volume the desirable treasures of sardonyx, carnelian and agate gems and gold jewelry as well as bronze vessels, silver tableware, Roman glass and even carbonized furniture. Pompeii had an almost uncountable abundance of everyday household items and precious objects, many of which, because they have not survived elsewhere, had never been seen before.

  To nearly all visitors, the manner of Pompeii’s demise was itself fairly easy to understand and became an obvious attraction of modern sympathy to ancient tragedy. That thousands died was perhaps less interesting than the fact that people could ascertain the exact moment and manner of death. This alone was a powerful and fascinating draw.

  Many artists came to draw and paint the romantic ruins, and scholars came alongside collectors to learn all they could. One of the most remarkable novelties in the eyes of the scholars was the prolific Roman wall paintings that were virtually unknown before Pompeii, as the city of Rome had hardly any surviving Roman painting intact.

  In 1750 the king adapted the Bourbon royal villa at nearby Portici to temporarily house the staggering collection of artifacts that was growing daily; it became a “Museo Herculanense.” The famous Oplontis villa of Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Cornelius Piso, soon supplied a whole library of carbonized papyrus scrolls in the years 1754-58 as literal caverns were dug under that seaside town. The king indirectly chartered the Accademia Ercolanese to begin publishing the royal collections in 1755. The royal excavations at Pompeii and the vicinity required a bureaucracy of civil servants to record and document the thousands of objects, let alone house and curate them.

  Charles, in the remarkable spirit of an innovating monarch who had no precedent to follow, allowed his administration to initiate a formal scientific establishment at Pompeii. Part of Charles’s staff was overseen by local scholars from the venerable University of Naples, or antiquarians like Camillo Paderni from Rome, in charge of the Museo Herculanense, and the French sculptor Joseph Canart, who supervised sculptural restoration. One of the king’s able noble ministers and a trusted friend was the Marquis Bernardo Tanucci, himself an antiquarian collector/ scholar from Tuscany, and some of his official duties extended to supervision of the Pompeii excavations for the king. The king was fortunate to have these and other cognizant officials who made initial decisions that would set the stage for generations of future archaeologists. It was not until much later, in 1860, that an astute archaeologist named Giuseppe Fiorelli saw the tufa cavities and lacunae themselves as potential artifacts: by pouring plaster of paris into the cavities, human effigies soon emerged in the very contortions of death by asphyxiation. One fact was plain: Rome had nothing compared to the plain of Naples. Buildings like the Pantheon that had survived on Rome’s surface were few and far between. Here was a whole plain of intact ghostly cities quickly coming to light.

  On the other hand, in the early “Neapolitan approach” of the eighteenth century, practicality was the guiding force behind pioneering conservation experiments. Such methods included brushing a protective application of melted wax varnish over plastered surfaces. This did much to preserve hundreds of the wall paintings that had been hidden from light so long, whereas paintings left alone on the walls at Pompeii soon oxidized in the pigment-fading photolysis of the hot Neapolitan sunlight.

  Some of the early travelers drawn to Pompeii’s growing fame were legends in their own right. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s greatest Romantic genius and author of Faust, came to Italy in 1786-87. Goethe’s portrait in Campania, painted by Johann Tischbein, shows Goethe informally sprawled in travel garb over the ruined landscape in cape and hat, surrounded by sculpture. In his Italian Journey from that year Goethe left his singular impressions of Pompeii, as well as keen observations; for example, describing the Villa of Diomedes in some detail, he writes:

  Pompeii surprises all by its dense compactness . . . with narrow straight streets and sidewalks . . . small houses without windows . . . but imaginatively and colorfully decorated and painted . . . Although the city, having first been buried under a rain of ash and stone and then looted by its excavators, is completely destroyed by now, it still witnesses artistic instinct and love of art . . . To picture more clearly what happened historically, one should imagine a mountain village buried by snow.

