Pod Insights The Ancients Pompeii: The Buried City About this episode Buried in ash, frozen in time—Pompeii offers one of the most extraordinary windows into everyday life in ancient Rome.
In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Gabriel Zuchtriegel, Director of Pompeii, to explore the latest discoveries at this iconic site. From slave quarters and gladiator graffiti to possible signs of early Christianity, uncover how new excavations are reshaping what we know about the lives—and final moments—of Pompeii’s ancient inhabitants.
Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Max Carrey, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds
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0:00 Tristan Hughes? Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
0:32 Speaker 01 Great meeting. Who took notes? Anyone?
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3:04 Tristan Hughes? Pompeii, the buried city. A place that is on many persons' life bucket list. A site that has captivated visitors for generations. Home to some of the most striking remains surviving from ancient Rome. But it's also a site tinged in tragedy. Thanks to the devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, this Roman town was buried under metres of volcanic ash and rock, along with hundreds of its inhabitants. The grim yet obvious benefit for us today is that this disaster allowed for the astonishing preservation of Roman remains that the site is renowned for.
3:48 Tristan Hughes? Slowly and carefully, expert teams continue to excavate more and more of Pompeii, unearthing more and more incredible discoveries: statues, bathhouses, graffiti, wall paintings, you name it.
4:04 Tristan Hughes? Their newly found treasures are never too far away from news headlines. And the insights they have given into the lost lives of everyday Pompeians are some of the most precious in the world. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Now, we've done episodes about Pompeii before, but this episode is rather different and it's really quite special. Because our guest is none other than Dr Gabriel Zuchtriegel. Gabriel is the director of Pompeii, the top job, one of the biggest jobs in archaeology. It was a real privilege to have the opportunity to interview him about some of the recent
4:47 Tristan Hughes? projects and discoveries that have happened at Pompeii under his watch. Over the next hour, we will cover everything from poignant Roman slave quarters, recently discovered just outside Pompeii's walls in a villa, to evidence of early Christianity before the eruption, to stick men, depictions of gladiators left by children on a wall, and so much more. The treasures being unearthed from Pompeii continue to fascinate and inspire people across the world, and I really hope that this interview with Gabriel kindles that flame even more.
5:22 Tristan Hughes? Enjoy. Gabriel, it is a pleasure, such an honour to have you on the podcast today.
5:37 Speaker 04 My pleasure.
5:38 Tristan Hughes? Now, you have what I'm sure many would argue is the greatest job in archaeology. Am I correct in saying that you are currently, or have just completed, overseeing the biggest project in Pompeii in a generation?
5:51 Speaker 04 Well, actually, we have been excavating a lot. We are still excavating a lot in Pompeii, which is something that may sound great, maybe we can be proud of that, but it's quite ambiguous, because excavating in Pompeii...
6:10 Speaker 04 It's always a huge responsibility and so everything we excavate has to be preserved and looked after and monitoring. And we see actually looking into the past of the excavations that enormous damage has been done to the houses and structures and frescoes, especially in the early years of the excavation. So we're still excavating, but now very carefully. And we try to take the decision, looking at all the consequences.
6:47 Tristan Hughes? So through this chat, Gabriel, I'd love to explore a number of discoveries and projects central to your time as Director of Pompeii through this interview, and many of which do feature in your book. I first want to ask though, when doing these excavations today, and as you've highlighted very, very carefully too, how much of an impetus is there now when finding and making these new discoveries to preserve them in situ, to not take them out where they've been discovered?
7:14 Speaker 04 Well, that's kind of the dream archaeologists had right from the beginning. When excavation started in Pompeii in 1748, people imagined, wow, that's great. Finally, we're not excavating just single monuments, but the entire city. So we can understand daily life and economy and how people spent their free time, everything. And so it would be great if you excavate in Pompeii, you really get this emotion. You find kind of the pot on the fire and the coins in the cash box.
7:55 Speaker 04 And so you think that would be so great for everybody to see. And you also see the destruction of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD that destroyed the city, but also preserved it for us. And so there's a great desire and temptation to make this all available.
8:18 Speaker 04 But it's always a question of techniques and how can you do it, right? And so in the beginning, when people started excavating Pompeii, there was no archaeology, there was no restoration techniques and science. So they cut out frescoes from the walls, which they deemed important. The rest remained in place and often was subject to a very rapid decay. And today, maybe it's, there's no trace anymore of entire walls and frescoes and so forth. This is also a story of loss and people tried new ways, new methods.
