The Ancients - Treasures of Pompeii

Episode Date: November 19, 2023

Despite being uncovered in the 16th Century - new finds are still being discovered daily in Pompeii. With each new discovery offering a fresh insight into what life was like 2000 years ago, we're able to piece together Pompeii's vibrant past and culture thanks to the work of Archaeologists and historians today. But what would life Pompeii actually have been like for the individuals who lived there, and what do we know about them today?In this episode, Tristan welcomes author and journalist Elodie Harper to the podcast to talk about the archaeological treasures being uncovered in Pompeii today and how they helped provide inspiration for her latest instalment in the bestselling Wolf Den trilogy. Looking at the recent archaeology, the role of the goddess Fortuna, and the indomitable Julia Felix - what would Pompeii have been like for the people who lived there, and what was life like after for those who survived the eruption?You can buy Elodie's book here.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS sign up now for your 14-day free trial HERE.You can take part in our listener survey here.

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. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode, we're going back to that ever popular,

incredibly well-preserved Roman town of Pompeii. We're going to be talking about some really remarkable treasures, discoveries made at Pompeii over the past few hundred years, some more recent than others. And our guest, well, she is an author who has recently completed a trilogy of books set in Pompeii just before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. She is, of course, Elodie Harper, the author of the Wolf Den trilogy. And in this episode, we talk about the real treasures, the real discoveries, objects, buildings that inspired Elodie when writing this trilogy of historical fiction. I really do hope you enjoy. And here's Elodie. Elodie, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast.

Oh, it's great to be here. Thank you. This is lovely. You're more than welcome. Last time we met was over a year ago. We haven't had you on the podcast yet, but had to get you on. We can never talk enough about Pompeii. I'd agree there. We've covered so many aspects, but focusing in on particular discoveries and objects, because it is such a treasure trove, isn't it? Every year they're finding new exciting discoveries, revealing more about what life was like here some 2,000 years ago.

That's absolutely right. And the sort of history of how Pompeii was discovered, the timeline of the discoveries is a fascinating story in itself. But definitely recently, the modern discoveries in the last few years that were made while I was actually writing the book, I think it just shows how the focus of archaeology has shifted. It's also why I chose Pompeii as a place because there's a lot of attention paid now to the most ordinary people, i.e. enslaved people, in terms of what they discover. Just to do a comparison, when the house of Julia Felix was discovered, the first house in the 1700s and 1750s, this was a grand villa and they abandoned a lot of stuff or destroyed the things that they didn't

find interesting and just focused on particular frescoes, things that were especially eye-catching to them. Whereas the recent discovery a couple of years ago of what's been called the slaves room, you can imagine earlier archaeologists would just have powered on through this. But it reveals extraordinary details about the sort of physical reality of how enslaved people lived, which is absolutely unique. We just don't really have this anywhere in the ancient world, but you have it in Pompeii. That is one of the great gems of Pompeii and must be such an amazing feeling to therefore write these stories about Pompeii to see these new discoveries coming out of the ground revealing more information and

allowing you to paint more of a picture of everyday life as you say not just for the elites but for slaves for that lower part of society who lived in this town. Absolutely. And that's exactly why Pompeii was such an exciting setting, given I wanted to focus very much on the lives of ordinary people, of women, enslaved people, freed men and women. Because, you know, when Vesuvius erupted, it didn't have a concept of what it was going to curate. It preserved completely at random, which is how we have, for instance, the broth brothel and we also have the incredibly grand houses for which it's so famous. While I was writing these discoveries about the lives of enslaved people were being made during the writing process so it was really interesting and exciting for me to try and incorporate some of the newer stuff and also when for instance the

slaves room which they believe was the room of a family of people, rammed in higgledy-piggledy, two adults and a child, with a kind of storeroom, completely unlike the grand bedrooms that we associate with the Roman world. And so, yeah, it was really interesting to think about that in terms of the characters I'd created, the type of lives and families they were trying to build for themselves. Let's explore these slave rooms now, because they are interesting, and it seems that there have been more than one that has been discovered. The one you were talking about right there, which slave room are we talking about? That's the first one and visually it's more

complete. It's this small room without ornate decoration at all. The beds are all quite tightly put together. There's a lot of storage equipment connected to where they probably worked which was to do with the stables, the chariots. So I guess it's the sense that this is both personal space and not personal space. It's not somewhere where you're going to find masses of personal artefacts belonging to the people. It's much more utilitarian, but at the same time, it feels deeply personal because it does look like it was a family room where there was a child. And I think it's Aesop who, as a kind of throwaway remark, says about the tragedy of being enslaved is having children who are enslaved.

