Dan Snow's History Hit - Pompeii

Episode Date: August 14, 2025

Warning: this episode contains explicit language and discussions of sex.Pompeii is a city frozen in time and shows us exactly how the Romans really lived. Buried by volcanic ash and debris from a catastrophic eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, visitors to the Roman town can still see eerily preserved homes, bathhouses, the notorious brothel, and plaster casts of victims in their last moments.Dan is joined by Dr Kate Lister to tell the story of the eruption and explain the history behind what remains in Pompeii and their top tips for visiting.This is part of our summer travel series 'Dan's Guide to Europe'.Produced by Mariana Des Forges, edited by Tim Arstall and sound designed by Dougal Patmore.Join Dan and the team for a special LIVE recording of Dan Snow's History Hit on Friday, 12th September 2025! To celebrate 10 years of the podcast, Dan is putting on a special show of signature storytelling, never-before-heard anecdotes from his often stranger-than-fiction career, as well as answering the burning questions you've always wanted to ask!Get tickets here, before they sell out: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/dan-snows-history-hit/.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail].

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you know that Simpsons poster with every character on it? We're trying to create that, but in podcast form. So listen to the Town Show out every Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts. ACAST helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcast everywhere. acast.com. with grapes, figs, dates, barley and olives. Men and women in their woolen, linen, togas, peruse what else is on offer, wine, herds and honey.

As they reach out to pick up the produce, the ground rumbles. The stalls sway, olives fall to the ground. For days, tremors have reverberated through the stone streets of this affluent Roman town on the Bay of Naples. But most of its 18,000 inhabitants have ignored them, continuing to go about their leisure and work. The city is a retreat for Rome's rich and the people who serve them. A vibrant centre for tourism, trade, food and fancy. There are dramatic gladiator fights in the amphitheatre. There are plays and performances.

There are bathhouses, sports grounds, shops and bars, places to eat, laundries and brothels. Mount the Vesuvius looms over the city, rising about 4,000 feet above Pompeii. On its mountainsides, farmers tend to crops and vineyards. On the day that Vesuvius erupted, the town bakers put bread into ovens, not realising that these loaves will stay here for nearly 2,000 years to be discovered by archaeologists strangely preserved. At 1pm that day, a young man, by the name of Pliny the Younger, looks across the Bay of Naples from around 30 kilometres away from Pompeii

and sees something extraordinary. A huge column shoots up from the volcano, gas, stone, ash. The sky blackens as volcanic debris rains down on Pompeii, Herculaneum and other surrounding settlements. Pliny later wrote, the daylight was now elsewhere in the world. But there the darkness was darker and thicker than any night. It must have felt like the world was ending. And for Pompeii, it was. The inhabitants panic, torn between escaping the danger of the raining debris

and the terror of leaving everything behind them. People tied pillows their heads to attempt to protect themselves while others just cried in despair. Many flee to the ports or nearby towns, but thousands remain. The hail of pumice strikes the town like sling. shots from the sky. Buildings struggle under the weights as it piles up and begins to bury people and things. Eventually the pumice will form a layer roughly three meters deep. Then there is another boom. The giant column of gas and ash stretching up from the volcano suddenly collapses

and forms an avalanche of superheated material that rampages down the slopes, destroying everything in its path. It tumbles down the mountainside, devouring vineyards, villas, fields and forests. It moves faster than any man can run. It is hotter than a furnace. It sweeps through the gates of Pompeii in an instant.

Those who have hidden indoors suffocate where they lay, those who run, die where they stand. In almost an instant, the city is gone buried beneath meters of ash and stone entombed to be uncovered centuries later Pompeii was rediscovered

at the end of the 16th century by the architect Dominico Fontana who was digging an underground channel to divert the Sarno River during the project he uncovered a series of ancient walls and frescoes and inscriptions, the ruins of Pompeii. But he was horrified to realise the fresco's depicted rather erotic scenes. He quickly covered the site up and Pompeii remained hidden for another century. Proper excavations began in the 1700s after the discovery of

nearby Herculaneum in 1709. Initially the work was haphazard and focused on finding treasures for the royal collection of Charles III of Naples. It wasn't until the following century that excavations became more careful and scientific. Lead archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli came up with the idea of making plaster casts of the voids that he believed had been left by the bodies of individuals who'd been buried in the ash during the eruption. Their bodies had then decomposed and left a cavity.

