The Ancients - Pompeii and the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius

Episode Date: November 26, 2020

Pompeii is back in the news. An extraordinary new, touching discovery, found during the Great Pompeii Project of Professor Massimo Osanna and his team. Roughly 700 metres northwest of Pompeii, in the remains of a suburban Roman villa, archaeologists have unearthed the incredibly-preserved remains of two men, victims of the infamous eruption of Mount Vesuvius that occurred almost 2,000 years ago in 79 AD.So what do we know about the eruption? What do we know about this terrible event that has left Pompeii with this astonishing legacy? Daisy Dunn came back on the show for this special, emergency podcast to talk through what we know about the eruption and those who witnessed it.Daisy is the author of In The Shadow of Vesuvius: A Tale of Two Plinys. She has also appeared on the Ancients podcast earlier this year, talking about Rome’s most erotic poet Catullus.

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and you might have noticed this week that Pompeii has been in the news yet again. They have made another extraordinary, touching new discovery, this time from a villa just outside of Pompeii, dating to that infamous day in 79 AD, when Mount Vesuvius erupted and a series of pyroclastic surges swept down and engulfed famous ancient settlements such as Herculaneum and Pompeii. Now to talk through the story of AD 79, the story of the eruption and its aftermath, I was delighted to get back on the show the one and only, the brilliant classicist Daisy Dunn. Daisy has been on The Ancients once before to talk about Catullus,

Rome's most erotic poet, which you can find in our Ancients library, and it was great to get her back on the show to talk through the story of AD 79. Here is Daisy Dunn. Here is Daisy Dunn. Daisy Dunn, it's a pleasure to have you back on the show. Thank you very much for having me. In this case, Pompeii, it's just been in the news all of this week. It has. It's one of those great things, Pompeii. It's kind of forever rising from the dead and from destruction.

I think every other year it seems there's something fantastic being found and I think at the moment there's a lot because there's been a great excavation project taking place there's been something called the Great Pompeii Project which has been a sort of hugely well-funded project to sort of restore and excavate and to discover what else is is under there and yeah the last week we've had fantastic news of two more humans being discovered at one of the sites and do we know anything more about these two humans at the moment i know it's a brief do we have any real idea about them we have a fair idea and so to put it into context we found we not me personally i wish um but two two humans have been discovered in an area called kivita juliana which is about 700 meters northwest of pompeii so just outside of the city proper

and it's two men it's thought looking at the build of them and they look slightly different from one another so they were found in a little room off a cryptoporticus and a cryptoporticus is a long sort of covered walkway in rather a nice villa. And they were sort of lying down on the ground and one of them they think is probably aged 18 to 25 and people looked at him and they think that some of his vertebrae in his spine are quite compressed. And from that, they've said maybe he was involved in some kind of manual labour. The other man is slightly taller. We're not talking tall here. I'm thinking I think it's about 162 centimetres or something, which I'm not quite sure. I'm not very good at my

convergence, but I think that's about five foot three, five foot four. Forgiven. of something which I'm not quite sure I'm not very good at my convergence but I think that's about five foot three five foot four forgiven yeah and I think they said that he was slightly older so aged between about 30 and 40 and had a sort of cloak on his body and one of the things that's really interesting is to see how the media has kind of reacted to this and straight away people have said in the papers here we've got a man and his slave, because looking at these compressed vertebrae, it would be unexpected to find a man who was aged 18 to 25 with that kind of condition of his body. But having said that, that's quite a conclusion to leap to, isn't it? It's difficult to say that that's a slave. I mean, it's possible a considerable proportion of the population of

Pompeii were slaves, So it's possible. But on that evidence alone, it's very difficult to say who he was in relation to the older man. And the other interesting thing is they said, have a look at the older man. He's wearing a cloak and that's a piece of evidence of his status and his wealth. And that, again, is very, very sort of problematic as evidence goes, because what we know actually looking at a lot of the bodies which have been found in Pompeii is that they very often had wooden cloaks on them if you think about it it's really kind of sensible you have all this sort of burning pumice falling down on you in the middle of an eruption you're going to put on your thickest

layers and venture out you're not going to go out wearing something skimpy are you're going to be burned so that in itself is very very difficult um again to sort of use as evidence of who this person was but the fact is we've got two people who were found there as skeletons were buried within the volcanic deposit and the archaeologists poured plaster into the deposit left behind by their bodies to preserve their final shapes and at least one of these men had his hand in this kind of we call this pugilistic pose a sort of boxer pose and that's evidence that he died of a result of the sort of intense heat that was kind of when he was caught up in the pyroclastic flow which buried them and that's kind of a very common cause of death of a lot of the victims of Pompeii is a

thermal shock. I find it absolutely astonishing what you're saying there. I mean, all these new discoveries that seem to come out of Pompeii, we see several times a year, all these amazing new discoveries, they seem to be telling us so much more about the people and the eruption. But at the same time,

they're also creating all these new questions that we're considering at the same time. I think this is the classic thing with Pompeii and the general area. You think as is the classic thing with Pompeii and sort of the general area. You think as soon as you find something, you think, fantastic, this is going to answer a load of these mysteries that we still have hanging over us sort of 2,000 years later. But actually almost every new piece of evidence that comes to light

