Dr. Jessica Venner

So you'd have been able to see where the amphitheater was and they'd have been like, right, okay, so the amphitheater's there.

There's a bit of a column poking out there from the forum.

My house should be around here somewhere.

So they're tunneling down trying to get their things.

And people would have gone back not knowing that these pyroclastic flows had hit necessarily if they'd gone to Rome, for example, and come back.

I can't imagine the shock of finding that.

Also, I don't know how people found each other afterwards.

They didn't have the luxury of communicating in that way and becoming refugees in their own country.

They had literally lost their town.

Yes.

So the Emperor Titus was in power at this time and he set up a relief fund and they took the money of anyone that hadn't managed to survive and put that into the relief fund as well.

But he did send people to, he went to Campania to survey the evidence of this disaster himself, as they say, and they basically decided there wasn't anything they could do.

And so they pretty much wrote Pompeii and Herculaneum off.

and took it off the maps essentially.

And after a while, it did just get forgotten.

It just became a footnote in history.

No, I've chosen their fates based on either the things I know about them from the archaeological record or to give a cross-section of the fates of people in Pompeii, and they're representing those fates.

And so we have different fates.

And no, I won't tell you.

But what I will say is that when I was writing the conclusion, it's one of the hardest things I've ever had to do.