These are the very haunting statues or casts that show us the very last second of the lives of the victims of Pompeii. During these historic excavations, and even today, we have found perfectly preserved artefacts, human remains, food, buildings, artworks, all manner of ancient objects that reveal the story of life in Pompeii. Its ruins are the most extraordinary time capsule we have into the ancient Roman world. So, as fellow history lovers, I can imagine Pompeii is on your bucket list, which is why I've included it in my summer travel series, Dan Snow's Guide to Europe.

I had the privilege of going to Pompey at the end of last year to film. a TV show with the incredible historian, Dr. Kate Lister, who is also the host of our sister podcast, Patrix the Sheets, and it seemed like the perfect excuse to meet up with Kate again to reminisce on that trip and what we learned, to give you the historic lowdown on what can be found at Pompeii, as well as our hot tips on how to see it if you're lucky enough to visit. Now, it's worth saying you, there's a little bit of swearing and sex talk in this episode because Pompeii has the only preserved brothel from the ancient world, and we couldn't not include it.

Kate Lister, how are you doing? I'm doing very well, thank you, Daznau. How are you doing? Good. We just come back from a great adventure in Pompeii. Was that your first time? I went to Pompeii for the very first time when I was 17, but I think I was very much a petulant teenager. Like, things were being pointed out to me. Like, you should appreciate this. I went there as a teenager. You're like, what am I doing here? What's happening here? But now that you're a sophisticated, you know, academic and public historian, and then thought leader. Tell us, what do you think about it?

It's amazing. It's absolutely incredible. It's such a surreal place to be because it's not like a museum where a group of historians have got together and gone, I think this is what a Roman place would look like. It's actually the city where they lived. And you really do, you like you walk in their streets. This is their houses. You can go into their homes. It is very eerie to be there, I think. People are drawn to the sort of box office bits like the particular murals or frescoes or statues. For me, it's the whole thing. It's mind-blowing. You're in a Roman city in a reasonable state, and you just get a sense from the streets and the buildings and the layout. And then, of course, so exciting,

because something like a third of it hasn't been excavated yet. I know loads of it's still underground, isn't it? Any historian is studying Pompeii, I guess, lives in fear, but also excitement of what they're going to discover. You could, like, do this whole thesis and what you think people in Pompeii would be doing, and then some bastard with a trowel over here is going to turn up and I just disprove everything. And what's great about it is that you and I were there's different zones, isn't there, there's residential, there's food and bev, we might call it now. Worshiping places, bathing places. Place for politics. Lots of walking in Pompeii. Oh, there's so much walking in Pompey to be done. That's actually a really good point. I always say to people,

if you can go, don't go in the summer, and we're walking shoes, because it is brutal. I wore the stupidest shoes. I don't want to say anything. The stupid, do you know what, they weren't stupid for if you were just walking around London. Of course they weren't. They're lovely shoes. They were very nice shoes. I just mean they weren't ideal for Pompey's. They had a rather chunky platform wedge to the sandals. And they would have been fine for walking around any city, but Pompey is a different beast altogether. Because you've got the volcanic, it's all made out of volcanic rock.

It's the big sort of paving stones that are slightly uneven on the streets, aren't they? And you're always hopping down on the... The curbs are very high. Yep. Because as we learned, those streets would have been filled with... Shit. Imagine the summer. It would have been awful, wouldn't it?

Just animal waste, human waste, food, just all being chucked into the streets. free flow in. As a visitor today, you're always kind of clambering up and down. It's hot, it's dusty. There are midges there as well. So you've got to be quite hardy, I think. And all the time you've got that amazing vista in the background. You got Vesuvius with the central cone blown out in that enormous eruption.

We'll probably talk about the one that would destroy Pompey or preserve Pompey, however you want to look at it. First of all, I guess let's talk about the kind of character of Pompey. It was on the Bay of Naples. It was the Hamptons. It was like the sandbanks in Bournemouth off of the Roman elite. There were these villas all around the Bay of Naples. So Pompeii was a sort of holiday town.

It was where the posh people went to kick the knees up and to have a good time. And yeah, I mean, it's on the coast. It's very beautiful. And it must have been where rich people would go, maybe not for a day out, probably a bit longer than that. But yeah, it had a big thriving tourist industry.

I guess that's not surprising because they, obviously, the famous Amalfi Coast is just around the corner. That's where everyone goes on the honeymoon stay. So it's still got that character. Someone said it was a bit like a cross between in Vegas and Miami or something. Like it was a real holiday town.

Didn't people let their hair down there as well? Yes. Yeah. And there was a lot for them to do as well. There were so many taverns and places to eat. And it's really catering for people together and have a good time. If you had money, that was one of the things that struck me about being there. There was, I never saw the middle bit.

