The Rest Is History - 16. Pompeii

Episode Date: January 21, 2021

Pompeii Why does Pompeii continue to hold such a fascination for so many people? And which secrets are still to be uncovered from beneath the ashes? Dr Sophie Hay, a leading expert on the ruined Italian city, joins Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook to answer lots of listener questions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello and welcome to The Rest is History, where today we are going off with a bang because we are talking about Pompeii, Herculaneum, Vesuvius, the works. I'm Tom Holland and with me is my co-conspirator Dominic Sandbrook. And Dominic, thank thank you very very much for allowing me to do Pompeii. It's really kind of you. You don't dare to face me on your own do you Tom? That's true and I'm very very happy to announce that we have a very special guest with us today.

Sophie Hay who is an archaeologist who's worked at Pompeii and the adjoining areas for 25 years, runs the Pompeii social media accounts, is just about to start a book on women archaeologists who worked at Pompeii, so there couldn't be anyone better to talk about the site. Sophie, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Hello. Well, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure, Sophie. So obviously, I'm terribly excited to be doing one on pompeii me too tom me too i think it would only be fair to hand over to dominic to ask the first question because otherwise i'm just going to kind of explode with excitement okay thank you tom sophie i went to pompeii on honeymoon in 2007 um along with you know a billion other people and it's a it's a kind of weird place

isn't it because it's both an archaeological site where you sort of dig for historical artifacts and for insights into history but it's also basically the roman disney world right i mean there's a kind of tension there isn't there it's a sort of strange must be a weird thing for you for whom it's work and most people just go on a day trip and they're interested in the gift shop and then you know sunshades and coke and all this sort of stuff so does that seem kind of weird to you to be working amidst all that um it's it's interesting i mean when i was working there i was mainly in a part where the tourists couldn't be so i was kind of you know shielded from all of that but I did work in the forum uh at one point and that it was like being a sort of museum exhibit yourself um tourists

coming up saying have you found any dinosaurs yet and I must be in about six billion people's photograph albums because everyone's taking photographs so yeah that kind of when it was really in my face it was it was weird and also work was very slow because you were just answering questions um but it's also great because you know that what you're doing matters and means something to so many people so there's a kind of that side of it i i adore i just love people's fascination continual sort of questions about sight um and what we're doing. So, yeah. It does make you uneasy that it's become a kind of, a sort of, well, you know,

how many coach loads of American, Chinese and British tourists go to Pompeii every year and sort of troop round and then troop off again. Yeah, no, that bit always makes me sad because I just think they do. They go to three main things. They see the forum, they see the brothelel they laugh in the brothel then they go and see one house and then they're back on their coach and they go off to you know have a nice lunch somewhere yeah um it does because i just feel like they haven't had the most of it but you know at the same time there are people who stay there for days on end and you know really try and embrace

everything so so for you you you hinted um at the fact that obviously lots of it is open to the public but also quite a lot isn't and even more hasn't even been excavated yeah and one of the excitements that's going on at the moment is that there's a kind of a surge of fresh fresh excavations so can you just give us a sense of um how much remains to be opened and what the most exciting recent discoveries have been well what remains to be opened is really hard to say because it changes every five minutes as they're doing conservation they open up a new house but then they close another one so that it kind of gets a break from tourists trooping in and out with

their backpacks scratching along the frescoes and things. So it's kind of always in kind of flux, the site. It's, you know, and some are only open in the morning. Some buildings are only open in the afternoon. So they're trying to kind of stagger it a bit just to kind of help. But in terms of what hasn't been excavated at all, it's about one third of the town. So it's still a huge amount that hasn't been excavated. And on top of that, there's sort of farms growing tomatoes,

which I used to go and steal for sandwiches, which is why I know they're up there. Yeah, because famously, the reason why the soil is so fertile is because it's volcanic. So in a sense, it's kind of devil's bargain, isn't there? So I guess we should, having just kind of vaguely sketched out what you can see and what the state of play is now we should talk briefly about how it is that Pompeii and Herculaneum have been preserved

um because it's probably the most famous volcanic explosion in history isn't it uh yeah I would I would go with that uh yeah so uh the whole eruption took sort of 24 hours I think in total uh so it was kind of a bit of a slow burner, which is why, you know, we find, I think, so many people still there because people kept thinking, we'll be OK, we'll be OK. But the first thing they saw really was this kind of column of smoke coming and a cloud of gas coming out of the out of the mountain. And we know about this because Pliny the Younger, who was the nephew of Pliny the Elder, was actually writing about this at the time, otherwise we wouldn't have a clue. So we have a really nice eyewitness account of this eruption. And yeah, this column of ash and gases rose up to about, I think it was about 30 kilometres up into the air and then collapsed on itself. And that's when we kind of get all the pumice stone raining down,

starting to cover the city. But this takes so long. I mean, there's sort of hours of this that people are kind of, well, maybe we'll be all right. And then, you know, as it builds up in the town and the material kind of gradually so had this happened had this happened before so in other words i mean in terms yes so people when they thought it's probably going to go away or it'll be a bit of a pain but we'll get over it they weren't being completely demented they thought they didn't i mean the previous one was sort of nearly 2,000 years beforehand.

