Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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The town is bustling, citizens walking up and down its stone streets, buying food from local bakeries, reading announcements on the walls saying when the next gladiatorial games were to be held at the amphitheatre just down the road, passing great townhouses home to wealthy families. In one of these houses lives a merchant. He was called Aulus Umbricius Scaurus.
Now, Scaurus had become something of a merchant celebrity, a magnate whose goods were famous throughout Pompeii and even far beyond the city's walls. The man was renowned for a very peculiar commodity, a smelly yet highly desired delicacy of the time, a fish sauce known as garum.
From his workshops in and around Pompeii, Scaurus had built himself a garum empire, with clay vessels carrying this condiment stamped with his mark being transported across the Roman Empire to places as far away as Londinium in distant Britannia. You can imagine Scaurus being pleased with himself and what he had achieved
Life was good for him in busy Pompeii, something that certainly couldn't be said for everyone. The occasional ground-shaking earthquakes, originating from the towering mountain above Pompeii, was a discomfort that he was willing to endure. Skouros intended his Garum business to last for generations. He had no idea that its destruction was imminent. Hours later, and an apocalypse had descended.
Day had turned to night, a huge column of black rock and ash spurting from Mount Vesuvius, covering Pompeii in a veil of darkness. For Scourus and many other Pompeians, they faced a stark choice. Do they hide and wait out this hellish experience, or do they try and flee?
Welcome to the Ancients, I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the story of the last days of Pompeii, exploring the lives of Pompeians who experienced this catastrophe firsthand. Figures like Scourus. Our guest is Dr. Jessica Venner, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Oxford, and the author of The Lost Voices of Pompeii.
Jess, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. It's great to have you on The Ancients.
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Chapter 2: What was daily life like in Pompeii before the eruption?
We don't talk about them. And they are the ones holding the empire up. So they definitely deserve a story for sure. Yes.
Let's set the scene. So Pompeii in the 70s AD, before the eruption, how important a town or can we say a city was this in the Roman Empire at that time?
You know, it was an ordinary town and that's what makes it remarkable in a way because of the way that it was preserved. It's the sense that we've actually got this snow globe of a city. And it was important just as much as any other town in the region was because Pompeii was in the region of Campania. And that's a very, very fertile region because of Vesuvius. Now, they didn't know this.
They didn't know Vesuvius was a volcano. They just thought, fantastic, there's a really fertile area. They used to grow on the volcano on the side of the vines. So that's what made Pompeii important. It was on the River Sarno. It was right by the sea, which we find very odd now, but the eruption did push it coast out.
And so they were able to connect themselves by the road and the sea and, you know, to other market centres, including Rome, and it wasn't too far away, relatively speaking. It was an important part of the operation of Rome itself, one of those towns.
Do we think there were many other Pompeii-like towns in the vicinity, likewise making the most of that really fertile land in Campania, that rich area of Italy? We think of Pompeii as unique today, but before the eruption, there were many other settlements that were quite similar to it.
Absolutely, yeah. And they were all sort of known for their own things.
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Chapter 3: Who was Aulus Umbricius Scaurus and what was his significance?
There was something unique about each of them. So, of course, we've got Herculaneum. That was very much on the coast. That had its own, you know, harbour right, right there. Pompeii did as well, but this one was characterised by being very sea heavy. They ate a lot of seafood as well. We know that from their skeletons. And it was a much smaller town, but much more posh.
A lot of rich people would live there. They even had marble sort of lined streets. So they were a lot fancier than Pompeii, which was very much a market town. It was very commercially driven. There were a lot of shops and workshops creating things. Whereas then you've got lots of villas around Pompeii. Pompeii and the other towns and smaller towns and bigger towns.
Puteoli was another one right on the coast on the Bay of Naples. That was a very important harbour town, the most important until it was moved to Ostia, I think. And so there were all these different characteristics of these towns. They all had their role to play, but in their own right, they were ordinary towns.
So what was Pompeii in particular? What was Pompeii famous for?
Pompeii was famous for a few things that might surprise. Pompeii was famous for fish sauce.
Okay, right.
Pompeii was famous for cherries and Pompeii was famous for cabbages.
I've never heard cherries and cabbages being linked to Pompeii before.
Yeah, Pliny's really like enthusiastic about this, you know, the importance of Pompeian cherries and fish sauce and things, which is fantastic because, you know, I'm sure we'll talk about it, but we know who was making the fish sauce. So it's even more mind blowing.
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Chapter 4: How did Pompeians react during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius?
rebuilding, changing the materials, deciding how they're going to fix certain buildings that had only kind of partially fallen down. So should we also be imagining Pompeii coming up to 79 AD? Maybe not the wealthiest it's ever been, but a city, a settlement that is in a state of repairing?
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. They've changed the structure of buildings.
Most importantly, a lot of buildings that were residential were being converted into commercial properties. or gardens, which is something I've spent a lot of time studying.
