The Ancients - Herculaneum

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

In 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius unleashed devastation on the Roman world, burying entire towns beneath volcanic ash. While Pompeii is world-famous, another extraordinary site met the same fate - Herculaneum.In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill to explore the incredible remains of this lesser-known Roman town. From lavish seaside villas and multi-story apartments to ancient fast-food stalls and bathhouses, Herculaneum offers an intimate glimpse into daily Roman life. Plus, we uncover the groundbreaking AI technology being used to decipher the carbonised scrolls found in its famed Villa of the Papyri.For more on this topic listen to our four-part series on Pompeii and Vesuvius:Pompeii: Life Before the Eruption: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3oIGA40brXolaPU9e3warcSex Work in Pompeii:https://open.spotify.com/episode/2k5CQDHXHmIRKCmu4kk9SBGladiators of Pompeii:https://open.spotify.com/episode/4c34S92PPQadej45S4F6cZPompeii: The Eruption of Vesuvius: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6IyQp6PYBrMwbFNWU33nqFPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes and if you would like the ancient ad free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting HistoryHit.com slash subscribe. 79 AD. A great column of volcanic ash and rock spews from the top of Mount Vesuvius, tens of kilometres into the sky before covering

the land below in a veil of darkness. One of the most catastrophic natural events of ancient history has just begun. Over the next couple of days, this volcano would bring death and destruction to the surrounding lands, its most famous victim the Roman town of Pompeii. Today Pompeii's remains are world famous. A place where you can walk in the footsteps of Romans down cobbled streets, be awestruck by lewd graffiti written on walls 2000 years ago, enter the amphitheatre where gladiators fought for the entertainment of the crowds.

It is quite the experience. But Pompeii was not the only settlement swallowed up by Vesuvius. It was one of several thriving towns along the Bay of Naples that fell victim to this infamous eruption that fateful day. Pompeii has a sister site, similarly destroyed in Vesuvius' eruption, a flourishing fishing town named after the mythical hero Hercules. Herculaneum. It's the Ancients on History hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. For anyone wanting to visit Roman remains in the Bay of Naples, Herculaneum is a must-see site.

It's much smaller than Pompeii, so you can do it in a day, walking from the ancient harbour front to the heart of the town, seeing awesome surviving art and architecture along the way. You can enter rich seafront houses that boasted the best views in ancient Herculaneum, multi-storey flats, fast food stalls, bathhouses and more. And of course, what has really caught people's attention lately with Herculaneum are these scrolls. These pieces of parchment discovered in a villa just outside the town that had been burnt to a crisp during the eruption. However, thanks to the use of modern technology, thanks to AI, scientists are starting to decipher

them, unraveling the clues, the secret texts, the literature that lies within. Herculaneum is a really exciting site, and to delve into its story I was delighted to interview one of the best people for the job, Andrew Wallace Hadrill, Professor Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. Andrew has worked on Herculaneum and Pompeii for decades. His knowledge of the site is on another level and it was such a privilege to head up to Cambridge to interview him in person about important and so special. Enjoy. Andrew, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Thank you. We have covered on this podcast several times before the story of Pompeii and various parts

of its archaeological story too. Herculaneum, I don't want to say that it's like the hidden gem isn't it, because people do know Herculaneum is there and sometimes they try to rival between the two and yet it's like they both live together. You have two extraordinary Roman towns surviving right next to each other. It's amazing. Yeah, the way I put it is it's like seeing with two eyes. If you see just with Pompeii, you have no perspective. If you've got Pompeii and Herculaneum, like eyes, they're quite close together, but they're not exactly the same perspective. And it just gives depth to your view of the ancient world. And this is the past, isn't it? It's not almost like another Pompeii herculeanum. It has different

types of archaeology that's been unearthed that is revealing even more about how these people lived and ultimately how they died as well. One of the extraordinary things is that though they're so close together and close to the same volcano, the effects of the eruption are significantly different in the two places, and that's part of what gives you that deeper perspective. In Herculaneum, if you'd like me to elaborate on that, you're under a pyroclastic flow which covers everything in what's initially gas and dust, but sets into rock. Whereas Pompeii is covered with these tiny little pumice pebbles. That's just a weirdness of how a volcano works. There's a third possible effect, which is a lava flow. And that mercifully is what did not happen. We always think in terms of lava,

if something gets covered in lava, bye-bye, you won't see it again. It's become part of the rock. But this pyroclastic flow that covers Herculaneum is a very soft rock rock and it's brilliant for preserving things really well and preserving things including organic materials, wood especially. Why does Herculaneum have this different fate to Pompeii when the eruption of Mount Vesuvius does happen in 79 AD? Is it to do with its location? Yes, it's location, location, location. Just a tiny difference, but it's marginally closer to the crater and it happens to be in a slightly different to the west

of the crater rather than the south of the crater. And just as the eruption, imagine the enormous, not only the enormous force of an eruption, but the enormous randomness. You've got Christ-swirling clouds of heaven knows what happening, changing through time. What the experts say, and the experts are people who come from Iceland, which I'm really interested in because you can see volcanoes in action in Iceland. And they know that you have all sorts of different effects. And they worked out that Herculaneum is at the beginning of the eruption, probably only 12 hours into the eruption, when it's covered in its flow.