actually just throws up a dozen more questions and sort of complicates the picture even further. But that's what I think what makes this area of history just so interesting because you can never find the absolute answer there's always something that leads you into another path and as a historian that's what you love you love these sort of never-ending labyrinths that you can sort of enter into and kind of interpret in new ways and kind of build up a bigger picture from what's coming to light all the time. Absolutely absolutely and just sticking a bit longer on this new discovery before going on to and kind of build up a bigger picture from what's coming to light all the time. Absolutely, absolutely. And just sticking a bit longer on this new discovery

before going on to the eruption itself, we have this new discovery and just to confirm, this isn't in Pompeii itself, it's nearby Pompeii. It's nearby, so I think it's about 700 metres northwest of sort of central Pompeii. So there's a lot of villas, larger villas in the surrounding area. And I think one thing,

when we're thinking about Pompeii, we think of it very much as sort of an urban centre, but actually it was very, very heavily involved in agriculture. Lots of people had orchards and farms, people were growing food. So it was quite a rustic area in some ways.

I mean, we have sort of people with rustic outbuildings, people with their own wine presses, all of this going on at the same time. So it's not quite the sort of picture of this, you know, very neat little city that you might have in mind. It's sort of a little bit more sprawling and spacious than that. Well, you mentioned wine culture, you mentioned agriculture, and you mentioned all these villas surrounding Pompeii there. And let's then look at Pompeii just before the eruption, because from what you're saying and from what the archaeology

seems to suggest, this was a thriving centre for trade, for viticulture, for agricultural trade. Very much so, yes. People were sort of contributing to the sort of trade and market by growing things such as figs. Figs were very popular in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Cabbages were grown here. About a century before the eruption, Pompeii was a great centre for producing sticky fish sauce. We might have heard of this garum, rather a foul thing, which they sort of poured on everything, but like our ketchup today,

sort of fermented fish, basically, is what went into it. And they sort of made this in these large vats but what we know is that in Pompeii this was quite popular at the time but then it was sort of superseded by industries elsewhere so particularly in Bilo Claudia in southern Spain they had this vast processing plant for fermented fish products there so Pompeii's industry in that area kind of waned so by the time of the eruption, its focus was very, very much on viticulture. And I think it's really interesting when you look at one of the really iconic wall paintings that's come out of Pompeii, you have a picture of what's very probably Vesuvius, and you have the wine god Bacchus,

and he's actually wearing this very sort of funky grape outfit. And he's presiding over all these vineyards, and you can see all these vines growing all the way up Vesuvius. And I think when you look at that picture, you think this is not the picture you have in mind. You look at Vesuvius today, you think of it as being in this very, very virulent, quite frightening place. When you look at the volcano in itself. It's a real sort of force. But I think when you look at it in that picture, you see it through the eyes of the people who were living in Pompeii at that time. We have a source, for example, describing it as a vineyard covered mountain. That was how it was seen. It was seen to be green. It was a place of great abundance and fertility. And people were growing vines there. This was very much the prime place where

wine was being produced. It was the main source of wine production for Rome, supplying Rome in this period, for example. And obviously the eruption devastated that. That whole source of its prosperity really fell away with the eruption. So that was a real turning point in the history of Pompeii. And talking about it being a place of great prosperity, at the same time, I think it's really important to bear in mind that about 16, 17 years prior to the eruption, it suffered a really devastating earthquake. So that's in the year AD 63. And so when we look at the remains of Pompeii today, you're seeing lots of fantastic things left behind.

But you're also seeing evidence that the city was sort of very much being rebuilt in the period. So when it was destroyed finally by Vesuvius, there were still things which were unfinished and things which were being recovered and sort of remade after this earlier devastation. It's amazing, you said, from that wall painting and everything, to have an idea of what the Romans thought of Vesuvius, what the Pompeians thought of Vesuvius before the eruption, because from what you're saying, it sounds like it had this association with wine growing. Did they know that it was a dangerous volcano? Did they have any idea of this at all? I believe not, actually. I mean, I'm going on particular, that description I just gave of it being a vineyard covered mountain, that came from the natural history of Pliny the Elder, who was a great

encyclopedist, who's also admiral of the fleet nearby in the Bay of Naples at this time. And there's no evidence that I found anyway, in any of the ancient sources where anyone's describing this as a volcano. And what's really interesting is the same figure, Pliny the Elder, he described lots of the volcanoes of the world within this reference book that he wrote, The Natural History, and he did not include Vesuvius in that volcano section at all. And what we now know, thanks to scientific analysis of the area, is that Vesuvius had been dormant for about 700 years before it erupted in AD 79. So there's absolutely no reason why anyone would have expected it to be anything other than this wonderfully fertile green mountain. I guess this also explains why there seem to be so many

elaborate villas, perhaps in ancient Roman Beverly Hills, stretch all along the side of Vesuvius. Yes, exactly. I mean, you'd think that if people were aware of it, they might have been slightly more cautious. I say that, but then look at it today. Again, it's very, very closely, very, very built up again. And I think, you know, there's that real sort of interesting fact that people were and are prepared to live within a danger zone. I think that's very much built into the Roman mindset as well. I think it's interesting when you look at some of the decorations of these villas, for example, you find in one of them at least a wonderful mosaic in the dining room of a skeleton