We can certainly explore that.
Yeah, we must. And so there was this sort of resilient response to this point of crisis. And they were having other crises going on as well. There was a recently recorded famine in during this period of time, this last 20 years, for example. Pompey had a fight with New Syria, this local town, in a riot and people were killed. Then they were punished for it by the Emperor and the Senate.
So they're having a bit of a rough time of it. Not that they really paid attention to that, by the way, but they're having a bit of a rough time. And so they seem to look at these problems a bit like we did during COVID, where you start to find creative ways to get around challenges. And you can see that across the town. So, yes, they're in a point of repair.
I mean, the Stabian Baths, one of the biggest bathhouses in the town, was still being repaired at the time. Whereas the Temple of Isis was repaired immediately by, I think he was seven years old. This young boy who repaired the Temple of Isis.
I'm sure it was just him.
All by himself. But he funded it. And that shows us that actually, you know, Isis was a goddess of rebirth. And I think that's a beautifully poetic thing to do.
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Chapter 5: What insights do we have about the lives of ordinary people in Pompeii?
And taken from Egypt as well. Yes. Yeah. Interesting. Yes. Because they're not prioritizing Roman worship. temples. The Temple of Jupiter in the Forum was still out of use at the time of the eruption, but they were like, no, we must prioritize this temple, which is for a goddess who was open to all social strata, slaves upwards. So she was unique in that way anyway.
So I think it's really important to look at those cracks and you can find what people would prioritize in them.
It's such an amazing way to get an insight into, you know, kind of that life and Pompeii at that time. And do we have any sense in regards to the total population? This is a tricky question for me to ask because there's all of this debate and new piece of information comes to light and they say, oh, actually it's more than 20,000 or it's less than. You've got an opinion on that, do you?
I'm pinning on a lot of things with Pompeii. I think that 20,000 is a very, very normal amount for that sort of size of city. It's usually based on the amphitheater's capacity that would have held a good amount of people. So it does follow that that should be at least the amount that can fit in an amphitheater. And then obviously not everyone's going to go to every single game.
And then you've got slaves on top of that. The slaves are the problem, really, actually, in the calculations of these things. Sometimes they're discounted too much. And I think there were far more slaves than are counted in some. Some of the estimates have gone down to 7,500 people, which is so small. I mean, anyone that's been to Pompeii, you've been many times and
you can see that it's a huge town, really, you know? And also then you would count the citizenry outside of the town walls as well. Do you count those? And yes, you do, because they're part of that territory. So it's a very open question, but I would personally say about 20,000 is a good estimate.
You also mentioned how in the changing landscape after the earthquake, you can see lots of gardens being created. Just because I know you've done a lot of work on that. Why? Why do so many people take advantage of this changing landscape and decide, right, I'm building a garden?
Oh, so it is this natural response that humans have to revert to horticulture in points of crisis. Yeah. We have it all over the world. It's still happening now. And I did mention COVID. We all started gardening again. All of a sudden there were window boxes everywhere and everyone wanted an allotment. It's almost like a natural response. But in Pompeii, it was an opportunistic thing, I think.
So after the earthquake in AD 62, in those 17 years up until the eruption, there was a 250% increase I found in urban agricultural gardens.
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Chapter 6: How did the earthquake in 62 AD impact Pompeii's community?
If it can't have happened plausibly or didn't happen, it's not in the book. And so the Temple of Isis is a really good example of that where the excavators, even though it was excavated really early, put a huge amount of effort into recording every bit of this temple. and preserving it.
If you go to the Archaeological Museum in Naples, and I recommend everybody goes, they have pretty much everything from the temple there. It's reconstructed even in this little plastic model, which is just fantastic. You walk in and my character, Amasucius, again, did exist. He's on a fresco. He's depicted his classic bald head that the priests would have.
They were completely hairless, pluck out eyelashes and everything in his robes. And underneath is a little name. And it's been interpreted as different names, but Amasucius is what I can read. And I'm sticking with that. So he would have been one of a number of priests. and priestesses in this temple to Isis. As I mentioned, Isis was the mother goddess of Egypt.
She was the goddess of rebirth and very important for all people in society. That was fairly rare in the sense that you wouldn't always get cults that were attracting women at the same time as slaves, at the same time as men and freedmen. It was one of those all-rounder cults. So it was very, very important in Pompeii.
And it was clearly becoming more and more popular because we've got graffiti around the town that says, there's one fabulous one that says, the worshippers of ISIS are everywhere. And that's the whole graffiti.
As a complaint or just saying it doesn't matter?
I don't know. I'm not sure. It kind of sounds like a threat. But we've also got evidence of this cult crossing over with the lives of other people. So Julia Felix is one of those. Really? Yes. She has a shrine in her garden to Isis. And she has Egyptian motifs in her dining room that we mentioned.
She does, yes. There's pygmies and there's crocodiles. There's a River Nile scene.
Exactly.
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