Dr. Jessica Venner

And so Panzer is one of those people that's very much attached to the fabric of Pompeii's life through his family, by virtue of his family.

And so he's rising up through the ranks.

He's not quite at the top, but he must have been elected very, very recently in the summer elections.

He would have then been put into office on the 1st of January, but we obviously don't get to that.

Regardless of the date of the eruption, it was at that time at the end of 79, so he would have come in in 80 AD, and he didn't quite get there.

But he would have been very much involved in city life already because he was so well known and they just elected him.

But Pompey is notorious in the Republic and onwards for being really difficult for politics.

Bear in mind, when Cicero was writing about Pompey, he says Pompey is difficult and he's talking about the politics of

And the fact that Cicero thinks that and he's, you know, having a hard time.

Yeah.

It's notorious for being politically difficult to survive.

So someone like Panza is going to have to be a pretty robust character to get through that.

And so, yeah, he's an interesting one, I think.

We have multiple things that we can draw on.

Of course, the archaeology is the main one.

It was preserved in a very specific way

with pyroclastic flows, which we'll talk about, the conditions of the eruption on that very specific day, down to the heat of it, preserved it in a certain way.

And that wouldn't necessarily happen on another day.

So as archaeologists, we're fortunate, and for lack of a better word, it's not fortunate at all, but it's preserved it in that way.

We also have Pliny the Younger's letters to Tacitus explaining this about 20 years later, explaining his firsthand account events of