It was just like there was palaces and palatial environments of people that had so much money and make your eyes water or people living in hovel. The wealth disparity was really stark. You're right, because we went to a few those places. And what's interesting, sometimes it's all in the same block. So there'll be like a really rich house. And it's sort of, it's grown organically, I suppose. He or she have bought their neighbours out.

But then there'll be like a blacksmiths, there'll be a smithy, and then like a tiny little dwelling right in amongst that same. So it must have been quite intense and noisy and, to a certain extent, confusing. You wouldn't necessarily know you were in a smart part of town or not. All the rich houses had really high levels of security, didn't they? To keep the oipoli out, obviously. Their windows were really high to stop people nicking all of their stuff. And we were lucky enough to see some new excavation that was really cool.

I'll never forget seeing those handprints on the wall. Do you see those handprints on the wall that kids are drawn around their hands and charcoal? When did you see that? I think maybe you were at the baths that day. They've just uncovered them. And if you think about it, that means it between the kids doing that and the eruption of the Sufis, probably didn't rain or anything. So it could have been days, weeks or hours.

And there was also next to those hands, there were some childlike graffiti of gladiators fighting as well. There's lots of eerie things. like that, like the bread that they've got that was put into the ovens the morning of the eruption and that's been preserved. That's quite eerie. It was just, it was never eaten. It was never touched. It was obviously put in almost immediately before the thing happened. We were very lucky because we got shown to some of those back areas, the storage. Because I think the buildings are special, but they're like skeletons, aren't they? You forget that, don't you? That obviously,

when they've excavated it, they've taken a load of stuff out. What you're looking at when you're walking around is basically the shell of it, all of the treasures and the things that they found are kept in. It wasn't a museum. It was like a storehouse in the centre, wasn't it? And we were lucky enough to go and have a look around it. And it's just shells really close together, absolutely stuffed with these artefacts. I felt terrified being in there. Terrified. Terrified of being in there. Like, it's just wall-to-wall, glass, boxes, things that they found, thousands of years old. Cooking utensils. And you know, one false move, one stumble, one sneeze, and I could smash this.

There were sort of things that you put as a centrepiece of a dining table. There was that earthenware jug that had all those eggs in it, and the eggs had baked and the shells had cracked, but they were all still there. In that storeroom, there was the statue with the enormous penis. The huge penis. The reason it was in the storeroom, someone had broken it off and tried to take it home. See, that's why we can't have nice things. That really is.

It was in someone's handbag leaving the site. I'll never forget that. Dan, who tried to steal that, by the way. No, it wasn't. No, it wasn't. It was not. But I did do a little Instagram video of it. Now, let's try and talk people through Pompey, in case they want to visit there, you go in through this wonderful gate, an original gate in the defensive walls,

which is something like two miles long. There were several gates. But you go in through this wonderful gate, and you go in there like we were lucky enough to do before the crowds, the sun shines straight down that. It's a magical experience entering, and it's quite magical, because then you get into the forum where there's temples and the positions, So there's sort of the court area for local politics. And then around the forum, what does one do if you're an ancient Roman in the forum?

Well, ideally you'd be a man, because I did learn that looking around, is that most women were just supposed to stay at home and out of the way. But the forum was the place where the politicians and the local officials would meet and have discussions and thoughts and do business. And all around that would have been people trading, catering to them. A lot of gossip. Yeah, a lot of gossip. Yeah, a funny thing that men like to say, we don't gossip.

Oh, you gossiped so much. You've gossiped so much. You gossiped so much. The whole forum idea is based around the idea of gossiping. There's so much gossiping that goes on. And there's temples around that forum. There is a slave market there. Yeah, that was grim, wasn't it?

That was very prominent. And now you got the Abundanza, which is called the Road of Abundance. That's a modern name for it, with lots of commercial properties, loads of shops, those are stores, and just bars, as you say, bars and taverns everywhere. Because they would eat on the way home. That was something else that I learned from Rome Pompeys, that rich people would eat at home. They'd have people to cook for them. Poor people wouldn't have the facilities to do it because they would live in a one room establishment. So they would

be buying food on their way home. So I thought in terms of public spaces, I think the forum's extraordinary and the building around the forum. And then you go down the VAB and Dan's only look at the shops, but the baths are amazing. I didn't do much. You did a lot of time in the baths. That's impressive when you go in there, because obviously they're divided by sex. You've got men's baths and you've got the women's baths. And the men's baths is it's got quite a, it's weird to say like a masculine vibe about it. But the images on the wall and the frescoes, there's sort of like nude men with big muscles and tiny penises all over the place. And when you go into the women's baths, the frescoes on the wall is it's flowers and birds and nice things. And in the

men's baths, they've got, it's like a big fire pit thing that they must have used to put water on to get the steam. And you can see the dedication on it. It was put there by somebody who was trying to get elected. So he was appealing to the men by just basically going, remember me. I'm like, I'm really rich. I'm really cool.