Pompeii is another 12 hours later. So think different things are happening by the time that Pompeii is at the moment. Well, it's nice to touch on the eruption now and I think we'll be returning to what happens to the people of Herculaneum a bit later because their skeletons aren't there that we can talk about in a bit. I'd like to actually first talk about the rediscovery of Herculaneum because with Pompeii, I think people get the sense that several centuries ago that they started unearthing Pompeii. With Herculaneum, is its discovery story

a bit different? It's the earlier stage of the same discovery story. In my view, archaeology is very closely linked to politics. You can't do archaeology without big money. Big money means politics. It's certainly the arrival of a new Spanish dynasty in the south of Italy that drives this discovery. But they, the Bourbons, who discovered it, also created a myth about it. They created a myth of a site that had been lost forever, entirely forgotten and that they were the first to expose it. One of the things we've discovered working in Herculaneum, exploring tunnels that had been explored by the excavators, is that there is material that goes back to the Middle Ages. People have been poking around, and of course in antiquity they were poking around. I think it's better

to think of it in terms of these places were never forgotten. But no one had the sort of absurd resource and the absurd ambition to try and dig it up again. After all, in antiquity, in 79, they could have – the Roman Emperor, he had resource – he could have said, let us excavate these sites and restore them to their ancient glory. No, the closed book. That was a decision not to recover them and rediscover. So they only sent little tunnels because an ancient city is full of wealth. Marble, lots of marble like the form of Pompeii. Silver. Silver treasures, that's what you're really after. Marble, you could make more marbles. Bronze is more valuable than marble. Bronze is good stuff, but silver's better. Gold.

So they tunneled away looking for that, but they didn't bother to recover the city. There are lots of other cities in antiquity that were destroyed and rebuilt, like Antioch. Antioch was completely destroyed in the 5th century and Justinian decided, we're going to remake remake it and he made a better one. Carthage, you know, the Roman Carthage, very different to the Punic. They left it a bit before they rebuilt it. But yes, yeah. So, you can remake an ancient city. They decided to leave Pompeii and Herculaneum. It was like they met these forces of nature that simply overawed them and they weren't going to touch it.

So what I'm saying is that it was never forgotten. You know, the stories of the destruction were some of the most vivid stories told from antiquity. Pliny's amazing letters describing the eruption. Wow! Imagine somebody who happened to be a brilliant writer, a brilliant journalist, being there at the moment and being able to write it all down. So they knew about it. They didn't forget it. Future generations read Pliny's letters and they thought, wouldn't it be amazing to rediscover Pompeii and Herculaneum? Mason It's interesting, isn't it? It almost feels

like it's been a bit more romanticised, the idea of the lost city of Pompeii or the lost town of Herculaneum. And isn't there the story of a farmer digging a well and then bits of marbled carmarth? So you get those stories, but actually, as you say, people have known about it and have been digging it for much longer. Yeah. In a funny way, it's built into it. You can't do it without myth. Compay, above all, is the great mythical site. People just create myths around it all the time. Every single discovery has to be overinterpreted and turned into something larger than life. And Herculaneum, as you rightly point out, doesn't quite have that public impact

that Pompeii has. It isn't the same sort of myth generator. And one of the things that fascinates me is the way that it was once. Because Herculaneum was discovered before Pompeii by these Spanish kings, the Bourbons. It's about 10 years earlier. The official date of excavation in Pompey is 1748. 1738 is the start of exploration of Herculaneum. For that reason, when they, the Bourbons, published their results, results from Herculaneum and Pompeii, they called it the Antiquities of Herculaneum. Because Herculaneum was the big name. And everyone had been getting overexcited about Herculaneum. And it takes time for Pompeii to overhaul Herculaneum and become the place. And I think there are technical reasons for

that too. And that is that it's so much easier to excavate in Pompeii than Herculaneum. It costs the dynasty, the Bourbons, it costs them enormous amounts to work on Herculaneum. And it seemed to be worth it because they were producing amazing results. You think of the Villa of Papyri. Yes, we'll get to that. But you think of these bronzes as well as the papyri. And wow, yeah, this is worth the digging. But then you get to Pompeii and you don't have to hack

through solid rock. You don't have to go down the same depth. Herculaneum is as much as 20 metres below the surface. That is serious excavation, serious mining. They used engineers. It's not a work of archaeology. It's a work of engineers. Because you can still get that sense today when you go to Herculaneum, isn't it? You go to the harbour area and you see that massive wall of volcanic rock, which is something like 20 metres high, isn't it? That's how much they had to dig for it. Even to 30 metres high at that point above sea level. And it beetles above you. It really makes it feel like something preserved in Aspic. It is like that. It's hard work excavating Herculaneum.

Pompeii is a pushover. You just shovel away these pomace pebbles, the lapilli. Literally, a shovel is your main excavating tool. You need a wheelbarrow to take the stuff away and you're going. The main excavations in Herculaneum in the modern period, done in the 1930s, were done with pneumatic drills. And you have to go through meters of solid stuff. It comes away rather nicely with a pneumatic drill, and it's a risk you can take because you know when you hit the archaeology and then you slow down a bit. But it's very easy to make mistakes. So yeah, this is a tough call. So Pompeii, Pompeii's a pushover. Money for jam and the stuff comes out and comes out.