But the volcano must have rumbled and thrown stuff. Yeah, they had no concept of an eruption. They had concepts of earthquakes. They had a lot of earthquakes, and they were well aware that, you know, they were in an unstable area, but they had no clue, not an inkling as to the idea of an eruption. And even Pliny the Elder, who is Mr. Natural History, he didn't really even think that Vesuvius was a volcano anyway.

So, I mean, you know, not even the people in the know knew. Pliny gets it wrong, Sean. Exactly, there's the headline. What did he think it was, just a mountain with a lot of smoke? It's there in the names, isn't it? Because the story is is that hercules the great hero who i'm sure we've talked about before dominic on many podcasts about um the story is that he he comes to italy and uh the giants are rebellious against the gods and so he shoves them underneath vesuvius and so the idea is that they're kind of twitching and shaking and

convulsing that must be the sort of earthquake. Which generates the earthquake. Yeah. And Heracles gives his name to Herculaneum, and he's supposed to have had a victory procession, which in Greek is Pompeii, which is supposedly where the name Pompeii comes from. So there must have been some kind of idea that... Yeah.

Potentially there was danger. But as you say, I mean, no idea about what came next. It's a long stretch from, you know, the earth shaking a bit to... Yeah. And people live in earthquake zones now, don't they? I mean, people live in LA or Istanbul or... Exactly. And they live under volcanoes now too. And, you know, it was when I lived there, I lived there solidly for four years. So I got to know, you know, the locals.

And it was a real split camp on whether people would stay in the city during an eruption or not. And, of course, some of them had actually lived through the last eruption, which was in 1944. So they kind of knew, you know, and they know that there were sort of potential disaster, but they weren't prepared to leave. That was their home, you know. That was where they were going to stay.

And then I found some friends who were on a motorbike and getting the hell out. And that's, you know, that's what I, those are the friends I stuck with. And give us some sense, Sophie, of the sort of size and importance of Pompeii before the eruption happened. So is it, it's not that far from, I mean, Naples was presumably a bigger place then, was it, Neapolis? Yes, Neapolis, exactly. And was it a sort of – was it a resort town, a market town? It's more of a port town.

So Herculaneum is more the kind of resort. Yeah, and Pompeii was very much a kind of working town. But it's interesting because people always say, well, Pompeii is a kind of bog standard town. It's like – I can't remember who said it, but someone said it. Reading, isn't it? Exactly. Something like that. Saffron Walden, I think it's been connected.

But I don't really think it is. I mean, I've traveled quite extensively around the Roman Empire. And I think it's actually, on its own, it's quite an astounding place. The level of craftsmanship, the sort of the organization of the place i think it's it was actually quite a special place but it was yeah the main hub of it was it was a port town and it's old isn't it i mean it's an old place it's kind of yeah proceeds the romans precedes the greeks you've got these people called oscars who are who are settling there and then um well actually sophie you and i know this because um sulla the the terrifying

republican general who is the first to march on rome the reason he has these armies is because the italians have kind of risen in revolt against roman rule and it's sulla who um essentially besieges and storms pompeii and the um the crater marks on the walls left by his catapults can still be seen and the last time you took me to pompeii you pointed them at me so it's an absolute highlight there is one catapult that still still exists they found it just i mean it does look like a a bomb really yeah that's going to do some damage kind of amazing amazing sight and um and then and then salop his his troops get planted there and it becomes a colony so in a sense you know within kind of you know less than two centuries by the time of the destruction it's

it's a collar it's been colonized by the Romans it's been stormed by the Romans it's been colonized by the Romans and so it is a kind of hybrid place yeah no absolutely and this is what aggravates me my little you know one of my mini heels that I'll go and die on is that people say it's a time capsule, frozen in time. I mean, well, you can't really say frozen when it's just undergone an eruption. But this kind of time capsule thing as if it's preserving something absolutely at a specific time, it really kind of annoys me because it has got this history that goes back to the sort of 6th century BC. And the whole city is a kind of palimpsest of all of this. It's, you know, as most cities are, they're sort of, you know, there's older bits, there's newer bits. And it doesn't really fit in that sort of time capsule moment for me at all.

