What Was Normal Life Like In Pompeii Before Its Destruction? | Pompeii with Mary Beard | Odyssey

[Music] in 79-80 this volcano exploded down below around the bay of naples there were farms houses luxurious villas roman towns the best known is pompeii the eruption which wipes this ancient town off the roman map is one of the world's most famous disasters but the tragedy has given historians a priceless legacy the inhabitants were overwhelmed by gas lethal gas volcanic debris and we found their bodies exactly where they died many have been cast in plaster frozen in time they've tantalized the world with their last horrific moments of death but they tell us little about their lives now in a cellar just two miles outside pompeii are 54 well-preserved skeletons lying exactly where they died they were hiding from the full force of the volcano two thousand years later they're about to give up their secrets i'm wondering whether they can tell us something about the most interesting question in pompeii which is not how the people died we know how they died it's about how the people in pompeii actually lived for the 25 years i've taught classics at cambridge i've been fascinated by what life was really like day to day in ancient pompeii i'm hoping these skeletons will help take this understanding one step further and put my theories to the test i'll explore the opulent and the ordinary don't have to be rich to wear jewelry in a city of the refined and the rude looks to me as if the woman is on top of him but sucking his toes i'll see the hardship endued and the pleasure's savored these guys don't look too pissed yet i can't find where i left my glass i want to see if we can probe a bit deeper and get beneath the skin of this ancient town you don't get closer to real rome than being in a suspect do you i'm hoping that the people in the cellar will help me discover what life was like before vesuvius forced them to flee pompeii is the most important archaeological site in the roman world nowhere else do we come face to face with antiquity up close in quite this personal way these perfectly preserved ruins bring millions of us here each year to see a snapshot of roman life but that's all we see a snapshot of a society where it appears the rich enjoyed a life of luxury and everyone else the poor and the slaves lived lives of drudgery that's always seemed too simple to me it's much more interesting than that i want to bust a few myths about the rich and the poor in pompeii this was the stretch of coastline where rich romans and i mean really really rich romans from the capital used to come for their holidays it was supposed to be particularly popular with the fast set they came here to gamble to have fun to have sex sort of a cross between las vegas and brighton and that's what makes pompeii so remarkable it was a turn where ordinary people lived cheek by jowl with the hedonistic rich it had all the essentials of a roman town with a forum at one end and at the other an amphitheater and training ground for gladiators a market temples baths even a brothel perhaps 12 000 people packed into less than a square mile pompeii lies between the mediterranean and vesuvius it's 17 miles along the coast from naples not far from herculaneum and it's in a suburb of pompeii aplontis where the cellar of skeletons was unearthed [Music] it must have seemed a sensible place to come it's partly underground and that would have seemed safe but it's got good access from the road outside it's very hard not to be moved by this site i mean they may be 2000 years old but they're still victims of a terrible human tragedy on the other hand i can't help wondering what these bones might tell us about the life of these people the first thing we can tell from the seller is that these people appear to be divided into two groups on one side they were carrying money and jewels these bodies have been catalogued and tidied away into boxes the others left where they fell were found with nothing so how can we explain this divide you could come up with all kinds of theories as to why it might be but for my money the most likely thing is that we're dealing with a distinction in wealth [Music] these skeletons are important because many of the bones found at pompeii have simply been jumbled up and the plaster casts they're very poignant but they're much less useful for forensic science because the bones inside get contaminated [Music] remains preserved like those in the cellar exactly where the people died are rare for the first time these are going to be analyzed by a forensic team led by fabian khans [Music] so far we have found at least 54 individuals here at least and this gives us a broad cross section of the society of the roman at that time the point is we have a great opportunity here because we have a snapshot of the society we might have slaves we might have upper class people and we can find out if there have been big differences one of the most complete skeletons is a man aged about 55. apart from some dental cavities he seems in pretty good nick if we look at the other bones i mean i noticed this and you know i don't know much about skeletons but that looks to me like something that's got a real big muscle attachment yeah yeah it's the right up arm and it's the muscle