Science Friday - How do you piece together what life was like in Pompeii?

Episode Date: July 20, 2026

Pompeii is known for its disastrous end with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, but for archeologists, what came before is just as interesting. Researchers are using artifacts left behind in the remarkably well-preserved Roman city to piece together what life was like for the thousands of people who lived there 2,000 years ago.  A new book and television show analyze some of these clues to tell the stories of the ordinary people who faced this extraordinary event. Flora speaks with archaeobotanist Jess Venner, author of “The Lost Voices of Pompeii,” and actor Tom Hiddleston, host of National Geographic’s “Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston.” Read an excerpt from “The Lost Voices of Pompeii: Life and Death on Pompeii’s Final Day” Watch the interview on YouTube. Guests: Dr. Jess Venner is an archaeobotanist at the University of Oxford and author of “The Lost Voices of Pompeii.” Tom Hiddleston is an actor and producer, and host of National Geographic’s “Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston.” Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey, I'm Flora Lichten, and you are listening to Science Friday. Okay, pack your bags because we are headed to Pompeii, the ancient Roman city that was frozen in time by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. While Pompei is known for its disastrous ending, for archaeologists, what came before that is maybe even more interesting. Because before Pompey was covered in ash, it was a city where people lived, worked, and made a life. My next guest has spent a lot of time trying to get to know the ordinary people who faced this extraordinary disaster, using artifacts to piece together what life in this Roman city was like 2,000 years ago. Dr. Jess Vennar is an archaeobotanist and author of the book The Lost Voices of Pompeii. Hey Jess, welcome to Science Friday and thanks for being here. Thank you so much for having me. Can't wait to talk about Pompeii.

Me too. And I think our listeners will feel the same way, which gets to my first question, which is why do you think we have this, endless fascination with Pompeii. Yeah, Pompey has a way of helping us to connect with people 2,000 years ago. It is altogether ordinary. It was a very ordinary town made extraordinary by its preservation. And what it gives us is a very unique insight into how specific people lived. And we can know their names, where they lived, what they used to do as a job, even about their family and friends.

And so we're able to connect on a different level with people in the Roman Empire. Is that different from other Roman cities? It is to an extent because of the level of preservation at Pompeii. It was destroyed in 8079, potentially the autumn we think now. I want to get back to that, by the way. Yes, we do need to talk about that. Ongoing debate. But a lot of the material there was preserved perfectly.

And so we have whole villas with frescoes, we've got mosaics, we've got items coming out that are belonging to ordinary people. also bakeries, shops, everything you can imagine that would be in a Roman town. It's there. And you can walk through it, I guess in a way that you can't, you know, in Rome where you also have like a pizza hut, not pizza hut because of Rome. Yeah, so local equivalent, exactly. Exactly that. You can walk through it today and it is absolutely massive. I mean, anyone preparing to go that hasn't gone, be prepared because this is exhausting and it's large. But yes, you can walk through the streets, you can go into the houses and the shops and the baths and even the brothel

and you can really experience these places. And some of them are easier to imagine than others. Some are just ruins. Some of the ones I recreate in my books, but other ones are really vividly beautiful just as they were when they were buried in AD 79. Who were you interested in profiling in your book? And why did you choose them? Yeah. So my research extends back about 12 years now professionally into Pompeii. And so I've come to know a certain amount of people very, very well. While I was doing my PhD, I studied urban agriculture, but also domestic architecture. And so there were certain people that I kept picking out where I kept thinking, do you know what, they've got some really good stories. And they're really normal people.

I could see myself in them. And so every time I'd go to Pompeii, I think last year I went about nine times. I would look in their houses or their places of work and think, I can almost see them walking around and they need to tell their stories. And that's why I wrote Lost Voices of Pompeii. Tell us about one of your favorites. I'm sure it's hard to choose. They're like your children at this point. They are. And it changes every time someone asks me. Today it is probably Alas umbrichius Scaurus, who was essentially the Heinz Ketchup CEO of Pompei. He was very famous for his fish sauce or garum. And he sent his garum across the empire.