So it's not a particular frozen moment of kind of Roman-ness? Absolutely not. No, not to me. And how many of the people there would have been, I mean, how many of the people, would everybody there have considered themselves Romans? More or less, yeah. So it wasn't a sort of a melting pot, as it were? Well, I mean, it is. But then, then you know to be a roman citizen you you were a roman citizen whether you came from syria right wherever so in that sense yes i mean then there's obviously there's a lot of slaves who were not considered citizens and stuff so there's you know

there's it is still a melting pot but but but the system is the indian goddess isn't there who is conventionally called lakshmi the statue The statue of the Indian goddess in the Naples Archaeological Museum. Yes. I don't think it is Lakshmi. No, it's not. It's the other one. I'm being told off that traditionally that's what she's called. It's the other one, but yes, the name escapes me.

But I mean, that is also the fascination of it, isn't it? That you get the sense of peoples who lived there who don't normally show up in the kind of historical records for the Grand Sweep. And so it is kind of possible to tell the stories of the kinds of class of people who otherwise we might not be able to. That's something that you're particularly interested in, isn't it? Yeah, no, for me, and I think, you know, it's become really popular more recently is to edge away from the emperors and the main civic buildings.

You know, we know about temples, we know about basilica and all of that stuff. But Pompeii gives you, you know, amazing, amazing opportunity to see everyday life and the person who owns a bar the person who runs uh a laundrette um and then the sort of the invisible slaves kind of come to life as well because you can actually start imagining them you know at work they don't leave many traces behind but you can suddenly see this city is only going to function with you know an engine room type thing of slaves behind it and i think that's what pompeii gives me is suddenly this sort of huge light is cast on those members of society that don't normally kind of get into the history books.

So let me ask you this question. So as a modern historian, when I go to a lot of these sites, there's always this slight element of being underwhelmed because there's a pile of stones. So when I dragged my son and I said, there's this most amazing Roman... You're that guy on TripAdvisor. Yeah, exactly. Wilm because there's a pile of stones. So when I dragged my son and I said, there's this most amazing Roman site, he often says, is there actually a wall or is it really just a line of stones? And there's some sort of degree of truth in that is that you go to these sites and you're hoping to get into the Roman world and and it is just buildings but Pompeii

is obviously different because the one thing that everybody gets from Pompeii are they the plaster casts of the people fleeing the explosion so you see the effectively see the people but you see them frozen or rather kind of I guess baked in the moment of agony in the moment of their death and at what point does that sort of cross a bit of a line? I mean, you wouldn't do that in any other, in any sort of recent natural disaster, you wouldn't say, oh, let's go and look at all the corpses of the people who died. So how do you, how do you kind of feel about that? Do you think it's, I mean, obviously, you know, the visitors love it, but do you feel it's okay? I sort of sit on a bit of a fence on that. I think, obviously, you know, the visitors love it, but do you feel it's OK?

I sort of sit on a bit of a fence on that. I think ethically I feel it is a bit voyeuristic and it makes me a little bit uncomfortable. But at the same time, it has given us and it's given Pompeii that real sort of visceral sense of what happened. And the city was populated and they did suffer. And I think without them being cast and just seeing, you know, some bones, I don't think it has that same power. And as archaeologists and tourists, we always feel we need that connection or to relate to something to better understand it. And I think that's what they provide for me anyway.

There are dogs and horses. I know, there's a pig. There's a pig. Kind of amazing. Exactly. No. So, Sophie, one thing I wonder about that, that the way that these, they're not bodies, are they?

I mean, the plaster casts, the kind of the gaps that these incinerated people had left. There seems to be a huge temptation to impose narratives and stories onto them. So it can be kind of quite fun. There was this kind of famous, was it last year? There was a picture of a body with a rock that had fallen on it that everyone found very funny. But you also get stories about women going to see gladiators and all this kind of stuff. Now, that is a kind of romantic projection, isn't it? I mean, the evidence for these stories, when you look at them closely, almost always tends to kind of slightly fall to pieces.