9:02 Speaker 04 I think it's very important when people started in Pompeii, the end of the 19th century, to imagine the houses being rebuilt with their roofs and everything. So somehow the house, the ancient building, becomes its own museum.
9:23 Tristan Hughes? Well, can you explain to me a phrase that I know you use? And it also seems important in the setup to our chat today, which is the phrase, the Pompeii effect and how this all relates to what we're talking about?
9:36 Speaker 04 Well, it's what everybody, I think, coming to Pompeii can feel. Sometimes you go into a room and it's so perfectly preserved that you have the feeling that the owner has just left. The people who lived there were here just five minutes ago. So this also scientific opportunity to find the things really where they were used in their original position. Normally we find things that were thrown away or rarely in their original.
10:14 Speaker 04 Primary position. And so this opens many, many new perspectives on ancient life in this city. And it's what we call the Pompeii effect. So you can see it in other sites sometimes, but every archaeologist tends to think of Pompeii. Oh, this is like Pompeii. And actually, there are many Pompeii's. If you look, search on internet, you'll find, you know, the Pompeii of prehistory and the Pompeii of the South American Pompeii and the Pompeii of the Alps and so forth. So this shows that the idea of Pompeii is the kind of the perfect dig, the perfect excavation is really a global thing.
10:58 Tristan Hughes? I think you're right. The one that immediately came to my mind was either Accretiri or Dura Europus on the Euphrates, which has similarly been described as Pompeii's for their preservation. Gabriel, if we then move on then to one of the first key themes I'd like to ask about, which is the size of Pompeii, because this feels like recently there's been new evidence and new scientific developments that is making people reevaluate just how many people lived in Pompeii. So what do archaeologists now think about the size of Pompeii? How many people lived there when the eruption of Vesuvius happened?
11:32 Speaker 04 It's a highly debated question. And I think it also reflects much of us who are looking at the site and trying to populate it. You go into the site and you see the rooms and houses and immediately start to think, well, how would it be lived there, to live there? And often in doing so, we imagine ourselves being, you know, the house owner and having a huge garden. But obviously, there were many poor people in Pompeii too. And there were also many slaves and enslaved workers. We estimate that. Up to a third of the ancient population were property of someone else.
12:16 Speaker 04 This too is part of the the history of the site. And so now you can start playing around with numbers. And if you look into the history of the excavations, you can see that initially, people were quite optimistic about the number of people who lived in Pompeii. Twenty thousand, thirty thousand maybe. And then later, the numbers started to fall. And after World War Two, archaeologists arrived at saying, well, ten thousand maybe, only ten thousand, or even less, maybe eight thousand. And so you get these numbers. And then boom, suddenly, and that's great. In archaeology, you always get surprises.
12:59 Speaker 04 An inscription was found in two thousand seventeen outside Porta Stabia on a tomb. Now, it doesn't give the number, okay? So that's a disclaimer. But it has some information. Because it talks about a very wealthy inhabitant of Pompeii. And he celebrates what they called his Toga Virili. So when he becomes a man, when he becomes of age, he organizes a huge party. And he invites basically the whole male population. That's what our impression is, to this feast.
13:41 Speaker 04 And so this is more than six thousand people. If these were all male citizens, then you have to imagine a population of thirty, forty thousand people. Women, children, unfree, so enslaved workers, people without citizenship and so forth. So that's a huge number. You know, if you have more than six thousand male citizens, ten thousand is not an option for the whole population of the city. But I have to say, you could also question this, of course, as often in archaeology and history.
14:23 Speaker 04 Say, is it really only the male citizens or also women and children and so forth? So it's not really clear. But it's a very strong indicator that points toward a higher population. And if you go into the site. Uh you know, we tend to walk through Pompeii like, oh, wow, the house of the Vetii and oh, the house of the Menando, beautiful frescoes, but there's much more to it. If you look to all the small apartments and the little shops and texture of the ancient city, you can really feel the density of population that you have, it's true, you have enormous
15:06 Speaker 04 gardens, they just had so much space, four hundred square meters only for the garden, six hundred maybe. And then you have others who live, an entire family live on twelve square meters and they have maybe two stories or like a small tower. You can see actually the traces of people trying to optimize the use of space and they would work there and sleep there and live there and yeah, so I think it's also a story of social inequality.
