Dr. Jessica Venner

Amongst archaeologists that study Pompeii, including myself, we all disagree.

It's a constant ongoing debate and an interesting one because I think they're all valid.

And people often ask me, why does it matter?

It matters greatly because the Roman calendar was very specific about what could happen when.

And so it tells us a lot about what they were doing at the time, which is impactful from the point of view of gardens because we've just been talking about them.

Had the harvest just happened?

It looks like it had.

And that's one of the reasons that we think about a certain date.

So I'm in the camp of thinking it was in the autumn.

In my book, I've said the 24th of October, but the classic date is the 24th of August, which of course we get from Pliny.

And, you know, I think there's good reasons for the 24th of August.

It's a good, you know, obviously, if something keeps being repeated in a manuscript, then that's pretty good evidence of that, right?

And people like Pliny the Younger were, from a very young age, trained to have an incredibly good memory for rhetoric.

So that was just something they were doing.

So, you know,

okay, fine.

That makes sense.

However, there's lots of archipotanical, you know, they'd already seemed to have done the harvest and they'd sealed up the amphorae in the floor.

So they finished that process of winemaking.

There were coins found there that pushed the date back.