Effectively, Herculaneum is forgotten for a period between, let us say, 1780 or so when Pompeii has become really the big name to 1930. But there's an earlier period, because for me, as a professor in Cambridge, it's really important that it was a professor from Cambridge who told the world Herculaneum is the place to work. A chap called Charles Wolstein, and he was an expert on Greek sculpture, that's up your street. And he knew that a load of Greek sculpture came from Herculaneum. And he was fascinated by it. And he led a campaign to excavate Herculaneum.

And the first modern book about Herculaneum is his book, Pompeii, Past, Present and Future, I think. It's including an elaborate plan, technical plan, of how to excavate using modern techniques to get through this rock and so on. And in 1908, he was on the brink of persuading the Italian government to allow an international project financed not just by Italy, but all sorts of nations. America, he was an American though he was a professor in Cambridge. And he was putting together the funding in a really imaginative way and the Italian government got cold feet. The terrifying prospect of foreigners discovering their most important site. The Italian parliament votes against it

and they back right off. So that when a new superintendent is appointed by the fascists in the 1920s, Amadeo Maiuri, wonderful character. He's very young. He's in his early 30s when he takes over. And he starts in Pompeii in 1924. And by 1927, he's leading a campaign, we've got to excavate Herculaneum. Look at this book by the Cambridge professor, Charles Wallstein. Herculaneum is actually more important than Pompeii. Its potential is higher than Pompeii.

And in my view, he's still right, and that still remains the case. Pompeii is pretty well excavated. Only one third of it is unexcavated. And in truth, it's the one third of it that's least likely to be interesting because it's closest to the walls where they had vineyards and so on. Less activity there. Whereas, Herculaneum, you've got at least two thirds of an excavation. You're right on the edge of the great public centre of the site. And the irony is the modern

town of Herculaneum is sitting right on top of the centre of ancient Herculaneum, and we can't get at it. We can see the edge of it, the edge of the centre. We can see it's really, really important. of the center, we can see it's really, really important. And you can't get in without causing the houses above to collapse, which is why Maiori stopped where he stopped. There were too many technical problems. Without actually demolishing modern Ercolano, you can't complete the excavation. In case you haven't heard, in the U.S. it's a presidential election year. We're going to hear a lot of, this is America. No, no, you're all wrong. This is America. But on American History Hit, we're leaving that to a lot of this is America. No, no, you're all wrong. This is America.

But on American History Hit, we're leaving that to the rest of them. Join me, Don Wildman, twice a week, where we look to the past to understand the United States of today with the help of some amazing guests. Let us introduce you to the founding fathers, guide you through the West Wing of the White House, and shelter you on the battlefields of years gone by to find out just how we got here. American History Hit, a podcast from History Hit. I could ask so many different questions, but before we delve into various parts of the archaeology, you said Greek sculpture. So I think then of when I was recently, I went to Pestum in South Italy and there's that great Greek influence, ancient Greek influence over Southern Italy. Does that also stem to Herculaneum's origins? Is it not originally a Roman town? No, it's not a Roman town. It becomes a Roman town by conquest. The Bay of Naples is a really

interesting geographical point of what you could call cultural collision, meetings of sometimes quite violent between different cultures. The south of Italy is colonized, if that's the right word for it. New cities are created by Greeks. And Poseidonia, Pistum, is the biggest city that is near the Bay of Naples, apart from Naples itself, Naples. There is a massive Greek presence in that area, but it's also rather obstinately local. It's hard to know what to call the locals. You can call them Oscans because Oscar is their language, which is very closely related to Latin, but not Latin and proudly not Latin. Of course, a Roman presence because the Romans were extremely interested in the Bay of Naples. By the end of the third century onwards, there are massive and

military presence there. Both Pompeii and Herculaneum are in this sort of twilight zone between what are we? Are we local? Are we Greek? Are we Roman? We're a mixture of these things. So, the very name of Herculaneum says Greek. And the myth is it was founded by Hercules, the great hero, in his wanderings around the Western Mediterranean. And I sometimes wish we could call it the City of Hercules because everyone knows Hercules and nobody can pronounce Herculaneum because there are too many syllables in it. And if only we called it the City of Hercules and nobody can pronounce Herculaneum because there are too many syllables in it. And if only we called it the city of Hercules, which is what it means. I think you're right. And I don't think many people actually realise, and I don't think

even I realised first of all, that of course Herculaneum comes from Hercules. I don't think many people actually made that connection before it's spelled out today. Yeah. And so, the ancient geographer Strabo says it was founded by Hercules, okay? That was the local myth. Really interestingly, we've looked desperately for any evidence, not of Hercules, of course. You don't expect mythology to show up in the archaeological record. But you might expect evidence of a presence back there in the Iron Age, in the seventh century, sixth century. Not a dicky bird. It's a mystery. One day someone may be able to find something, but we can't go earlier than the third century. I don't think that means it was first founded in the third century. I don't think that means it was first founded in the third century. I don't find that credible. They were so convinced

and they had the story. It was founded by Hercules. It was originally an Ascan city, and then the Romans arrived. The Romans arrive in that traumatic period, which we call the social wars, which is when the allies of Rome, the Ossoc speaking ones, they rebel against Rome. Why? Because they have been fighting all the battles alongside the Romans. The Romans have been helping themselves, all the prophets of conquest, and saying to the Oscars, you can have Tupen's evening. And the Oscars are really frustrated and they say, we want equal rights, equal rights, citizenship. Come on, we're the same as you. The Romans say no. They're right, we're going to fight for it. And the Romans defeat them, but they cave in.

