Selects: How Pompeii Worked

What must be one of the most famous natural disasters in history took place when Mt Vesuvius buried Pompeii in 79 CE. But when the town was resurrected 1700 years later, a new chapter in its history was written. Learn all about it in this classic episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, it's Josh and Chuck is here in spirit too,
and we just wanted to drop a casual reminder that
we are going to have a swinging Pacific Northwest Swing
this coming February, and tickets are now on sale. February
one will be at the More Theater in Seattle, February
two will be at Revolution Hall in Portland, and on

(00:22):
February three, for SF Sketch Fest, will be at the
Sydney Goldstein Theater. Go check out all of our social
media's for more information and links to tickets, and we'll
see you in February. Hey, everybody, have you ever been
buried under ash from a volcano? Well? I haven't either,
but the people of Pompey were, so this episode How

(00:45):
Pompey Worked goes back to February and it was a
good one. It's our real cracker, so check it out. Now.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,

(01:08):
There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there. We're
all wearing togas, which makes the Stuff you Should Know,
the Ancient Roman Edition or the Animal House Edition. Yeah
it could be. I'm blue do I just saw that
that movie that Netflix movie about Oh yeah, Doug Kenny

(01:31):
and then Lampoon. Is it good? Well, the documentary is better.
Oh is this like a biopic? Uh? Yeah, I mean yeah,
it's a movie movie. I got you. Yeah, I judge
my um what I watch on Netflix just based on
like the illustration or the drawing or the art. And

(01:53):
sometimes that's a good rule of thumb, in other times
it's not. But that one I kind of avoided it
because of the art. Yeah, I mean it's not great.
I kind of enjoyed it because I like all the
people and it's kind of fun seeing someone be Bill
Murray and someone be Chevy Chase and John Belushi and
a little bit of the making of Animal House and Caddyshack.
But ultimately the documentary is much better. What's the name

(02:15):
of the documentary, um A drunk, stoned, brilliant dead, or
some combination of those words. I'm not sure I've come
across that. Yeah, that's that's really good. But brilliant and
feudal gesture, feudal and stupid gesture. Yeah, that's right. Is uh?
I give it two stars. I don't know how out

(02:35):
of how many though, I've just been steady consuming riff
tracks as fast as they'll clear him on Amazon Prime. Really, yeah,
that stuff never gets old. It really doesn't. It really
really doesn't. All right, Chuck. Now that we've gotten our
initial tangent a k a. The introduction out of the
way recommended viewing, right, um, let's talk Pompeii. Yeah, because

(03:03):
I mean that's what we're doing today. And frankly, it's
two thousand and eighteen. We've been doing this for almost
a decade now, we're coming up on a decade in
a few months in April. Yeah, and we this is
the first we're doing on Pompeii. And that is just
utterly mind blowing to me. It really is, considering we've
done shows on both volcanoes and super volcanoes um and

(03:28):
our our show on tiny volcanoes all right, that was
Little the Littlest Volcano. That was so good. It is
weird that we're finally getting around to us. Yeah, it
really is. Because we've also done like the Seven Wonders,
We've done tons of archaeology stuff. It's it's strange. We
did one on the real Atlantis, remember that one. Nope,

(03:50):
it was a good one. You should go back and
listen to it. Really, yeah, man, Yeah, I was like, oh, Monopoly,
we haven't done one on that and looked it up
and yep, we should have. I do remember that one.
I was scouring my brain like, Okay, what what was
this episode? Like? What did we talk about? Nothing? It's
like it never happened. I mean, maybe we should just

(04:12):
go back and re record some of these for our
own benefit. Okay, reboot our own show, right just for us?
So um, okay, Well, we are finally talking POMPEII, and
to do that, we have to go back the way
Back machine and we should probably bring helmets and the
dog attack outfits that those those trainers wear. Yeah, and

(04:36):
also we need to fuel the way back with olive
oil on this trip. Let's we need to retrofit it
because we'll be in big trouble if we don't. Well,
let's use the good stuff, like the really high grade stuff,
because it burns my throat. I like the mid grade
e v o O, So let's save that for eating,
use the high test stuff for traveling. Oh you don't
like really get olive wood? H No, I don't I

(04:59):
want to say that I do, but I don't. It
burns my throat. Yeah, like when you just do shots
of it. Yeah, maybe that's the problem. Shot of olive oil,
shot of crank case soil. Well, you know what they say,
olive oil before crank case oil never sicker, right, No,
it's the other. Oh god, alright. So we're in the

(05:27):
way back machine. We have our our rescue gear. We
have our olive oil. It's our dog attack gear. Sure
why because the dogs there? No, because of the falling
pummice in stone that's about to hit the area. Yeah,
but there. I just wondered because they're very famously was
a cast of a dog, and there's actually a very
famous mosaic that says cave conum, which is aware of dog. Okay,

(05:52):
so yeah there are dogs there. Well, good thing, we
got that suit right in our nice dispositions. Good dog. Okay.
So we're we're here. It's pretty nice. It's a very
nice area. It's pretty well populated. This is Pompeii itself,
and Pompeii is one of several towns right around here
on the Bay of Naples. And if you look up

