A young girl and her friends frolic on a paved road outside an elegant mansion.
The mother of one of the girls peers through luxurious drapes out the window.
Tourists pass by, visiting the famed town of Pompeii, there to experience the bustling
taverns and elaborate bathhouses, the busy cafes and acclaimed artisans’ stalls.
Hundreds of others mingle in market squares or head to the giant arena, and meanwhile
the many slaves of the town clean floors, work in factories, or massage men in the local
“wolf den”.
Then suddenly a deafening crack is heard, followed by great plumes of ash blackening
the sky.
Those people in the streets see daytime turn to night.
People soon scream in the darkness as buildings collapse around them.
Noxious gases and superheated rocks will envelop them all.
That’s what happened the day the Roman city of Pompeii was swallowed, when something like
12-20,000 folks were stopped in their tracks, consumed by nature’s whim.
How we know the scene was something close to that is because many, many years later
archeologists managed to put the pieces back together.
But before we get to what they discovered, let’s have a closer look at Pompeii in ancient
times.
The city, which today lies in the Province of Naples, Italy, was home to people from
present day Italy as far back as the 8th century BC.
We’ll make this part quick and just tell you that the ancient Greeks landed there,
and in the 6th century BC it became a place with flourishing trade.
City walls were constructed and temples were built, and over a period of a few hundred
years Pompeii enriched itself through trade and agriculture.
Wealthy people would flock there after hearing about this beautiful town, marked with grand
private buildings, theaters, bathhouses and marvelous statues saluting the Gods.
Not long before the cataclysmic eruption destroyed the city in its entirety in 79 AD, it was
renowned as a place where rich Roman men could lavish themselves on fine wines and the many
women that worked in the brothels.
Being right on the sea it would attract wealthy tourists, so you might say Pompeii was to
some extent a resort town.
But overlooking the city was something that made itself aware on occasion to the people
of Pompeii, and that was the great Mount Vesuvius.
We say made aware, because the thing would rumble from time-to-time, noted by some Roman
authors.
The Romans actually thought this mount was divine, giving it a mythological meaning which
was later discovered in mural paintings called frescos.
What the Romans didn’t know was that Pompeii itself stood on a lava plateau that had been
created by an eruption of this volcano.
The people should have been worried, and they got a taste of what was to come when around
17 years before most of them would die they experienced an earthquake that caused considerable
damage in Pompeii and beyond.
The ensuing years saw a lot of reconstruction of damaged buildings while other edifices
were erected.
Things were getting back to normal.
Let’s now get to that bad day-in-the-life of Pompeii.
We know something about how it went down because a Roman author named Pliny the Younger wrote
about the catastrophe.
His uncle, Pliny the Elder, had actually died while trying to evacuate people from the town.
It’s thought the eruption happened sometime in October or November.
Pliny wrote that on the day a great plume of smoke was seen rising from the mountain.
He actually described it like this, “Its general appearance can best be expressed as
being like an umbrella pine, for it rose to a great height on a sort of trunk and then
split off into branches.”
His uncle at this time was not in the town, but not far away.
He realized that what he had seen was an event of great magnitude, and so he called his men
and set off to help.
The uncle got to the shore next to the city.
It was there it seems he choked to death, according to his nephew anyway.
Pliny wrote to the great Roman historian Tacitus about the eruption.
This is what he recalls of the second day of the disaster and what happened to him and
his mother.
Pliny wrote that he heard women screaming, infants crying, people feeling their way through
the darkness, looking for lost relatives, praying.
In his own words he said, “Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined
there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore.”
He was right, too.
There was to be eternal darkness for the people of Pompeii, but they would experience some
kind of resurrection.
Some of them are now being photographed by tourists with smartphones, but we’ll talk
more about that soon.
It was first thought that the people, well, most of them, would have died from ash inhalation.
No doubt a lot did succumb that way, but most perished not from ash, but from heat.
You see, when Vesuvius erupted it ejected something called pyroclastic surges.
These surges happened six times in total.
What happens in these surges is incredibly hot ash along with toxic gases are spewed
out, and those travel at incredibly fast speeds.
Vesuvius might be located 10 miles (6km) from the town, but the surges could have travelled
at 100mph (160kph).
The people really didn’t have anywhere to run.
Scientists now say inside or outside, when these surges happened the temperature would
have been around 570°F (300°C) and people would have been killed on the spot.
We also know that some of the people died as if frozen in suspended actions.
One researcher said this, “The contorted postures are not the effects of a long agony,
but of the cadaveric spasm, a consequence of heat shock on corpses.”
When all calmed down and the city was destroyed along with its inhabitants, robbers arrived
on the scene.
Pompeii wasn’t completely buried, although those thieves did have to dig through some
ash to find their bounty.
Those guys looted from the deceased, but after that for many centuries Pompeii was dead to
the world.
It no longer existed.
The place that had suffered the wrath of the Gods was left to itself.