Like, I put that thing in the baths. Nothing like that in the women's bath. And when I asked Sophie our guide about that, she went, yeah, but they can't vote. So, oh, yeah, so who cares? Amazing. One of the very useful things about Pompey, anyway, is that unlike ancient Egypt,

the whole place is full of inscriptions of this is who I am. Yeah. This is the year. This is who's the emperor. This is what I'm trying to achieve. If I'd like to get elected to this office, please enjoy this nice drinking fountain. So for historians and archaeologists, they're like, well, it's quite useful. And graffiti everywhere.

Everywhere. That was their version of social media. They're scrolling on walls, on doors, on... There's so much graffiti around Pompeii. It was that fun by the walls. I think it was on the north side. It was like, please stop doing a business outside my house. People just defecating on the street.

Obviously, I'd put outside this poor person's house. And they just scrolled this massive sign up on the wall. Fair enough. Yeah. So the bars, of all the Roman customs, I'd like to get involved in that. Well, I thought that too. And when you're looking around, you're like, this actually feels quite familiar and quite modern because they've got a plunge pool and they've got a hot room and they've got another

hotter room and like you move through them. And it sounds all lovely until you realise they don't have any plumbing system in there. It's all the same water being recycled again and again and again. So it's, yeah. That's not something. That's not something, is it? I thought the idea of the community. coming together, like they do a bit of work in the morning and then you go and all meet up for a

chat and a hang out. Go and have a shower with your mates. Yeah, I like that. I quite like that too, but they were very important to them in the baths. It was where they would get a lot of business done and a lot of chatting and you just go and hang out. That does have a modern feel because we've got leisure centres and spars and things today. I also felt the palistro, which is that huge big square, colonnaded square, where you and I spent quite a lot of time. And that was, I think, strangely. A lot of elite kids would go there and have schooling in one of those conades with their clever Greek tutors and things. But also in the middle of that swimming pool, so it was a big athletics ground as well. And the swing pool had like a shallow end and a deep end.

I like that. What about the night time, well, the night economy? Because it was quite a, well, as you say, it was a place that attracted tourists. It's a place where that night economy seemed to be quite important. One of the things that you really learn when you're walking around it, I think that when you can actually do that, you learn a lot about history just by actually being there and physically experiencing it that you hadn't realised before. Like how dark it would have been. That was one of the things that, like, obviously if you think about it, you do realise that.

But we were there at night at one point, and it is pitch black. You can't see anything in front of you. And we had a few torches and a few lamps. I mean, it must have been terrifying to have gone out and walked about in Pompeii when it was that dark. And there are a lot of records about people getting robbed

and that you wouldn't want to go out after dark. If you were wealthy, you'd be accompanied by someone. If you were wealthy, you would be at home. You would be at home on your sofa or whatever the Romans had instead of a sofa. You might want to sneak out at night because there's lots to do, isn't there? There's the theatres, which I was very struck by. There were two theatres right next door to each other, two main ones. And clearly, getting together and doing things together is a big part of life for these Romans,

being a town like that. You're training together, you're bathing together, you're in the theatres together. That's something that now feels quite alien to us. There wasn't a lot of privacy in Pompeii. everything was in on top of one another. I think that would get on my nerves after a while, to be completely honest. You were never, ever alone. It seems like there wasn't any space for anyone.

There's no introverts in Pompeii. Everybody has to be social with everybody else. You listen to Dan Snow's history. This is my guide to Pompeii. ship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoners Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into Feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and Shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to

survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories. Listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. I guess the other activity that you need to really find out would be the gladiator arena

that you went to. It's right on the other side of town from the forum. They loved a gladiator, didn't they? Yeah. and that is just one of the great gladiator arenas of the Roman world. Women weren't allowed to attend the games. They could if they sat right at the top, I think. They were allowed to go, but they had to sit in the back

and they had to behave themselves. It fits something like 20,000 people. So possibly more than the population of Pompeii fit. Was it a big deal there, their amphitheatre? Do you think so? It was a big amphitheater. I think it was, wasn't it? Yeah.