(06:13):
over here, that giant, almost cartoonishly volcanic volcano over there.
That's Vesuvious. It's like an eight year old drew of
volcano and put it in Italy at the Bay of
Naples by Naples, and uh, that's it. That's that's Vesuvius.
It's a it's what's called a strato volcano. That's right. Uh,

(06:37):
And well, I guess we should. You can go back
and listen to volcanoes from December two thousand ten or
super volcanoes just last April. But for those of you
don't know, a strato volcano is sort of if you
think about the just the run of the mill traditional
volcano and a cartoon where it just pops like a

(07:00):
campaigne bottle, that's a strato volcano. Yeah, and it's it's
actually just built up from previous explosions. So the very
presence of a strato volcano indicates that there's been a
lot of activity in that area and it's blown straight
up into the air and then come down and settle
down around it, and now you have a new layer
and it just builds up as a cone. And the

(07:20):
thing about the strato volcanoes, like you said, it pops
like a cork. The reason it does that is because
the lava that's kind of slowly growing and building up
over time, UM has gases that it seeps into the rock,
the surrounding rock that makes up the volcano, right and
um when those gases finally overcome a certain threshold, the
pressure threshold, that's when that cork goes off. And it's

(07:43):
about to happen, because it's either August or September or October,
and we're here in Pompeii. Yeah, and we should also
mention to you there are other volcanoes around if you
look around, because this isn't a unique area of Europe.
That is called the companion arc uh and there are

(08:06):
quite a few volcans, well not quite a few, but
there are several volcanoes. Vesuvius obviously the most active and
deadly um and famous. But what the companion arc is
or companion is there's a process called subduction where basically
a tectonic plate bumps up against another one and moves

(08:27):
down into the mantle beneath the other plate. And that's
what's going on here where the African plate is meeting
the Eurasian plate. Right. So there's like all that um
hot molten earth that's kind of bubbling up through that seam,
and one of those holes is the volcano that we
know is Vesuvius. Right, yes, okay, so we got here
just in time to look around for a little bit

(08:48):
and kind of take in the the culture of the
area before the volcano. It's very nice. It is very nice.
It was like a very very wealthy town, but not
really an important town as far as the Roman Empire
was concerned, but there were there was an inordinate amount
of wealthy people, and those wealthy people were inordinately wealthy. Um,

(09:11):
and they spend a lot of money on the town.
There's lots of statues everywhere. There's a good number of temples. Um.
There's one to isis. Uh, there's one a Jupiter. Um.
There's a big amphitheater and a big theater as well,
two separate things. Yeah, there's one that holds twenty thousand people,
which um, at its peak, that's how many people lived

(09:33):
in Pompeii. Which is a very democratic thing to do,
to say that, hey, uh, we're gonna host a show
here and we want everyone to be able to come
right and and that that's pretty cool that they did
do that, because there's a pretty mixed population in Pompeii
at the time, Pompeii and suburban Pompeii, which included Herculaneum,

(09:53):
uh Stabia, and um what was the other one, Chuck,
there's uh plazas, plazas Okay, Okay, So there's this string
of towns, but Pompeii is definitely the biggest of all
of them, and that's kind of like the center of
the area, right. But there's a lot of different people,

(10:14):
a lot of different type of people who were kind
of who kind of gravitated towards Pompeii. It was like
a cosmopolitan area, right, So you had wealthy people, you
have poor people, you have people from different areas. That's right.
And it was also kind of unique for its time
and that it was. It was a bit of a
resort town, so wealthy people all around Italy. Actually, some

(10:39):
of them would have I guess what you would call
it now would be a vacation home. Uh. And that
kind of got me down a rabbit hole of vacationing,
Like when did that actually begin? Because I had no
idea that the people of ancient Italy vacations. Yeah, but
apparently it's the thing. And even Nero is said to
maybe have had a place at Pompeii. Uh, And I

(11:00):
guess it's just you know, the weather here is lovely.
There's wine and olive oil everywhere. Like I said, that
big theater they built that and said, one day Pink
Floyd shall play here. Man, I watched that Echoes video
like ten times while I was researching this. It's pretty cool.
For those of you who don't know, Pink Floyd did
a very famous live concert, um, well not a concert

(11:22):
concert for no one, a live performance um in front
of whatever fifteen crew people that were filming it. Yeah,
in the middle of the Amphitheater at POMPEII. Yeah it's
a little trippy, Yeah, just a dad um. But then
David Gilmour uh a couple of years ago, I think
in two thousand and sixteen did a show there with

(11:43):
actual people there and it was the first like attended
concert event there since you know the Volcano Incante. Really
cool since the v I. Yeah, but and that also
is will kind of see in a little while. That
really gives away like just how accessible POMPEII is, the excavated,
ruined city. Um that you could go see a David

(12:06):
Gilmour concert there. Yeah. Um, like I said, wine and
olive oil was kind of one of the main trades.
But it was just a very rich farmland area because
that volcanic soil is so rich in nutrients. And they
were right there by the water with the Sarno River
and then right there on the bay, and they just