attachment for the brachialis and as you can see on the left side it's nearly the same and he must be a really strong man he's my age he's got about as good teeth as me but he's much stronger these are the rest of his bones but why are his bones green yeah you are right on the whole left side he's green and greens come from metal objects which means he was wealthy there was some bronze or copper or brass object buried with him he had considerable amount of metal wealth with him yeah and the acid in the soil is reacting with the metal objects and that's makes him green nearly all of the so-called ridge sample have been at least one or two bones green so they've all been buried close to something metal whereas what we're calling the poor do any of them have this green no not at all carrying no possessions at all the bones of the people on one side are unmarked but on the other side of the cellar the people with green bones were discovered with a dazzling array of objects these are now kept in a guarded vault at the archaeological museum in naples for the very first time i've been allowed to get really close to this amazing stuff and actually get my hands on it look this is really exciting for me it's the first time i've ever touched any jewelry from pompeii and i'm gonna be very naughty and i'm gonna put the bracelet on and however cynical you are however much a boring old academic you are it's still exciting to wear the bracelet worn two thousand years ago and uh nothing will ever stop me thinking that's exciting i think this is very attractive actually pick it up you can feel instantly it's heavy this is a solid bangle but what strikes you about it instantly is it so big it's not only women that wear bracelets this could be man's jewelry uh it's a big hunking man this really is a very very delicate um piece of jewelry they've told me very specially that i'm not allowed to try this one on um the the links are really tiny it's very high quality workmanship very nicely done um it must have been it would be very pricey now it must have been pricey then too there was a vast treasure horde in the cellar close to the skeleton of the man with green bones was a woman in her early twenties she had with her one of the very very biggest amounts of money found with anybody anywhere in pompeii uh in roman currency it was ten thousand seas what that means is it's about the equivalent of ten years pay for a legionary roman soldier and these are some of the coins some were in silver uh but a lot were in gold and she had them with her in two separate containers instantly you can see that the silver ones are very worn these have actually have been money in circulation these are actually buying things in the pompeo marketplace but the gold ones are an absolutely beautiful condition so i think what that tells us is these really have been somebody's savings i think you can imagine very easily what must have happened that the people were fleeing they wanted to take their valuables with them they get the purse they stuff what's most important to them this thing these things they stuff it inside the purse put it in their pocket and off they go this is what the people in the cellar chose to take with them as they tried to escape they sought refuge from the eruption in what was probably an underground storeroom they never made it further than this cellar in aplontis the building above the cellar appears at first like a two-story residential home but if you explore a little further you see that much more was going on there's a large building with two floors of storerooms piles of big containers and wheel ruts made by hundreds of carts this was clearly more than somebody's house this is an agricultural depot it's ghostly now in roman times it must be an absolute hub of activity with people packing things up carting things wheeling them off getting them ready for dispatch whoever owned this place must have been pretty wealthy but he wasn't anything like as wealthy as one of his neighbors because just over there few yards from this place is one of the most luxurious villas ever found in all of the roman world the cellar is only a stone's throw from this stunning roman mansion a hundred rooms decorated with sumptuous frescoes painted with pigments from the farthest corners of the roman empire and to top it all an olympic-sized 200-foot long swimming pool where the guests could let their hair down so while the rich frolicked at their pool parties what was life like on the streets of [Music] pompeii mattia guandono's family has lived in pompeii for generations and he's one of the site's most experienced guides he's got a local sense of how this place might once have what's your sense of what the ancient town was like the basics what was life like here smell the smell of the people smell of the activity of commerciality that was here smell everywhere smelling on money and the smell of the animals too presumably yes and just think of the smell of the yes awful for them was normal life [Music] to get an idea of pompeii as the people in the cellar would have seen it i've come to naples though it's a modern city there are some striking similarities with the ancient town nearby so you could feel yourself in pompeii here yes now why you feel yourself important because