And you get a lot of graffiti around the amphitheatre that tells us how the gladiators were viewed, and they have this kind of celebrity status, Even a heartthrob status. There's one that says Kresken, the net fighter, will make the girl sigh. They obviously were the slave, but they were also enslaved. That was weird, wasn't it? Trying to get your head around that.

Like, okay, so how does your system of slavery work then? Because you enslave a lot of people. I think some of the historians were saying up to a third of people were enslaved, but also doctors, midwives, teachers. They were all slaves. White-collar accountants that, yeah, they could be slaves. Gladiators, sex work. Like, I'm trying to get your head round that.

So these are quite skilled jobs of people that live in your house, but they're also slaves and they don't have any rights. I found that really jarring to try and work out how this system of slavery works for them. Speaking of sex workers, that's something that feels quite present in Pompeii. There are these places that we think are brothels. Yeah. You visited a lot of them. Were they out of the way places?

Was it something that was kind of shameful? Was it kept a lid on or was it quite out there? Well, there is one known brothel in Pompeii, and there's quite a lot of historical debate around how do you classify a brothel, not just in Pompeii or in Rome, but any time throughout history, like what is the definition of it? And the definition that they've come up with is it's a place that has to be used exclusively for the sale of sex. It's got more than one bed in it. It's got these kind of classification. Because obviously you get other places like taverns where someone might have been selling sex out the back. And there's a few of those in Pompey where some of the graffiti. suggests that might have been happening. The brothel is the only known establishment that that's all it was doing. It was there to sell sex. And it's the most popular tourist destination in Pompeii. Everybody wants to see it.

Everybody wants to go. But from a historical point of view, it's a really, really important site, a really important find. It's the only surviving brothel that we have from the ancient world. And even more important than that, it's got graffiti on the walls that were written by the people that work there. So for the first time ever, you get a snapshot into lives that would have absolutely been lost to us had that not happened. Part of the attraction people of the brothel are the frescoes. They're not actually that erotic when you look at them. It's kind of... I've seen worse. I've seen... They're a worse in Pompeii. There are worse ones in Pompeii than

what's on the brothel. And is the suggestion that people can point and go, can I do that, please? That is what the tour guides tell you, but that's not the case. No, it's not like it was a menu and people were just pointing out what they wanted. It's more to create an ambience, a kind of an erotic setting. And when you're actually in there, like the rooms are kind of sectioned off, but they would have had curtains perhaps covering the doorway. So it would have all been very open and all very present. I mean, there's not much that you can conceal behind a curtain. Like perhaps you conceal your view, but everyone's aware of what's going on there. We know that when they excavated it, they found things like razor blade, things for cleaning.

yourselves. So perhaps the clients were being asked to have a wash before or maybe afterwards. It's two stories, but we don't know what the top floor was used for. Maybe the person who owned it or ran it lived up there. We just don't know. We've got a few names of the people that were there, men and women. Most of them were enslaved, so forced to do this. Some of them seem to have had freeborn names. So there might have just been people trying to make a bit of extra money. But Nowhere else in the whole of history do we have the voices of someone who's enslaved and somebody who's a sex worker. That's the only place that we have it. There was a guy where they're called Isidorus and one of the pieces says that he's a great cunt liquor. So fair play, Isidorus. They're

making fun of clients as well. There's one piece that calls one of the clients Mr. Garlic Farts, which I know, I know. But that's also funny. That's a good joke from 2000 years ago. There's also a piece of graffiti that says something to the effect of weep girls, my penis now will penetrate men's behinds. So we know that there was a lot of gay sex going on there. There was another person at work, they're called Mola. Her name appears a few times. But we don't know very much information about these people,

but the fact that we know them at all is frankly amazing. And what should we make, any of the sexy murals that seem to be in private houses? Were they just artistic fashion? Or were there rooms in their private houses where these rich people were trying to create their own little mini brothels? That is an argument that a lot of historians have made. There's one house. The house of the vetti, it's called. There is one room that has got very, very erotic frescoes in it and what looks to be a price list. So there's some suggestion that that was being used as a brothel, perhaps, or perhaps that was somebody that they were enslaved and made

to do that. We just don't know. But also the thing is, like, trying to understand what the Romans saw when they saw the things that they looked at and what we see. is it so different. You must have noticed all around Pompeii. There are just penises everywhere. They're on the pavement. They're on the wall. They're in the frescoes.