And I think this was a sort of focus in my writing is what did it mean for Roman people who were enslaved, who had families, how did they keep themselves together? They are physically contained in this space together, this family, but legally they wouldn't have belonged to each other. They could have been separated at any time. So it's interesting from that point of view as well, like the physical closeness, and yet they wouldn't have had the same rights to even be a family. I guess it's also interesting to imagine, could that have been that small room,

given how the squalid nature of a room like that, but also to think that for these people, this could have been their own, maybe their own and only private space sometimes where they lived. Exactly. And it's possible we're even sentimentalising it. Maybe they weren't even related. For me, I very much saw this as a parent-child set up and that's how it was written up it is acknowledged this could have been not even a private space maybe these were just workmates who all had to bunk up together but yes it is possible that it is exactly as you say and that's certainly how I like to think about it as a rare example of a private space and it's interesting as well what you were saying about the squalid conditions because this year some more enslaved people's quarters have been found. And when you talk about squalid, there were rats that have been found there and a mouse that were killed when Vesuvius erupted. But obviously there were vermin. Potentially not very pleasant places to live either.

And that's one of the most recent discoveries from Pompeii. Yes. I think I saw it in the news literally a couple of weeks ago. Yes, exactly. This particular room. What do we know about this room? What artefacts were discovered in that room? Again, it's incredibly sparse.

These storage jars with rodents and a bed. There's not masses of material, but I think even the scarcity of material is quite telling. And alongside these bedrooms of what we assume belong to these slaves who lived in these grand villas or elsewhere in and outside of Pompeii. What other sorts of rooms have been discovered from the archaeology that are associated with slaves from Pompeii? So there are all sorts of interesting aspects of life. For instance, Julia Felix is a character in my novels, and she ran a sort of huge leisure complex, essentially, with a complex and also apartments and shop space and bar space

that she rented out. And she had for this luxury complex a whole service corridor around the back. You physically see the spaces where people who were enslaved both were part of because in the Roman term familia it included people who were enslaved. So you see people who are both part of the world of the family and yet apart from it as well, stuck in the service corridor in the back. And the villa, I think it's in a plantus, but certainly one of the grand villas in Campania, not in Pompeii. You can see the difference in physical design in different parts of the house.

You have this very sort of stark geometric black and white painting for the service areas as opposed to the sort of incredible frescoes of mythological scenes that we're used to elsewhere so you can visually see the differences of what people would have looked at so it's parts of the villa that were to be seen by guests and other parts of the villa that weren't to be seen that you say are from those people who are keeping the house running. Yes, exactly. They have a separate, they're both, it's this sense of separation and yet integration at the same time. And for me, obviously the visual is very interesting and important when you're world building.

But for me, certainly as a fiction writer, I wanted to think about the psychological impact of what this tells us, that it's not as simple as the kind of standard school narrative that there used to be of they're all kind of part of the family. It can almost be jovial or whatever. Yes, of course, some enslaved people would have had close links to the families that they worked for. But a lot really wouldn't. They would have put in a great deal of resentment. The Roman motto, a man has as many enemies as he has slaves.

So it's also the psychological space when you are tied to someone against your will, you work in incredibly close proximity with them. They would often be sexual relationships between people who had total power and no power. And just how that psychologically works works how you cope with that if you were the person with no power is in many ways kind of the basis of the entire trilogy in terms of what interested me which is why I started it in the Lupana where yes it's obviously the people there were obliged to sell sex but actually and almost certainly not for their own profit for somebody else's profit but in a sense you could the fact it was a brothel versus a house or a pub or wherever else the sexual element of what it meant to be enslaved was universal and i think you touched on something

else there which i think is really important which is the names of the people and the people who are at the bottom order society and say sometimes they are just put together as the slaves and they're not written about by lots of our surviving literary sources however you do know the names of some of these figures because of that archaeology that has survived from pompeii and that feels even if it is just a small bit of writing, to have that surviving, to have a name of one of those figures, that's absolutely extraordinary. Totally. I find it profoundly moving, actually. And sometimes you even have slightly more than the names. So certainly in the brothel, you have names, you have Victoria, who refers to herself