(12:29):
like life live in life there was pretty good and
even the slaves apparently could earn money and potentially even
by their freedom, which was pretty unusual. Um. I have
to say, also, you mean and I went to Pompeii,
as I've told you, and I can attest about that
that farmland and the fertility of it. They have lemons,

(12:50):
no joke, the size of your head, like they look
like you shouldn't. You shouldn't stand too close to them.
What do you do with that much? I don't, I
don't know. I'm mean make lemonade, I guess if you're
an optimist. Yeah, but it's just like you get one
lemon and you've really got fourteen lemons pretty much all right.
I think you're just slowly but surely cut away at it,

(13:13):
squeeze it into your face, pick up another piece, do
it again. Got you should we take a break. I
think that we weren't ready for a break yet until
that last joke, and now we are. Okay, So yeah,
all right, we'll be back right after this and talk
a little bit about the v I as watch my

(13:35):
sk sk but you should know I sk alright, Chuck,

(13:56):
what is the v I? The volcano incidet okay, I
didn't realize it had been abbreviated, or the big one.
That's a good one too, So let's go with the
let's go with the b oh Okay. So um Pompey,
it's this nice driving city of twenty thousands. It's a
resort area to um and on. I guess the morning

(14:20):
of August, and we should say that date is actually
up for debate. Well sure, I guess we'll talk about
it a little more later, but we're going with August
because that's the date that's still in use. Um. There
was a rumble from Vesuvius. There was an earthquake in
the area enough to like get everybody's attention. But supposedly
that wasn't a very infrequent occurrence. That that Vesuvius caused

(14:44):
earthquakes pretty pretty frequently in the region, and it wasn't
a big cause of panic. Yeah, Like one reason so
many people died because I think because they were used
to that kind of activity and they were like, man,
a big deal. We're used to the earth moving under
our feet. No reason to to flee the town, right,
There have been a pretty substantial earthquake sixteen years before,

(15:05):
and I think sixty three ce Um where they had
to reconstruct a lot of stuff like entire temples and
things have been knocked down. So I'm sure they were like,
that's nothing compared to Old sixty three, the quake of
sixty three. Yeah. Yeah, and they also, um, they weren't
panicked because they the previous eruptions no one really knew about.

(15:29):
There were no records of those. There wasn't even they
didn't even say volcano. There wasn't a word for volcano,
so it wasn't really on their radar as Hey, this
thing has happened before on a grand scale. Uh. They
were just kind of enjoying their life. Yeah. There weren't
cartoons back then to be like that's a cartoonishly volcanic volcano,

(15:49):
that's right, So they that's kind of ironic too that
they didn't realize that there was a long history of
volcanic activity there because it turns out that modern volcanologists
in gall just an archaeologist, are pretty sure that there
are plenty of human settlements that were covered over by
the volcano, and that by the time Pompeii was built,

(16:10):
it was built atop these old settlements that have been
covered over. So it's like lost city thanks to the volcano.
Everybody forgets. Somebody's like, oh, this is a nice area,
will come build here, covered over by volcano. Everybody forgets
in the cycle repeats again, and that's where Pompeii found
itself and by s and so on this day the

(16:32):
earth rumbles And I want to direct you to this
really great website called open Culture and just search Destruction
of Pompeii Open Culture and they have a video it's
like eight minutes long, which is basically like a It's
like they placed a camera in the c g I
world of um Pompeii just and trained it on Vesuvius

(16:53):
and left it running for twenty four hours. And um,
it really gets to point across of how destructive this
this would have been. Yeah, I think we I think
you shouted that very same thing out on super volcanoes
had to have. It's a really cool video. If you
have you seen it yet, Yeah, yeah, I saw it
after you shouted it out. Yeah. I watched it again
this morning. And I think just from researching all of

(17:15):
this stuff, that really drove at home even more. It
was kind of unsettling to watch this time, you know
for sure. So uh, a little afternoon on is when this, um,
when this when the champagne cork popped. Uh. And they
were not ready for this. Uh, like we said, just

(17:35):
because of all the aforementioned reasons. Um. And the only
account or one of the only accounts we have is
we've talked about plenty of the elder and his nephew,
plenty the younger before. Uh, they were not there. They
were in my see Him, which is not too far away.
It was on the northwestern edge of the Bay of Naples,

(17:56):
but that's where plenty of the Elder was stationed. And
then plenty of the younger and his mom were there
as well. Uh. And apparently when this started to go down, UM,
plenty of the elder got a message from a friend saying, hey,
can you come and get me? It's going down, And
he took off to go and plenty the younger was like, no,
I'm gonna stay here, which was a pretty smart move. Yeah.