15:45 Tristan Hughes? Well, I think we're going to keep on that a bit longer now, Gabriel, and you mentioned the house of the Vetii in passing there and we will return to that. But I feel that this is a good time actually to go outside of the walls of Pompeii and a discovery that I know is very close to your heart. I mean, Gabriel, first of all, as the director of Pompeii and when telling the story of Pompeii, how important actually is it to explain that there was much more to this ancient town or city than what is within the walls, that you need to explore the archaeology beyond the site of Pompeii itself?
16:19 Speaker 04 Well, I think it's really essential because we have this idea, you know, archaeology started from people actually living in cities. And so what they did was looking at cities in the ancient world. And there's a huge tradition and a huge amount of knowledge produced every year on ancient cities, which is of course important.
16:42 Speaker 04 But we tend to forget that there's a countryside and you can't understand Pompeii without the countryside and without the wealth produced in the countryside, the agricultural production, especially wine, which was exported into the entire Mediterranean. So we find amphoras from Pompeii in Spain and southern France and Turkey and northern Africa. So that was a huge business, but it's also many of the problems, I don't this society, you can trace them in the countryside. So people were investing into the wine business. The
17:24 Speaker 04 wine from Pompeii supposedly wasn't the best, at least. That's what someone wrote on a wall in Pompeii saying, yeah, eat the bread in Pompeii, but drink the wine of Neteria, which is another ancient town. And they were kind of competitive at the time. So specializing on wine, export, great business activities meant that at some point, they couldn't produce the grain necessary to feed the local populations. So they had to import grain from other parts
18:05 Speaker 04 of the Mediterranean, which is something that to us seems normal today, but in antiquity, this was potentially risky because of things that could happen. And so suddenly it could be without the necessary provisions. It's one thing in Rome, which had a huge population, maybe up to a million at that time, but it's a different thing in a town like Pompeii. And actually, we see that the same inscription mentioning the possible number of male citizens talks about a famine in Pompeii. Four years, there was a shortage of supply and this wealthy
18:47 Speaker 04 man bought grain and bread and and gave it to the poor and so forth. But this means, you know, in this great network.
18:59 Speaker 04 Where we export wine and import grain and other things. You know, there's a small thing out of balance and you feel the problems around the whole Mediterranean.
19:10 Tristan Hughes? Because that is something I'd never thought about, Gabriel. I mean, the idea you get with like the fertile volcanic soils, like vineyards everywhere around Pompeii and all of this land and the Bay of Naples as well, that they would be able to have enough food. But as you're saying there, the importance of of importing food and the fact that there were famines. I would have never thought there would have been famines in ancient Pompeii. That's something I guess you don't really see from the surviving archaeology, at least if you're visiting.
19:39 Speaker 04 Well, I think inscriptions are extremely important. And I actually think we are going toward a very critical direction in our disciplines, in our field. Archaeology of the classical world should never forget the texts, which is not only the great tradition of manuscripts and history writing and so, but so the thousands of inscriptions, you have to see this all together and then you get the picture. And you can see also the corruption and the problems this society had. And it really makes you think about our own present.
20:20 Speaker 04 Because you start to understand that it's not that people were simply not informed or, you know, they didn't know better. But maybe some knew and others didn't want to hear it. And that makes us maybe think of things like climate change, right? So what's really going on? There's a discussion. Is it caused by humans or by, in antiquity, maybe the gods, you know, or whatever? You start to understand the complexity and how humanity and human progress, if you want to call it like that,
21:00 Speaker 04 is often not so much about discoveries, genius, you know, the new insight, the new thing. But it's more about how can we find a way together? Collectively to deal with that new thing and with change and with, you know, climate change, which existed already in antiquity. It was much slower, but people had to adapt to. And so you understand it's it's much more about what we're doing now. We're trying to explain something. And it's not only, you know, the the great discovery. The steam engine basically had been invented in antiquity, but with without any consequences.