as a conquerors, Victrix. I chose to use that as being part of her personality. Of course, we can't know, it could have been a form of advertising, really. But even just having the names of the women, and one woman actually references the name of her father. And we've got doodles on the walls, drawn a ship, a face, a bird, so not sexual symbols, other types of doodling, which sort of is pointing to an interior life. But sometimes you do actually get more writing. So for me, the graffiti that encapsulates for me, almost the most poignant side of Pompeii and why it's so fascinating are two completely contrasting pieces of script. So there's one, which is a kind of public piece of graffiti written by someone saying, take hold of

your slave girl whenever you want. It's your right to use her, which is the sort of both legal and ethical viewpoint, actually, of the Roman world of the elite. That is how they saw enslaved women as a piece of property that could be used. But we also have a very rare example of writing by an enslaved woman, which is on the theatre, and it's along the lines of Methé, the slave girl of Cominia, loves Crestus, may Pompey and Venus bless their love and may they always live in harmony. This is a really poignant, quite innocent declaration of love between two people, completely at odds with the objectification that was going on from outside. Maybe Methé was fortunate to have owners who didn't brutally mistreat her. We don't know.

But in all likelihood, she had a very difficult life. And yet she's expressing an aspect of her interior world there, the love she has for another human being, which is timeless. Absolutely timeless. And I know it's a bit of a generalisation, and maybe it's a quite difficult question to answer, I'm going to go next, is the writing, if some of this writing, let's say, was by Methé herself,

so the generalisation that all slaves couldn't write back then and stuff like that, can we maybe assume that actually some of these slaves, they could write? Yes, I think that's a really interesting question. For the purposes of fiction, I just assumed, I wanted to assume that a lot of this stuff was written by the people themselves. It's true, of course, maybe Methé asked a passing guy, could he write this on the wall for her? whether she physically wrote it herself or whether somebody else wrote it for her. I guess for me, from a point of fiction, whether it was dictated or physically written was less important. And for shorthand, I had people write it themselves.

But the degree of literacy does seem to have been perhaps higher than one might expect in terms of where the graffiti is found. In taverns, there's two guys arguing about who the barmaid fancies more. That's one of my favourite pieces of graffiti. It's quite funny. There is potential that literacy was more widespread than one might expect. Now, we've got to talk about that more morbid part of Pompeii's story, which is, of course, the bodies, those unfortunate victims of the eruption. Pompeii story, which is, of course, the bodies, those unfortunate victims of the eruption.

Have there been discoveries of bodies from Pompeii that have been identified as slaves? There was a recent discovery, I think, I can't remember exactly how long ago, where they thought it was an enslaved person and that person's owner. And they thought this from the surviving clothing and who was better nourished than the other. But I think in some ways, the bodies are incredibly democratic or if they were the children of the household. There is this kind of democracy in death that we simply don't know a lot of the time, particularly as a lot of the castes are older. I have to be honest, I have quite an uncomfortable relationship with the castes. Yeah, they're very confronting to look at, I think, in a way that, say, skeletal remains aren't. You mentioned their clothing. Let's move on to that, therefore. Do we know much about when you're trying to paint a picture of one of these slaves, one of these unfortunate people at the bottom end of Roman society, do we know what they would have worn? There's a certain degree of controversy about whether,

for instance, prostituted women wore togas or not, which was a male dress, and whether they wore this in order to mark them out as being a different type of woman. They inhabit a kind of transgressive sphere, they're infamious, so they are cut off from ever being a full citizen. And it's a way of advertising who they are. But I think it also, perhaps unwittingly, the fact that if you're an enslaved prostitute, you're wearing a toga, unwittingly the fact that if you're an enslaved prostitute you're wearing a toga which is an elite male garment i'm sure they wouldn't have been fancy togas it also indicates how the outsider status didn't grant freedom as such but i guess not subject to exactly the same type of social norms as other women women enslaved in ael, that's not going to do

them much good, but higher up the scale, courtesans wouldn't have worn togas, I can't imagine. They would have wanted to mark themselves out as inferior in that way. But I guess taking the more broader point away from clothing, this kind of outsider liminal status that they had, courtesans, women who were independent from being owned by a man in terms of a husband or a father. They were businesswomen in their own right. In their own right indeed. And so there'll be talks about Julia Felix. We could do a whole podcast on Julia Felix,