Yes. Well, that's that kind of goes back to us always trying to relate and to make them something that we understand or give them a story so that we feel emotionally attached um and yes there's the the cast of the pregnant woman um or is it just a bit of her clothing that's ridden up and has given her a bulge and you know we're not sure um uh so yes i think it's a really a natural sort of idea for us to try and make these stories and then yes as you say later on you know they scan the cast and they find out that actually that woman was a man or the other way around um uh i think there was one that was supposed to be it was called the more and it turned out to be a local lad of 14 or something

who just happened to be a bit bigger framed. So, yes, they did get unravelled, but at the same time, it's so natural. And when I do it every day on site, you know, I would make up little stories about my barman because it kind of helps kind of tick it along. But equally, not to be a party pooper, there are amazing stories

that you can extrapolate perhaps not from the bodies but from the graffiti and from the exactly so on so so just give a couple of your favorite examples of that uh i think one of my favorites is um this uh this man called gaius alias nigidius maus. And I like him because he kind of embodies to me how we find out about these people in Pompeii. We don't go into their houses and rummage through their sort of desk drawers and find a whole load of documents that tell us exactly what he was doing on this day or whatever. You know, we don't have that in Pompeii. And I think people think that that's how it works is, you know, you find the house of someone and you automatically know what they're all up to. And this guy who, they discovered his house in 1810, I think. So very early on in the beginning of the excavations. And they found his

name painted on the wall and said, this is my property, I want to let it out. So see my slave Primus about, you know, renting it. And that's what we knew about him. Then it kind of transpired that his family who had adopted him was very rich because they've got tombs outside the town. And then about a hundred years later, you know, on the other side of Pompeii, excavation is continuing and they find some painted notices on the wall,

which tell us that Negidius Maius is in charge of organising the amphitheatre games. So we suddenly get a flashback 100 years later to sort of, you know, this guy, yes, I remember him from over there. And then we find out that he was organising games probably during the ban, when Nero banned the games from AD 59,

because he starts putting on games, but they don't have gladiators in them because they're banned because there was a riot and Nero got cross. And then spool forward to, I think it was about 2018. So another hundred years passes and they find a tomb in the south of the city and they find a huge long inscription. Everyone gets very excited, except there's no name on it.

So it's still kind of a blank. But in the inscription, they've got details of this huge banquet that's put on for over, well, it's nearly 7,000 people he puts a banquet on for. But it also says he was the organiser of the games during the ban of Nero. So it's probably his tune. And this whole inscription is a bit sort of like the Reyes-Guestide type thing.

It's sort of what I did when I was alive and what I accomplished and how great they are. So then we've suddenly got a biography of this man. But this has taken 200 years to piece together from three different places in town. And I just think, you know, his life is, he was very important in the town. He had the highest office, the ranking office that you could have. But yeah, that's, the process is really slow. And I think that he embodies it for me. And I just kind of love that fragmentary sticking jigsaw pieces together.

So Dom, he's kind of Barry Hearn. Yes, or indeed Donald Trump. That's a nice thought, isn't it? He put games on free. He was nice. He was a nice guy. There's never a free lunch. No, no, no.

There's a quid pro quo, isn't there? Sophie, since you've already outed me as the man man on trip advisor who complains about a pile of stones might as well go all in okay um the other thing that people take away from pompeii that everybody knows about is the erotic art right i mean that's what a lot of tourists come to see they come to see they expect to see mosaics of sort of people, you know, behaving in a debauched way. Yes. Now, my question is sort of twofold. Is that, have we exaggerated that or was that kind of the norm?

And if it was the norm and people had that stuff in their kind of dining room, does that tell us that the Romans were completely unlike us and their sort of moral standards and everything were utterly different? Or am I exaggerating and overplaying that no i think you're spot on i think um it is really prevalent and when they first started excavating in the in the mid 18th century the excavators were horrified to find that there were phalluses um of sort of transcended every class in Pompeii. It wasn't just, you know, in the elite or it wasn't just the, you know, the naughty little sort of bar owners and things like that.

It pervaded all sort of society. And they were absolutely horrified. And they took all of the material away and hid it in a museum in the palace at Portage, because they just didn't want people to know that, you know, the Romans were so unlike, I mean, I say us, I mean, this is already 50 years ago. And that carried on, you know, hiding this stuff. And in fact, which then became the secret museum in Naples, which only opened to the public in 2000. That's when it was kind of deemed okay. So, I mean, it's taken us quite a long time to get to grips with the pornography.

As it were. As it were, yes. No pun intended. In fact, I went to the British Library. I probably shouldn't name and shame them, but I went to the British Library to look at one of the erotic art books of Pompeii and it was under sort of special handling label or something and I had to go and I had to go to a desk where I

wasn't allowed to take photographs it had you know a big sort of stickers on it saying don't take photos and it was literally a coffee table book of the frescoes that we see on the internet all the time but I just thought this is quite hilarious that still, you know, in 2019, whenever it was, that it was still under this kind of ban. But no, it was. It was everywhere. And I think they did. So give me some sense.

