Buried in a day
Pompeii was a prosperous town of the Bay of Naples, a few kilometres from Vesuvius. When the volcano erupted, a column of gas and pumice rose high into the sky and the stones began to fall on the town for hours. Roofs gave way under the weight. Then waves of hot gas and ash, which volcanologists call pyroclastic currents, swept down the mountain and filled what was left. Within about a day the town lay under 4 to 6 metres of volcanic material.
We know the sequence partly from Pliny the Younger, who watched from across the bay and described it years later in two letters to the historian Tacitus. His uncle, Pliny the Elder, died trying to rescue people by ship.
Which day was it?
The traditional date is 24 August 79, taken from medieval copies of Pliny’s letter, which do not all agree. In 2018 excavators in the area called Regio V found a charcoal note on a wall dated the sixteenth day before the Kalends of November, that is 17 October. It was probably written in 79, since charcoal would not have lasted long on a wall being redecorated. Many archaeologists now prefer a date in late October, but the question is still open.
Left alone for 1,700 years
Most Roman towns were never buried. They were lived in, rebuilt and stripped for stone, so their houses vanished under later ones. Pompeii escaped that. After the eruption some survivors and looters dug down for valuables, but the town was abandoned and its name faded. In the 1590s a canal was cut right under the site without anyone recognising it.
The ash also kept out weather. Walls stayed upright up to the level of the deposit, and paintings were protected from rain and sun. That is why Pompeii holds one of the richest collections of Roman wall painting, from the red rooms of the House of the Vettii to small panels of cupids at work. The town also caught a moment of repair: an earthquake in 62 CE had damaged many buildings, and work on some of them was still going on in 79.
Well preserved, but not intact
Pompeii is also a fragile ruin. Most roofs collapsed in the eruption, and wood, cloth and food mostly rotted away, leaving empty spaces in the ash. From 1863 the archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli filled some of those spaces with plaster, and the casts of the victims are among the most painful images of the ancient world. Excavation itself brought damage: what was dug up in the eighteenth century has been exposed to weather ever since, Allied bombs hit the site in 1943, and in 2010 the House of the Gladiators collapsed. Since 2012 a large programme of repairs, the Great Pompeii Project, has stabilised much of the town.
Its neighbour fared better. Herculaneum, closer to the volcano, was sealed by hot flows instead of falling pumice, and the deposit hardened into rock. There even wood, upper floors and food survived.
A whole Roman town
Pompeii covers about 66 hectares, and about two thirds have been excavated. The rest is left underground for future archaeologists. With its forum, temples, baths, bakeries, theatres and an amphitheatre older than the Colosseum, it shows how a Roman town worked, from public life to private taste, and how much of Roman art was made for ordinary houses. Since 1997 it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site, together with Herculaneum and Oplontis.
Where to see it
The excavations are in the modern town of Pompei, south-east of Naples, and are reached by train on the Circumvesuviana line. Many of the finest paintings, mosaics and objects are in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples.
Sources
- Parco archeologico di Pompei, history of the site and of the excavations; Regio V inscription (2018).
- Pliny the Younger, Letters 6.16 and 6.20.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Archaeological Areas of Pompei, Herculaneum and Torre Annunziata”.
- M. Beard, Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town (London, 2008).
