Pompeii and Herculaneum: Cities Frozen in Time
On 24 August 79 CE, the volcano Mount Vesuvius erupted. In less than twenty-four hours, it buried the Roman cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae, and Oplontis under a thick layer of volcanic ash, pumice, and mud. About 2,000 people died — perhaps fifteen percent of the population of Pompeii, and almost all of Herculaneum. The rest of the population fled or was evacuated. The cities were abandoned, the very locations forgotten, and the ruins slowly disappeared under a covering of ash and mud.
For seventeen hundred years, Pompeii and Herculaneum lay buried. Then, beginning in 1748, the Bourbon kings of Naples began to excavate the site, and the cities emerged into the daylight of the modern world almost exactly as they had been on the day of the eruption. The ash and mud had preserved the buildings, the furniture, the food, the tools, the graffiti, the paintings, the very bodies of the people who died. Pompeii and Herculaneum are the most complete record of an ancient Roman city we have.
On the afternoon of 24 August 79 CE, a seventeen-year-old Roman named Pliny the Younger watched a pine-shaped cloud rise above the Bay of Naples from across the water, while his uncle sailed into it and never sailed back. Twenty hours later, the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried under volcanic ash — and they have been giving us the most complete record of Roman daily life ever since. The page covers the eruption, the cities, the excavation, and what the graffiti and the garbage tell us, with detours into Roman Gladiators, Roman Baths, the Roman Empire cluster, and the Daily Life in Ancient Rome cluster.