(18:18):
And and what's how do you pronounce that town? I
never tried my scene him is there right? Okay? So
he and his mom were there, and it's not really close.
I mean, as far as like Pompeii is concerned, Pompey
is way closer to Vesuvius than mycene him is. But
they still had an extremely harrowing um experience there on

(18:41):
mycene him too, just from the fallout from Vesuvius um,
even though Pompeii and Herculaneum and um uh Stabbia all
got the worst of it um plenty. The younger's account,
it's the only firsthand account of the eruption of Vesuvius. Then, um,
it's pretty scary stuff. Like he says, like the sky

(19:03):
went dark, but not dark, like the moon wasn't out,
or there weren't any stars. He said, it suddenly got
dark like somebody put a light out in an enclosed room,
like that kind of dark, like apparently you couldn't see
people just a few feet ahead of you. They just
got real dark, real fast. Yeah, And you can you
can read his entire account online but here's another nice

(19:23):
pull quote. You could hear the shrieks of women, the
wailing of infants, and the shouting of men. There were
some who prayed for death. In their terror of dying,
many besought the aid of the gods. But still more
imagine there were no gods left, and that the universe
was plunged into eternal darkness forever more. It's pretty grim, geez.
So this is again in Massini Um. I think I'm

(19:45):
not saying that right still seen him, my seeing him um.
And Pompeii the situation is much much, much worse. And
Pliny the Younger was saying that they were kind of
huddled in I think a house or something somewhere. But
even in this house, the ash that was like accumulating
around them and on top of them was so much
that they had to stand up every once in a
while and shake it off. It was again much worse

(20:08):
in Pompeii itself. There's a lot of ash falling and
covering people inside their houses and under structures, and either
you stay there and start to worry about getting buried,
or even worse, you start to worry about the roof
collapsing under the weight of all that gathering ash and pummice,
or you risk going out and being hit by one

(20:29):
of those pummice rocks, which if you've ever picked up
a volcanic rock, it is way lighter because it's very porous,
way lighter than a like a sedimentary rock of the
same size. But you still wouldn't want to get hit
in the head by one of those things after it's
falling twenty miles out of the sky. And this is
actually what they think. Um the height that this ejective

(20:50):
coming out of the volcano reached was twenty miles or
something like thirty two kilometers, I think. Yeah, So here's
here's a couple of stats for you. Um ash was
falling at a rate of about six inches an hour,
which is you know, that's if you imagine that as rain,
and if you've ever seen a rain like that, that's
an unbelievable amount of rain. So imagine that is Ashu

(21:13):
lava was flowing at about sixty eight miles an hour
by the time it started sailing down the hillside right right.
So so you've got a few things. You've got the
first explosion, the eruption, where like you said, the court
goes off the ejective goes into the air. Pliny described
it as like a great pine tree with a big
long trunk, and then way up high it branches out,

(21:35):
and those are now called pliny in eruptions um. And
then later on from all this activity, the the cone
of the volcano collapses, and when that happened, it shot
out this pyroclastic flow, which is made up of ash
and hot gas. From between. I think I saw four

(21:56):
hundred to fift hundred degrees fahrenheight, which is um a
substantial amount in celsius too. That's the that's the that's
the translation. And um, it's it's like you said, flowing.
I saw a hundred miles an hour. You saw sixty
three mile. But I mean that's one of those that's

(22:16):
one of those things that I'm sure you know they
can't really tell exactly, but at any rate that it's
going to be super fast, super fast, super hot. And
they think now, before they thought that everybody in Pompeii
died from being covered in ash um, they think now
that they actually died much more quickly than that, right
when that priorro clastic flow was anywhere near them, especially

(22:38):
when it overtook them, it would have killed them instantly,
which actually is we'll see accounts for some of the
faces that we've have been found around on the people
of the Pompeii victims. Yeah, and they even think and
by the way, we went right past the fact that
Pyrochastic Flow is a great, great band name, it really is.
Uh but they even think out that most of them

(23:01):
died from head injuries even before that even happened. Oh really,
I hadn't seen that one. Yeah, well we'll get to that.
I'll just throw that out there as a tease. Uh.
So this is shortly after midnight is when herculan a
Um was covered and obliterated. About six thirty a m.
The following morning is when Pompeii started getting hit with

(23:22):
this flow. The whole thing takes about twenty five hours
for all, for about two plus square miles to get
completely destroyed. Yeah, and it in nineteen hours. It shot
out something like one cubic mile of rock and ash
out of that volcano. A cubic mile. Imagine looking up

(23:44):
and seeing a mile cube and it's just all coming
down on you. Well and again seeing this and not
like not even knowing what a volcano is yeah, that
it makes it anything scarier, I guess. But they must
have thought the world was ending. Well yeah, I mean
if they thought there were no more gods, I would
guess that that that they would think like, well, this

(24:06):
is it, this is the end of mill house um. Uh.
Plenty of the younger two wrote about uh about the water,
the sea retreating as I pushed by the earthquakes. And
so the thought now is is that it also caused
a tsunami at the climax of this eruption. So now
imagine you know, the Bay of Naples flowing inland while

(24:30):
all of this destruction is raining down around you, right, yeah,
and then you definitely think the world is ending. There's
actually there's a very famous beach at Herculaneum, uh where
there's a lot of there were a lot of bodies found,
and there's a thirty foot boat that was just kind
of like jammed up against them. And I guess that
would have been from the tsunami. It would have brought

(24:50):
it in well. And that's apparently just to finish up
with Plenty of the elder he did initially he was
going to go out in a big boat and kind
of just had a better look at what was going on.
But when he got this message from his friends saying, hey,
come rescue us. Uh, he got in a fast boat,
a fast sailing cutter, and which is probably was his

(25:12):
end because by the time they got there, the winds
were blowing in a weird direction apparently, Uh, the way
they usually blow it would have blown a lot of
this out to sea, but unusually it was blowing in
in the opposite direction that day. So a lot of
things kind of came together for you know, the worst
possible scenario. But um, so plenty of the elder gets nearby.

