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4.6 Daily Life and the Eruption of Vesuvius
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From the course by Yale University
Roman Architecture
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From the lesson
Civic Life interrupted: Nightmare and Destiny on August 24, A.D. 79
Civic, commercial, and religious buildings of Pompeii buried by the devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 and later rediscovered. Daily life in Pompeii is illustrated through its bakeries and fast food stands and a moving account dramatizes what happened when disaster struck.
Meet the Instructors
Diana E.E. KleinerDunham Professor of History of Art and Classics at Yale University
History Of Art
Very quickly I just want to remind you,
we talked about this in the introductory lecture
that one of the main reasons that Pompeii [COUGH] is so interesting to us today is
because it tells us so much about the daily life, not only of the Pompeiians but
of the Romans in general because we have
all these wonderful shops still preserved at Pompeii.
This was a bakery.
We see the millstones that where actually used
for the grinding of the grain, still preserved.
We see the oven over here,
looking wonderfully, like a modern pizza oven, as you can see.
And we also, believe it or not, have from Pompeii, a petrified bread, it's
preserved, that gives you a sense of what Pompeian bread looked like.
And it looks, it looks strikingly like our
pizzas, with the segments, segments of the bread.
So if you want to have a sense of where pizza came from,
here I told you the Romans, again there's nothing the Romans didn't invent;
bread, pizza, whatever.
But you see that petrified bread, giving you a very good sense
of the, of the, of what was produced in this particular bakery.
I also mentioned in the introductory lecture the fast
food stands of Pompeii, the thermopolium in the singular
and the thermopolia in the plural, these fast food
stands where you could get a, bite real, real quickly.
The way they were designed was to have a great counter in them, with recesses.
Fresh hot and cold food was put out, obviously, every day.
And if you were hungry, you just went up to
the counter, you took a peek at what was there.
You pointed out what you wanted and you could eat on the run.
The Romans were never far to have, you know,
their state religion and their family religion far from them.
And you can also see a nod to the gods over here.
There's a shrine with some of the representations of
the household gods, even in this fast food emporium.
We have wine shops from Pompeii as well.
I show you actually a scene of one of the storage rooms at Pompeii.
That you can see, actually, as you walk
along, so wonderful, roughly, turning to the next page.
The, these wine, these amphoras, these great clay
amphoras that held wine that are located in one
of these storage areas that one can see as
one walks along the forum on the left side.
In Pompeii today.
But you can imagine these on shelves in a wine shop of, of ancient Pompeii offering
wines gathered from all over the world for discerning oenophile, oenophiles.
Is that the word?
Oenophile.
Connecting all of these shops to one another
were of course the streets of the ciity.
The streets of the city are extremely well preserved.
I show you to,
here couple of views of the crossing of the Cardo and the Decumanus in Pompeii.
And you can see exactly what the streets looked like.
You can see the multi-sided paving stones of the streets, you
can see the sidewalks looking, uncannily modern, you can see, I
don't, you can't see exactly here, but there are drains along
the way to allow rainwater to filter off the streets and
all of this again an extremely modern look and,
the streets of Pompeii give us the best sense of
any, of any streets of any preserved ancient city, of
what the streets looked like in any given Roman town.
These streets had along them, again because
of needs for water had along them fountains.
Here's a very modest fountain where we
see a representation of the goddess Ceres Ceres
with her cornucopia, and the fountain spout coming out of her mouth.
And you can see this is the sort of thing when the Romans just needed
a little bit of water for household use they would go out to the local fountain.
So as you walk along the streets of
Pompeii you see a lot of these small fountains.
You also see graffiti, what would a city be without some graffiti on its buildings?
Any of you who've been in Rome recently know that there is too much graffiti.
There's like a graffiti craze.
I mean, the Romans have
always had a lot of graffiti, but it's gotten so bad, it's, it's
almost unimaginable now, but the graffiti tradition was alive and well in Pompeii.
And you see it here, covered with glass.
But you see it here.
You see it here and there in the city as
you wander by, and it gives you a sense that people
did write right on their buildings, these, what they wrote
on these buildings tended to be political, for the most part.
And you'd see graffiti that would say things
like vote for vote for Barbados, the bearded one.
he's, he'll be the best guy for the office, and he's pretty handsome too.
That's the kind of graffiti that you'll see as you walk along, if your
Latin is good, that you'll see as you walk along the streets of Pompeii.
You'll also see these big blocks of stone.
And there are people who look at these and
they think oh, how interesting, that's debris from Vesuvius.
It's not debris from Vesuvius, [LAUGH], clearly.
These are there deliberately.
These are stepping stones.
The Roman's where so ingenious, and so again, concerned about
how to protect people in inclement weather, that they created.
They, they put these stepping stones all
around the city, usually at the cross-sections
of two streets.
So that if there was torrential rain, and if the water piled up, and if the
drains couldn't quite handle it you could get
across the street without stepping in the water.
And it would that we had this in the
slushiness that was New Haven in the last week.
I can't tell you how many times I think why doesn't [UNKNOWN] have Stepping stone.
We really could use them.
But here they are and you can see very clearly
the ruts that come from the carts that have been,
that were made between the stepping stones by those
carts constantly riding through them and it shows you that
they had to orchestrate the wheels of the cart in
such a way that they would span the stepping stones.
But it's a very ingenious thing.
They're fun to look at, fun to walk on, fun, really fun to take pictures on.
I have tons of them.
I, I didn't, decided to not bring a personal picture this time.
Me or anyone else in my family on stepping
stones or other [UNKNOWN], I've got lots of those two.
I didn't bring those today, but I did bring something I'm really proud of.
Because in all the years I've taught this monument, this city, excuse me.
I've always wanted to actually show what it looked
like when rain when there, when it had rained.