that extraordinary figure. But I've got a few other discoveries and objects that we really should delve into because they are brilliant. Keeping on a slave girl a bit longer, there is this artifact that i know you've done a lot of work around and it is this gold bracelet with that inscription on it what is this gold bracelet so the gold bracelet is a golden snake and it's inscribed from the master to his slave girl and it was initially seen as being quite a romantic

gesture that gosh he must have loved her a lot to have given her such a priceless piece of jewelry. Could have been that. Could have been someone that maybe he marked out the favoured concubine in a long series of concubines. I think, again, the bracelet kind of underlines the ambiguity of the relationships between free or freed and enslaved people. The character that I gave the bracelet to is one of the most powerful women in the book and she was given it by her. So it has the sinister meaning of it being in a long line

of concubines, but she is the last survivor standing. He leaves her this bracelet and also her freedom. So that's how she sets up as a sex worker in business. How did you want to portray this relationship between slave girls and their owners in your book? Did you want to portray different relationships with different characters in the book? So I think power dynamics are central to all the books in their different forms. So the first book, I suppose, is incredibly straightforward because the central character, Amara, she is enslaved. She used to be free. Her family fell on very hard times, and so slavery was a form of survival, which wasn't uncommon in the ancient world.

And so it's very much an underdog story. She wants to regain her freedom. She has a love-hate relationship with the man who owns her, but she chooses for it to be hate. She creates that psychological distance for herself she has a much more complex relationship with the man she hopes to free her and I have to be honest I did play around a bit with that with kind of the pretty woman tropes but a kind of dark version in the sense of is real love actually possible between someone who has all the power

and no power so that was looking at romance tropes in the context of this but I think what I felt was important to do what I wanted to look at in the second book I'm afraid this is a bit of a spoiler but the trilogy doesn't stay in the brothel with the woman remaining enslaved that would be unrelentingly grim so So by the second book, she is a freed woman. And the thing is, freed people who had been enslaved then went on to own other people. And I felt it was really important that this character that hopefully people loved and identified with was shown in that role as also being a slave owner. And the psychological journey she would have to go on to do that because this is simply something that people did. I gave her quite a high degree of guilt and awareness over it because that is easier for us to understand and I also think not psychologically

implausible given she had been enslaved herself she would understand what it meant but at the same time she doesn't. She uses people for profit. She does exactly what's been done to her. It's almost becoming part of the system, isn't it? Yeah. In a grim way, but also that survival element of raising up the ladder almost. The survival element and also belonging to the society to which you belong with the social expectations and beliefs. It's so tempting when you write historical fiction, and I'm sure I fall into this to a certain degree, It's so tempting when you write historical fiction, and I'm sure I fall into this to a certain degree, to bring a modern sensibility.

But I really tried not to as much as I possibly could. There were certain... I chose not to sugarcoat it. You could go down a really grim alley with this type of story. I didn't want to show any explicit or graphic sexual scenes, for instance. I thought it's absolutely more than sufficient to know that this is happening without having to witness it in detail as a reader or indeed as a writer this can be quite traumatizing for people to read I would have found it traumatizing to write but at the same time I did try to stay as close as possible to the ancient mindset

and it must be so interesting when you're in that focus, when you're doing all of this research and writing this fiction, to then look at the archaeology of real figures from Pompeii. Let's say like Julia Felix, the businesswoman who seems to have had this background of once being a slave, then going on to own slaves herself. It must give you an interesting perspective, viewpoint on your thoughts of someone like Julia Felix. So Julia Felix, I think, wasn't ever enslaved. No, not at all. It's Amara's the central character. But Julia Felix was the daughter of a freedman. That's what it says on the inscription. Yeah. So thinking about Julia Felix, how I built that character, things that we know about her, that she was an incredibly successful businesswoman. She probably capitalised on the

earthquake, which knocked some of the baths out of action for a while of renting out this bath space. Some of her home decor is incredibly imaginative and more original than maybe some of the other stuff that we see in that she paints everyday objects, not her personally, but she has painted everyday objects, scenes from the forum, for instance, which we've conveniently decided were not overly idealized and do actually represent from the forum for instance which we've conveniently decided were not overly idealized and do actually represent what the forum looked like whereas very sort of high-end mythological scenes are more common in the expensive houses we know she was i guess quite a grounded person from this successful at business we also know she was likely a pretty extraordinary person because her complex is one of the only ones where she managed to get an entire road closed off for her to expand her business. That is a fair enough assumption to make given the roads closed. incredibly charming because I think she would have had to have been successful in a leisure business