They get their citizenship, and that is the way that Rome then forward can expand, and it sets the model for expansion right across the empire. So Herculaneum was a rebel city. Oh, we do know it was, didn't we? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's one of the earliest passages that mentions Herculaneum. It's a narrative. We only have a fragment of this, a narrative of the social war. And the Roman general arrives with his army, and he finds this guard post, this guard post, a stronghold between two rivers. So, the thing we know about Herculaneum was it was between two rivers, which would make it really easy to defend. We can't find

the rivers. We know where one was. It's right on the edge of the site. We can't find the other though. It must be just past the theatre, we think. But the whole area, there will have been many rivers because what you've got is volcanic flow coming down to the sea, which then gets riven by a series of water courses which create rivers through the soft tooth. And I guess that also highlights one of the most appealing things of percolating the people living there, wasn't it? It was the fertile soils, the agriculture, but also the fruits of the sea in regards to seafood and everything that they got on the Bay of Naples. So strategic,

yes, with rivers, but also economically, it's a very rich place. It's a nice place to live. Absolutely. This is the paradox of living with a volcano. English people find it really hard to get their heads around. Why on earth did anyone live on the Bay of Naples? You have to take a page from Seneca, who, when there was a great earthquake a little before the eruption, He was asked, and he was writing a work for science, he was asked, should we evacuate? Is it too dangerous to live in this area? He said, look, nowhere is safe to live, and the truth is the whole west coast of Italy is volcanic. Senek said, you know, it might blow anywhere. You can't be confident of the Earth.

So just stay there, he said. Just stay. And people do stay around volcanoes because they are tremendously fertile. It's like you're living on fertilizer. You can grow three crops a year instead of one crop a year. And in that mild atmosphere of the Bay, it's just glorious. I also find it interesting with Herculaneum because I think of all of the ancient towns that there would have been in Rome and Italy, and if it's smaller than Pompeii, actually to have meant a good deal smaller, to actually have mentions of it surviving in literature, like you mentioned, the social war. But do we amplify its importance today because it survived? Yeah. Well, no, no, no, no. It punches above its weight, doesn't it? It makes no sense to us

that a town of, they say 4,000 inhabitants. I say that's too many. I can't put them within the walls. I say 3,000 maximum, could be 2,500, but it really doesn't matter. It's not a big, to us, it's not even a town. It's a big village in terms of size, but in terms of public amenities, in terms of how impressive it was. It's way, way up the list. The truth is, in antiquity, cities were small by our standards. Of course, they didn't have cities of 10 million, only one city, Rome, of as many as 1 million. Most cities are in the 5 to 10 million range. million. Most cities are in the five to ten million range. So, okay, even for antiquity, Herculaneum's not a big place, but it's a proud place. It's a rich place. It's a prosperous place. It's a place to be. Well, an interesting comparison, although nowhere near as rich and elaborate as Herculaneum

would be. I believe Colchester, when the Romans make it a colony, when Boudicca sacks it, the estimate there is about 2,000 to 4,000 people live there. So it's funny to think actually the same number roughly in Herculaneum, although as you say, Herculaneum is much more grand than this newly created Roman colony that's about to be destroyed by Boudicca. But interesting nonetheless. And Colchester doesn't do bad in terms of public monuments and so on. No, exactly. You know, when the Romans make a town, it's impressive. Absolutely. Well, let's delve into this archaeology now. We've covered the discovery and the continued thought and the origins of it. But what has been excavated so far? Do we have all the

hallmarks of a standard Roman town? Almost the blueprint of a Roman town that you can see again and again across the empire? Well, of course, we have to assume that we do. Because nowhere else is preserved like Pompeii and Herculaneum are preserved. And so, we look at the almost pathetic remains of most Roman cities, and we have to reconstruct what they were like and we turn to Pompeii and Herculaneum. What if this rose to a few more stories? And of course, Pompeii gives you a model of one story. You can see up to the top of the walls of the first story in Pompeii, Herculaneum gives you the second floor. So multi-storey flats. Yeah, but that's the equivalent.

If you've got an excavation that is as deep as 20 meters, of course, you're getting a great depth. The tallest building is the block of flats on the edge of the site, and there are bits of the third story surviving. So, you know, I've been up there. I've looked down from a latrine on the third story. And it's an amazing experience. The truth is, I've done the same in Rome. I've stood on a fifth story in Rome, right under the Capitoline, there is a five-story block of flats that has survived. So, you know, it's not impossible. But because of the nature of the and the detail of the preservation of these sites, we have to extrapolate from them to understand other cities. I think

the danger is turning everywhere else into a Pompeian Herculaneum for the bits that are missing. Were Roman cities all following a similar formula? Yes. There are certain components you find again and again. Like the central forum, the main area. You've got to have a central forum. You've got to have the public buildings around the forum. You've got to have a basilica, which in Herculaneum's case is really important, though we haven't excavated it.

You've got to have a basilica, a senate house, civic buildings, temples, markets, and then you have the entertainment baths and amphitheatres and so on. Herculaneum has the full set. Yet though, okay, pretty well every Roman city has a selection of these elements, not necessarily all. They don't all have amphitheaters. And Herculaneum didn't have an amphitheater. Doesn't it? Pompeii does.