21:44 Tristan Hughes? I always think of um, Archytas's or Archytas's steam powered bird, which is one of my nerdy little favourite stories. But well, I'm hoping then, Gabriel, if you wouldn't mind, if we keep outside of the walls of Pompeii a little longer, if you wouldn't mind telling me the story of Civita Juliana, I hope I've I've said that correctly or or near enough, I mean, what this is and the amazing discovery, we could say discoveries that were made there in twenty twenty one, because I know this is a story really close to your heart.
22:15 Speaker 04 Well, and it still continues. We're still excavating there. In Pompeii, there's a unique thing which doesn't exist in any other site, not even in Heculaneum, which is another town destroyed by the Subius. The eruption had two phases. The first one was characterized by the fall of the lapilli, small pumice stones, and the second by the arrival of the pyroclastic flow. So very hot ash, kind of dust like, that then became
22:53 Speaker 04 solid soil. And because it was so hot and so much, it basically killed everybody and all humans and animals were still in Pompeii, covered them, bodies, human bodies dissolved and aren't there anymore. But the soil became solid. And so.
23:16 Speaker 04 The organic material left an imprint, a negative, an empty space in the soil, and you can fill it. If you excavate, you find actually a hole in the ground and you can fill it with plaster. And then you can reconstruct the forms. And you can actually look into the faces of people who died in Pompeii. There are about a hundred of these plaster casts, which is really chilling in a way. Some people call them statues. Of course, they are not statues. They are people, but they aren't there anymore. So it's a very special type of archaeological discovery.
23:56 Speaker 04 And with the same methodology, you can reconstruct other things that were covered by ash and then dissolved, like wood, leather, wooden baskets and so forth. So what we found in Chivita is incredibly well-preserved slave rooms. So we're excavating now in the slave quarter, which is the same size like the quarter where the owners lived. So a huge, many rooms. I think at least sixty people could live there because they had so much land to work.
24:41 Speaker 04 And so what we start to see is the furniture, the small daily-use objects, the blanket thrown on one of the beds. How the beds are made, they're very primitive. There's no mattress. People are sleeping like on a net of ropes, not very comfortable. You know, no floor, only stamped earth, basically. Basically, we found also several remains of rats and mice. So you can really imagine the precarious life situation of these people.
25:22 Speaker 04 And this is really important because we have this idea of the classical world as a rattle of democracy and philosophy and science and beautiful art and marble. That's all true, that's part of it, but it's only one part. It's also a society where you had enslaved people, where you had this huge differences between the wealthy and the poor, maybe only one wall, a wall separating the two parts of the building. That's why we had an exhibition, we called it The Other Pompeii.
26:05 Speaker 04 It's of course the same city, but you can look at it from different perspectives. And I think if you walk through Pompeii, you can see the other Pompeii everywhere, everywhere. You can see the traces of precarious lives and slavery and beautiful artworks and wealth.
26:23 Tristan Hughes? I mean, Gabriel, and just a bit more context, forgive my ignorance. So the Civita Giuliana, is this a big villa just outside of Pompeii? But the discovery of the slave quarters almost feels like the greatest part of it, as you say, because it's not, you know, highlighting the wealth of the rich, it's giving an insight into those people who are usually missed in the ancient record.
26:47 Speaker 04 Well, yeah, but it depends on us. In Civita Giuliana, which was, I think, one of the biggest villas in the countryside around Pompeii known so far, it's very interesting because it's not the first villa, of course, that has been excavated in Pompeii and the countryside. There has been found a beautiful chariot with bronze and silver decorations, also very important. So you could present the whole complex as, you know, the villa of the chariot and try to create a narrative around that.
27:28 Speaker 04 Or you can try to say, well, this is so unique because of the slave rooms and the furniture and all that. It really depends on us. And what we try to do is to say, well, it's not, you know, the chariot isn't important or that one aspect is more true or more important than the other.
27:50 Speaker 04 But I think for our visitors, it would be very important to know more about what was life like in ancient Pompeii. And if we focus only on the beautiful things, that's, you know, nice and maybe entertaining, but it doesn't maybe touch us in the way the stories of children and women and men living in very difficult situations sometimes do. And it makes us think about our own society and justice and, you know, inequality. And that's important.
28:31 Tristan Hughes? Gabriel, I remember when the story of the slave quarters broke to the media, I mean, to the public world. And there was that massive reaction to it, lots and lots of excitement around it. Did you expect that? I mean, were you expecting there to be such a massive reaction to the discovery of these slave quarters?
