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.
This cluster page tells the story of the eruption, the cities, the excavation, and what the ruins tell us about the Roman world. It links out to Roman Gladiators, Roman Baths, the Roman Empire cluster, and the Daily Life in Ancient Rome cluster.
The Eruption of Vesuvius
The Roman naturalist Pliny the Younger, then seventeen years old, was staying with his uncle, the naturalist and admiral Pliny the Elder, at Misenum across the Bay of Naples. On the afternoon of 24 August, his mother pointed out a strange cloud rising above Vesuvius, in the shape of a pine tree. His uncle immediately organized a fleet to evacuate the seaside towns and sailed across the bay to investigate.
Pliny the Elder landed at Stabiae, where he spent the night trying to calm his friends and study the eruption. By morning, the eruptions of pumice and ash had become so heavy that he could not leave. He died on the shore, probably of asphyxiation. His nephew, watching from across the bay, left the only surviving eyewitness account of the eruption.
The eruption column rose to a height of more than 30 km (100,000 feet). Pyroclastic surges — fast-moving currents of hot gas and ash — swept down the flanks of the volcano at speeds of up to 700 km/h (450 mph). Pompeii, on the south side of the volcano, was buried by a fall of pumice and ash that built up to a depth of 4 to 6 meters (13 to 20 feet). Herculaneum, on the west side, was buried by hot pyroclastic surges that carbonized wood and instantly killed everyone in the city.
Pompeii
Pompeii was a medium-sized Roman city of perhaps 11,000–15,000 people, originally Oscan-speaking, colonized by Sulla’s veterans in 80 BCE, and a popular resort town in the late Republic and early Empire. The city was built on a grid, with a main forum, a basilica, two theaters, an amphitheater, a large palaestra (exercise ground), and a network of streets with raised crosswalks and stepping stones for pedestrians.
The houses of Pompeii are remarkably well preserved. The House of the Faun, named for a small bronze statue of a dancing faun, was a grand Hellenistic mansion with two atria, two peristyle gardens, and the famous Alexander Mosaic — a large floor mosaic depicting the Battle of Issus between Alexander the Great and Darius III. The House of the Vettii, owned by two freedmen brothers, has exquisite frescoes and a small shrine to Priapus. The Villa of the Mysteries, just outside the city walls, has a famous set of large frescoes depicting a (probably) Dionysiac mystery initiation.
The food shops, bakeries, taverns, brothels, and businesses of Pompeii give an unparalleled picture of everyday Roman commercial life. The graffiti — political slogans, declarations of love, insults, jokes, lists of gladiatorial victories — give an unparalleled picture of everyday Roman mental life.
Herculaneum
Herculaneum was a smaller, wealthier town than Pompeii, with a population of perhaps 5,000. It was buried by hot pyroclastic surges that preserved organic materials — wood, food, papyrus, cloth — that do not survive in Pompeii. The most spectacular find is the Villa of the Papyri, an ancient Roman library that contained more than 1,800 papyrus scrolls, most of them by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus. The scrolls were carbonized by the heat of the surge and have been extraordinarily difficult to unroll and read; new techniques developed in the twenty-first century have begun to reveal their content.
The Other Towns
Stabiae, on the south side of the bay, was also buried by the eruption. The modern town of Castellammare di Stabia has grown up on top of the ancient site. Oplontis, between Pompeii and Herculaneum, was a suburb of Pompeii famous for the Villa of Poppaea, a vast and luxurious country house that belonged to the emperor Nero’s second wife, Poppaea Sabina. Misenum, across the bay, was the home of the Roman imperial fleet and was not destroyed, although the fleet’s admiral Pliny the Elder was killed in the eruption.
The Rediscovery
The locations of the buried towns were gradually forgotten, and the volcanic soil was planted with vineyards and farms. In 1592, the architect Domenico Fontana discovered inscriptions and frescoes while building an aqueduct across the buried site of Pompeii. In 1748, the Spanish Bourbon king Charles VII of Naples ordered the first systematic excavations. The work continued in fits and starts for the next two centuries.
The 1860s and 1870s, under the direction of Giuseppe Fiorelli, saw the development of the modern archaeological method. Fiorelli introduced the famous plaster casts of the Pompeian victims: by pouring plaster into the cavities left in the ash by the decomposed bodies, the excavators were able to create eerily lifelike figures of the people who died. The work of excavation has continued into the twenty-first century, and large parts of both cities are still unexcavated.
What the Ruins Tell Us
Pompeii and Herculaneum are the most important archaeological sites in the world. The buildings, the food, the tools, the graffiti, the frescoes, the bodies, the sewage, the gardens, the shrines, the amphitheater, the brothels — all of it gives us an extraordinarily complete picture of Roman daily life.
The political graffiti of Pompeii gives us a unique look at the rough-and-tumble of Roman election campaigns. The commercial graffiti gives us a unique look at the ordinary Roman economy. The wall paintings give us a unique look at Roman interior decoration. The skeletons of the victims, many of them with the gas bubbles in their bones that indicate they died of extreme heat, give us a unique look at the catastrophe. The food — the carbonized loaves of bread, the jars of fish sauce, the nuts and fruit and eggs — gives us a unique look at the Roman diet.
Pompeii and Herculaneum are, quite simply, the closest we will ever come to time travel.