(25:32):
I think, um they landed at uh pompa pompa neanis
I think it was at Stabbia. Oh where plenty of
the Elder landed. Yeah, his friend was pomp pomp Panius.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry, that was who's going to
rescue and Pompannius was at Stabbia, this little super ultra

(25:53):
wealthy resort area. Yeah. So, uh they couldn't get out
of there basically because of their I think their boat
was so light and it kept pushing them back in
and um apparently said hey, let's write it out here.
That's our only choice, and he was he basically died.
They couldn't get him up in the theory for a

(26:14):
while that is that he died of inhaling toxic fumes.
But now modern historians and scientists are saying, no, he
was fat and kind of old and out of shape
and he died of a heart attack. Yeah. I think
the consensus among historians today is that he was boss
hog esque. Yes, good way to put it. Yeah, so

(26:37):
that's a that's a not a good end for Pliny
the Elder, But um, that's kind of cool to be
able to say, like, yeah, I died at Pompeii? Is it?
I was a super famous dude in the Roman world,
And where did I find my end? Pompeii another famous
thing in the Roman world. That's how you'd say that
kind of thing. Yeah, I think it's neat. So Pliny

(26:58):
the Elder died. Pliny the Younger lived, though, and we
know about all of this because again, he was an eyewitness.
He was also a historian, a statesman, just all around
smart dude. But he didn't write his um his letter
to Tacitus the Historian for like twenty seven years after
the fact, and so um, yeah, I don't know if

(27:21):
he just heard Testitus was getting a history together and
he wanted to contribute, or what what the what the
difference was, or what the deal was with the gap.
But there is a lot of um there's a lot
of disagreement about whether his date of August is the
correct one. The reason everyone says August twenty is because
he wrote that in the letter, he said that this

(27:43):
happened on August twenty four. The thing is, apparently there
are other drafts of his letter, that same letter that
either didn't give the date or gave a different date
later on, I think of November twenty. And then there's
a lot of actual circumstantial evidence that suggests that this
actually took place either on October or November twenty four
rather than August. So there's things like there was a

(28:06):
there was a just an inordinate amount of pomegranates and
figs and nuts found around the town, which would suggest
that the harvest had just happened the autumn harvest, which
you wouldn't have done in August. Uh, there's a coin
that that had a um a title of Caesar that
wasn't bestowed until September of seventy nine. So that coin, Yeah,

(28:31):
that coin shouldn't have existed. There's there's all this evidence
that's coming together that says no, it actually probably was
either October November, but it's just been August for so
long now that it's going to be another ten twenty
years before everybody's like it happened in October November. Yeah,

(28:51):
and truth be told, that's sort of one of those
things that wonky archaeologists would argue over. I hear it,
and I think, what's a couple of months really, you know,
but I just think it's it's it's really fascinating that
that they found a coin and they said, Okay, this
coin shouldn't exist. And the reason why because because there
was um there was a like Britain was conquered by

(29:14):
the Romans a little around like around that time, and
so they minted a coin to honor that. And because
that coin shows up and POMPEII we can date when
Vesuvius erupted more accurately. That to me is it's just
eye popping, like look at my eyes, good old fashioned
police work. So either one so Vesuvius has spoken, Pompeii

(29:39):
is now gone, it's covered in something like um. I
believe ten meters, like about thirty ft of ash and pummice. Yeah,
I've seen all kinds of anywhere from like eight to
thirty ft, so a lot of feet. So it's covered
up a lot. And I don't know if we said
this or not, but Um, of the twenty people, about

(29:59):
eighteen thousand of those residents left when there was the
first sign of trouble, because again Vesuvius gave plenty of warning.
But there were about two thousand people in the town
of Pompeii itself when Vesuvius went off and covered the town.
But now it's everything's calm, it's quiet, Vesuvius is quiet again,
and Pompeii Herculaneum stabia a plantas they're gone. Yeah, I

(30:23):
think about twenty total people in the region died, that
is what I saw. Oh really that many? Huh? Yeah,
among that, you know, the two square miles. So so
this the whole area has just been radically changed. Um.
And there these cities were so lost that even the

(30:43):
people who stayed in the area and continued to live there,
they lost track of exactly where Pompeii was and they
stopped talking about it. Eventually. There's another city named Pompei
that was founded many many years later. That's the modern Pompeii.
And if they ever even referenced Pompeii, they just called
it uh Chi Vita the city, and they just knew

(31:03):
that there was a lost city somewhere in the area.
And that's how things stayed for about the next um
sevent d years. That's right, And you want to take
a break, yes, all right, Well we'll get into the
discovery of Pompeii after this. Skaw large sk All right, dude,