Though they don't all have everything and they aren't all necessarily in the same relationship to each other. There are patterns, but there's endless variation on the patterns. And so one of the consequences is we don't know where the Forum of Herculaneum was. That is to say, I am pretty confident that I know where it was, but many people disagree with me about it. So right on the edge of the excavation, there is a beautiful archway and it leads into the edge of a space. Yes, I remember that. Which very awkwardly was the Bourbons thought it was a basilica. And then we decided it wasn't a basilica. So it became the so-called basilica. So was a sort of non-space with a this-is-what-it-isn't name. I'm confident that must be the forum because an arch typically leads, and not only is there

just one arch, there's another corresponding one buried in the edge of the material on the other side. So a double arch leading into a space, for my money, is a forum. But we can't be confident of that and colleagues disagree with me. And also, because you mentioned the word basilica there, so we shouldn't be thinking of a church there. We should be thinking of the law courts. It's a key building though. You said probably not a basilica, but we've used that term. That would have been another building surrounding the Forum. Yep. A basilica is essentially a meeting space for lots of people to meet in. We live with the myth that the Greeks and Romans lived an outdoor life and could do everything in the Forum. No, even in antiquity, it rained, it snowed.

There was bad weather. You have to have an inside space as well as an outside space. And not surprisingly, law courts need shelter. So mostly trials were held in the covered space called the Basilica, which is a great portico. You could have several trials going on at the same time. There's a lovely, lovely document preserved on a wooden tablet from Herculaneum recording a trial. The trial was actually held in Rome, and it specifies which building in Rome, the Forum of Augustus, it would be held in, and exactly when, which column in the Forum, the third column on the right, the praetor would hear the case. So you can expect in a basilica to find everything happening, and not just legal cases. There will have been meetings of all sorts. The basilica is the throbbing heart of an ancient city,

and we do have the basilica of Herculaneum. We've only excavated the edge of it, but the Bourbons tunneled the rest of it, and they did a very nice ground plan and it's completely convincing and they found fantastic inscriptions there. We know where the Basilica was and it's right by the fort. It's so tempting to talk about those kind of big buildings, isn't it, that we often associate with Roman towns, whether it's the Basilica or the baths or the markets, that forum area. But I know with Herculaneum, something that makes it really

special was something that you highlighted earlier, which is insights into the houses of everyday people. Can you talk a bit more about this? First off, this fact that something we need to get our heads around is that they had flats. They had flats and they had multi-storey flats as well. That's such an amazing insight into people who are normally lost from the archaeological record. That is completely right. You asked me the wrong question because I've dedicated too much of my life to trying to understand this society and how these sites can actually help you to understand the society. When I first started working on Pompeii help you to understand the society. When I first started working on Pompeii and Herculaneum, my first book about it was Pompeii and Herculaneum. What I wanted to understand was, can you get an idea of the full spectrum of the inhabitants from the richest to the poorest?

And I set about it by looking at the full spectrum of places to live, let's call them houses, but some are just flats from richest to poorest. I've reached the conclusion in the end it's even more complicated than that because even the richest houses contained poor people because they had tenants and they had slaves and in the biggest houses everything is happening. In the littlest houses very little is happening and they are relatively poor. And one thing that fascinated me was, you know, the tourists wants to go into the big houses with the famous frescoes and lovely mosaic floors and even statues and so on, and large impressive rooms. Yeah, but what about the little ones? And the thing that was striking me was that it's not just the big ones that have frescoes and mosaics and so on, really quite modest little houses have their fancy little

bits and the sort of language that they use, the things that make a house seem impressive. One thing is you look in from the door and you get a vista. In the big houses, you get a vista through the doorway, through the entrance hall of the atrium, through the tablinum, it's a public reception space beyond it, through into the garden beyond, and you get an infinitely receding vista in the grand houses. In the little houses, you can have a vista too. You can look through the door. My favorite is the house of Neptune and Amphitrite. And you look through the door, you look through the rather little entrance hall, the rather little tabl And on the back wall of the garden, they've made a glorious mosaic that gives the house its name. The god Neptune with his trident and his wife and

Fidriotix. That bright blue and yellow one, it is so striking. It is one of the most striking images in all Herculaneum, and it's in a very modest house. MG I didn't know that. I didn't know it wasn't in a villa. MG It really sells it, doesn't it? You think, wow, these people had money. And then you think, come on, measure it up. This is not big. That little garden has to serve a double function because it's the outdoor dining room at the same time and

they've got a triclinium, a space with three couches where you can lie just under the mosaic. But it's not even 10 meters wide, it's just crammed in. I love the way that they all have a slice of the good life. And of course, there are those who have zero slice of the good life. But very often that can be explained by the fact they didn't even own the houses, because there are a lot of tenants there. They're really rich. They own little shops, little flats, and so on. They may have farms in the countryside that bring them in income, but they have properties in the town, very often around the big house. There is this sort of penumbra of little places, which they make good money out of. We know that even Cicero made money out of flats. He said,

even the rats are deserting my flats. They're in such a bad condition. So this is why the smallest places may have the least decoration. It's because the owners decided I'm not going to pay for decoration here. But it's interesting, as you say, we shouldn't then just be thinking almost the dichotomy of the rich in their villas and the poor just all in their very, very small ones. It seems like, as you say, this almost middle class is probably too modern a term to say, but the shopkeepers and the shop owners have kind of a modest way of life. As you say, they can save up and spend on some things and show off to their friends looking at this great thing we've got in our small garden, but we've still got a beautiful

artistic design. You can relate to it in modern day, can't you, when you've got to look after your money, but you want to show off something so you can save up and buy something really impressive to show off your friends. Yeah. I too try to avoid calling them the middle class because it's suddenly, it takes you to the industrial revolution and all sorts of inappropriate things. But the people in the middle,

who are either the richest or the poorest, really important. I think you have to remember that antiquity invents citizenship. City has citizens and the citizens aren't just the stinking rich. Sorry, the stinking rich may be the magistrates, they may be the generals, they may be the top of the society. There's a whole society.