We actually found bottles even in Britain. So he is very important. Pliny the Elder, who was a writer at the time, talks about how famous Pompeii is for its fish sauce. What was in it? Yeah, so it was a really salty, umami sort of taste. So you would get the fish, usually macrol and sardines and the salty sort of tiny fish.

you would crush them, put salt over them and ferment them in the heat. So you put them in a big jar. So it stank to the point where archaeologists finding some of these dollier that they were contained in opened them up 2,000 years later and it still smelt a fish sauce. Wow, really fermented at that point, a fine-aged fish sauce, exactly. So, okay, so why was this guy interesting to you? Tell us more about it. Yeah.

Yeah, so he was an old man at the time of the eruption in AD 79. He was a family man. We know about his son and parts of his family. We know that his family came from a small tribe, a very ancient Roman tribe, so very noble, just outside of Rome. And at some point, in the late 1st century BC, they moved to Pompeii and started selling fish sauce. And one of the other characters that I cover is Umbricia Fortunata. Again, real and actually lived there. And she was a freedwoman of Owls and Brickius Scouris.

And she took his name and went into business with him. She actually went into such a niche part of his business that she started selling kosher garum. Was it common to business women in Roman times? Do you know, I think it was much more common than we traditionally thought. And Pompeii, again, this is another reason why it's so wonderful, has a really wonderful way of showing us the bits about ancient history that we may have mistaken and female interests and the way that they were involved in business and negotiation and property

management even. It has a way of telling us different stories. And the other great example is Julia Felix, who is quite well known now. She's depicted fairly often in literature. So Julia is a female businesswoman. We know this because she had a huge advertisement on the outside. side of her house, a big estate near the amphitheater. And in this advertisement, she says, for discerning customers, you can use my Venus baths, which she remodeled after an earthquake, by the way, in AD62. So she was like, okay, there's an opportunity here. All the other bars are shutting down because they're all damaged in this earthquake. I'm going to start making money, but only for really cool, wealthy people, basically. So she's only letting serve people in.

She's got shops and apartments that she's renting out. She's got her own living areas. She's a very big worshipper of ISIS. But she's clearly a businesswoman on her own because she's advertising this in her own name. And she's daughter of Spurias, which kind of means that she isn't claiming a father figure in her life. And she's not claiming either a guardian or a husband. She might be a widow, but she doesn't mention it. So she's really, really interesting as an independent figure.

What artifacts are you drawing from? You must be piecing together lots of different pieces of evidence to sort of paint these pictures of people. Yeah, exactly. So it is so, so vast. And I originally wrote it by just remembering these things intuitively. So for example, when Petrinus, the slave in the first chapter, he walks through and does a shopping trip essentially through the city. So we see a lot of different places. I would go as granular as finding fish scales on the floor, and that was where the fish market was. Like with a little, should I imagine you, like, you know, in a dig with like a tiny little brush, finding a fish scale? And you know, not me specifically. I have been doing that today on another one in Canossos, but not that one in Pompeii particularly. But amazingly, there's so many archives of this archaeological remains that I can go to and say,

okay, this is exactly what this shop would have looked like. This is exactly what this bakery would have looked like. This is where the slaves would have moved inside it. This is where the oven was. This is where they would have prepared the bread. Right down to those granular details. Even down to the objects that were left, I have, for example, Julia Felix and a friend looking for perfume in the friend's house. And I knew exactly where the cupboard was, what sort of perfume bottles were found inside, a little grape bottle. So it gets shaped like a bunch of grapes. So it gets really, really granular, yes. That's amazing.

Okay, so we have to come back to the time of the eruption. This is a hot topic in your world, right? It is, yes. So the site of Pompeii are officially going with the 24th of August, which is the traditional date. And this is the date that's been given to us by Pliny the Younger. Pliny the Younger was the nephew of Pliny the Elder that I mentioned earlier. and he wrote two letters to Tacitus, a historian,

about 20 years after the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. So it's been a while, but he had a very good memory because Roman males of that status were taught memory theory. So they wouldn't really forget a traumatic experience like that, particularly as his uncle died during the event. So he's not going to forget that. So this seems like good evidence. Right?

It seems like good evidence. Exactly. However, we only have his letters because they're, they've been handed down to us through manuscript copying by monks. And monks didn't always understand the Latin that Pliny was using. They were also in grueling copying sessions that would go on for hours and hours and hours and hours. And so sometimes they would make mistakes. Roman dating in particular is really hard to wrap your head round.