(31:41):
we're back, that's right. So what we've got here as
far as Roman history pre Pompeii and post Pompeii, UH,
is they've focused a lot on um what they would
call the important people of society, so military stuff, wealthy people,
political stuff. They didn't say, like, hey, maybe be valuable

(32:04):
to record what it's like for um, everyday people of
Rome because they didn't care. That's why Pompeii and the
the rediscovery and the excavation over the years has been
so important is because all of these a lot of
these people and in the shops and all the homes
and the art were really well preserved. Uh. Once they

(32:24):
started digging into this stuff, which was a pretty remarkable
flind and continues to be. Yeah. Plus, um, Rome has
was around for so long. It has been around for
so long that it evolved, right, So over time, what
Rome once was culturally historically um is kind of lost

(32:45):
and replaced as the culture itself evolves in ages. And
apparently it grew more and more conservative the longer it
was around. And one of the things that Pompey also
gives us that the snapshot of Roman culture before it
became conservative, and it was hyper sexual at the time
when Pompeii was covered over. So that was another thing

(33:05):
because at the time, until Pompeii was discovered, um, everyone
considered Rome, ancient Rome as this very staid, conservative civilization.
And then they started to discover this stuff from pompeign
and we're like, whoa, what were these people into back then? Yeah,
there was a lot of highly erotic art. Yeah, I
saw a statue of the god pan having graphics sex

(33:29):
with a goat, like a pretty pretty realistic statue. And
they found that they dug that out of Pompey pretty
early on. And there's phalluses they found everywhere. Some people
put fallacies on their houses, like sticking out into the street. Um,
there was pre Apiss, which is a lesser god who

(33:49):
um was extraordinarily unsettlingly well endowed. Um, there was just
a lot of fertility stuff and a lot of just
explicit sex reality in their in their artwork back then.
And Rome eventually moved on past that, and it had
been forgotten until POMPEII, you know, gave up its secrets. Yeah,

(34:10):
so uh, kind of immediately afterward up until about the
seventeen hundreds throughout and like I said, like you said,
it was kind of forgotten for a little while. But
during this whole long period of time, POMPEII was kind
of essentially rated again and again by either um, you know,

(34:31):
people hunting for valuables or kings and queens who wanted
to plunder things, you know, like statues and stuff for
their own palaces. And this sort of happened again and
again throughout history until about the eighteen hundreds, when like
legit archaeology really started to happen where they could go

(34:52):
in there with the name and actually preserving some of
this stuff. Yeah. I think the earliest ones were the king,
the Bourbon King Charles the who it was discovered under
his watch in seventeen forty eight, and then the French
came into the area, and by this time they were
crazy about archaeology thanks to their fascination with Egypt, so
they brought in some pretty good practices. But even still,

(35:15):
I mean, compared to what archaeologists know and do today,
this is pretty hokey, basic backward archaeological methodology. Yeah. Like
even when they started to do it right, Uh, they
just weren't as advance as we are today. Um. But
things kind of change for the better when a man
named Giuseppe B. Fiorelli came along in eighteen sixty and

(35:38):
he said, hey, I'm in charge now. UM, I'm gonna
get in here and try and do it right. I'm
gonna be way more careful. My team is going to
be more careful. We're gonna record all the positions of people,
everything that we find. And that's when it that's when
it really legitimized, um kind of what was going on
as far as excavation goes. Uh. And he also made

(35:59):
his name most famously for what ended up being named
after him, the Fiarelli process. Is when he saw these
you know, every you know, everything is covered in ash
and hardened, so they had they were basically encased in
these you know, over the years, the bodies would run away,
and so they were encased in these hollow cavities. The
people were and dogs and you know, all sorts of animals.

(36:22):
So he said, why don't we inject this guess, so
this plaster into these cavities and see what we come
up with. And what he came up with very famously,
we're we're the uh well, were the people of Pompeii,
like more than a thousand of them? Yeah? Do you
remember our Molderrama episode that just came out. I do
remember that. So when these people were covered in that

(36:42):
ash and their bodies rotted away, it left what is
effectively a mold, and he filled it with that that
plaster and made plaster casts of them, right and and
apparently really detailed once I saw him, But I didn't
see anything as detailed as like ed Ed points out
that you can see like the um the design somebody
had shaved into their pubic hair. That's pretty pretty detailed

(37:06):
plaster cast of a dead person from two thousand years ago. Um,
there was you can very famously see um a man
like agony on a man's face like like you was
just captured at the moment of death, just basically flash
frozen a lot like Hansolo and carbonite. Yeah, it was.
It was a huge, huge find and it just kind

(37:28):
of shook the world, and uh, reproductions and photos of
all these casts became the sensation of the day all
over the world. Um. Like I said, there's a very
famous one of a dog kind of writhing in pain
on his back. It's one of the more sad ones.
It looked like he had a collar onto Yeah he did,
which is interesting although that I've later seen where that