but also really savvy intelligent ruthless and I made her without any spoilers quite transgressive in other ways too. We always love talking about Julia Felix but let's move on because I'd like to talk about some other discoveries from Pompeii and another one that I know takes a part in your book this recent discovery. I can't believe this. I love it when something like this is unearthed. A chariot. Oh my gosh, the chariot. It's incredible. Yeah. So this is the rooms for enslaved people. The chariot is actually not within the walls of Pompeii itself. It's slightly north of it, but it is still the same archaeological site. The chariot is absolutely fascinating.

So it would have been, I think it's been described as the Lamborghini of Roman road travel. These massive wheels, it would have been painted scarlet. It had these roundels showing scenes of what to modernise looks like sexual assault, to be honest. looks like sexual assault, to be honest. I think that is quite telling in the sense that some erotic art of Pompeii looks pretty non-consensual, which I'm sorry to say does illustrate their attitudes about this. They found this extraordinary chariot and was it maybe bridal was it maybe used in some kind of religious festivals we don't know it was probably looked after by the enslaved people whose rooms we found that had horse type equipment in it when I saw this my sister phoned me and was like Amara's gotta have a ride in this chariot I was writing the second book at the time and she was going to be celebrating the Floralia, which was a festival that celebrated courtesans, sex workers, sex, spring. And I just

thought, there we go. She can be in the chariot for the Floralia. Yeah, I really enjoyed writing about it. But it is an extraordinary piece of archaeology. You mentioned the Lamborghini of ancient Rome and those chariots have been described as the sports car, the ancient sports car. But to think, it's elaborate, it's rich in decoration, it's not used in warfare like those other powers from hundreds of years before the time we're talking about now. But this was there. It's important. The first time I think, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, but there is physical proof of these chariots within Italy alongside, let's say, the depictions on reliefs and so on. To think, to create that world where you had had these processional vehicles

going down the streets of Pompeii, maybe to the Forum or across the countryside. It's that wonderful ability to create that world and to have that archaeological basis for it too. Yes, I mean, it is extraordinary. And I think it also underlines when you find a new discovery, just how much we will never know. And it is why fiction is an easier job than nonfiction, because it's like with another they represented good luck good fortune a propitious relationship between gods and men some kind of doorway state but ultimately we'll never know exactly what some of these things meant but i do think what you were saying in terms of creating the world what pompeii gives us even if we don't understand the meaning in the ways that the ancients would have understood the meaning of these objects we can understand what they looked like we have to draw our own inferences as to what they may

have meant but for me certainly i find that extraordinary i find that extraordinary about pompeii and the surrounding sites that you can walk into a house that is over 2 000 years old and know that house even though it's semi-ruinous, would be recognisable to the person who last lived there 2,000 years ago. You are seeing so much of what they saw. Let's talk about one of those particular houses. This has also been in the news recently. You mentioned those golden serpents.

And correct me if I'm wrong if it's in a different house, but also in that house you have these beautiful frescoes that have survived, including one of food. And I see the word pizza being mentioned all around the place. Now, clear the air on this. What is this? Oh my goodness, the pizza. The short answer is, I don't know what the pizza was. It probably wasn't a pizza, but it looks like one. And I think that's, again, it's about the visual. It's this type of bread that's got fruit or other food on it. But visually, it looks like a pizza. So let's say we're walking into one of these houses,

and Pompeii is full of all of these incredible, beautiful, colourful frescoes, whether in the house of Julia Felix in the Triclinium or many of these other villas. The scenes that are depicted there is a great variety of scenes aren't there? Yes absolutely. When we walk into these grand houses or indeed some of the less savoury places like the brothel, when I was recreating this in fiction the brothel is a very small compact space. I spent a lot of time studying it and trying to recreate it visually exactly as it was. When it came to some of the grander houses, what I wanted to do was look at a variety and then invent my own based on what is there. And some of the ones that I found really interesting. So there's the incredibly famous

House of Menander, which has a lot of theatrical frescoes, which is fascinating. So it's a lot of things to do with the theatre. In fact, a lot of Pompeii has a lot of theatrical frescoes, which is fascinating. So it's a lot of things to do with the theatre. In fact, a lot of Pompeii has a lot of theatrical paintings and mosaics, and that fitted in with Rufus, the character who loves the theatre and loves performance. In terms of The House with the Golden Door, it was based on a number of houses, in particular the Casa de Sey, which has this unbelievably powerful, massive garden fresco of a beast hunt.