You're the expert on things like this. Why do people do that? So another thing the tour guides might tell you is that they're pointing towards the brothel. That's not true. That's not true. Like if you try to follow those and find a brothel, you would just get hopelessly lost for hours.

It looks like they're good look charms. So they're warding off evil. And there are other cultures and civilizations that do some similar Egypt. for instance. So it just seems that they were good luck charms. And the other thing that you realize when you're walking around Pompeii or indeed Rome is, how masculine it is, how macho it is. It's a really bros, bros, bros culture. They didn't think an awful lot of women and they had to stay home most of the time. If you don't get vulvas around Pompeii, they've got this

huge love of penises, not one vulva to be found. Yeah, so that's men carving them for men as it were. This is not women just going, oh, I love a penis. There are penises drawn on the women's baths, on the walls with women's baths, really big penises as well. I like to think that a woman drew that. I'm seeing male artist there, I've got to be honest. What are the penises and the frescoes and the fact there is at least one brothel? What does that tell us about attitudes towards sex in the Roman world? They clearly had very different attitudes to our own.

And you can tell that by how shocked we are by Pompeii. The Victorians really freaked out when they started excavating it. They were absolutely horrified about all this smut and all the penises that they were finding. They'd locked it up in a secret room in the Museum of Naples. But even today, the fact that we're so fascinated by it. I'm like, oh, look, it's a penis, that statue's got a massive penis. It's a brothel. I don't think that it would have bothered any of the Romans at all.

I don't think that it would have been a thought in their head. That's how normal it was to them. They had quite a bawdy sense of humour. They have quite a permissive attitude around sex. They have a lot of hang-ups. Let's not pretend it was some kind of sexual utopia. But they obviously have a much more open dialogue around sex than perhaps we do today, probably borne out by the fact that, again, we're back to that issue of privacy. If you have your own bedroom and if you have your own space, that is a very modern phenomenon. That is a luxury that our ancestors could only have dreamt of. And if you are all living piled in on top of one another, naked bodies, sex, these kind of things are going to have a much more immediate presence. than they do when we try and lock everything away. So obviously they're very, very different attitudes to sex than we have today. You mentioned the brothel and everyone wants to see that,

but everybody who visits Pompeii wants to see the plaster casts of the bodies as well. That is just that's so, they're so striking. People just want to know where those bodies are and they don't want to see them. And they are extraordinary. We should say how they were formed, right? Because when they were excavating, they would find these hollows, wouldn't they? Yeah. Where the ash and the pumice had rained down from the voles.

volcano and it had squished down and compacted and it had basically encased anything that was underneath it and then over time that material rots away and what you're left with is a shell of a body that was once there. So they were sort of breaking through the volcanic debris and they'd find a sort of a cavity with some human bones in it or some animal bones. They'd be like, what is this? And then they had the idea in the 19th century to fill that void with plaster and what do they find the shape of bodies? it's really eerie isn't it is to see them to see it was one of the most giant things about pompeze you can have so much fun like walking around going oh there's a brothel there's the baths there's it and you have such a time and then you sort of face to face with one of these bodies and yeah oh oh the terrible thing happened i'd almost forgotten about the terrible thing happening it is very moving when you see them because a lot of the time their bodies are convulsed in strange positions and they're holding things to their mouths or the really moving ones is where you've got people huddled together and a little kid I know, the mother and child, or an adult and child, certainly.

Yeah, and you just don't know who these people are. Your heart just breaks for them when you realise that that was their last moment. More Pompeii coming up afterwards. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the poisoners' cup in. Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where

samurai warlords and Shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed, not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits. There are new episodes every week. And also they've started doing that with organic materials as well. Some of the old wooden doors, they've now rendered those in plaster. And I went down to a big house. I think it was just outside the walls.

And in the slaves' course, they've got like enslaved people's beds. They've got two beds in this tiny room, little place for a camera. candle, a little bit of whitewash, and they'll all try and reflect the light of that candle. And now they've been able to preserve through this method. These beds are all just sort of recreated in plaster. It's fascinating, yeah. So the technology and the science and the archaeology is just coming on leaps and bounds. It's a very exciting place in it.