  Literature on Pompeii made its forgotten tragedy famous to an eager audience

  Pompeii was a magnet to a world that tried to imagine the lost city’s final hours, much as Edward Bulwer-Lytton attempted in 1834 with his florid novel The Last Days of Pompeii. Another early British antiquarian and scholar at Pompeii was Sir William Gell, writing his Pompeiana in 1817 after years in the area. Literary descriptions of Pompeii run the gamut from romantically poetic to pedantic. René de Chateaubriand visited in 1804 and published his Voyage en Italie in 1824. It should not be a surprise that the Marquis de Sade, ever the explorer and observer of pain, visited and wrote a bit about Pompeii in 1775 in his Voyage d’Italie. Literati who visited and unforgettably described Pompeii include the poet Théophile Gautier, who wrote a tale about a tragic young Pompeiian girl in his Arria Marcella in 1852. Alexandre Dumas—also appointed by Garibaldi for a short time as director of the Museo Nazionale at Naples—wrote Le Corricolo about Pompeii in 1843.

  Pompeii also was more influential than any other ancient site in forming the Grand Tour across the Mediterranean. It was the de rigueur stop for the noble and upper middle classes in search of antiquity as a component of education. Virtually every head of state and member of European royalty had to come to view Pompeii, where “new discoveries” were staged for their benefit. Naturally, among the countless visitors to Pompeii in the nineteenth century was the widely traveled Charles Dickens, who in his Pictures from Italy in 1846 described Pompeii thus:Look up the silent streets . . . over the broken houses . . . to Mt. Vesuvius . . . in the strange and melancholy sensation of seeing the Destroyed and the Destroyer making this quiet picture. Then ramble on, and see at every turn the familiar tokens of human habitation and every-day pursuits . . . the track of carriage wheels in the pavement of the street; the marks of drinking vessels on the stone counter of the wine shop; the amphorae in private cellars, stored away so many hundred years ago, and undisturbed to this hour—all rendering the solitude and deadly lonesomeness of the place, ten thousand times more solemn, than if the volcano in its fury had swept the city from the earth and sunk it in the bottom of the sea . . . We watch Vesuvius as it disappears from the prospect, and watch for it again on our return, with the same thrill of interest: as the doom and destiny of all this beautiful country, biding its terrible time.

  The modern impact of Pompeii has continued its archaeological legacy

  Pompeii would become an arbiter of archaeological field methods for centuries, each generation building on the experience as well as mistakes of prior excavations. Having been appointed by King Victor Emmanuel II in 1860, the same able archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli who had pioneered the plaster of paris casting of the victims also published three volumes of his comprehensive tome Pompeianarum Antiquitatem Historia. His “History of Antiquities of the Pompeiians,” written and made available between 1860 and 1864, is an immensely quantitative record of finds, many merely ordinary, some quite gruesome. Thanks to Fiorelli, there are scores of plaster casts of victims spread throughout Pompeii in their death poses. One of the most poignant is the cast of a small child fou
nd under the stairs in the House of the Golden Bucket. He (or she) was perhaps three or four years old and facial features (including shut eyelids) are nearly perfectly preserved at the moment of a sleeplike death. In the dockside warehouses parents have locked arms lovingly over a child they could not protect from this calamity. In the House of Julius Polybius, among twelve other victims, a young pregnant teenager was found clutching her hastily gathered belongings to her chest with a few gold and silver coins. Others died not so peacefully as we would like to imagine, like the dog writhing on its back as it chokes on the ash and burning air, its gasping mouth wide open. Based on excavations from the nineteenth century onward, especially under Giuseppe Fiorelli, Pompeii is divided today into nine districts, somewhat in chronological sequence of their excavation histories.

  Because Pompeii has always been at the forefront of archaeological research, it is still a place where experimental techniques were pioneered that were then followed elsewhere. The twentieth century saw renewed archaeological excavations of a more modern nature, ambitiously unearthing new sectors previously covered. Under an organized Soprintendenza, the official bureaucracy overseeing cultural property, Pompeii came of age as the world’s grande dame of vintage archaeology and the fashionable focus of modern scholarship. The great “Prince among Archaeologists,” Amedeo Maiuri, took advantage in the 1930s of Mussolini’s intention to recast the new Italian state as a continuation of the old Roman one that had controlled the world by inspiring authority. Pompeii was an opportunity to showcase Roman urbanism, so huge tracts of new excavations laid bare larger parts of the buried city. According to Robert Etienne in Pompeii: The Day a City Died (1992), Maiuri defined what is presently seen of Pompeii by his extensive excavations. At the end of the twentieth century, Antonio Varone continued excavating Pompeii but without the propagandizing vision of Fascism. International efforts also encouraged collaborative projects between nations and academic institutions to keep Pompeii at the cutting edge of archaeology, which is only fitting for the world’s most famous archaeological site.