So basically, if you grew up in Pompeii or indeed any Roman town in that time, you were surrounded by this stuff all the time, right? From childhood to, you know, it wasn't something that little Johnny and great-aunt Marjorie don't get to see because they're the wrong age and it's not appropriate. It's always appropriate? Was that the kind of... I think there were slight boundaries. I mean, there's lots of context for sort of rude bits and pieces. Obviously, you've got the brothel, which, which you know kids probably wouldn't be going to um but inside private houses you know they're mainly the erotic

pictures are mainly in the more private areas although there's some are in sort of the atrium which is where everyone can go um but then you've got things like the plaques with penises on for um sort of good luck so that has a a completely different sort of idea about it. And that was seen by everybody. They were on street corners, they were above your door, they were on wind chimes, lamps. I mean, yeah, you would see a phallic symbol even as a child, absolutely. I find Pompeii quite oppressive for that reason because it's tempting

to fight going in a t he huge fallacies everywhere yeah but i mean actually children would have been sexually abused um in in houses and in brothels i mean they were you know they're perfectly legitimate and what what i feel when you go to pompeii and you look at the spaces in which the slaves were obliged to live and you you know that they are kind of free game for whoever is free, whoever owns them. And you feel how horrendous it must have been to be owned, to be kind of subject to the kind of sustained sexual abuse that clearly is providing the the sexual economy of of Pompeii with its its foundations and so I think that one of the one of the tensions in going to Pompeii is that it is marketed as um uh something where you can see how the Romans really lived and the implication is oh look they were just like us but actually I think if you look more deeply you find

they weren't like us at all it It was kind of terrifyingly different. On which note, I think perhaps we should go for a break. And when we come back, maybe... I thought you were going to plug your book there, Tom. That was the obvious. I was about to. I was about to. I could see you thinking of it.

I was about to. And I could sense the disappointment unspoken coming at me down the line. So no, I'm not going to plug my book, which is available from all good bookshops. Let's go for a break and when we come back, maybe I can plug it then. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment

news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to the rest of the entertainment.com that's the rest is entertainment.com welcome back to uh my show Rest Is History, with my guests Tom Holland and Dr Sophie Hay, who's here to talk about Pompeii. We have a ton of questions, Tom, from people on Twitter. I'm going to kick off with Mark Woodhouse. He says, he just wants to cut to the chase, basically. He says he wants to know what is the most significant find

from the recent excavations and what do you reckon is there? What is left? What's waiting to be dug up, Sophie? So, yeah, no, the new excavations have been absolutely, I mean, just mind-boggling to me. And I'm quite used to all of, you know, the things that are found in Pompeii. But I have been as googly-eyed as everybody else watching these things kind of appear out the

ground and there should be some kind of um caveat saying that why these excavations took place because I think people are just believing that they're going ahead digging without conserving what they've got and in fact this is all part of a of a bigger project um that was given eu funding to to basically make the sides of the excavation stable um so it's a conservation project but it's got an element as they kind of step back the side of the excavation there they are actually digging in houses um but yeah no absolutely stunning and i do actually think that the the most recent find of the of the bar right um bar is probably one of the most important because it takes us beyond what we knew before.

Whereas a lot of the other things, although they're stunning. And why does it do that, Sophie? Because of the material found, the food that was found actually in the pots? Yeah, no, absolutely. For the first time, and they're quite right in saying that, we can dig something absolutely properly and they can throw technology at it they've got the zoo archaeologists they've got archaeobotanists looking at the at the remains inside the pot so the fact that they found duck bone a duck bone inside the pot it's actually the first time that we've got a bone in a pot

in a bar in pompeii um food has been found in these kind of sunken, sort of sunken ceramic vessels that are kind of encased within the bar. And all the previous ones that we know of or any evidence we've had is always dried food. So we've always had this thing that the, you know, they were serving dried food and suddenly we get shifted completely off

and we suddenly think, oh, actually they were producing hot food and it was being stored in these in these in these pots and we have i think there was a pork and fish dish so probably the first surf and turf dish that there was um in one pot the other the next pot is even worse you'd right and get pork and fish rather than snails fish and sheep soup or something snails

fish and what sheep sheep yeah and then fish gut sauce exactly garum

is that garum yeah well that's alright actually that's more like soy sauce so we can we can kind of let the garum

garum slide off but snail soup doesn't eat much I mean important to emphasise as well that it's off but but snail soup there's not much for me i mean important to emphasize as well that it's not just pompeii because there's also herculaneum which is yes the modern town of um is is built right on top of it and i i think um i'm right in remembering that um the house of the local mafia boss is over a crucial section of it yes so that's not going to happen and then of course there's the famous the villa of papyri isn't that exactly yeah the tantalizing possibility yeah no when i worked