28:50 Speaker 04 Yes and no. We were working behind the scenes. So we tried to to launch it and to give it importance. So we were happy to see that the story was taken up by many news outlets. Sometimes I I think maybe outside archaeology, there's maybe more openness to to our certain themes. We have to do more in this direction. But also, how do you open Pompeii? There are highlights, and that's also important. But even the highlights, you know, the House of the Vetii, which is one of the most famous houses of Pompeii.
29:34 Speaker 04 You can look at it and say it's basically in all of the manuals of ancient art and painting and so. But there's also a slave quarter inside the house. And you can ask where did these people get the wealth from? And then probably the wine business, right? And so you can connect it to the countryside and to other facilities, the harbour and so. So even the the great art is part of this economic and cultural and social history, which is, I think, very exciting.
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32:22 Tristan Hughes? I mean, so exciting. And Gabriel, we will go on and talk about the legacies of children in Pompeii as well, and also projects around young men and women today in Pompeii that I know is also very close to your heart. But I will ask now about the beauty, about the elite part of Pompeii briefly now, if you don't mind, and to go to the house of the Vetii that you mentioned. Because near the start of your book, you do highlight very early on, this striking presence of Greek art and scenes from Greek mythology that regularly, when new announcements are made to the press, the discoveries normally feature images from Greek culture in these very rich houses. I mean, Gabriel, first of
33:06 Tristan Hughes? all, why is that? Why is there such a presence of scenes of Greek mythology and Greek culture in Roman Pompeii?
33:14 Speaker 04 We tend to think about Pompeii as a Roman city. Actually, we could look at it as a Greek and Roman city, because it's so full of Greek culture. The Romans looked at Greece. They were superior in terms of military and political force. They conquered Greece at a certain point, but they felt themselves somehow inferior culturally. And so they learned Greek. All the great politicians and writers had to know Greek. We can see in Pompeii people writing in Greek. Some make mistakes. But there were also many people
33:59 Speaker 04 from the eastern Mediterranean. Greek was the main language, not only in Greece, but also in Palestine and Egypt and Syria and so forth.
34:11 Speaker 04 So this is one reason. Then the Greeks had such a sophisticated literature and culture. And they had, you know, paintings and statues. And and even such things like erotic manuals and things, you know, the Romans, very pragmatic, had also difficulties to accept. And so there was a discussion inside the Roman society. Isn't this corrupting? You know, isn't this something that will, in the long run, make us weak? All this Greek culture and, you know, drinking and feasting.
34:55 Speaker 04 At the end, they couldn't resist. But there was always this kind of ambivalent relation to Greek culture. And then, of course, the Romans made something new of it. And that's what we often maybe don't see. But the great authors of Latin literature, Virgil, Ovid and so forth, they all had Greek models, but they did something new. They weren't just translations or or imitations of Greek literature. And and that's what you see in Pompeii. You see the traditional Roman houses with the ground plan, which is strictly linked
35:40 Speaker 04 to the social function of the house. So you have the atrium with the opening in the roof and the tablinum, where the house owner, every morning, for the salutatio, would receive the his clients, right, which were the people who asked for favors and who then would vote for him when he would run for an office in the in the town. But these very traditional houses are full of Greek paintings. So it's as if they were trying to live two lives, two cultural codes. Maybe in the morning, you're the traditional Roman house owner and you.
36:24 Speaker 04 Do your social and political business and then in the afternoon and in the evening, you become a bit more Greek and you drink some Greek wine and meet with friends and Greek poems are performed and you look at the paintings and they become really stories to reflect on the lives of the people who were there. So they often, we know this from texts, they would say, well, you know, Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, had to wait ten, twenty years until he came back, ten siege of Troy and then ten years to come back. And then
37:06 Speaker 04 from there you start talking about, you know, marriage problems or whatever.
37:11 Tristan Hughes? Because it does seem like, isn't it, with those wall paintings, those frescoes, those scenes of Greek mythology, in those great houses, Gabriel, could you almost say kind of conversation starters if they're adorning the walls and, or maybe, you know, just thoughts, as you say, if you're in the afternoon, you're feeling a bit more Greek, I mean, I mean, things to ponder over almost. It's an interesting insight into how they thought and how they lived.