(37:49):
might have been a fake, which I don't fully understand. Yeah,
I hadn't seen that at all because there were no
bones inside of it. Uh so they're not quite sure
about that one. But um, they're just some really sad
ones of like what is clearly a mother like holding
her child. Um, families and couples in embrace and like

(38:09):
horrific embrace. Uh. And it's just really kind of sad
to look through these these photos and they kept finding them,
like all over the place. They were just groups of
people huddled. When they would excavate a house, uh, they
would they would find bodies quite frequently, and like you said,
like in that that that those embraces just caught in

(38:29):
their last moment, like their literal last moment was just
caught in time. So it was it was quite a
fine and like you said, it really definitely caught the
imagination of the rest of the world. Um. So much
so that there was like a Greek neo classical revival
in the Enlightenment period because everyone had Pompey fever when
it was discovered Pompey fever. Pompey fever catch it. So

(38:54):
a couple of years ago, I guess a few years
ago now, a group did CTS scans on some of
these casts about I think thirty or forty of them
and that dog and that bore uh, and they this
provided just a lot more detail of um. So if
like you can look at the casts and then look
at the ct scan and it kind of brings it

(39:15):
to life. Uh. And they found it revealed a few
really interesting things. UM. One is that the people of
Pompeii had almost perfect teeth, which had been really unusual
at the time. And they think it's because they ate
a lot of fruits and vegetables, very little sugar and
that the water was heavily fluoridated, so they all had

(39:35):
really like nice straight teeth. Um. And then what I
was talking about the head injuries. This is there's an
article in the Atlantic called How the People of Pompei
Really Died, And almost all of these CT scans revealed
that they had head injuries from getting you know, smashed
in the head from this volcanic rock. What a way
to go. Yeah, although I guess it would be quick right. Well,

(39:58):
either way, even if it's that, or if it's um
what you were saying, it's not the slow suffocating death
that they used to think it was. Yeah, which is
way better. Um. I saw also check there was an
excavation of like a latrine, I guess, and and just
a normal housing block where poor people or middle class

(40:20):
workers would have lived. And um, they found evidence of
really great diets. And they think that the people that Pompeii,
the rich people actually probably ate a little worse because
they ate slightly richer food. But everyone there, including the
lower classes, were very like well fed on very healthy foods,
basically like the Mediterranean diet like you think of today. Um.

(40:43):
And that they were also taller on average than the
citizens of the area today. Interesting. Yeah, it's usually the
exact opposite if you think about it. You know, George
Washington four ft tall. Everybody knows that they also found
in some of the um I think the runoff into
the drainage systems or something they found. You know, you

(41:06):
were talking about the rich people eating um more exotic meats.
They found evidence at the eight Sea urchin. So I'll
give him that because people eat that flamingo had and
seen that one. I know it's coming there. Giraffe. Yeah,
who looks at a giraffe and says, I wonder what
that tastes like? And then does it follows through on it?

(41:28):
I don't know. It's the following through part that really
knocks my socks off. So those are some recent excavations, right, yeah,
I mean this is the kind of stuff that has
come out with things like DNA analysis. Okay, so so
this is extraordinarily new as far as Pompey goes. Pompeii
is it's really cool because it's got its ancient history

(41:50):
when it was covered over by Vesuvius, but then it
also has a secondary history of its discovery, and then
it's it's excavations since then, and apparently it's the longest
continuously excavated site in the world as far as archaeology goes.
I wouldn't I wouldn't be surprised. It is extraordinarily big.

(42:11):
Um and the the fact that it's been around for
so long, it's been excavated for so long, it was
basically there when archaeology was born. Archaeological techniques that have
been developed over the age have all been tried and
tested and frequently discarded at Pompeii UH And as a result,

(42:31):
a lot of those early ones that were just just
not very smart have actually had a They've had a
pretty tough effect on the town. Like um, the frescoes.
They discovered frescoes, which are paintings on plaster walls all
over the town. Most houses had really beautiful frescoes, and
the workers were like, well, these are going to flake off.

(42:53):
This is back in the nineties, so we need to
we need to do something. So they covered him in
paraffin wax, which I guess it makes sense. It's covered
in wax. We can figure out what to do with
it later. Maybe we never will, but you can still
kind of see through it. The problem is that the
pigments bonded to the wax, not just rubbed off, like

(43:13):
molecularly bonded with the wax. And then as water grew
behind the walls and seeped through the walls behind the painting,
it pushed the painting off the walls onto the wax.
So now if you want to get this wax off,
they finally developed a technique where you can use a
laser that just removes the wax and leaves the pigment.