there they had demolished a whole series of houses and there was this sort of little island sticking up and and in it was the uh the mafia boss under house arrest um watching us doing our work so yeah so yeah so the roman patterns of patronage last into the 21st century exactly okay well here here's here's the here's the big question here's the big question it's from neil page are we any closer in getting consensus on a confirmed date for when vesuvius erupted okay and dominic as a as a historian of of modern britain i'm sure this embodies all your frustrations with ancient history that we don't even know don't even know when it happened are you are you able to give us the the kind of the rival as it were in a nutshell yes what the positions are okay so yes plinny

the younger um writing his we've got we've only got medieval copies of his writing so he wrote these letters um and he put in the date of the eruption that it happened thank you very much except the scribes so i don't blame plinny i blame the later scribes uh they couldn't quite read it it was in a bit of you know tattery state or something and so they just basically all made up different dates and inserted them so we have the 24th of august but we also have uh 30th of november or something and something in october and one in december i think so but the one that the sort of the copy of the letter that's the best preserved is the one that's got the 24th of august so that has basically become canon and that's the one that's banded

around then you kind of look at uh the archaeology and it kind of doesn't quite fit uh for the 24th of august so the main the main archaeological evidence against august is pomegranates. And I'm definitely team pomegranate. The fact you've got ripened pomegranates means it has to have been later in autumn. So they don't ripen and get eaten until end of September. So pomegranates are one. Then there's some really nice stuff actually from grapes because obviously you harvest grapes sort of october time and when one of the wine pressing rooms in pompeii was being dug um they found that kind of sludge still on the floor from

from all the debris from from wine pressing and that wouldn't have been there in august i mean one would hope they'd have cleaned it up by then uh so yeah so yes do you have a sense of as is there a has the consensus swung now um i mean these things take time don't they it's like moving an oil tanker but do you think that it is a majority opinion now that it was in the autumn i think i think we'd all like to yes say that that is the case but people will still refer to the 24th of August. And then we had that graffito in the new excavations, in fact. So that's another really important thing. So what's that say? It's written in charcoal, and annoyingly

it has a date of the 17th of October. So everyone got super excited, saying, well, you can't write 17th of October if it's, you know, if it was all up in smoke in August. But of course there's no date. There's no year date. So it could have been.

And they could conceivably be. Your face is like, oh no. But they could conceivably also be writing, I'll see you next month. Well, indeed. Indeed, it could have been, yes. So there's, I mean, we have all these little tantalizing glimpses.

There was a coin as well that came up, which everyone said, this could only have been minted after the 24th of August. And it was found in a context that was completely safe, that there was no evidence of tampering. And yet, then it went to the British Museum,

this coin got looked at, and they said, well, a bit that kind of gives you that sort of honorific title for Titus is actually really worn and you can't quite read it. You see, this is why you want to stick with Harrison. You don't get this kind of nonsense.

Tony Benn's diaries. We don't even know the date of the big earthquake either. There's a huge earthquake and there's debate over that as well. We have two same dates and we don't know which is which. That brilliant kind of freeze showing all the buildings, tilting and toppling and things.

Exactly. But yeah, 62, 63, who knows? Dominic, do we have another question? Yeah, we do. Let me ask a question from Nathan. Nathan's got a very good question, actually. He's asking about the rediscovery of Pompeii and what people knew about it beforehand.

So in other words, had Pompeii completely been forgotten? Was there kind of local law um that survived through all the centuries that said there is something there that is covered there was this terrible tragedy you know did sort of folk tales persist or was this a sort of complete bolt from the blue when people started to uncover it uh one of the Bourbons who were digging it in 1748 would want you to believe that it was a complete bolt out of the blue and look at them, look what they discovered. Whereas actually in reality, it was known about the whole time,

pretty much, I would say. Really? Yeah. So people had grown up for generations knowing that this stuff... Yeah, so it appears on a map that's 3rd, 4th century AD, and it's labelled on the Putinger map, so it's a map of Italy, and it's labelled as Pompeii there, as is Herculaneum, as is Oplontis, as is Stabale.

And then it becomes, sort of in the medieval period, it becomes known as La Civita. So it's a mound, it's still covered. And I mean, there's debate as to whether things were popping out or not in terms of buildings. But La Civita means the settlement. So it's kind of understood that there's something still under there. And if you plowing the ground all the time, because again, fertile soil, you know, things would pop out and bits of marble would come out. And so they did know all along.

It's just that it wasn't interesting to them there's uh sanazaro isn't it the um neapolitan poet writing at the beginning of the 16th century and yeah poem arcadia yes exactly he kind of says you know there are cities and towns and villas and things yeah no someone someone in 15 in 1594 said, because in 1594, they started digging a tunnel through Pompeii for a canal. And so they kept hitting, as they were digging through the mound, they kept hitting walls.