and he's holding two bottles of wine. And it's very much this idea that people are living with an awareness that death can come at any time. It's a real sort of carpe diem attitude and almost a sort of, you know, willingness just to sort of embrace that and to accept that that is part of life, is this sort of realisation that death can come at any time. So you wonder actually whether they,

if they did know that it was an active volcano and could blow at any moment, whether they'd have done things any differently. I'm not 100% sure that they would have done. 100%. Was it worth the risk, as it were? As you you said if it hadn't been active for 700 years or so and daisy you mentioned just there the other main p word of this discussion plinny because for the eruption itself we've got this amazing archaeology but we're also gifted with this brilliant contemporary literary source of the eruption. Yes, we are incredibly lucky when it comes to the eruption of Vesuvius

to have one or the two eyewitness accounts of the eruption itself. And this is two letters which are written by Pliny the Younger, who was 17 years old when Vesuvius erupted. So a mid boy, really. And his uncle was Pliny the Elder who wrote the encyclopedia. And the uncle had a villa somewhere near Vesuvius, a place called Mycenaeum, which is about 30 kilometres away from the volcano. And Pliny the Younger was staying with his uncle and his mother at this villa when the eruption began and uh i don't want to go into this whole story now but go on absolutely don't worry you can we can uh so

obviously so one of my favorite stories coming out of the ancient world because it's true the elder penny was alerted by his sister to this amazing cloud which was rising in the distance that's all they saw at the beginning of early. And he wanted to go and have a closer look at it. So he sort of got his shoes, had a look and thought, I really, really want to go and inspect this at closer quarters. Bear in mind, he's a natural scientist, he's writing this great monumental encyclopedia. He's a very, very curious man, he wants to see what's going on. And as he's also Admiral of the Fleet, he has this whole fleet at his disposal. So he says to his nephew i'm gonna go and have a look would you like to come with me and the 17 year old boy says no

i'd rather stay at home with with mum and get on with my my research my studies so he stays with his books it's very unusual to unexpected choice maybe but um ultimately a sensible one so the elder pliny goes off with the fleet and he sails across the bay of naples and as this happens this cloud starts to rain pumice down upon him and this pumice flow gets gets heavier and heavier and ultimately the pumice gets so thick that it actually forms kind of masses on the water so pliny the elder can't actually go to the place where he wanted to he'd actually received just before he left a message from a friend of his who said she's just basically begging him for help she said we can't get out

you know please bring help so Pliny the Elder doesn't seem to be able to reach her so he continues and he puts in where he can which is at at Stabiae, which is about 16 kilometres from the volcano. And he meets up with a friend there and he kind of lives out the rest of the eruption at that site. And all of this information comes to us from these two letters, which were written to the historian Tacitus by his nephew, who meanwhile is kind of witnessing the whole thing, but from slightly further away at Mycena. You mentioned the pumice storm just then. The pumice storm, is this one of the first real visible indications that the eruption is starting?

Yes, it is. And it's immediately unclear to people and clearly to the two Pliny's what this is. It's a cloud. The uncle Pliny compares it to an umbrella pine tree in its shape. It's sort of that kind of shape as a kind of trunk and then the kind of branches coming out of the top. And the pumice, it starts off quite white, it turns gradually more grey and heavier. I mean, it went on for hours and hours and hours. And this is kind of what becomes really problematic when Pliny the Elder actually meets up with his friends where he where he is at Stabiae and their whole villa

is actually being sort of rained upon so heavily that they realize that if they don't leave that villa now they won't be able to later because the pumice gets so high outside their doorway they're actually going to be sealed into the villa so they have to escape that way and presumably other people were actually sort of you know reigned in entirely by by this pumice flow and then you know that's kind of followed by these pyroclastic flows and surges and the layers build up and up and up well just just keep on that for the moment so as plinioldi's traveling across the bay towards Stabiae on his own quest, on his own journey. At the same time, the Pumice Cloud is, I'm guessing it's also raining at this time down

on Pompeii and for several hours. It is, yes. Suddenly when you look at different cities and towns in the area, they all seem to experience this slightly differently. So the Pumice Floor at Herculaneum, for example, isn't heavy at at all at pompeii it seems to get heavier into the next morning so it goes on probably till about 7 a.m i think so it's something that people haven't experienced before and it causes as it gets heavier buildings to to fall down and you've got to bear in mind at the same time as this you've got earthquakes going on so there's a whole sort of situation of various things happening at once and obviously causing confusion and panic. Well, confusion and panic, it must have felt like the end of the world. Do we have any evidence at

this time that there seemed to be, with the people of Pompeii, a mass exodus from the city as they see all this occurring around them, all this Armageddon? We think that a lot of people did actually manage to escape in time. I mean, this is one of the million-dollar questions, again, for classists today, is how many people died and how many people survived, how many people got away from the eruption. And so far, it's been a question, again,

an answer that's eluded us. People still actually sort of dispute how many people lived in Pompeii at this time. This is something which is hotly contested. I'd say somewhere in the region of 10,000 to 15,000. Of the number of bodies we found, somewhere between 1,000 and 1,200. So that would suggest that the vast majority managed to get out. But bear in mind that not all of Pompeii has been excavated yet.