(43:35):
But um, that's extraordinarily new to I think just in
the last couple of years they started using that. Before
then they would do things like use gasoline and stuff
to get the wax off and it would just take
the fresco clean off. Yeah, I'm surprised there's anything left
between being continually rated um, earthquakes since then, World War Two,

(43:56):
since then, vandals, tourists, rainwater. Uh, it's just like it's
been just beaten up for thousands, you know, like a
couple of thousand years now, but there's like you've been there,
there's still a lot of stuff there. Yeah, there is.
I think they they've uncovered two thirds of it, they think,
and so they've gotten to this point now where they're like, okay,

(44:17):
wait a minute, wait a minute. I think in the
nineteen nineties, whoever was the director of archaeology at Pompey
said we need to stop excavating. We're gonna leave the
what's left for later generations who have better techniques to
to uncover, and we're going to focus on preserving what's
here now. Um, which is a big deal because it's

(44:38):
a World Heritage site. And UNESCO basically came in in
two thou thirteen and they effectively condemned it. Like what
a city would do to a building that was falling down.
That's what you meant new Unesco did to the Pompey site.
They said, this this thing is toast. It's it's they
put it on the Endanger List. Uh. And one of
the big reasons is as tourists, well, while when you're there,

(45:00):
you're like, are are you sure I'm allowed to be
sitting on this thing and taking a funny picture, or
I'm I'm really allowed to walk through here? They let
you go almost everywhere on that site, touch everything, run around.
It's it's just like a big playground basically, and you
have to stop and remind yourself. Wait, this is an
archaeological site in operations still and um they they the

(45:25):
the fact that tourists have been allowed to do that
for so long, it's had a huge effect on the
deterioration of the site itself too. Yeah. Well not only that,
but it's um, it's been corrupt over the years, the
management of these ruins. Um. A lot of the structures
have collapsed over time completely and gone away. And then

(45:45):
finally in two thousand and twelve, the EU and the
Italian government finally got together and said, listen, we need
to really reinvest in this in this find here, and
it's called the Great Pompeii Project, and they invested about
a hundred hundred and five million euros to try and
repair and preserve what they have left. Um. I'm surprised

(46:05):
they haven't closed down more parts of it, because, like
you said, you can still go everywhere. But what they
have done is restored a lot of these frescoes and mosaics,
like you were saying, Um, a lot of the best
work has been done in the last five years. Yeah,
easily to try and get this thing preserved as much
as they can at this point. Yeah, And one of

(46:27):
the things that got them going was the um the
gladiator school, which is a pretty big structure that housed
the gladiators where they trained in town. And it it crumbled,
it fell, it turned into ruins um because it had
gotten eroded I think by drainage. And one of the
things they're figuring out now is that there was a

(46:47):
pretty decent sewer system underneath these towns, but that pyroclastic
flow covered it all up, so the water has nowhere
to go but over the ruins, and over the last
hundred and fifty years it's eroded some of these buildings.
That's another thing they're dealing with two And I don't
know if you sit it up with the Herculaneum conservation project,

(47:08):
did you mention that, uh, the Great Pompei or the
Herculaneum the Herculaneum. So there's a there's like a model
for for dealing with these sites, to preserve these sites,
and it's in Herculaneum. It was apparently worse off than
pomp Pay for a long time, and the public private
partnership took control of the thing, and now it's like

(47:29):
the model of how to how to rescue sites like this.
So it's possible that Pompeii project will will be successful
and in like twenty years there will probably be walkways
everywhere that are raised above ground and you won't be
able to touch anything. Um. I would guess if you
want to be able to touch Pompey, you should go

(47:49):
in the next few years, because I don't think they're
gonna keep allowing that for much longer. If you want
to touch Pompeii, if you want to touch it, do
you got anything else? Well, it's Pompey, man, we did it. Fine,
that's right. Okay, Well, if you want to touch pomp Pay,
you should go to Pompeii. Uh. And in the meantime,
while you're waiting to do that, if you should type

(48:10):
pomp Pay into the search bar how stuffworks dot com,
which we'll bring up this great article by the grap stor.
And since I said graps, there's time for listener mail,
I'm gonna call this Artifacts and our Monuments from Germany. Hey, guys,
just finish the episode on public monument removal and it
was fantastic as usual. It made me think of the
monument removal in other parts of the world, in particular

(48:33):
in Germany. Comes to mind because I studied German all
through high school and college to the study abroad there
first summer. The way Germans treat their Nazi history is
different by no means an expert, but as I understand that,
they do everything in their power to prevent their citizens
from idolizing or idealizing Nazi Germany. Um, you can't buy
mind comp which I think that's true, isn't it. I

(48:56):
think so. There are no statues or monuments of any kind.
They're not saying tizing their history or pretending it didn't happen,
but they don't want to commemorate it either anyway. In
honor of today being the day the Berlin Wall has
been gone longer than it was up, I'd like to
recommend that you see the movie Goodbye Lenin if you
haven't never seen it. It's great. It takes place when

(49:16):
the Berlin Wall comes down in the first year or
so after during German reunification. Funny and thoughtful and sad
and just really really good. It's one of my favorite movies.
And no spoilers, but it has my favorite scene ever
of a monument being removed. UM, and I looked it up.
It was I think it was nominated for Golden Globe
for Best Foreign Film and a host of other like

(49:38):
Baptis and European Awards, so it looks pretty good. Um,
look forward to you in the new episodes. And that
is from Ellie Nice. Thanks a lot, Ellie appreciate that email.
Very thoughtful. I don't think Germany was even allowed to
have a flag for a while. Um. All right, well
that's it. If you want to get in touch with us,
you can tweet to us s y s K podcast.

(50:00):
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