It's a sort of beautifully depicted scene of violence. And, you know, my character Amara creates a very violent, she commissions a very violent scene of Actaeon being torn apart by Diana's hounds. So I think we do sometimes visually think of the frescoes, which are more common, of quite small scenes, almost like paintings on the wall. So you'll have like a red colour and then like a square or a circle with a beautiful detailed scene of mythological characters. But there were also these massive pictures

that you have to stand to look up at them. They would have been quite overwhelming to see. And it's so interesting to think that there are these, almost these, I've seen you describe them as these high subject frescoes, as you say, of epic scenes of Greek mythology or a scene from the amphitheatre, maybe a famous bout or something like that. Or, of course, I'll have to say that Alexander the Great's mosaic. Yeah, extraordinary.

Extraordinary one. Two frescoes of someone selling bread or selling pots in the forum so you get that everyday aspect you get the the grand narratives from history alongside it seems in many of these places these events that people would have been doing almost every day in pompeii yeah that is what's so special about them and And thinking about recent discoveries as well, the fast food place, because it's only just been discovered, you see how incredibly bright the colours were. It's bright yellow. It's got pictures of the livestock that they perhaps would have cooked or maybe a slightly more expensive version of what they would have cooked given

snails seem to have been one of the things that was found in a stew. Yes, almost for a semi-literate society, some of the images are telling the story. I think it's Herculaneum where you have pictures of what's for sale and the price underneath. But stuff that's quite utilitarian and then this extraordinary mythological scenes. Mythological scenes are quite repetitive. You get certain myths repeated over and over.

Venus is really popular, Venus and Mars in Pompeii, because Venus was the patron of Pompeii. She appears quite often. And something else you mentioned there, which seems also really important to stress, is colour. When you're recreating this world to emphasise that vibrant nature of Pompeii and the fact that those people, whether it's Amara or Julia Felix, they're walking through this place or elsewhere in the Roman Empire and there is colour absolutely everywhere.

Colour everywhere, that's right. Even on the statues, which to us look quite austere and white, they would have been painted. I always love coming across ancient Roman statues that still have traces of paint. There was one I saw in Rome where there were traces that the whole face was painted gold. So not always lifelike paintings either. They would have been incredibly imposing and overwhelming, I think, and sometimes probably quite Gordian garish. But yeah, the colour, I think, is something that both metaphorically and literally I wanted to be in the book, the sense that this is a technicolour world.

Absolutely very striking indeed. Now, I did promise before we end we would go on to the next topic, which I know focuses, is a big part of your upcoming book. And this is what happened after the eruption, this relief effort in the wake of this massive disaster. effort in the wake of this massive disaster? Yes. So setting a trilogy in Pompeii, people expect rightly that you're going to deal with the eruption. And for the first book in particular, because what interests me is actually not the eruption, I'm really, as you've probably worked out from this podcast, I am just so fascinated by the details of how people lived rather than how they tragically died. But I wanted to cover the eruption because I felt it is part of Pompeii's story, this idea of this incredibly vibrant, busy place that is simply interrupted and how everyone's lives are interrupted.

But A, how unsatisfying to end a trilogy with they all die in the end and the eruption being the kind of full stop to the story and not continuing the characters arcs or understanding what what happens but also i think that it's so famous it's covered i wanted to look at what's lesser known but just as important which was the relief effort afterwards this eruption which destroyed a whole area of life, had a massive impact on Roman consciousness, not just for the people who lived there, but right across Italy. Apparently, the eruption caused clouding over Rome. It was a massive natural disaster that had this economic, psychological, logistical impact. psychological, logistical impact. And even though we don't have masses of detail, we do know that the Romans took the relief effort very seriously, that Titus, the emperor of the time, actually