We've got two more found this week. not all of Pompeii has been excavated yet. We've got two more found this week. You've then got sort of areas of Pompeii where you found evidence of people actually trying to escape. There's an area, for example, called, I think it's called the Garden of the Fugitives. And this is kind of almost a vineyard type area. And it has sort of 13 people were found there.

And they seem to have been probably trying to get towards one of the gates when they were overwhelmed by volcanic matter. So it very very difficult to say who got away and and who didn't but i think you know there is good evidence that many of the people did manage to use of in the early stages of the eruption allude you know the worst that was to come whereas other people who maybe were more frail or more infirm or simply sort of reluctant to give up their property you know prefer to stay where they were and probably the two that were just being found who maybe were more frail or more infirm, more simply sort of reluctant to give up their property, you know, prefer to stay where they were. And probably the two that were just being found,

the fact that they were in a cryptoporticus in a kind of covered area, suggests maybe they thought they were going to be safer there sort of taking shelter under a building than sort of actually going out into the open and being rained on by all of the pumice and by the ash and everything that followed. So is that something that we're seeing in the archaeology over the years and including this most recent find from Pompeii and the surrounding area that we're seeing a lot of the bodies of the

people, the unfortunate victims of this natural disaster, they were trying to find places of safety underground or in shelter as what they thought? I think very much so. I think a case in point is that through much of our history, people thought that most people from Herculaneum, for example, had managed to escape. And it was only in the 80s, the early 80s, that people realised they came across all these boat stores near the shore where they found hundreds of skeletons

where people had taken cover in these kind of archways, very, very narrow archways. And until that time, people thought, you know, that not many bodies had been found in these kind of archways very very narrow archways and until that time people thought you know that not many bodies had been found in her claim and clearly everyone got out but that was only 40 years ago it's not that long ago that they suddenly came across all these hundreds of human remains all crowded together trying to obviously seek safety in a very covered, sheltered area. It's just unfortunate that that kind of situation would not have saved them from the absolutely catastrophic heat of the pyroclastic flows and people would have died

upon impact with the heat. I think when you read the scientific descriptions of how those people would have died, it's incredibly grim. Yeah, incredibly so. And you mentioned it there, the pyroclastic flow we got to really talk about that the end product of this eruption as it were so after the pumice cloud this early morning this early morning it seems this must have been a morning like no other it mustn't have felt like a morning it must have been completely dark yes i mean one of the fantastic

descriptions that plinny the younger left behind is he he likens it he says it's like night but it's darker than any night it's he's it's like sitting in a study where someone's switched out the lamp or blown out the lamp you know in a darkened room so to be in a situation it's been darker than any other morning known to man I mean it defies belief you I mean that's such a kind of poignant description I think you read read that, you think, God, and that really must have been terrifying. And obviously, no electricity then, very, very limited light. People were carrying torches to try and guide their way outside. But it's frightening at the same time, he's plenty younger, even though he's 30 kilometres away. He's terrified of being trampled by the crowds who are trying to make their escape.

I mean, that seems a legitimate worry. It's not let alone sort of all of the volcanic matter that's around. It's the actual sort of force of the people that poses a risk to life. Yeah, so what is Pliny witnessing at Mycenaeum at this time, a bit further away from the volcano you mentioned? So he's seeing all of these people making their way through the city? He is. He's seeing huge crowds of panicking people. I mean, he can only really imagine how bad it is that much closer to the volcano. He doesn't know if his uncle is dead or alive. In the course of his escape, he actually bumps into one of the friends of his uncle,

who says to him, his mother, why are you still here? I mean, if your uncle was here, he'd be telling you to get away. If he's dead, he'd want you to survive him so he kind of hastens them along and they kind of begin on a sort of chariot ride through this and they realize they have to get off and continue their journey by foot because it's the only way they can do it but they're seeing absolutely incredible things I mean at one point the the sea seems to be kind of sucked back into itself Pliny the younger says and we're not quite sure whether this is just in a further effect of the eruption or whether it's beginning of a tsunami. But he

sees all this kind of like stranded sea life, you know, in its wake. I mean, the whole thing is beyond words in many ways. I mean, reading these letters, you kind of get breathless, like reading this and trying to imagine what it was like in those really really desperate moments is that one of the things and yourself being such an esteemed roman historian when you're trying to look at look at these works of figures like catullus or for plenty when they're writing these amazing amazing works trying to get into their their minds perhaps to say or what they were seeing at that time but what they were thinking from our 21st century mindset it must be one of the most difficult things out there it is it is it's it's really difficult because i think you forget there's a real

kind of risk i think with this period in history when you you look at things like the casts which have just been produced of these two dead people or any of the others which have been found to date and you see them and you think oh wow isn't that amazing there's kind of this sort of slightly lurid aspect to it or you look at them almost as works of art and you kind of forget that these are the remains of real people and what they've been through and I think when you read the letters of the younger Pliny in conjunction with all the sort of archaeological evidence you have to kind of appreciate that these people were going through something which like none of them had ever anticipated before and the kind of descriptions that Pliny the Younger gives he says that people start to kind of elaborate what was happening