And since I've been to Pompeii so, so many times over the years.
But it doesn't tend to rain when I go there.
You know, June, July, August, just doesn't rain.
So I've never been able to do that. I was there this past June.
And low and behold I was very upset, because who
wants to wander around the city of Pompeii in the rain,
but I had one day to go there and I
was there and I said, wow it's raining, here's my chance.
So I finally was able to get some views of what happens
and this was right, and we had torrential rain for about a half
an hour and the sun came out, and this is what you
see as you wandered the streets, you see that the water has accumulated.
But again, lo and behold you can easily make your way across that stream,
across those stepping stones, nonetheless.
Just a very few words on what happens to the streets of the city of Pompeii, or any
Roman city for that matter, when you leave the
gates and you go out on the inter city roads.
Many of those inter city roads become cemeteries.
The Romans used these roads as their cemeteries.
The Romans had a, a religious belief that
you, there was a separation between the city
of the living and the city of the dead.
So all of the tombs are outside the walls of the city.
So you see at Pompeii two extremely well preserved tomb streets, the street of the
tombs and the via Nucera which is the one you see here and you see era.
With tombs of all sorts of shapes and sizes.
I'm not going to go into these in any detail in this course.
There is a paper topic, for any of you who get interested
in tomb architecture, on the tombs of Pompeii.
We will look at some tombs in Rome in great detail
but I'm just going to give you a glimpse of them here.
They come in all sizes and shapes, they're very very interesting,
they honor the people who were buried there, including there's a bench
tomb for example, where you can sit and think on the
the life and times of, of the individual who was buried there.
So a, an absolutely fascinating,
fascinating street with a lot of different tomb types.
That show the variety of tomb architecture under the Romans.
I'd like to end today [COUGH], I'd like to end today by,
by making at least a passing reference to a matter which
is of huge concern to archaeologist and huge concern to all of us as human beings.
And that is what happened to the people
of Pompeii in those very last moments of life.
And archaeologists have been able to reconstruct exactly what
happened to, or not exactly, but as close as,
as possible in this day, you know, in, in
the time from which Pompeii was excavated to now.
To reconstruct, again, what happened to these, these
human beings, at the time of the eruption
of Vesuvius.
[COUGH] They've been able to again, to reconstruct a
very moving picture of their last moments of life.
What we know is that the ash and lava from Vesuvius, and you see a,
a, a restored view here of what that would have been, would have looked like and
you can see Vesuvius and you can see the forum over here with the temple
of Jupiter and the temple of Apollo and the throngs of people, inside the forum at
this particular juncture, as they look up and see.
What is happening and on the right hand side, this is actually a view of
Mount St. Helens, which as you know erupted
in 1980 and the eruption's not so different
as you can as you gaze upon them and look at them in comparison today,
but we know that the, that the eruption of Vesuvius did not happen all at once.
It didn't just happen and cover the city.
It was gradual. There was actually quite a bit
of time.
There was time to escape, the Roman, the Pompeiians saw what was happening.
And those who were smart did escape.
But like any other natural disaster there were, of course, a group of hardy souls,
or perhaps we would call them foolhardy souls,
who thought that they could ride it out.
And they thought they could ride it out by hiding in their own
houses or by, some of the smarter ones of the foolhardy type [COUGH] decided
that they could ride it out in some of
the very strong walled buildings, public buildings of the city.
For example, the bath buildings, the [INAUDIBLE] baths
or the forum baths that we looked at today.
They were gravely mistaken.
Gravely mistaken. We don't know how many stayed.
We think it was actually a fairly small number.
Some have said about a thousand; we don't know.
But what, whatever, the, those who did stay made a grave error.
Because they
were not actually killed by the ash and lava, the molten
ash and lava, despite the fact that it was extremely hot.
But what killed them was the noxious gases that came into
the city after the eruption, that followed that ash and lava.
They were asphyxiated by those gases. [COUGH] Before, after they
had died, but before their bodies decomposed, the ash and lava formed
a protective shell around their bodies protecting them and what the archaeologist
were clever enough to do, is when the modern archaeologist when they were
working with their pick axes and when that pick axe hit a hollow
in the in the ash and lava, they poured plaster into that hollow.
Sometimes that produced nothing, but sometimes it produced bodies, the actual
shape of the bodies of those whose bodies had decomposed there.
and, and we can look at those bodies till today.
And I show you a scene of a number of the
victims of Pompeii huddled together for
mutual and indeed, ultimately futile protection.
I can show you the body of an individual who is lying on the ground,
his face in his hands, trying to
protect himself obviously from those noxious gases that
have come into the city.
I can show you the,the body of, the plaster cast obliviously of
the body of another Pompeiian who was sitting with his knees up and
his hands in front of his face trying to protect himself once
again from those fumes that are about to over take him any second.
The body of an individual who's essentially given up at this point.
He is expired. He's lying on his back.
There's no hope any longer for him.
a, a poor fellow who died on that day.
And then this, this fellow, this heroic fellow who is lifting himself, in
his last moment of life, lifting himself, either to gasp a last breath or
perhaps to whisper something to an endeared, to a dear a family member who is
by his side [COUGH] and we even have the body of a dog.
This story is particularily sad because this dog,
this plaster cast of this dog was found with a chain around his neck so
probably what happened here is the owner of
this particular dog had the dog chained up.
Didn't have time either to take the dog or to release
the dog from his chains so he could try himself to escape.
And that poor dog perished on that day, and
we have the plaster cast of his body till today.
All of these bodies can still be seen on the site
of Pompeii.
And make the visit there all the more poignant.
I know of no more moving human document
from the ancient world than these bodies of
these Pompeians, kept in perpetuity and for us
to commiserate with and to understand, even today.
Thank you.
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