The important thing about citizens is they're free men. And the real poor are the slaves. They're the ones who suffer. And so quite a relatively poor citizen. Yeah, but he's freeing. He has some pride. So I think you've got a whole range of citizens. And these citizens, and one of the most fascinating things is that the slave could become a citizen. He could be given his freedom and citizenship. And they're very anxious to show that they belong to this society of citizens. They matter. And what I'm seeing is not just a society of an elite. There is an elite, of course. The wealth of the richest is unbelievable. But the prosperity, the generalised prosperity of a whole broad stratum underneath

them, that's what makes Pompeii and Hoculanum so amazing. Mason. They're the people who, yes, maybe it's the rich who are owning some of the shops, but these are the people who are the shopkeepers. They're the people who like, yes, maybe it's the ritual owning some of the shops, but these are the people are the shopkeepers that they're doing all those things that on these roads that whether it's the bakery or the fast food place, I'm not going to say the word thermopolium. Too late. Well, I've now said it now, I've not. But those shops that you see and those counters that you see again and again in Herculaneum

Pompeii, do we imagine it's these people, they are the ones who keep, in a weird kind of way, I mean they are the people who keep Herculaneum running? They really do, yes. There's a terrible passage of Cicero in which he's talking about how to be a perfect gentleman. And he says there are some traits that are really illiberal. They don't talk about gentlemen, they talk about freemen, the things that are suitable for a freeborn person. And he says effectively butchers and beggars and candlestick makers, the people who run pubs, even builders and pullers, the people who clean clothes. just these are illiberal trades. Okay, so the Roman elite may have looked down on them, but they didn't look down on themselves.

They were very anxious to prove to the Roman elite, no, we can't too. Well, let us now focus on the richest in Herculaneum, because I feel we need to do that now. We talked about Villa the Papyri, we're going to get to that, but you do sometimes get that sense in the Herculaneum with the villas. Some people always see it's almost a resort on the seafront for quite a lot. So yes, you have the everyday people, yes, you have the slaves, but there is still quite a strong contingent of the elite owning property in Herculaneum and reflecting it in how elaborate those buildings, those villas are. Very much so. People can get confused about what villa means. And I remember years ago, an architect came to me and he said, I want to reconstruct a Roman villa. And after I talked to him for a bit, I said, oh, you mean a townhouse, a domus. And he said, what's the difference?

And I said, oh, it was very simple. A villa is out of the city. Adomos is in the city. So there's a technical distinction, and a villa is to do with farming and so on. And actually, a farmhouse, they call them villas too, right? So there is a contrast between you and the village. The grandest houses out in the country can be very much bigger than the grandest houses in the town, there's more space. But actually, the Roman elite crisscrossed that boundary. That's one of the most amazing things. And they built what were effectively villas and have much of the character of great villas outside. They built them in the city. And along the South Sea Wall of Herculaneum is a series of really grand houses. One, two,

three, four, five, half a dozen unbelievably grand houses. And by South Wall, that would have been overlooking the Bay of Naples. And I think there's a magic moment that happens because up to a certain period, when you're back in the days of the social wars in the early first century BC, what are walls for? For defence. What do you do with your walls? You have to keep a whole strip, a broad strip of land free behind the walls so that the troops can move up and down. At a certain

point it becomes absolutely clear there are going to be no more such wars. And really Roman conquest should mark that moment, but even more so with the victory of Augustus, it creates a sense of right. Civil wars are over. We're not going to face any more invasions. We can forget about the defensive function of our wars. And the great benefactor of Herculaneum, Nonyas Balbus, whose statues proudly outside the seawall. An inscription says, I restored the walls of the city. But he didn't just restore the walls of the city. He converted all the area behind them, which was a military zone, into potential for expansion. And I imagine Nonyas Balbus Balbus letting his mates have, you can have this one, you can have that one, and that gives them enormous urban space to

move into. There's wonderful houses like the House of the Stags and House of Mosaic Adrian that are built right up to the seawall and use the potential of land that has never had houses on it before. It's open land. So they can have glorious gardens with fountains and statues coming up to the wall with the knockout view of the Bay of Naples. Best views in the Campania in that area, isn't it? So there are half a dozen real wow opportunities along those walls. And that's what gives the site the reputation as something for a resort. It's beyond a resort. However many millions people pay nowadays for the house with the sea view, They're another level above it. Balbus, you cunning, cunning man. That is clever. Yeah, very clever. And of course, one of them must be Balbus' own house.

