Eruption Rebuilt Features and What to Know

I'm Tom Hiddston and today we're going to talk about the survivors of Pompei. A decade after the eruption of Vuvius, the Roman poet Stasius mused, "Will future generations believe when crops grow again and this wasteland is green once more that cities and people lie buried beneath, or that their ancestors fields fell victim to the same fate?" By then, the highway around the Bay of Naples had been reconstructed with raised walls to keep windblown ash from covering the pavement. Behind the volcano, the Great Augustine Aqueduct, 90 km long, continued to flow. The cities of Pompei and Herculanium, however, had not been rebuilt. They never would be. This was not because all the former inhabitants had lost their

lives. Contrary to popular belief, most residents of Pompei and Herculanium survived the disaster. Although the falling ash and pummus that marked the first stages of the eruption made travel difficult, there was a window about 12 hours at Herculanium and 18 hours at Pompei in which escape was possible. I asked Professor Katie Barrett, who has worked at Pompei for years, about the evidence for Pompeans trying to escape after the eruption began. Some people's bodies were actually found on top of the pummus. So, they clearly had waited until the pummus had already advanced quite some time before they tried to escape. Uh so in the estate of Julia Felix for example, the body that

was found lying in the garden, which could have been in fact the remains of Julia Felix herself, was on top of the accumulation of Leili. Um and a recent study of some of the casts of the remains of individuals who lost their lives in the eruption, mostly from the Port of Nola. Uh that study showed that they were lying on top of the pummus layer. So they were actually trying to wade through it to escape and some of them were trying to cover their mouths with their clothing. They seemed to have died about 20 hours after the start of the eruption. So I mean it's awful to imagine what those individuals must have gone through. Um it does seem that a lot of people did remain in their homes at least at first.

To date, about 1,150 bodies have been found in Pompei and 350 in Herculanium. But even if we assume that these represent only half the victims claimed by the eruption, thousands must have survived. In fact, tens of thousands since the combined population of Pompei and Herculanium was probably around 35,000. In his recent book, Escape from Pompei, Professor Steven Tuck uses inscriptions to trace the survivors of Vuvius. Most appear to have remained nearby in cities around the Bay of Naples. At Naples, a neighborhood came to be known as the district of the Hercilanians, apparently after the refugees who settled there. In neighboring Pioli, members of the Pompeian family sat on

the city council and remained locally prominent for centuries. The Umbrichius clan, which had run a thriving garam business in Pompei, also relocated to Putioli. Within a generation, they were shipping garam to Rome and beyond. at Kumi, a short distance down the coast. Demission appears to have sponsored a massive building program meant at least in part to accommodate refugees from Pompei and Herculanium. The forum and baths were renovated and a harbor and amphitheater were constructed. The Via Demitana, still in use today, was built to connect Kumi and Pioli with the Viaappia. In his recent documentary Pompei, Out of Time, Tom Hiddston follows three victims

of Vuvius, the boy Avianas, the businesswoman Julia Felix, and a Ptorian at Herculanium. In my life as an undergraduate um studying classics at Cambridge, I always believed that Pompei was um covered by the blanket of the pyrolastic flow of ash and pummus and superheated rock instantly. I didn't know that there was time um what we would can think of as about a day, 24 hours between the eruption and the burial. Time for individuals to make choices. time perhaps for a teenage boy like Avianis Avaniius to escape. Julia Felix, we know what her she ran a business, a bath house for respectable people. uh balnium venerium non-gentum uh and uh we would might think of it as a kind of spa and that uh that we discovered that there was no she had

evacuated the property. Um, nobody was found there. And the conclusion or the suggestion is that she organized a full-scale evacuation of the entire property, animals, clients, guests, and herself stayed behind because they found uh a necklace near the uh the shrine to the goddess Isis um which historians suspect belonged to Julia herself. about the Ptorian soldier in Herculanium um have been discovered um traces of the Ptorian soldier, a sword, a military belt and his um military pay uh in dinari which add up exactly to the paycheck of a Ptorian soldier in that time. The question we ask is what's a Ptorian soldier doing in Herculanium on the day of the eruption? Um it's an unusual place to be. Um but you know, but perhaps he is on what we might

consider leave. Perhaps he's uh taking some RNR. Um this is where the archaeological record runs out and one makes educated guesses or leaps of imagination. Um but there is enough evidence to know that these individuals were there and that based on what we know about the circumstances of their lives um whether they survived or whether they did not. The mission's projects around Kumi were likely an extension of the relief program begun by his brother and predecessor Titus. In the immediate aftermath of the eruption, Titus sent two highranking commissioners to supervise relief efforts, ordering that the assets of those who had lost their lives in the eruption should be committed to the cause.