But in that house, they have the only horses they've recovered. So Plato Paris horses with their bridles on and stuff. So it's conceivable that they were being ready to try and gallop out, trying to escape if there was a gap in the volcanic debris. And there they found two bodies, two men, I think, one possibly a man. master and won an enslaved persons. They were together. Wow. It was in a little corridor of this house. So fascinating stuff. That really is, isn't it? And you're just seeing them in their last moments. Yeah, it's powerful. It's powerful. I think equally powerful is the dog that was chained to the post near the

temple of ISIS. And it's sort of, the dog's back is arch, its feet are straight out, its heads twisted away. Very rare in archaeology, isn't it, to sort of reach back and touch a nanosecond from nearly 2,000 years ago. But that feels like that. That dog has just been hit by this wall of heat and volcanic debris. A lot of the bodies are convulsing in strange positions. They contort in strange positions, and that's because of the heat that hit them. It causes the muscles to go into spasm. It was the heat of the pyroclastic flow that caused the body to contract.

And we say people that don't know in August, although they're thinking now it could be later in the end of October in 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius, which towers over Pompeii and is part of a super volcano, by the way, everyone. New Fear Unlocked. That will blow up one day and destroy most of Europe. Is that what a supervolcano is? No, yeah, Vesvish is part of it. The Flegrean fields are all under Naples and all round. No. So that whole area of the Bay of Naples is a super volcano. Who told you that?

A vocalologist on the programme. All right, I'll believe that. Yeah. And he says he's got a car ready to go with stuff in the back for when his reading started going off the scale. The super volcano is going to blow at some stage. They didn't tell me that. Well, we didn't. We didn't tell you that before we took that. I didn't know I was walking around a super volcano.

No. Well, you were. And you know what? We made it. We made it. And that's why, if you go to Naples, you see lots of volcanic rock and lava and things. That whole area has been subject to repeated eruptions. But Vesuvius, the catastrophic, the enormous eruption that blew the top off, was in 79. And it's the first volcanic eruption history for which we have a sort of scientific observation of because Pliny the younger was watching it. His uncle, Pliny the elder, went to help and actually ended up dying in this eruption. He describes this huge column going up in the air. like Pine Tree, I think he said it was, and there's little fragments come off. And then Pompeii was subjected to a reign of pumice and ash. Yeah. And some bombs. Remember those volcanic bombs? It could bigger, bigger rocks that are superheated and it's loud like a mortar bomb on there.

It would have all been really bad news because when you pick the pumice up, it doesn't feel that heavy, does it? And you could be forgiven for a moment thinking, this will be right. This will be all right. Well, I think that's why lots of people stayed. Then there was a few hours when, you know, pumice was building up on roofs and they were collapsing and the streets are filling up. And I think people were making that some people, lots of people went down. We know in Herculean, they went down to the water and many perished. Are you going to risk it?

Are you going to go for it? Indeed, some ships in the Bay of Naples came to help people, but then they were sunk by these rocks landing on them. And Pumice was floating on the surface of the Day of Naples, I thought. And it's like, it's really thick, isn't it? It's like meters and meters. So you could sort of almost drown in Pumice. And then volcanic ash falling.

I think there was a little tsunami as well. And then... Throw that in there. Quite a few hours later, there's this extraordinary superheated, so three, 400 degrees centigrade. pyroclastic. That enormous column collapses and rumbles down the side of a sea was like an avalanche and just smashes Pompeii. Super hot. Super hot. Super heated. Immediately carbonising all that wood and the bread that we saw. I saw that also grass. There was a lawn which they've preserved and it's just blackened

grass. When the end actually came for these people, would it have been quite quick? Yes, it would be very quick. When that pyroclastic surge hits, it's instantaneous. Boom, that's it done. And you got lots of skeletons and Herculaneum. We're all puddling next to the port. we think they were trying to evacuate from there. But what's also really interesting is there's Roman settlements that survive. The cloud sort of collapses in this pyroclastic avalanche travels across the countryside because the wind was in a certain direction. Actually, if you're on the edge of it, you could survive.

So the hot take, what I've learned is sometimes you want to escape by heading towards the volcano. That's terrible advice, Dan. Don't give people that kind of advice. No, but if you're down wind, if you run that way, it's going to fall on you. If you actually go around the edge of the volcano and go up wind, you might be right. We know people escaped. How many bodies have they found? I don't know.

I don't know the answer. It's not. Well, we know that there were thousands of people living in it there. They haven't found thousands of bodies. So clearly people did. Many people escaped. And we got accounts of a town nearby, which had a few huge influx of refugees, for example. Would you have gone?

Would you have run? I think so. Do you know why I would? Tell me. Because, like you, I'm a historian. And I've studied a lot of a disaster in the past of people getting it wrong and not right. I'd run quick. My main lesson from history is at the slightest whiff of trouble.