Well, must have, surely. He must want one of those for his own, shouldn't he? And those villas just go on and on. The House of the Stags is in that main area and it's just above the harbour area. So kind of where they're doing all the fishing everyday people are below you doing this getting all the fish in and right above almost up high which I guess is a symbol in its own right. You have an elite family maybe sitting in their garden and basically they can hear that but they can't see it because they can see straight out to the beautiful view beyond. But I like it when you refer to the everyday people doing that fishing, as if that was a different world from the world of the rich. But one of the fascinating things about the frescoes that they put up is a favorite thing is a view, a sea view, with fishermen going about their business in little boats and here's a little man with a donkey walking along the shore and so on. And for them, that is part of life and that's part of beautiful

life looking out over human activity. So they will have loved that part of the view too. I wish I could ask about, we could focus in on so many things, but we should focus on the House of the Papyri. Yeah. And it's a correct sequel because as you go along, there's wonderful houses that are like Finner's along the Seawall. You move straight into the Villa of the Papyri. There is a tiny gap between the last of the great houses with a magnificent bath house that came out in the new excavations. Really amazing. And then there's a small gap and then the villa of the bari starts. And it's a villa because that is actually outside the walls, is that?

There we go. If only we'd found the walls, I would be 100% certain. Mary Beard once said to me, Andrew, how do you know it's a villa? How do you know where the walls are? I said, I can't prove it until we find the walls, but it seems highly probable that the walls lie between those grand houses that are villas and the Villa of the Papyri. And the Villa of the Papyri just sets another standard. It is truly amazing because impressive those houses may have been. You are into the sort of league that is only possible when that is only possible when you belong to the highest Roman elite. So the villain has been extremely plausibly attributed to a character called Calpurnius

Piso. In Cicero's day, there's a character he really, really, really dislikes and he wrote a speech against Piso in Pisonem, and he mocks Piso for all sorts of things, the dusty busts of his ancestors on the walls and so on. And he mocks him for having a tame philosopher, a philosopher called Philodemus, who's an Epicurean. The Villa of the Papyri, those amazing papyri, and wouldn't it be wonderful to read some more and we will read some more. And I am prepared to make an enormous bet on what the next papyrus they read will prove to be.

It'll be Burke by Philodemus the Epicurean philosopher, who was a protégé of Calpurnia Spicer. An extraordinary number, not all, but a majority of the papyri that have been read are works by Philodemus. Not only that, but there are as many as three copies of the same work by Philodenas. Oh, but the author would have three copies of his work on his shelves. I'm sorry. They're the copies they received from the publisher, isn't it? They want to share with friends but they haven't been able to get them all away. And epicureanism, that's a particular type of philosophy from the Hellenistic period, isn't it? I don't want to go into too many details now,

but it's a strand of philosophy that has some popularity with particular Roman… Yeah, enormous popularity. In that period of the first century before and the first century after, it was a tussle between the Epicureans and the Stoics of what is the right philosophy to see you through life. Let's not go into the details, except to say that obviously from the name we think associate Epicurean with good living. Whereas Stoicism is about duty and service, Epicureanism, Pecurenes, it isn't really about enjoyment, but it's about escaping from false fears, false fears that the gods are going to do terrible things to you, false ambitions that you try to rise too high. And Piso, Calpurnius Piso, he was a consul. He had risen very high indeed. And he needed his tame philosopher to tell him, calm down, chill out. Time to chill. Come and let's discuss

atomic theory. No, I wish he had discussed atomic theory. Unfortunately, Philodemus was more interested in the good life than atomic theory, which is the other great thing that the Epicureans do. The fact that all those papyri point to Calpurnius Pisa is then reinforced because Caesar's father-in-law is not the only one of the family. And in the early empire, they have really important family with several branches. And one of them is a major advisor of Augustus and an advisor of Tiberius. And I'm pretty sure that he's the guy who was the definitive inhabitant of that house. Why? Because a portrait bust of him was found. How do we know it was him? Because he also built a really rather splendid

building in North Italy, a place called Velleia, and there his portrait bust has an inscription, say, Calpurnius Pisa. So you've got a ringer, you've got the face, you've got the name, and you've got the Epicurean library. Because we'll get back to the library very quickly in a second, but they really liked their portraits, didn't they? There's that room in the Archaeological Museum at Naples. And I remember going there recently and you've got marble busts, you've got the bronze busts. You can still get the eyes in it. One, I think, used to be attributed to Scipio, I believe. Now, there's a bit more debate around them. You see one of my favorites there. There's allegedly a Pyrrhus of Epirus. You see philosophers

like Archytas, who's an ancient Greek one from Taranto in southern Italy. So he likes his busts as well, the family, they like their busts. And then, as you say, they've got the library and these scrolls that have fascinated people very recently, haven't they? Because they survived the eruption, but they were carbonised and they haven't been unraveled. Is that the gist of the story? I'll tell you that story, but I want to go back to the past. Go on. Yes. Because you're absolutely right in your recital of famous figures from the Greek past, but also Romans who must be family members. You say, was it Scipio? And there's another. Is it Seneca? No, of course it isn't. Seneca.

