Dr. Jessica Venner

Other towns were as well, but Pompeii is particularly mentioned by writers at the time.

And they say that people in the town were walking about unable to know what to do with themselves.

They were completely disorientated.

We even have a little frieze, which is a sort of marble cutout almost, a decoration in someone's house, a banker called Caecilius Eucundus, who if anyone's done a Cambridge Latin course... Caecilius!

We know Caecilius est in auto, and he had a frieze in his atrium that was depicting this earthquake.

So you've got little statues in the forum next to the Temple of Jupiter falling off of their horses in this picture.

It's like a little satirical sort of take on the earthquake.

But interestingly, Caecilius potentially died in this earthquake because he was one of the biggest bankers in Pompeii,

And his records, his wax tablets, were found in his house by excavators.

And the records stop almost exactly at the date of the earthquake.

So...

I'm moving to Rome or something like that.

Although I do find it really weird that his family would commemorate the earthquake that potentially killed him in his atrium.

It's very much that.

Yes.

We think of Pompeii today as this sort of grey landscape of buildings without roofs and things like that.

It's quite hard to imagine what it would have looked like.

But there are clues throughout the site.

There's cracks in walls.

They've blocked up doors.