Like it. Political. Geological. Get out. My kids, we got a rendezvous point. Oh, do you? Where's your rendezvous point? In case a volcano goes off. No, yes, we have different. In fact, we have different rendezvous points for different crises. Is this true? Yes. I told my kids we go to the highest point in the new forest where I got the ordinance survey map out. It's not very high. And we're going to go and stand there if there's a tsunami. What if there's an earthquake? Well, I don't have a plan for that. Did they know it was a volcano?

They knew it was a geologically active area because there's a flagrant fields. Earthquake. In fact, there had been an earthquake right before. Yeah, they were still repairing from that, weren't they? They must have been fuming. They must have been fuming. Because there's a big, almost imperials of royal villa slash palace quite near Pompeii that was also covered. And they think that might not have been used at the time because they could have been repairing

it from the earthquake. So, yeah, some of the rich people may have stayed away. But, yeah, so I guess they knew it was an area of, but they didn't know about plate atomics. They didn't know about geological time. No. No. As somebody visited for the first time as an adult, what was the one thing you

take away. Wear sensible shoes. Don't be wearing silly fashion shoes. If you're going to go, go later in the day, I think, because everybody tries to get there at nine, but by five, six, it's actually cleared out quite a lot. If it's what I learnt about the Romans, when we were putting on togas, when the toga experts came along to put togas on us, I hadn't realized how much balance was involved in that, because it's not pinned. It's like it's all draped overuse. That's true. You have to stand in a way that keeps it all together. You have to be like, you know, have a good core muscle and you can't be messing around and trying to walk wearing that.

I learned that bakeries were horrible places to work. Horrible places to work. I hadn't realized that. Yeah. I thought that would be quite lovely. Yeah, fresh bread, artisanal bakery. Yeah, but it was, it was awful. The air was thick with flour as you were pushing that mill stone thing round.

I learned that there are diseases that you can get when you're inside a volcano. I learned that. And the name of the disease, if I can get this right, pneumonia, ultra-microscopic silico-volcanoiniosis. Why did that come from? That was amazing. Is that a lung... That's a lung illness that you get from volcanoes.

See, I went into the crater and no one mentioned that. Well, no one mentioned that it's an ultra-volcano to me either. So we both lied to. In the same way that you went to the bakery, I went to the laundry. Oh, yes. We learned about how the enslaved people had to use urine to clean the... to clean things. They were really minging, weren't they?

Really disgusting places. And hot and enclosed and in the back, you know, there'd be these huge, big tubs. And you got in there with your feet and that stamped them down for hours and hours on end. That Garum, the Romans, go on and on and on and on about, which is effectively a rotted fish sauce. And I was given the opportunity to try it.

And I had it in my head that it can't be as disgusting as it sounds because the Romans were nuts for this stuff. And Pompey made loads of it. They exported it. So I had this idea that when you take it, tasted it, it would actually be like, oh my God, that's a revelation. No, it's not. No, it's not. It was like cat food. It was awful. Italian food, folks, before tomatoes, potatoes, before the Americas, Italian food, not great. It really wasn't great. Nice desserts, though. The desserts were

good. There was that cheesecake thing that we tried. That was all right. But my whole mouth tasted a rotten fish by that point, so everything was horrible. Well, anyway, Kate, thanks for sharing that with us. And people should go to your podcast to find out more. Yes, that would be very nice. We would love to see them there. It is betwixt the sheets, a history of sex, a scandal in society. Wherever you get your pods, go and check it out. If you're listening to this and you're in the UK and you want to see the TV show Kate and I Made, you can watch it at channel 5.com. It's called Pompeii Life in the City. If you're outside the UK, well, we have got plenty of Pompeii content on our digital history channel,

history hits. So go and check it out. You can also, of course, get more. of Kate on her history podcast, Betwixt the Sheets. Join me for my next installment of my guide to here upon Monday, where I'll be walking the streets of Napoleonic Paris to discover how that great French emperor transformed the city into what he dreamed would become the capital of the universe. I discover how Paris in turn shaped him,

a young, ambitious military school student determined to make an aim for himself. Do you know the reason you get bread with a meal at restaurants in Europe is all because of Napoleon? But you didn't know that, so keep it out for that episode on Monday. because it's full of fascinating little bits like that. We should use to impress your friends.

See you next time, folks. Bye-bye. ACAS powers the world. ACAS powers the world's best podcasts. Here's the show that we recommend. I'm Mark. And I'm Ryan, and you might know us from our award-winning CBC podcast, Let's Make a Sci-Fi. But we want to tell you about our brand-new show, the town show.

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