more or less the atmosphere the first floor and the busy town it's easy to forget that pompeii was a two-story town people lived above their shops and bars and stairs opened right onto the streets just as they do in naples today i think people often wonder where all the stuff was in a pompeian shop or a bar i think what this this tells you is that it uh you can hang a lofty up you can actually hang it from the ceiling like they did two thousand years ago as this painting shows us all around modern naples are echoes of pompeii's past from the doors just like the ones you see in pompei and frescoes there are things like this in pompeii yes just the head the head careful because we don't want the overnight okay we can get that to the images they left on their walls and i think the graffiti is pretty pompen the poppy and graffiti were better than this they're better than [Music] was cleaner than that do you really think so oh yes but here you don't do you [Music] so we can find all kinds of clues as to how ancient pompeians lived in modern naples but what can the bones from the cellar add to the picture of their lives see this looks quite ordinary to me this this is a leg bone this is the lower part of the leg bone and if you compare it to this bone it's swollen oh yeah and you can see all these little holes and what is that this is the infection of the skin and the bone a possible reason for this might be a cut this is one one explanation for it so you get a cut you haven't got antiseptic you um maybe don't even know exactly what the relationship is between dirt and infection no um and so the cut never properly heals and is a kind of lifetime infection really yeah painful or not peaceful very painful very painful so where could this infection have come from after all we tend to think of romans as a rather clean lot regularly visiting the baths it's true that bathing was an important part of life as we can see at the baths near the forum in pompeii they give us a better picture than anywhere else in the world of how roman bathing actually worked this is where you took your clothes off uh i think it must have been quite stunning to come in from the hot sweaty outside through the narrow corridor into this beautifully decorated room i think you have to imagine the baths as being a place where someone whose life could be a bit drab could come to bright colors twinkling lights water splashing everybody with their clothes off the baths were the people's palace bathing was a great leveler almost everyone in ancient rome rich and poor men and women would have gone to the baths including the people from our cellar these feats of engineering had under floor heating a series of hot and cold rooms and in rome itself they could even have a library attached you get all sorts of things that come into a roman bath you get hot and cool and you get rest but i think it's also crucial to remember you get wonderful things to look at too and the ceiling still has some traces of the kinds of uh over-the-top decoration that you expect in a really good roman bath and everybody shares those things we tend to think of these luxurious baths as pristine marble palaces where people came to get clean but is that really the case here is where i guess you just spent your time in this lovely marble pool it's a bit like a jacuzzi i think think california or perhaps think rugby club you sit down the warm waters around your feet this is a great time to relax to talk to your friends in this lovely setting there is however a nasty surprise in store we can see ever so clearly where the water comes into this pool there's a nice little spout here bringing the water in but you can look all around and there isn't a single place where it can go out what this means is there is absolutely no circulation of water at all in this pool all the people who piss in here their sweat it all comes into a steaming hot watery mass just how healthy is that well it's not at all healthy even some roman doctors realized it wasn't healthy the great roman doctor called kelsis who says make sure you don't go to the baths if you've got an open wound because you're likely to die of gangrene if you do [Music] whether the people in the cellar made that connection we don't know but the bones offer an extraordinary revelation about another area of the population's health so these are two different people they are two different people 10 to 12 year old children they're both the same age and they have both the same abnormalities on their teeth we think most probably they have been twins they made same teeth yeah and they had a problem on closer examination of the twins teeth fabian's colleague marche henneberg discovered evidence of a horrible and unexpected disease they must have a massive illness illnesses and one possible explanation for it this is uh congenital syphilis i know i'm not joking but i thought syphilis didn't come to europe until much later than this i mean yeah so if this were the case yeah this would be our first roman case of congenital syphilis yes of course well that would be something to find in this cell isn't it if this is true it would overturn the idea that the disease first arrived in europe with columbus's sailors this would be the first recorded case of syphilis by more