So they do it in this funny way. And so again, there's more instances of mistakes happening. There are actually three months that are mentioned frequently in his manuscripts, August, October and November. I most often go with October 24th, and this is because I'm an archaeobotanist. So at the University of Oxford now in my research position, I study urban agriculture and use botanical remains

in the archaeology to reconstruct gardens in urban centres. And so that was one of the areas that I looked at. So we've got a wine harvest that's already happened, for example. Everything's been taken off the vines, they've been crushed, They've been put into Dolia in the ground. They've been sealed. This wouldn't have happened in a couple of days by 24th of August, which is when the harvest would have happened around that time. It takes time.

This is a fall type of thing. It's a full thing. Exactly. It takes time. So that was, I was kind of like, okay, that doesn't seem about right. Then we have what we now call the pomegranate problem. Where? Pomegranate gate.

Bring it. I know, right. So it's a very, very, very big pile of pomegranate. that shouldn't have been harvested at that time in August, sitting in Villa B in a Plontist, which is a villa right near Pompeii. So that's another one where I was kind of like, a lot of other arquebotanical remains, again, related to the harvest times that kind of don't add up. You know, you can make arguments for things being preserved, but it just doesn't quite, in my academic community anyway of arquebotonists, we're kind of, you know, on the fence about that.

But there's other things too. There's been coins that have been found, which are, shouldn't have gone into circulation in that time. You know, the wind blowing a certain way, would you believe it, at that time of year? So it gets really specific. It's fun. It's like detective work. Yeah. It is.

And we can't save the surfs in one way or another, which is quite nice, really. Yes. Yeah. Do people get really heated about this at conferences? Yes. It's still one of those things. You get people not saying, you know, what side of the fence they're on until you're talking to them privately. Really? It's hilarious. It's like you can't talk about eruption date politics and

religion at Pompey conference. I know. We really specific people, aren't we? But, you know, it's all good fun. The stakes are a little, are not that high. I mean, are there other open questions about Pompeii? So a third of the city is still left to be excavated. So in a way, there's a lot of open questions, yes. And things are ongoing. You know, in my research from my PhD, I found a 250% increase in urban agriculture in the city after the earthquake that I mentioned in AD62, where much of the town was destroyed. And what they were doing essentially is what we all started doing during COVID, which was gardening again.

And they saw an opportunity in that, particularly because landowners of the time would have thought, actually, I'm not going to rebuild those buildings because that's going to cost me a fortune and we keep having earthquakes. The other thing we can do is everyone wants some food right now. let's build gardens, let's build vigniars, let's build orchards, let's build vegetable plots. And so that was happening there. So I found that out only a couple of years ago. I've just published it the other day in the Journal of Roman Archaeology.

So there's always things being found. You just don't know always what the questions are. Yes, that's the beauty of it. Yes, that sounds like the fun of it. I mean, you know, obviously we are in modern times obsessed with Pompeii, but we're Romans obsessed with Pompeii after the eruption? So this is the sad thing. By every indication, it seems not, actually. The Emperor Titus, he went to survey the damage, he went to Campania immediately, looked around as politicians do during

these crises and said, you know what, there's not much we can do. We will set up a relief fund for survivors. We will take the money and the property of people that haven't survived that can't be track down and we will distribute that. But for me, I haven't found any examples of people sort of using that or that being talked about or even the refugees. We don't know where they went. People were so displaced from this. I mean, an estimated 20,000 people in Pompeii, the city, the urban city alone, you know, and the hinterland just about. And we only have a body count at the moment of about 1,600 people from the city itself. So, you know, counting in the third and everything,

we've got a death rate of between 8 and 11%. So many people survived. Yes, we had a huge amount of survivors, but it's very hard to track down. There's been recent research that, again, I'm on the fence with. It sounds like I'm very skeptical. It's all my job to be a skeptic. But, you know, that's tracking down potentially these survivors,

but I argue that, you know, it's like trying to find John Smith after World War II across the world. You know, how would you do that? You know, Roman names were very generic and formulaic. So I find it a little bit difficult to say that at the moment, with the evidence that we have, we can track down these survivors. But yes, there were a lot of survivors. After the break, we have a special guest joining us. You may recognize his voice from the Avengers series.