people kind of magnify it people say kind of paint a worse picture in some situations of the destruction than is actually occurring. And other people kind of trying to make sense of it, that people will talk about giants trampling the landscapes. There are descriptions by other historians of people in Rome and people, I mean, in Rome, the sky went all dark. People had no idea what was happening there either. People were thinking that this was the end of the world. I mean, what would you say if you're not in Pompeii? I think we focus so much on Pompeii and on the Bay of Naples, that's the epicentre of this. But to people that much further away, the impact was

still felt miles and miles and miles, hundreds of miles away, even in North Africa and Syria. The dust from the volcano is said to have reached these places as well i think you've got to try and put yourself in in the head of those people as well where you've got no kind of information coming to you you've just got these strange kind of you know happenings in the sky above what do you say to yourself what do you imagine i mean i think the only explanation you could give would be that this was the end of the world. Absolutely. And then you can also, I guess, you think the sounds as well, the completely unusual sounds that they would have heard, whether you're on Pompeii, and then obviously you have no more chance after that, but if you were in Mycenae or whatever.

And once again, it must really emphasise this idea that they could have thought that this was the end of the world as they knew it. Yeah, you're completely right. I mean, with the sounds as that's that's one thing that really comes i think across when you read these eyewitness accounts you get descriptions of people calling to their loved ones the wailing of children um trying to sort of make out each other's voices in this kind of melee of people trying to escape and when i was writing about this i was really struck by the parallel it just seems so similar in many ways this description to when you read Aeneid the Aeneid by Virgil where he describes what it's like in the underworld essentially he describes all these sort of infants weeping at their mother's breasts and things like this and the description's you know really remarkably similar and it is almost like they're in they've kind of entered this this hell as as as described by the poets we're talking about the Aeneid keeping on

that just quickly because one of the things I found really interesting from your book the Pliny's on this was the parallel it was as it were between Pliny and his mother in Mycenaeum and that of Aeneas and his own mother trying to escape Troy. I mean, that's remarkable in itself. Yeah, it's incredible. I think this is one thing that you really warm to this 17-year-old boy. His mother says, you must go on without me. She said to him, I'll slow you down. Please escape and save yourself. Don't save me.

But the younger Pony says, no, no, no. And he kind of takes her by the hand and ensures that they escape together. I mean, this really evokes to a classist description in the ineared where they're trying to escape from burning troy and aneas actually loses his mother because just in the confusion of people leaving again you've got this whole sort of band of refugees desperate to escape and he loses her and you know it's just it's just a devastating thing you almost kind of see Pliny the Anger trying desperately just to stop you know stop himself from repeating the mistake of Aeneas. And as Pliny and his mother are and Pliny's trying

to make sure he doesn't repeat the mistake of Aeneas as they're trying to flee from Mycenae in this same morning is this roughly the same time that the devastating pyroclastic flow hits the people of Pompeii who are still in that city? Yes. So we know, we think there are about six pyroclastic surges and Pompeii experiences several of these, but I think there are two which are very, very significant. The first of these seems to have kind of quite a limited effect on the city but it's the second one which seems to absolutely devastate and kill anyone who's still remaining there and certainly the the two people just found seem to have died they can tell

this by looking in the the nature of the kind of sediment um these two people seem to have died in that second pyroclastic flow, which was just so much material just being deposited on top of the city. It's just monumental. The whole effect of this was beyond words. It changed the whole shoreline of this part of the world. It pushed it out. I think that's one of the confusing things when you visit Pompeii and you visit Herculaneum, you forget that actually originally before this eruption, they were a lot closer to the water. Especially when you look at Herculaneum, you see these boat arches where people were trying to take cover. You think these boat arches, I mean, it seems ages from the water, but it's just the whole coastline is different. It's changed as a result

of this eruption. I i mean the effects of this are just absolutely massive it's almost inconceivable today well let's keep on the effects then for a bit you mentioned how the the coastline seems to change with the eruption was one of the like the the greatest and long-lasting effects of the vesuvius eruption the whole layout shall we say ofania, the region of Campania. Yeah, it changes. It just has a different feel to it afterwards. And I think when you rediscover these great villas,

you have to bear in mind that most of them have these wonderful sea views, which again today you can't really appreciate necessarily. Particularly when you look at Herculaneum. Herculaneum, I think, is absolutely fascinating fascinating it should be visited just as much as Pompeii in in some ways it's easier to get a sense of it as an ancient bustling town than it is Pompeii because it's that much smaller I think its population was only probably about five to six thousand so probably about half the size of Pompeii but it's a lot wealthier in many ways the villas which are found there are absolutely monumental and I mean one of them has the oldest library surviving from the Greco-Roman world and sort of the biggest collection of statues found anywhere in Greece or Rome and they were these

great maritime villas and you just don't get that kind of sense of them today necessarily. and you just don't get that kind of sense of them today necessarily. And you mentioned it right there, Herculaneum, Steviae, these other places that are affected by the eruption. But Daisy, why is it when we think of the Vesuvius eruption, why is it that Pompeii is the town that we almost always think of? Why Pompeii rather than Herculaneum or any of the others? I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that it's been so celebrated by writers and by artists. I mean, everyone from