than 1400 years but the twins and the cellar also tell us about another aspect of ancient roman life this must have been really bad and serious illness somebody had to took care of them very a lot of care a lot of healthcare a lot of uh effort to that they made it what strikes me is that they were found in the so-called poor sample but still must have received years of medical care i mean it is interesting because it's going from a really nice scientific observation just to a glimpse of a family support network parents looking after them the very base of their survival is about human care the possibility of a sexually transmitted disease might at first sight reinforce a view many people have of ancient rome as a society of debauchery and sexual excess there's willies big willies everywhere when one object was first found in a pompeian bar it was deemed too shocking to be put on public display [Music] it's a bronze lamp and all kinds of things dangled off at bells and stuff the kind of wind chimes for us the romans would have called it a tintin abulum but the center of attention must have been this chap here a bronze hunchback pygmy with a huge willy which he is in the process of cutting off i like to think that this shows uh greater anxiety on the part of the romans about their masculinity but who knows maybe it's a strange form of erotica maybe it's a joke on the guys who came to drink in the bar or is it in the end just a lamp whatever its function you only need to stroll around town to see the same phallic theme again and again what did they mean what were they for everybody's had a theory and there'd been some pretty mad ones uh do they for example point to the nearest brothel well i'm afraid not a hope if this were the case pompeii would be littered with brothels some people think it is but i'm not so sure if you look carefully at this upmarket bath house you see that displays of sex can be interpreted differently the painting on the room you come into features all kinds of sexual positions from back from the front with the tongue you name it it's here not just that each one is given a number this has launched the theory that this bath establishment is not just a bath establishment but has perhaps on the upper floor a brothel attached it's a kind of massage parlor with fringe activities i'm afraid the truth about these paintings is a bit more mundane what we've really come into is the changing room you can see along the walls the place where the shelf to hold your clothes would have been put and what these paintings are i think are not adverts for the sex that might be going on upstairs you know please could i have three hours of number four i think they are a clever way of helping you remember where you left your tunic or your toga and in fact if you look rather carefully at what the numbers are written on they're written on kind of wicker baskets which i think is what we imagine would be on the shelf below where you left your belongings so the idea would be i left my toga near the fellatio it's a kind of joke but if you head across town there is one building where there is no debate about its intended function as far as i'm concerned this is the town's one and only known brothel now this is where you can see that the whole wall is covered with the graffiti of the customers they're an interesting multicultural bunch there's a couple in greek they're very hard to read latin handwriting is absolutely dreadful but this one here is clear and pretty typical uh i came along here and i had a good which is about as clear as you can get it's a pretty gloomy place and i think my heart goes out to the prostitutes um who have to work here honestly the sex here still sells 2 000 years later because this is the most popular visitor attraction on the entire site this place is always packed with people because we still have a glamorous view about roman sex and roman brothels we also get told a lot of rubbish about it if you listen to what the tour guides are saying here they look at these paintings up above the cubicles and they say oh what these are they're the menu at the brothel you might not be able to speak latin very well but you could always ask like in a bar for you know can i have some of that one above that door it's rubbish it doesn't add up to me and i think they are fantasy images about sex this place is bad enough um it's dark it's dingy the girls are working in prison cells effectively um you don't have to make it worse by pretending that it's what came and chose sex like you choose a hamburger between the frescoes the fallacies and the brothel you can see how he ended up with the image of pompeii as a society obsessed with sex but we need to think again about this ancient myth my idea is pretty simple honestly i don't really think that the romans are any more interested in sex than we are i think it's much more to do with male power it's to say this is a very masculine culture roman power is about male power the phallus tells you that roman power is built on its masculinity we've been too keen to see sex in every corner of pompeii and that may go for another image of roman life too we picture the rich gorging themselves in gluttonous feasts while the poor and the slaves who serve them go hungry i wonder if the skeletons