Tonight, The Wife and I watched a History Channel program about Pompeii. It brought the story to life in a way I hadn’t seen before. You know the story — on August 24, in the year 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted, and within two days, three cities nearby were destroyed and preserved under the volcanic debris. The result is quite possibly the richest, most extensive archeaological site in the world, a snapshot of a city.
Recall that the city of Pompeii was the luxury destination for the Roman elite and many members of the luxury class lived there almost full-time. All of the people needed to support their luxurious lifestyle also lived there, in more humble surroundings — artists, chefs, grocers, bakers, potters, musicians, olive oil pressers, construction workers, bath-tenders, and so on. Tens of thousands of people lived there, a reasonably large city for the ancient world. Then there would have been more lower-class people, too; farm workers, fishermen, household slaves. All of these people (many of the slaves included) lived there with their families. As for the culture of the city, think Las Vegas or Monaco mixed with South Beach or Palm Springs.
The TV show toured the Phlegraean Fields, a few miles west of Vesuvius, which looked exactly like the ancient images of the gates of Hell. Ash-white rock with outcrops of bright yellow sulfur, fumaroles belching out hot, poisonous smoke. There was also a look at Stromboli, an active volcano in the ocean, which erupts several times a day, suggesting that had Vesuvius been producing relatively harmless plumes of smoke and sometimes spectacular showers of glowing magma bombs. The host suggested that this may have been an object of amusement rather than of terror to the Romans who vacationed or lived there.
But I can’t be awed by the extent of the city’s remains, and the astonishing amount of information we have about Roman life in the first century. At least, not without remembering that this city is also a mass grave. Twenty-five thousand people or more died; buried under what was a twenty-mile high tower of pumice pebbles that fell for twelve hours, and killed in an instant by a hundred-mile-an-hour surge of pyroplastic flow — a superheated mixture of poisonous gas, lava foam, and rocks. As archeaologists began to uncover the city a century ago, they found that there were cavities in the rock, left over from the victims.
Whole families, terrified at nature run amok around them, suddenly and instantly killed. Mothers and fathers trying against all odds to protect their children from the overwhelming force of the volcano. And their poses, and in some cases faces, are preserved for us now, are preserved and speak to the horror and terror they felt as they died. For whatever reason, it real struck home for me that these were people just like my wife and I, our families, our friends. These were people who lived their lives as best they could; they had people who loved them and grieved over them when they died. In part it was the pets and service animals — dogs and mules — and in part it was the plentiful incidents of everyday life, like the plaster image of a child clutching a beloved toy as she died.
It’s a reminder that as fascinating, informative, pleasurable, and useful a study of history is, it is also a study of real people, who lived real lives. People like you and me. People who did not know their own futures, people who made decisions and had families. Pompeii and Herculaneum and Stabiae were towns like Palmdale and Knoxville and Watertown. They were victims of a natural disaster, like Hurricane Katrina last year or the tsunami in southeast Asia the year before or an earthquake or anything else. And the people who died deserve the same respect and grief from us as the victims of these more recent tragedies do.
By the way, Vesuvius last erupted in March of 1944, just after the Allies had invaded Italy. This was a different kind of explosion, one that produced more lava than airborne debris. Lava engulfed San Sebastiano, a small village near the volcano. The deaths in that village — which had been mostly evacuated — were caused not by flowing lava (which encased the village in up to twenty feet of the stuff) but by collapsing roofs, overburdened by falling ash. And today, three million people live in and around Naples. It is only a matter of time until there is another gigantic explosion, and now there are almost a hundred times as many people in the area as there were in Roman times. Let us hope that should the worst happen again, the preparations made by the Neapolitan government to evacuate the area spares more lives than were lost nineteen hundred years ago.