In the 16th century some city walls were discovered, decorated with frescos, but it wasn’t until
the early 19th century that it was realized after some excavations that there must have
been some great city that once occupied that area.
The ashes had preserved the city, and some of the people to some extent.
It was as if they had been frozen in time.
So, what did they find?
The most incredible thing was just how well-built this place was.
They discovered what you might call a state-of-the art Roman amphitheater, along with a gymnasium
with a swimming pool.
They found public baths, theaters, cafes, factories, markets, and even an area dedicated
to brothels.
Wait a minute, how would they know a place could have been a house where rich Romans
went to sow their seed?
Well, it’s the same reason they know what else was there.
The Romans designed places for a specific intention.
A brothel was called a “lupanar”, which means Wolf Den.
Pompeii’s wolf den was credited as being a “Grand Lupanar.”
In the den excavators found walls covered with erotic paintings as well as graffiti
that has been transcribed.
It explains what went on inside those walls.
One such bit of graffiti actually reads, “Euplia was here with two thousand beautiful men.”
We won’t tell you what else they found because we don’t want to make this an X-rated show,
but suffice to say, it doesn’t seem that lewd graffiti has changed very much in 2000
and a bit years.
They also discovered that Pompeii was served by an aqueduct which delivered water to private
dwellings as well as bathhouses, the swimming pool and the 25 water fountains in the city.
They could see how crops were cultivated and how wine was produced, what foods the people
must have eaten and what some people might have done for business.
As for those bodies, you can see people crouching down and looking like they are praying.
Others are mid-crawl; some are huddled together.
We should say that these whole-looking bodies are casts that were made from impressions
of bodies in the ash.
The skeletons were surrounded by voids of ash, and so plaster of Paris was poured into
those voids.
They represent how the body would have looked, but aren’t actually the body.
The stone people are creations or representations.
Most would have been killed by those surges we talked about, but others might have succumbed
from choking on ash, or from roofs falling on them, or from flying rocks.
Some lucky others might have gotten away because no boats have ever been found.
Thirteen bodies were found in what has been called the “Garden of the Fugitives”,
which must have been a kind of fruit farm.
The “House of Mysteries” is home to nine bodies, and it’s thought a roof might have
fallen on those folks.
One person was just chilling in a tavern when he died, while others were at the baths and
others at the market.
There are even casts of animals, such as a dog and a pig.
It’s all the erotic stuff that has really given us an insight into the private lives
of the rich Romans, and there was quite a haul.
Unfortunately some of it was destroyed in the 19th century by people who were too prudish
to allow Roman sexuality to be seen.
Other parts of this collection were locked in what was called a “secret cabinet.”
Thankfully these pieces of art are now open for public viewing.
Thanks to CT scans we also know a bit more about the health of the people that died.
One thing we know is that many of the people had great teeth, and that is because they
had a good diet.
Not much sugar and lots of fiber.
You might wonder what we’d look like if we were dug up in a thousand years.
And this segues nicely into the next part.
Because what’s perhaps frightening is that Mount Vesuvius is now surrounded by around
600,000 people who live in what’s called a danger zone.
About three million people live close enough to be affected if that thing should go off
again.
It’s actually the most densely populated area in the entire world where an active volcano
is present.
But what are the chances of another eruption happening anytime soon?
Well, it went off the last time in 1944, not long after the Allies invaded Italy.
Again, ash filled the skies and rocks rained down on nearby villages.
As if the war wasn’t enough, those folks were having to put up with the violent vagaries
of nature.
People fled their houses as lava approached.
Vesuvius has popped its lids on many occasions, and there were eruptions in the 1600s, 1700s
and 1800s which saw explosions of ash and gas and flows of lava.
In 1631 after an eruption, thousands of people died.
In 1944, most of the town folks got away quickly enough.
26 died.
In 1906 residents weren’t that fortunate and over 100 people died.
It devastated nearby villages and also Naples.
These days if Vesuvius went off and you were one of the 600,000-plus people living in the
Red Zone you could be in big trouble.
The Red Zone consists of people living in 9-mile (12-kilometer) radius of the volcano.
Looking at how active this volcano has been and the period of quiet that has passed, you
might think another eruption is due.
That’s why it’s call a time-bomb.
The good news is that the Italian government in the 2000s put evacuation drills in place
and it might know better than those ancient Romans when the volcano will go off.
It’s being observed all the time, so that might help matters.
The government even tried to relocate people, but not many folks were interested in that.
Today scientists say that if Vesuvius did erupt there would be trouble, and it’s very
likely it’s due another eruption soon.
In 2019, the volcano was put under surveillance after magma was seen pushing up to the surface.
A year before that volcanic activity was making some people very nervous and new evacuation
plans were being drawn up.
It’s gonna go off; it’s just a matter of time.
And since it is just a matter of time, you need to know what would happen to YOUR body
if you fell into a volcano, so go watch “What Happens To Your Body When You Fall Into a
Volcano” right now!
We’re serious, don’t wait, the volcanos could start going off at any time!