And they sort of flagged it up and went, I think we're hitting something. And the people in charge were like, well, don't worry about it, keep going. Because it basically didn't adhere to the kind of the ideology of um the inquisition which was kind of that period um and any kind of reference to the past was was kind of politically incorrect sophia i wanted to i wanted to quiz you a bit on that you said that they didn't care about it they weren't interested can that really be true are you telling me that all these people just genuinely weren't,

they didn't care? Well, there wasn't that. I don't think there was that sort of fever for, I mean, to me Pompeii is always a very political thing. It's used for propaganda. It's used by the Bourbons to promote themselves. It's used by Napoleon. It's used by Mussolini.

You know, it's used during theoleon it's used by mussolini you know it's entire it's used during the period of um unification of italy you know to say who we are what we are as people you know it's always had a political edge so without that political edge there's kind of no real not even antiquarianism that didn't that wasn't i think it was i don't think it was it was it was too early for collecting a statue, basically. Yeah. I mean, that's my sort of hold on this. I think there's some evidence, isn't there, in the 16th and 17th century that people are kind of starting to ferret.

I mean, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's kind of towards the end of the 17th century that somebody finds an inscription with Pompeii on it so that they then know that it's well they think it's at that point well no at that point they think it's the villa of Pompey the great so they confuse it and they're like well it's not as great and then they cross reference and exactly so no there's there is sort of interest amongst some but it's not it's not a big explosion of we've got to have the statuary and everything that happens. I mean, in Herculaneum, it starts beforehand. It starts at the beginning of the 18th century when a guy sinks his well over the theatre in Herculaneum

and pulls out marble. And then there's an Austrian prince who decides, well, I'm building a villa. I'd quite like that marble on my walls, thanks. So he starts the process and then it kind of gets um exploded when when charles bourbon um kind of comes into town and says yes let's have all this stuff and builds a museum and the rest of it and then um lady hamilton's yes well yes he does a fair bit

he does a lot of work. We've got a question. We've already kind of touched on it, but maybe we could just, as it were, flesh it out. It's from the aptly named Ennius. And he says, in the light of recent discoveries, what would the typical daily diet of a resident of Pompeii and Herculaneum be? And I suppose that depends on what class of person I'll be talking about. Actually, it's quite interesting. Our good friend Andrew Wallace Hadwell dug a sewer in Herculaneum and the sewer goes underneath a range of houses and shops

from very low class to slightly better. And he could see exactly what they were shitting out of each house. And in fact, the range of foods was was just like you'd find you know in an elite house they were having fresh fish i mean they live right on the coast uh seashells um meats different vegetables and their diet is actually sort of the one thing that's the great unifier in in in these towns i think um from his from this evidence. And then you've got all the frescoes of food, which kind of help us see what they were growing. I think, to me, the Pompeians and Herculaneum people

were sort of perpetually eating. So if they weren't growing it themselves in their gardens, which they did a lot, and we have good excavations to show us what kind of, you know, they had cabbages and garlic and things like that and obviously vineyards um but then then they had pictures of them on their walls and then they you know they would go out and buy it and then eventually they would eat it but it's kind of just constant which is very italian actually if you go to italy now if you're having a meal with

an italian they'll they'll be talking about the next meal. So how many meals a day, Sophie? I think they were having three. I think the main meal, I think, in the day was lunch, if I'm not mistaken. I will always be grateful to you for taking me behind the scenes of the museum at Herculaneum and showing me the charred remains of all the figs and the grain. Amazing, amazing science.

And the bread. Really amazing. Loaves of bread. But yeah, so all of that evidence helps us know exactly what they're eating. But yeah, I think the Herculaneum evidence is excellent for kind of saying across the board that these people were all enjoying a kind of really good diet. They were on fertile land next to a bountiful sea.

It was kind of perfect. Well, this brings us perfectly to John Hawke's question. He wants to know about, he's obviously a sewerage consultant or some sort of waste disposal professional. He wants to know about street cleansing. Was it dirty? Were people throwing their stuff out in the street? He questions whether there were sewers. There appeared to be little or no sewers, he says. Was it dirty? Were people throwing their stuff out in the street? How many were there?

He questions whether there were sewers. There appeared to be little or no sewers, he says. So, no, Pompeii does have a lack of sewers. I think there's one massive big one. But basically under the streets of Pompeii, there's none. They used, for their poo, they basically used sort sort of soakaways um they just had they just used the natural earth to kind of absorb um so yeah it's smelly uh so yes no there's one thing that i think a lot of people forget is is the smell of and i think it would have been pretty rancid at times um in terms of cleaning the streets there they are there are laws about making sure that your property is clean outside.