But did you know he's also a Pompeii Super Bowl? fan. Stay with us. Okay, I want to bring on another guest for our Pompeii Beluza, someone who has also spent a lot of time thinking about the people of Pompeii. Here with us is Pompeii Superfan and actor Tom Hiddleston, host of the new National Geographic show Pompeii out of time with Tom Hittleston. You may also know Tom as Loki from many, many Marvel movies and TV shows. Tom, and welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much. What an honor to be on Science Friday.

Oh, thank you for saying that. It's music to my ears. Tom, I mean, I think, you know, our audience will know you as an actor. Are you secretly a big nerd? That's a compliment on this show, by the way. Oh, yeah, 100%. I mean, like long before I took a little detour into acting, a detour that's taken me 25 years to this point.

my by my primary curiosity was the ancient world. I have always loved it. That is absolutely true. I remember, and this is really nerdy, and I haven't ever spoken about this before, I actually started learning Latin when I was 10. That's great to hear. And honestly, you could ask my parents and my teachers

if they can remember. They probably can't. It was a really, extraordinary match for me. And it was the birth of a curiosity about the ancient world because I had also loved the stories. I loved them as a child. What was it about them? Why does the ancient world capture your brain? The scale of those stories as a child, I think for children, they're so exciting. The scale is grand and vast. It's It's gods and monsters. It's truly epic. And they become the great lessons of humanity in a way.

And I think having that just basic love for that storytelling as a kid. And then for my BA, for my degree at university, I did classics at Cambridge and was really grateful to get a place there. And it just kept my fascination and my curiosity with the ancient world has never really dimmed. I love this story. Tom, you talk to a lot of scientists for this series, but, you know, I was thinking as I was watching it,

that you as an actor, also an expert, and getting in people's heads based on, you know, text on a page, which is a lot like the work that Jess is doing in her book. And I just, how do you think about that process? And did you get to flex that muscle on this show? 100%. I've, I mean, I'm 45 years old and I think that all I know now is that there's no more powerful tool of communication than story. Story as a mechanism is kind of how we learn best. It's how we learn easiest. And I actually think that all history is very similar because you can cleave to the historical record and you can study the data.

but we don't have all the data and we can't interview the inhabitants of Pompeii as to how they felt and what they were thinking. And maybe when we look at the evidence, we have the letters A, D and E, but we don't have B and C, and historians have to make the leap from A to Z and it really is an imaginative leap.

You're trying to build a complete picture with limited information. Jess, what do you think about that? Music to my ears. I did the same thing and do you know it's actually got a name for it, sometimes critical fabulation. So if you go up to the boundaries, it's a ridiculous name, but if you go up to the boundaries of the evidence you have and then do what you do as an actor or what I do as a historian and then build out these lived experiences of these people based on our experiences, humans and, you know, our obvious intelligence and intuition and emotions that we all have and sort of build out those bits, just knowing those people based on, like you said, the amount of research. you do want to, I was actually going to ask your question. Is that okay? Go for it, Jess. Yeah. I was just wondering, because when I started writing this, I've been studying Pompeii for about 12 years now. I think I counted the other day. And even writing my book, I got to know these people so well that I felt so emotional doing it. How did you feel doing this documentary?

Did you have a new emotional waking with Pompeii? It was instantaneous and only deepened through the process. When I first went to Pompeii when I was 17, that's what I was so struck by. And it was a particular plaster cast of an adult and a child. You know, the adult with their arms wrapped around the child as if to protect them from the disaster. And also strangely, the dog. There's the plaster cast of the dog that was chained to the wall. And we had a family dog and I thought, these are just like, these people are just like us.

But the magic of it for me is that, Pompeii becomes a gateway for time travel. That it's so far away. It was 2,000 years ago, but it feels so close. And to walk in the streets of Pompeii is to feel as if it happened last week or yesterday. And that sense of 2,000 years collapsing. And that as you say, you can almost touch their reality,

makes me feel less alone in the world because you realize they were the same as we were. Dr. Jess Fenner, archaeobotanist and author of the book The Lost Voices of Pompeii, and actor Tom Hiddleston, host of the National Geographic Show, Pompeii, out of time with Tom Hiddleston. Thank you, Tom. Thanks, Jess. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on Science Friday.

This episode was produced by Kathleen Davis, and if you liked what you heard, but only if you liked what you heard, please rate and review us on your favorite podcast app. Thank you for listening. I'm Flora Lichten.