37:34 Speaker 04 Right. And you have to understand that people didn't have all these books. They had books, but they were scrolls, right? And they copied by hand and so forth. They didn't have, of course, television and newspapers and all that. So there was no public school. There's no place where you could go and someone would tell you the story of our country and how did everything become like it is. So these images had a great importance for the whole society to imagine who are we, where do we come from? They didn't make a big difference between myth and history. So the boundary was somehow fluent. How do we look into the
38:18 Speaker 04 future is really dependent on what's our imaginary history, you know, all these stories. That's literally where people lived their lives. And when Mount Vesuvius erupted, people didn't know really what was going on. They had no geology and volcanology and so forth. So some saw giants in the smoke.
38:47 Speaker 04 And in the ash over Mount Vesuvius and Pliny writes, many prayed to the gods. Many others thought there weren't any gods anymore in the world and a new age of eternal darkness had begun. So this is what they take from this world of images and stories and myth. And then you live with that and you approach the catastrophes of life with that baggage.
39:19 Tristan Hughes? And Pliny the Younger that you mentioned there, who was an eyewitness of the eruption and his letters, two letters on it have survived. And Gabriel, I'm just mentioning the house of the Vettii because as you've highlighted earlier, one of the most striking houses in Pompeii with all of those scenes, various scenes from Greek mythology. And I guess the other thing to highlight is if you have a guest coming over, for them to be able to recognise just from the painting that you have, they have to identify what myth that is. And I guess that's also another marker, isn't it? You might have two figures from Greek mythology on a wall, but maybe almost testing the guest who's coming along. Can you tell us who that is and the myth that they're from?
39:56 Speaker 04 And who was very wealthy, but maybe didn't have such a profound education, paid or had a slave standing nearby during the dinner parties. And he would whisper the stories and the poems, the beginnings, so he could at least pretend to be one of the cultural elite. That was very important, yeah.
40:24 Tristan Hughes? And do we sometimes see with these beautiful frescoes, these wall paintings, my last question on this before we move on, do you also see beneath the beauty and beneath them being symbols of, well, elements for conversation starters and high status, a religious origin to them, like a religious background to these beautiful paintings?
40:45 Speaker 04 Absolutely. But I think what we see in Pompeii is how this is getting lost because it's so omnipresent that the images started to lose their magic.
41:00 Speaker 04 We tend to look at antiquity and say, well, how was it here? How did people live? But actually, it's, you know, more than a thousand years. And so there's a huge development. In the early centuries of Rome and Athens and Greece, and also Pompeii, images were a magic objects. So you had them basically in the sanctuaries, in the temples, and in the tombs. They weren't just representations. They had the function of making the presence of the divinity manifest. The deities would be present through the image.
41:43 Speaker 04 And then, if you have this huge production of images, not only in holy places, in sacred spaces, but also in private houses, certainly something changes. And so you can still see the religion's origin, but evidently it had become more like some kind of cultural code and almost some kind of decoration. And I think you can also see some kind of nostalgic memory. And in Pompeii, there are many of these small landscape pictures, images, where you often see temples and shrines and statues of divinities.
42:28 Speaker 04 But it's all a bit rundown and you have trees growing through the columns of the small temple. What I see there is kind of the memory. You know, once there was this unity of nature, landscape, gods. The landscape was inhabited by gods and humans who lived in the landscape. But now it's separated because we are in the city. And we are, we are looking at these paintings, but we are not part anymore of the natural landscape, because who's working the fields? Enslaved workers. Who, who goes into the woods, uh, hunting and cutting wood?
43:12 Speaker 04 Not the people who had villas in Pompeii.
43:16 Tristan Hughes? Is this what makes, I mean, arguably the most famous wall painting ever found at Pompeii, the mysteries frieze and this new discovery, or recent discovery, Gabriel announced to the press, the one that the House of Theasus, so interesting if it reveals more kind of clearly, please correct me if I'm getting my words wrong here, but almost kind of an outright religious event being shown or ritual event being shown in a wall painting?
43:41 Speaker 04 Well, yes and no, because it has always been a question. We know that from a hundred eighty-six B.C., the Dionysian mysteries were forbidden by the Roman Senate in Rome, in, in Italy, because there had been a big scandal and sex and money and, and murder. And so no mysteries anymore. But then you see these images in the villa of the mysteries. So people initially thought, well, maybe they secretly continue to celebrate these mysteries here. And the same holds true for the recently found frieze, which is very similar, but also with important differences.