in the cellar can give us a different view on that too fabian is there anything that you've been able to discover so far which might tell us about the diet of these people from what we can see with the naked eye we didn't find any signs of malnutrition or lack of minerals there is no significant difference between the two groups so everybody here was getting enough of what they needed to keep alive and pretty healthy yeah this is remarkable we might expect to see big differences between the rich and the poor the poor perhaps smaller and showing signs of nutritional deficiency but not here so can we find out more about what these people had actually been eating fabian i noticed when i was looking at some of the teeth that they do seem very worn um very much more worn down than modern teeth because mainly the process of of of milding the grain is completely different and in this time there was a lot of stones in the flower so so when our pompons eat they're nice pompeian bread they're also eating bits of the millstone as well yeah yeah and it and it abrades it [Music] bread was such a staple food that in pompei alone there are 30 bakeries one of the biggest is on the town's high street and it gives us a vivid picture of how pompeians baked their daily bread [Music] one thing that we can be certain about all the people who ended up in our cellar rich and poor alike is that they'd have eaten bread from the same sort of bakery maybe even the same bakery now this is a really typical baking establishment of pompeii i'm standing now in the area where the corn was ground mules would have driven these rotating mills the main entrance to the bakery from the street was there and this is where the dough was prepared probably by slaves flower was brought from this area round to here they formed it into loaves as yet unbaked they put those loaves on this shelf here and they washed through to be picked up and put in the oven here [Music] and we know exactly what it looked like a painting from pompeii shows us round loaves of bread divided into eight portions in fact 81 carbonized loaves cooked and ready to be sold have been found perfectly preserved in one of the town's many ovens and that's not all archaeologists have found pomegranates walnuts even eggs preserved for two thousand years and now an extraordinary piece of new research means we can prove that it wasn't just rich romans who act well in herculaneum nine miles from aplontis historian andrew wallis hadrial is leading the excavation project herculaneum was buried under more than 50 feet of volcanic debris during the eruption of 79. [Music] above this street was an apartment block inhabited not by rome super-rich but by the ordinary people of the town what went into their mouths came out 15 feet below let's come down here mary it's not quite so scary as it looks down here the evidence of roman diet has been perfectly preserved for two millennia i'm not great on ladders yeah to be disappearing into the bowels of the earth we're getting to the bit where you can see some very good downpipes here this whole sewer is fed from above the stuff coming down smears down the wall generations of stuff leaves a trail and it's still brown you can see very clearly how brown it is it just leaves this trail of it feels real you don't get closer to real rome than being in a suspect do you so you got a layer of on the floor yep and then volcanic material covering it exactly beautifully sealing the stuff on the floor right so you take out the volcanic material and get to the that's right it's all gone up to our knees roughly was really really precious material in archaeological terms this is gold you mean it's precious because it literally was what had gone through these roman lavatories down here was the story of roman diet just waiting to be found this is the world's largest archaeological excavation of sewers over 700 bags of human waste were collected from the sewer floor and are being systematically analyzed to tell us more about what romans were eating what have you learned well in terms of diet the amazing thing about the contents down here is the variety you've got bones of all sorts a lot of fish bones were right by the sea they had a high fish diet but also chicken and eggs but walnuts and good variety of nuts so you've got a complete mixture between local stuff and imported stuff which is so difficult of the roman empire it's only going to live well on this live healthy honest what's important is to try and fix who the people were that were living above this desperate and sending there are a series of shops immediately above us so some of them are shopkeepers definitely and then above them are two more floors of flats and it's terribly tempting to think because they're flats these must be absolutely dirt poor they're neither dirt poor nor stinking rich and this is a really hard thing that you know people often think of the roman world as being they're these really posh people at the top and then everyone else is ground down and miserable yeah no sorry it's much more complicated than that there are these are not really posh people they aren't rich enough to live a life of luxury they're ordinary people ordinary the excavation in the sewers supports what we found in the cellar that rich