visited to see the relief effort, that there was a lot of thought putting into how the rebuilding was done, how it was paid for. People who died in the eruption without heirs, that money went to the relief effort. The state didn't take it. And in Naples, for instance, a whole kind of area of the town was named after Herculaneum, which suggests that's where refugees from Herculaneum settled. And how quickly that was built, we don't know. Maybe they were living in a kind of shantytown of tents whilst the building was going on. And in terms of the site of Pompeii itself, that was stripped and salvaged, thieved from. It's not entirely clear, but certainly some of the marble, for instance, from the Forum might have been stripped off to then build some of

these new things in Naples. That whole aspect of the story and what it would have meant for people that the whole place where you've lived no longer exists it does not exist it's been obliterated just how people might have come to terms with that psychologicalist first of all you've survived what seems like armageddon and then figuring out okay i've survived what happens next where's my town can i go back and get any belongings is there exactly these people who are digging through this debris to get marble or whatever from their houses? This is it. We don't know exactly. There's 100% people dug in. We don't know the dates of when they dug in and who was doing the digging.

So some would have been thieves. Some might have been the official relief effort. Some might have been people desperate to get back in. Some of the bodies that have been found in Pompeii might actually have been those of salvagers. It was incredibly dangerous to get back into this site. So it complicates the picture and some of the damage done to the site is again, particularly around the Forum area or the Temple of Venus. We don't know if that was caused by the eruption or earthquakes or people salvaging. So yeah, there is that sense. And the eruption itself as well, of course, is remarkably recounted by Pliny the Younger in a lot of detail. So that also was very handy to write about. Absolutely, to have Pliny's letters. One letter in particular is very good, then there's the other one, isn't there?

Yes. I think you've always highlighted it really well there. The fact that sometimes we can get focused on the eruption itself and it's important to talk about the eruption but actually the story of Pompeii the lives of the people who lived there before the eruption what this town was like and also trying to get a sense of what it was like for the people who then survived this catastrophe those are two parts of Pompeii's story which are arguably more interesting than the eruption itself. For me, 100% more interesting. I'm not saying that the eruption isn't a hugely dramatic event.

I hope it's dramatic in the way that I've written it. But I do think absolutely the life of the town. That was the primary reason why I wanted to write about the place, because it is just unbelievably rich in what it shows us and tells us. But the aftermath, I think, what it reveals, the fact that the emperor went, is that so different from modern American presidents going to see relief efforts? Why did he go? This is a morale boosting exercise, surely, as much as it is him actually going to do anything useful there on the ground, glad handing or whatever. The people he put in charge to manage it, it's a sense of saying, Rome is here.

I decided to have the army and Pliny's, because we know that Pliny's fleet obviously attempted, Pliny the Elder attempted a rescue mission. So I had them playing a role in the relief effort as well. We don't know all the logistics of it, but we know that it was a big deal and that many people survived. And many of them stayed in the local area. It's not like they decided to go further away. Very interesting indeed.

I like how you mentioned that Herculanean citizens who may well have survived and then settled in that area. And then that part of that area being renamed after the Herculaneans. Yeah, for hundreds of years it was known as that. Elodie, that seems like a good place to start wrapping this up. The end of the trilogy is nigh. The last book it is called? So the last book is called The Temple of Fortuna. It's out on the 9th of November and is available for pre-order.

It looks at a number of different temples of Fortuna in the ancient world, one in Rome, of which we still have some remains, and the same in Pompeii, where there's another temple of Fortuna. Pliny the Elder said that Fortuna is more powerful than God, this deity that can upend every aspect of life. And what's more fitting than when you're looking at a massive natural disaster than the goddess of fortune?

Absolutely. It definitely seems the God you need at that time. Elodie, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Oh, thank you so much for having me, Tristan. It's been such a pleasure. Well, there you go. There was Elodie Harper talking all things these great treasures of Pompeii and what inspired her when writing this trilogy of fictional books set in Pompeii just before the eruption of Vesuvius, both actual objects discovered and buildings too. I really do hope you enjoyed the episode today. Now last very special

thing from me, because from the 1st of December, well the ancients, we're going to be starting to release bonus episodes. And as a subscriber to History Hit hit you will be able to access these bonus episodes you can subscribe directly via apple if that's where you listen or by following the link in the show notes and boy these bonus episodes where we're determined to make them something special for you so stay tuned look out for the first of december and our first big bonus episode that's going to be released but that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.