But that doesn't mean that it wasn't quite disgusting. And in fact, in the recent excavations, because they weren't just trying to get down to hard and fast archaeology in terms of roads and buildings, they were looking at all the sort of accumulations. They did find on a road a sort of a slew of shit, basically. And it kind of does show the state that some of these, you know, back streets might have been in. The main thoroughfares might have been really nice and clean and looked after because that's where the ediles of the town were kind of passing through. But the back streets may have been worse. But in terms of cleaning the streets, they had a sort streets, they used nature. And because Pompeii is on a slope, when it rains, they had water towers and things collecting water during drier seasons.

But that would overflow and they would just let the water race down the street. And when it rains in Pompeii, if you're there now, the roads are like rivers. And then you suddenly realise why those little stepping stones are actually quite useful. So you can kind of avoid these torrents of water. So it kind of would have naturally cleaned itself, but people would have been involved. But yeah, it would have been a pretty smelly place. Yeah.

Of course, the people would have been very smelly, wouldn't they? Yes. Although they did enjoy their baths regularly. But the baths. They had a little oily smell to you yes wading around in other people's rooms yes okay this is this is the next question is from ian mckinney and it is something that we have touched on several times but let's just try and nail it down realistically is there likely to be any more completely new discoveries at pompeii or have we probably learned everything we're going to learn so i guess by that he means you know some spectacular building some amazing edifice but of course i mean that actually in a way what's most

fascinating is the kind of the tiny details graffiti or the exactly yeah unexpected unless they find unless they find the planning office I'd like that for my work. Sort of how houses developed and things like that, that would be really useful. But no, absolutely, the key is in the detail. And these new excavations have provided a lot of confirmation of what we already knew, which is reassuring. But they keep adding little details, new graffiti or signs that say somebody's running for political office or something like that so we we are building a picture but but things like the bar that really change how we know about their diet or what was being eaten in these fast food places which i mean i shouldn't call it fast food it actually makes me a little queasy calling that that yeah

because we're labeling it as such i just yeah um but yeah no i think there's plenty to be found i mean one third of the city's still uncovered there's there's still a lot out there but i hope in a weird way i don't want to see it in my lifetime yeah if you but if you had a kind of dream discovery sophie if there's one thing you wanted to find a question that nags at you or a discovery what would it be um it would be the planning office it would be how people had you know uh if i mean if that's not the answer i was expecting oh sorry okay something more romantic i know but this is what you get when you work there too long and you're obsessed by walls you want to know did they get permission to add to their houses and change their property back you want to know if they got planning permission that's genuinely your the question that keeps you awake at night

she should be writing the history of 1970s england uh yeah i haven't i haven't got a very romantic um notion on that sorry so not not the buried library well if it comes if if the if the planning office happens to be next to the library, then bingo. Everyone would be happy. I think we've covered a fair amount. Do you mind if I just crowbar in one thing that I carefully researched? Because I was asked the question, is there any evidence for Christians having been in Pompeii. And I think it's interesting because it shows how, in a way, how difficult it is to kind of make sense of the process of archaeology. Because it turns out that there was an inscription that was found in 1862 that apparently did, it has Christianos, so Christians, and it's conventionally translated as Bovio is listening to the Christians who are cruel haters is how it's conventionally translated. But the problem is that there

were various transcriptions made of this inscription that was on a building that no longer exists. So the issue then becomes, you know, was it copied down correctly? And of course, because in the middle of the 19th century, people were looking for Christians in Pompeii. Was there a bit of wish fulfilment going on? I think the latest consensus probably it is authentic, but hard to know. And again, this will confirm Dominic's darkest suspicions. Yeah. Just when you think that you've got a really clinching piece of evidence, it kind of slips through your fingers.

Yeah, there's a crucifix in Herculaneum on the wall. There's the shape of a crucifix. People got extremely excited about this. And it ends up, it's probably just a fixture for a shelf. It's like ear fitting. You can't explain these things away. Yeah, but the same is true for Jews. I've been asked if there are lots of Jews in Pompeii.

And, you know, we don't really have much evidence, but we know they're in Rome. But whether they're in Pompeii, hard to tell. But we do have that Indian goddess. But we do have that, yes. Let's cling to that. Well, Sophie, thanks so much. Pleasure.

Very, very exciting. After Stephen Fry, you are our first guest very very much he was a great warmer warmer pat thanks thank you sophie that was fascinating no my pleasure thank you very much okay we'll be uh we'll be back next week uh on my show and my special guest will be with me as well so we'll see you then goodbye thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes early access ad free listening access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.