and poor shared the same basic healthy diet but let's not kid ourselves the rich took every chance to show off their wealth and where you ate was one way to do that this is a top of the range roman dining room but we might imagine that some of the richest of the skeletons in our cellar even if they didn't own something like this might once or twice have eaten somewhere like this is built around the idea of running trickling trinkling water water would rush down from that little niche at the back it would then feed in to this pool here it would feed out over the marble and it would end up in another pool with a fountain overlooking a garden beyond the other thing that i think is quite interesting is it reveals very sharply how dependent the rich would be for their display eating on slaves got to get up there to recline how do you do it and how would you do it in a toga the answer must be that you were helped by your slaves that's a very nice day-to-day indication of how the roman elite relied on the servant class let me try and get up because it's not easy whoops now i suppose that what i do is recline like this but i hope to goodness they had some cushions because it really isn't very comfortable i'm a bit far from where my wine might be in here certainly seems to me that this is ostentatious dining coming at the price of comfort so unlike today when having money means you can eat out if you were rich in pompeii you were dining at home surrounded by opulence but what about ordinary pompeians who weren't living in luxury where were they eating fast food joints are one of the commonest features of the pompeian street scene there's over 150 of them in the city there's 20 of them in this section of street alone there's so many of them that they can't possibly have been for the rich alone they probably weren't for the rich at all they were the people who didn't have places to eat at home they were the people coming in from the countryside or the people coming in from the port who wanted to get a bite to eat you've got two choices if you're a customer at this bar either you come to the street or to the counter see what they've got on offer in the dishes here choose what you want take it away fast food but if you've got more time and i guess if you've got more money because probably like modern naples you've got charred more if you want to sit down as you go into the back room and you spend time eating and drinking at a table i imagine it was pretty crowded perhaps six or eight tables with people sitting round and when you got down on the tables when you're sitting on the chairs at your eye level these lovely little scenes of life in the bar from the storerooms of the naples museum a fresco found in pompeii has been specially brought out for me to see it once decorated the walls of another bar and gives us an idea of a typical pompeian night out they're very clever actually because it's not just paintings but the paintings have got the ancient equivalent of speech bubbles attached to them so the little dialogue a little story develops and the story is not entirely unfamiliar after a good few drinks two men get into an argument about a game of dice the upshot of this we see in the sadly bashed up last scene but happily the writing still survives one's saying you scumbag i won and the other is saying quite literally no you didn't you and just at the right hand corner it must be the landlord because his speech bubble is saying look chaps if you want to fight get outside now i think it's nice actually ending this little series of scenes with the landlord because it reminds us that bars are not just places where people go and get drunk and gamble and flirt they're actually somebody's business [Music] so where rich and paul were eating and drinking was worlds apart but what they yet was for the most part very similar everybody shared the benefit of food grown in this marvelously fertile region and sourced from the plentiful mediterranean which in those days was right on their doorstep it's easy to forget that in roman times pompeii was absolutely of the seashore it's only the seismic activity that means that it's now finland pompeii itself had a port and there were other little harbours up and down this coastline goods came in from abroad and goods went out from this rich agricultural land [Music] it might have looked like a small provincial italian town by the sea but there's plenty of evidence some of it from the skeletons in the cellar of just how far pompeii's international connections stretched [Music] what we've got here is a gorgeous gorgeous necklace it was found near one of the skeletons the likely candidate is that it was with a middle-aged woman and it is stunningly modern in its feel um it's got a narrow neck it's going to go around there's no way i think it might just go around me um but it's too big to be a bracelet so it must have been a choker going i think tight around somebody's neck one of the puzzles about these things always is where exactly the raw material for them comes from emeralds aren't found naturally near pompeii the likelihood is that they come from egypt these roughly shaped emeralds belonging to one of the skeletons aren't the only evidence we have of rome's two-way global traffic this is one of the most