Edward Ball Lytton to Robert Harris has written of Pompeii and the last days there. Fantastic books coming out of it. And I think because it was well excavated quite early on, particularly from the 18th century, but particularly in the 19th century, a lot of these bodies were found there. So it seemed more human. And I think it has something to do with the human aspect of it. Herculaneum actually began to be excavated slightly earlier than Pompeii. But as I said, we didn't really have the discovery of human remains at that early stage in the same degree as we did in Pompeii. But as I said, we didn't really have the discovery of human remains

at that early stage in the same degree as we did in Pompeii. I think with Pompeii, I mean, there's just so much to see there in terms of daily life, that you're just immediately surprised by the fact that people had shops, for example, at the front of their villas, that people had a kind of laundrette, the Fulonica. There were about 30 bakeries or something there. And it just, you can really imagine it as a fully functioning town. And I think people like to almost draw that parallel between their own kind of town and Pompeii. And I think, you know, I personally say that there's,

you can just as well do that with Herculeanium and with Stabian and with some of these other places. But I just think that Pompeii just, because there's so much there, it's so much bigger, I think, than you anticipate when you visit. And it was subject, from what you're saying there, to some remarkable archaeological excavations

during the 19th century. Particularly in the 19th century. I think a lot happened in the 19th century. in the 19th century i think a lot happened in the 19th century i mean initially it was discovered by accident and people sort of you know engineers trying to dig canals that sort of thing but standard yeah standard sort of stuff um but in the 19th century it kind of came into its own because uh that's when we got a sort of a new archaeologist came along called fiorelli and he was the one who masterminded this whole technique of how to preserve the shapes of the ancient dead so he's the one who said oh look I've left a

deposit we can pour plaster into the cavity left in the in the kind of volcanic deposit and then preserve the shapes of of these ancient people and that's where we get all these sort of casts from that we've seen before so that was kind of an exciting time initially I have to say sort of a lot of the early excavations looking sort of prior to that period in particular very very slapdash like really really badly done people kind of going in and raiding and taking out the kind of wall paintings cutting stuff out and actually causing more damage than than good it's almost comparable to Schliemann in Troy. It's really, really made a mess of the situation. I think that's one of the situations, one of the explanations

really for why people often ask me today, well, why aren't we excavating more of Pompeii and Herculean because so much of both these places remains covered over. But actually archaeologists today have to focus a lot on trying to shore up and preserve what they have actually uncovered because a lot of these places are very very fragile and part of this is a result of tunnelling and stuff that's happened you know for centuries earlier we've got evidence of people tunnelling even before that either of these places were officially excavated I mean this probably began in Roman times themselves. I mean, what we know is that people actually returned to the site after the eruption and people did kind of break into homes and steal treasures that were sort of remaining there. I mean, this kind of began

from the very beginning and it kind of continued through history. So this whole kind of history of looting very much accompanies the history of Pompeii. Wow, I didn't know anything about that whatsoever. The picture in my mind was that this was just so many layers of ash that no one would have been able to get through at all. But from what you're saying, that there was looting throughout history of this site. Yeah, it happened, I think, certainly. I think there's evidence from the 14th century, even of people starting to tunnel through some of this kind of concretised material.

Obviously very, very difficult. And I think there were probably areas of of pompeii and herculean which were easier to access than others obviously there were parts which were completely covered under meters and meters and meters which no one was going to get to but at the same time people were dropping treasure and all kinds of things we know looking at the cars people kind of gathered up bags of money bags of jewelry people put on as many rings and things as they could to try and escape but obviously things were dropped in the process all kinds of things were discovered as part of the excavation process where you see people trying to make off of their livelihood as much as possible but this left the door open for other people to come in and try and

make the most of and daisy the the surviving arts and architecture and the shape of the bodies themselves of those who unfortunately perished in this natural disaster almost 2,000 years ago, they must give us an invaluable insight into the people of Pompeii, their lifestyle, what they were doing, etc, etc. They do, yes. I mean, I think this comes as a note of caution, which I think all historians have to give, which is whenever you look at these casts, and there's been a great history of people looking at them thinking, oh, look, that person looks like they're hugging their friend. Or look, casting these people in plaster they've actually sort of incorporated other bits and bobs other kind of cloaks and all kinds of things and given a kind of a false impression of what's actually underneath them they can sometimes tell quite a kind of confusing story but other times you have quite a clear picture i mean when you see

people huddled together obviously trying to comfort each other in their final moments you can't help but be touched by that and those stories i mean they don't really need words they kind of speak for themselves you see them together you see children clearly much smaller figures with their their parents being completely helpless and kind of just you know absolutely knocked back by the force of of the eruption and it is devastating i I mean I think I just try and sort of remind everyone who looks at these people that this isn't some like fantastic sight and I think it's a very sort of Victorian

thing particularly it was popular in the Victorian period of people kind of played this up almost like a fairground effect you know people looked at this almost as a sort of amusement and entertainment but it's really a very tragic human story at the end of the day. Absolutely, absolutely.

Well, talking about hotly debated topics and slightly confusing issues surrounding this whole period of ancient history, Daisy, quite recent archaeology has made suggestions that the traditional date surrounding the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD may not be as accurate as we first thought. No, this is another. We were talking earlier about the sort of confusion that's caused by excavations, thinking we hope this is going to answer our questions, but actually throws up a dozen more questions. thinking we hope this is going to answer our questions, but actually throws up a dozen more questions. The date has been another of those big, big dilemmas and sort of question marks that hangs over the eruption.