It's got to be a family member. And they're presenting themselves in the great line that goes back to great Greek generals and sons. This is the sort of company we keep, we calpurnii. They are nothing if not ambitious. And so their papyri too are part of their ambition. They're associating themselves with that extraordinary Greek world of so many achievements and of philosophy. And it is the most extraordinary gift that we have those papyris surviving. And I think it's worth remembering that we don't have papyri surviving from the rest of the site. It's a great disappointment. I think there are one or two examples of fragments of papyri that are actually documentary papyri, but not works of

literature and so on. I'm really puzzled, where have they gone? Because Grand Romans, they read literature, don't tell me that they didn't have books too. So it's a bit of fluently good luck that some, because of where exactly it was, the way that the eruption affected it, maybe it was a lovely protected room they looked after the papari very well. They survived and other ones have not. So

that makes them really, really exceptional. Hence, our desperate desire to read them. And we're talking about something like 800 scrolls still to read. Can you imagine if they're all the same book, the same epicurean text, and this guy just really enjoyed his own stuff and just bought 800 versions of it? I mean, it must, we'd sap the people who were trying to decipher them. Well, it's a bit of a warning, isn't it? You're likely to find another copy of the last book by Philodemus that you published. But that, actually, if you're a papyrologist, that's

tremendously good news because you know what you're looking for. You know that even if it isn't exactly the same thing, if it's the same author, you know the sort of words he'll use. It'll help you read it. It'll make it a great deal easier. But if they were the sort of thing that people fantasize that they might discover. My favorite one is the Lost Books of Tacitus, who hadn't even written about the time of the eruption. People like to imagine every lost work of ancient literature must somehow be there. Everyone nominates their favourite author. There were some Latin papyri and there were some non-philosophical papyri and I would love it

if I found more of them, but I'm a bit gloomy about it. Mason Hickes Let's wait and see those heroes that are slowly deciphering it with AI and stuff like that. It's really extraordinary stuff. Andrew, I wish I could talk so much more about so many different things. I feel then, to wrap it up, we mentioned the eruption early on, but the people themselves, I mean, I haven't asked about diet, I wish I could, but that's another thing. But the people themselves, I mean, I haven't asked about diet, I wish I could, but that's another thing. But I mean, the people, learning more about the people, not just how they lived, but I guess also who were caught up in the eruption. Do we know much about how they died? I

mean, they're skeletons that survive, aren't they? Yes. Of course, we know much too much about how they died and much too little about how they lived. But I think it's one of the most exciting projects still to be done, and it's on the verge of being done, to use their skeletons to understand their lives and not just how they died. So we do know how they died. We can see very clearly that at Herculaneum, unlike Pompeii, they were caught in this superheated pyroclastic surge. And their bodies, their skeletons, show all signs of muscular contraction, which is exactly, apparently in detail, what you find in victims of a house fire. And their fingers and their toes and their limbs all contract at the moment of death in a fire.

It's not nice. But let's get beyond how they died. How did they live? Because the story is all there. The story is in their teeth. Isotopic analysis will tell you astonishingly from looking at their teeth what water they were drinking when the teeth were formed. And because teeth form at different stages in life, they can a bit follow development, but above all they say where you were born. And to me, that is a project that needs to be done and we need to understand. We've got over 300 skeletons from Herculaneum. And potentially by looking at their teeth teeth we can say where they come from which means were they born in Herculaneum. The water of Herculaneum is very very distinctive

because of the volcanic thing is very high in chlorine. So you know a Herculaneum born tooth. We know that a lot of them came to Herculaneum through slavery. It could be an most amazing window into the impact of slavery in the I Empire on the site. But my guess is that you would find majority of them were of non-Italian origin. And beyond that, there's DNA. And we're now at a stage where we can actually extract the DNA and read the DNA and say a lot about the relationships

between different skeletons of these family members. Often Often when you find a group of people who died together, you attribute a family relationship. But DNA work is beginning to show that not necessarily family members because in the horror of an eruption, you cling to almost anyone. Yes. I believe that that is going to be a scientific discovery that's as big as the reading of the papyri.

Andrew, that's a lovely way to finish it. And I think it emphasizes, doesn't it, as you've highlighted straight from the beginning, how you've dedicated most of your academic life to Herculaneum and Pompeii and the stories of these people and learning more about them. But how much more there is still to learn? How exciting a field it is. You can go to Herculaneum today, you can learn about it from this podcast episode, but lo and behold in five years' time, there'll be so much more information that people will have gathered. It's really exciting. You're absolutely right. And you know, 10 years ago I wrote a book about Herculaneum and I'm now trying to update it for the second edition. And as I do so, I have the appalling

prospect that in another ten years it'll be out of date again. But that's good. We want to carry on learning exciting new things from this amazing site. Absolutely. And Andrew, you mentioned your book there, so last but certainly not least, your book on Herculaneum, this is called. Herculaneum, Past and Future. Thank you for bringing me up to the faculty of Classical Archaeology,

the Classical Archaeology Museum at Cambridge, and it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. You're more than welcome. Well, there you go. There was Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadreald podcast today. You're more than welcome. Well there you go, there was Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadreald giving you this awesome introduction into Herculaneum and why research around this ancient Roman town over the next few years promises to be very, very exciting indeed. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. We will put a poll at the bottom

of this episode asking which lost city of ancient history you would like us to cover next. Thank you for listening to this episode of the ancients. Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. Don't forget you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts at free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com slash subscribe. Lastly if you want more ancient history videos and clips then be sure to follow me on Instagram at ancientstristin.

That is enough from me and I'll see you in the next episode.