extraordinary objects ever found in pompeii what it is is an ivory statuette and you only have to look at it to see this looks indian and it is indian that's where it comes from so it absolutely brings it home to you in an instant that pompeii and pompeian inhabitants know about what happens in the outside world or they have an awareness of egypt and africa and asia and all the other places around the mediterranean in a way that's quite different from what one imagines the the global view of an english village might be in the 18th or 19th century [Music] so pompeii was a small town with a world view but how far do our skeletons in the cellar reflect that we know that pompeii is in some ways a surprisingly multicultural little place there are foreign objects here foreign imports it's got a port it's looking towards the outside world what's always been much trickier to pin down is just how far the population was multicultural have we got any evidence from these skeletons about the makeup of pompeian society i mean really the ethnic or racial makeup we found two skeletons where we're quite sure that they are of african ancestry this is from the so-called rich group and there's another one it's a female lying on her belly there and she's of african origin tell me how you know it's of african origin it's just the shape of the face i mean are you talking sub-saharan africa not not north yeah black black african people what you're seeming to suggest and i think that's a really important point is that uh there are people living here who have an origin really on the other side of the roman empire that's not the only thing interesting about the african skeleton his skull is green stained by metal objects and he's in the group found with treasure it's possible he was the slave of someone rich but he might also have been rich himself we can't assume all africans were slaves brutal and degrading as roman slavery certainly could be it wasn't as straightforward as that in one ancient cemetery outside pompeii is a tomb that paints a much more complex picture of slavery what you've got here is a tomb to hold the ashes of three people and they tell you who they are there's a man called publius vessonius who is an ex-slave he tells you he's an ex-play there's a woman called vesonia who had actually owned him and then freed him and my guess is they'd probably then got married and he's also putting it up for the guy on the right a friend of his the first text says vesonius put this up for this trio but the text underneath tells the sequel which isn't so happy stop and read this he says because that guy on the right who i thought was my friend turned out to be false in fact says vesonius he took me to court we quarrelled and he took me to court but luckily my innocence and the gods above saved me but he was a complete bastard we don't know why this man didn't just remove his ex-friend's statue that's what i would have done but luckily he didn't as this monument tells a fascinating story here was an ex-slave rich enough to put up this big tomb for three and then to go to court to settle the dispute with his former friend the point about roman slavery is that it isn't always a lifetime sentence slaves get freed by the people who own them and they sometimes go on to do very well in fact my guess is that a majority probably of the pompeian population certainly some of the people in our cellar would have had slaves somewhere in their ancestry it's been calculated that more than half the population of herculaneum were descended from slaves and slaves certainly sometimes did what we think of as high status jobs there's evidence for that in a very surprising place yeah you have the bog there's probably one seat here and then yes you can come and sit by me yep you see what's brilliant about this is that the last person to use this lou before the corruption happened has left his name it starts with an a here that's right and it's what it's saying is it's his name it's apolloniaris yes medicus yes apolinaris the doctor of the emperor titus then you can't read this any longer because it's got two faded but we know it said had a good here this name apolinaris we can't be certain but it's very likely a slave name so the emperor's doctor is a slave now we tend to think of slave jobs as being very drudge manual labor and some of them certainly were but slaves also did high in our terms high status professional jobs like being doctors so that's another reason why slavery is more complicated but also to be a slave of the emperor is to be really someone quite important in some ways it's better to be a slave of an emperor than an ordinary free born person with a tiny little shop in in hercules i'd much rather be the emperor titus's slave doctor than a flower cellar on the way up this guy yeah so slavery was a fact of life in pompeii almost certainly some of the people in our cellar were slaves they died right next to their masters as they would have lived at the house of the baker on the main street of pompeii we find a nice illustration of that closeness in a painting on the dining room wall these guys don't look too pissed yet um although i think we can imagine what might happen next but the giveaway scene is in the background where that lady is clearly about to