Some of these funds, to judge from inscriptions found in cities all around the Bay of Naples, were used to reconstruct buildings damaged by the eruption and the earthquakes that had preceded it. At Pompei, buried less steeply than Herculanium, there were extensive efforts to recover valuables and expensive building materials in the years and decades after the eruption. The forum was stripped of its columns. The lead tanks of the water towers were removed and marble facings were scavenged from the suburban baths and many houses. Near the entrance of one heavily tunnneled Pompeian mansion, archaeologists found the message house opened, left apparently by a party of

lutters. I asked Katie whether she had encountered any evidence for post eruption salvaging in her work on the houses of Pompei. Quite a lot. So this seems to have started immediately and we can imagine the survivors as well as people from the surrounding area. They knew where Pompei was. Some parts of the city were still visible above the volcanic debris. So right after the eruption we see evidence for people trying to dig to salvage valuable materials such as the statues from the forum for example. And even in later periods of what we would call antiquity within the time span of the Roman Empire, there's

evidence for reoccupation of some parts of Pompei. This has been a really exciting finding from the archaeological parks work over the past year in the Insula Meridian Alice in the south of the city uh where the upper levels of buildings were probably still visible over the volcanic deposits. There seems to have been reoccupation of some spaces into as late as the fifth century CE. So Pompei had a long afterlife beyond the 79 CE eruption. Um there's a 12th century map of the Roman Empire of the roads of the Roman Empire which seems to be a copy of a late antique map which still correctly lists the location of Pompei and other Vuvian cities. And then we've got evidence for more sporadic

digging subsequently in the medieval through early modern period. Um Amado Mayori who excavated in the area of the garden of Julia Felix's estate says he found what he thought were medieval burials above the level of the ash. So um people didn't stop being active here. um and the site that my team excavates, the so-called house of Queen Caroline, I co-direct a project that works there. And one of the research questions that we have to address is when we see evidence of disturbance, is that ancient or is it post eruption? So, for example, some of the floors in the house, there are rooms that once had beautiful, highly decorated marble floors, and those have been removed. And so one question we have is, is this evidence

for repair and renovation that people were doing when the eruption interrupted them, or is it evidence for early modern 19th century uh not later than early modern, but activity having to do with the earliest excavations at Pompei? Often it's hard to tell the difference, although there are certain ways one can distinguish the two. Of course, there was limited resettlement in parts of the city. As Katie mentioned, recent work on the Insula Meridian has revealed the existence of a shanty town that grew up after the eruption. The settlers lived in the upper floors of houses and warehouses that projected above the volcanic debris, using the buried lower rooms as sellers.

Just outside the city, archaeologists have discovered post eruption occupation levels in a bath complex and several seaside villas. Some degree of settlement seems to have persisted until the eruption of 472. Yet, there was never any organized attempt to rebuild the infrastructure or public places of Pompei, which remained buried until the excavations of the 18th century. In part, this reflects the difficulties of dealing with the debris that covered the city. The eruption had buried Pompei beneath up to 6 m of ash and pummus, a layer too deep to clear away and too unstable to build upon.

Moreover, since ash and pummus are highly porous, the landscape around Pompei was unable to retain moisture, it took decades for the volcanic debris to consolidate and become fertile. Even if there had been the political will to overcome the practical problems of reconstruction, Vuvius refused to cooperate. The mountain appears to have remained active long after the disaster of 79. Stacius notes continued eruptions in his poem. Galen a century later mentions that Vuvius routinely produced clouds of ash. Cashistio records an eruption in 203 AD that was loud enough to be heard in Capua. With a volcano so active, any

attempt at resettlement must have seemed foolhardy. In any case, there was no political or economic need to rebuild Pompei. As the Roman authorities discovered, the former residents could be far more easily accommodated by repairing and expanding neighboring cities. Plutarch writing a generation after the eruption of 79 claimed that even the locations of Pompei and Turculanium had been lost. This, as we have seen, was an exaggeration. In Plutarch's time, the site of Pompei would have been dotted with impromptu excavations and clusters of houses with gardens planted in the increasingly fertile volcanic soil.

Neither then nor even in the Middle Ages when an inscription from Pompei was built into a local church was Pompei truly forgotten. The discoveries of the 18th century only apprised the world of what locals had always known that a Roman city lay just below the surface. I think what's extraordinary is I um I believed that previously that there were no survivors. And it's interesting as an avenue of intellectual exploration and curiosity to think about the extent to which a place is represented by its buildings or its people. And the idea that there were survivors of Pompei who escaped the volcanic eruption makes me think that there was a part of the legacy of Pompei which endured because people from Pompei survived,

would have resettled, would have reorganized their lives and carried on their local or family traditions carried on the legacy of Pompei. If it had been destroyed and all of its people, then it exists as a final conclusive record of a particular time. Um, but I don't believe that's the case anymore. And it makes me wonder about what elements of ordinary life in Pompei were preserved in their customs and rituals and values and practices that all those survivors would have taken on into their new lives. Just as we can imagine with a very contemporary situation when there are natural disasters in our world and there are survivors and those Excuse me. Those become refugees, but they don't leave their practice and their culture and

their tradition behind. They take them on and reinvigorate and revitalize and uh recontextualize them in the new environment. Check out the Tolden Stone Patreon linked below for my full interview with Tom Hston. Next spring, join me as I explore the Roman ruins of Tunisia. We'll visit Carthage, Duga, and many other fascinating sites. Follow the link in the description for a full itinerary. You'll also find a link for my May 2027 tour to Jordan, which includes Gash, Roman forts, Crusader Castles, and of course, Petra.

Please check out my other channels, Scenic Roots of the Past and Toten Stone Footnotes. And as always, thanks for watching.