When did Vesuvius erupt in the year AD 79? The confusion really basically comes down to the fact that these eyewitness accounts of Penelope Younger are preserved in various manuscripts and when scholars were reading them a long time ago they decided that they said that the eruption happened on the 24th of August 79 AD and this is one of many dates preserved in the manuscript but kind of textually it looked the most secure so people went with that for ages but then archaeologists started to look at the evidence and they said well hang on a minute

there's a lot of evidence here to suggest that the eruption happened far deeper into the year than August and for a start you've got people in wooden cloaks but as I said that's not really evidence because people are covering themselves up then there are um evidence of pomegranates um people having harvested wine already which isn't traditionally done by that date in August uh there is evidence of all kinds of things um all these sort of fruits and vegetables which aren't necessarily sort of harvested at that time of year or being around then so people say it must have happened in in later into autumn and other things have come to light so at some some stage someone found a coin a silver denarius which was there and someone read it and thought this is very exciting because

this coin seems to say september so that would suggest that it happened post-september but then they reread this coin legend a couple of years ago and discovered that the first person who read it actually read it wrong and it couldn't be used as evidence after all it was probably minted in July or August so no help to us whatsoever. Then a few years ago someone found an inscription, it's a part of the latest excavation, very very excitingly found an inscription in charcoal which mentions the date 17th of October and it's just this sort of silly piece of graffiti talking about someone sort of eating too much or something I ate too much on the 17th of October so that suggests that it happened after the 17th of October because I mean

and sort of fairly recently afterwards because charcoal doesn't really survive long you'd have thought if it rained or anything else it would have disappeared but at the same time it doesn't give us a date at all. So now people are looking at other pieces of evidence so people look for example at the dispersal of the evidence and that seems to suggest that the wind was blowing in a southeasterly direction and that doesn't generally happen in August. So I would say most evidence suggests it's into October at least in 79 AD and it's not that Pliny was necessarily wrong about this I think it was to do with the manuscript tradition of it being kind of the date

going with the wrong date essentially going with the date in that particular manuscript when I could have chosen one of these other dates so I think October is probably a more a more probable uh a date for for the eruption but I think one thing that interests me and one thing that i would say is this isn't a question of it happening in summer versus autumn you've got to bear in mind plenty of the elder great encyclopedist who died in the eruption he said that autumn began on the 8th or the 11th of august so whichever way you look at it this is an autumn event so I mean that's how I see it I just love what you're saying that I just love how some of the smallest archaeological finds whether it be a coin or whether it be these fruits these pomegranates I mean that in itself

is extraordinary organic material and how things as small as that can completely alter what people have thought for decades or even centuries yeah yeah it can and i think that's the thing the more that comes to light the more people are going to you know question it and try and who knows maybe there will be another inscription at some point which will give us a more accurate date but it seems at this stage unlikely at least it's more that we're getting building up a jigsaw as so often with this from looking at things like pomegranates. That's what we're working with at this stage. Talking about the effects of the eruption in Cincinnati, especially for the Romans, and we've talked about it earlier that there seems to be a lot of people who perhaps were able to

get out before the main eruption, before the devastation really occurred. But do we know much? I mean, this seems really extraordinary and amazing, but do we know much about the survivors of Vesuvius, as it were? The survivor we know most about is the Younger Pliny, because he's our only sort of person that we know the identity of, who wrote about the eruption. But we get sort of snippets in other authors as well of what this meant, what the eruption meant for the people of Naples and even for people living further afield. I mean, one poet,

for example, called Statius, he comments on, he says, I mean, will people ever believe what happened when these fields grow green again? Will people actually know what's buried beneath it? And what's really striking is that a lot of vegetation appears to kind of recover and grow back within about 20 years of the eruption, which really isn't long at all. And there's evidence of people going back there and that the area kind of regained its reputation for fertility and abundance in agriculture. I mean, so much so that the younger Pliny, his wife became quite unwell, probably as a result of a miscarriage. And the one place she chose to go to to try and recover was Campania. And you think actually, she could have gone

anywhere. And Pliny the Younger had loads of villas all over Italy, she could have gone to any one of those. But no, she went to this this area which had traditionally had this reputation for being a place of great health benefits and it's astonishing to me that within 20 years it had regained that reputation that said you get descriptions of sort of the more immediate aftermath where we hear of people suffering terribly from this kind of pestilence which developed as a result of sort of the volcanic material and people getting ill as a result of maybe going back and maybe breathing in a lot of the dust which had settled. So it was quite unpleasant, obviously, as an area afterwards, it wasn't really habitable to the kind of extent that it had been. Certainly when we hear of the

emperor at the time, Titus actually rushes down there and tries to kind of put together a rescue attempt and try and salvage what buildings he can. And to make sure that the privy purse doesn't really benefit from this natural disaster. And there's kind of, you know, some senators who try and put things back together as much as he can. But obviously that's not possible. The fact that we're still working on this today is testament to that, really. But I think that's the most surprising thing for me is how quickly this area kind of recovered at least in the popular imagination. It is quite interesting to think isn't it if someone who was able to escape Pompeii or a citizen of Pompeii managed to escape it when

the eruption occurred could possibly go back 20 years or so later and see so much of it well the greenery of the area back as it was before the eruption. It's astonishing, isn't it? And I think it's also the bravery. It kind of goes back to what we were discussing earlier. This doesn't seem to have had a kind of, it's always really hard to say this with Roman sources, but Pliny the Younger doesn't seem to be mentally scarred by this. He's not worried, especially for his wife going to this area in particular. He's not worrying there's going to be another terrible disaster, which could happen at any time.