keel over and she's being propped up by the slave behind her i imagine slaves came in pretty handy for this kind of job but it wasn't just slaves and masters living on top of each other here in the baker's house right next to the smart dining room there's a stable and in the stable the bones of the animals the ones that used to turn the mills which ground the grain and no doubt delivered the bread around town too here we've got the finest room in the baker's residential quarters right up next to where the mules lived and just a few yards away is the back end of a really rich house in pompeii that was being given a complete makeover at the time of the eruption so the rich are living right next door right up against the working bakery the baker has his possessed room right next door to his animals that's how pompeians lived cheat by jam and that's how we find the people in the cellar rich and poor male and female old and young lying close to each other in death just as they would have been in life but in 79 a.d that life came to an end neither they nor the others in this town had any idea that they lived in the shadow of a volcano the last major eruption had been 1500 years before nothing could prepare the population for what happened when vesuvius exploded the people in the cellar had just one choice to try and escape or stay and find shelter [Music] from out at sea you get a very good impression of how vesuvius really lowers over the whole area but also you get this slightly uncomfortable sense of how very close the volcano is makes you realize how difficult it would have been to escape from it especially if you left it a little bit too late while friends and neighbours fled we know that our 54 people looked for cover and many took their most precious belongings with them [Music] why most of them stayed put we can only guess but in one case there's a strong clue [Music] fabian tell me about the remains of this person that you've got laid out here this is maybe one of the most dramatic and tragic persons we found in this in the whole sample because these are the bones of a young female and we found with the skeleton this small bone pelvic bone of a fetus and she must have been pregnant right if you measure it you can determine it was in the last month of pregnancy and it was yeah it's quite dramatic the thought of being eight and a half months pregnant and trying to flee for your life from the erupting volcano is something just dreadful amazingly an eyewitness account of the eruption survives it describes how on that fateful day you could hear the shrieks of women the squalling of infants and the shouting of men some calling out for their parents others for their children or their wives it was so dark they could only recognize them by their voices many pleaded for the help of the gods but more thought that the gods had disappeared and that the world had been plunged into eternal darkness [Music] it must have been pitch black when the volcanic debris started to fall and our people tried to escape several of them certainly have brought lamps with them this one is rather nice because uh the center just where the oil goes in got a lovely picture here of the goddess of rome herself she's sadly broken in half but she's quite recognizable with her helmet on the people in the cellar were sheltering there as the eruption intensified outside plunging them further into darkness heaven knows how you could have found your way through the streets at night using just one of these it makes me realize how vulnerable the people in this cellar must have felt they've fled through the darkness all trace of the sun has been obliterated by the volcanic debris they've come in here they're huddled together for shelter and support and the only protection against the dark they've got is half a dozen little lamps like this [Music] of course in the end these people couldn't protect themselves from the same fate as the others in pompeii but the romans in the cellar didn't just leave us with evidence of their tragic death but of the lives they lived too it may have been a male-dominated world where the rich dined in luxury and exploited the poor but pompeii was also a place where slaves could earn their freedom where women could own wealth and the ordinary roman could eat and drink well it was a place where even the poorest knew something of the world outside [Music] the people who died in this cellar help us to understand that roman society wasn't quite as black and white as we often imagined it to be sure these people would have had vastly different lifestyles but they lived cheek by jowl and they shared a lot too the smells the dark and the dirt not to mention the wine the sex the food and the fun and in the end of course they shared the same fate in the same cellar 2 000 years ago [Music] you

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 218,208

Keywords: ancient history, classical history, ancient civilisations, classical antiquity, history documentary, classical documentary, mary beard, pompeii, roman history, mt vesuvius, supervolcano, destruction of pompeii, pompeii history, bbc documentary, documentary movies - topic, full documentary

Id: Y0i2eNqotlY

Length: 58min 42sec (3522 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 29 2021