This doesn't seem to be a concern. It's more that people see that the benefits of the area outweigh the risks. And I think that's really interesting. It says something about the mindset. And how does witnessing the eruption of vesuvius affects pliny apart from what you've just mentioned there like for the rest of his life i think well this is the other really surprising thing i mean i don't get the impression that it does i don't think it i mean you'd think this would stay with you you're 17 years old your uncle has died he seems to have suffocated on the beach at stabi whene when he was there trying to escape. Pliny the Younger writes about these things probably 25 to 30 years after the events when Tacitus asks for a

description of them. And he seems incredibly level-headed in the way he describes them. And what we know with him is that within nine months of the eruption he's actually embarked upon his career and we find him in Rome he's joined this court and becomes a young junior lawyer I mean that doesn't seem like the action of someone who is so kind of you know shaken up by the disaster that he's not having to sort of but that's again that's not a really Roman thing is it's not a very sort of stoic way of thinking about it I mean I, I think it's a very modern reading to assume that everyone would have been, you know, in some ways really, really shaken by this and unable to live their lives in the same way that they had before. I mean, obviously, that must have happened to people who lost loved ones, their lives could not have been the same again. But we just we don't find

that in the sources. Do we have any other snippets from others? And you mentioned one earlier, but do we have any other snippets from later Roman writers who are recalling the events of Vesuvius and Pompeii and the aftermath? Or does Pliny, does he really stand out above the rest for the description? He very much, I mean, he's alone really with that description. I mean, it's astonishing that we just don't really have anything else what we know is that he wrote these two letters to tacitus because tacitus wanted to incorporate some of the information into what was probably his histories but that part of the book unfortunately is missing so we might have had you know a whole load more and it would be really interesting to see what tacitus did with that information and how he incorporated it into his own storytelling

but we just don't find anything like it really we We find little bits and bobs here and there. We find Cassius Dio, for example, talking about the eruption happening. He says it happens in late autumns. Again, that's another indication of the timing. But we just don't find this really detailed description of what was going on and of the course of events the rest of the story is very much told to us by what's on the ground and what's continuing to come out of the ground and you mentioned continuing to come out of the ground now do you think this latest find really emphasizes and we said it right at the start of the chat how pompeii and the area surrounding pompeii it's just got all this on one one level, horrible, but on the other level, extraordinary archaeology remaining to be uncovered that can tell us so much about this period in ancient history.

Exactly. I think, I mean, looking at something like this, it's just so exciting, especially when you think, I think this is the same area where, I don't know if you remember, I think it was about three years ago, they found some horses with their harnesses still in place. And that was all in the newspapers as well. And you just think this is a story which is still evolving. And the fact that such sort of important finds are coming up with their regularity is really significant. And, you know, I think it's only right that they still continue to find their place in our media today, because they are incredibly important events. And they're filling in a story which we all think we we all think we know so well but in many ways we don't i think with everything that comes up there's always more questions to be asked um you get a sort of another perspective on things i mean looking at the art for example as well that's coming out the last few years a lot lot of the artwork is showing us sort of representations

of myths, which we hadn't really seen so much of before, you know, quite sort of risque pictures a lot of the time, and just very surprising things which tell us as much about life really as they do about death. It is absolutely extraordinary. And there are those places in the Roman Empire, like over 2000 years ago, that really seem to strike out. Pompeii being one of them, my mind instantly starts to think of the Vindolanda excavations as well, with the tablets that continue to reveal more about the daily life of these people on the frontier, in Pompeii and elsewhere. It is extraordinary, these sites, exactly from what you were saying there, in showing how this might have occurred almost 2000 years ago but we are still

every year every half year uncovering so much more and learning so much more about these ancient societies and long may that continue to happen i mean i guess get so excited every time i you know open the newspapers and finding this sort of all being spoken about with such interest because i think i mean it puts paid that whole idea of when I certainly when I started studying classics people saying what a remote thing what a remote subject to want to do how arcane how very cut off from from our world but I'm just so glad that this changed so much I think in the last 10 years certainly people seeing this is very much an interesting evolving story something that has impact upon the way that we live now, and something that tells us something about ourselves as well as about the remote past as we see it. Absolutely. Ancient history is very much alive and kicking. It's where the cool kids

of history stay. Daisy, last thing, your book on Vesuvius and the Plinies is called? It's called In the Shadow of Vesuvius, A Life of Pliny. It's essentially a biography of the two Plinies that tells the story of the eruption and how they lived their lives around it. Fantastic. Daisy, thank you so much for coming back on the show. My pleasure. Thank you.