44:27 Speaker 04 And in a way, through the ancient Senatus Consultum, which forbid the mysteries, was never abolished officially, as far as we know. So, yeah, what's happening? Probably people were playing with this, right? I mean, it's not really, it's only on the wall, it's only a painting. And as long as we're not engaging again in sex orgies and murder and, and stealing money from others and so forth, there's nothing wrong about it, there shouldn't be. On the other hand, I think there's a longing for meaning and the mystery is so exciting
45:10 Speaker 04 and so fascinating, because there's something hidden there. The famous psychologist Karl Gustaf Jung said, only something that's incomprehensible.
45:24 Speaker 04 can make sense. Because we try to find a sense. If if everything is clear, then it's it's also boring in a way. I think people were working on that. You know, they were trying to to figure it out. And and they had this feeling that there must be something. But it it was fading away. And so I think this is also an explanation why new religious movements like Christianity were so appealing in in a society that had nothing to do with, you know, the ancient Jewish religion. And that was all seen as very awkward and and strange
46:07 Speaker 04 and not being part of the Roman tradition and culture. But still, it had such a success at the end, right?
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47:40 Tristan Hughes? Because you mentioned it there, I must ask, because 79 AD doesn't feel very long after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, but is there potentially any evidence of Christianity at Pompeii, very early Christianity?
47:55 Speaker 04 People always imagined, and this was fascinating, because theoretically, yes, there could be, the early Christian texts were already circulating, like the Gospel of Mark, which is dated around 70, and even older, around many of the Letters of Paul. You have novels and movies with this idea that there was a small community of Christians in Pompeii. Actually, we don't have any evidence, but there's basically two very strange and interesting graffiti. So, not official inscriptions carved in marble, but things people were writing
48:36 Speaker 04 on the walls, like today, maybe in the bathroom of the local school, you can see many of these. So people wrote, one says, just two words, Sodum Gomora.
48:51 Tristan Hughes? No way!
48:52 Speaker 04 From the Old Testament, which were destroyed because they were so sinful, and so the Lord let fire and brimstone. And this is so similar to Pompeii. And people noticed that already in the past. And then suddenly, in the 19th century, this inscription is discovered, and it seemed really incredible. So people even wondered if someone had come back, you know, and excavated in Pompeii and made this inscription. I don't believe that. I think it's probably someone who saw Pompeii from a distance and saw, you know, the sensuality
49:32 Speaker 04 and the sexual exploitation, also prostitution and so forth, and said, well, that's what we were experiencing. And then there's another inscription, a charcoal inscription, which is not preserved, unfortunately, but we know drawings.
49:49 Speaker 04 And it's not really clear what it said, but clearly it mentioned the name of the Christianity, the Christians, and it probably was some kind of defamation. So it said, uh, look at this guy here, he is part of this crazy movement. So we don't know if it's true or not, but evidently people had heard of this. That's very interesting.
50:15 Tristan Hughes? It's also interesting, I must admit, that that has become one of my favourite facts, that there is evidence of Sodom and Gomorrah, a mention of it in Pompeii before the eruption. I mean, Gabriel, that that is extraordinary. But if we quickly move on to to children at Pompeii, I mean, it seems to have been some really interesting discoveries there. I mean, an another group of people usually hidden from the archaeological record. But at Pompeii, I saw some images recently, almost like like ancient Roman stick men done by children. Is that true?
50:46 Speaker 04 Yeah, and they are very interesting because they are gladiators and animal hunts. So things you could usually see in the amphitheatre. And they are drawn in a typical children-like way. So we called some psychologists from the university at Naples to help us, help us to understand how old were these kids who made the drawings? And based on the drawings, where you do, you have the legs and arms coming directly out of the head,
51:29 Speaker 04 which is a way still today, children until the age of five or six draw the human figure. So it seems very constant in in the history of mankind.
51:43 Speaker 04 But we didn't really know if this was the case 2000 years ago. They had no, you know, drawing books and kindergarten and all that. So maybe they were drawing like that even at an older age. But then we had another fantastic discovery because these children did another thing, which is very typical still today. They put their hands, their small hands on the walls and with a piece of charcoal, made a drawing around. And so we could compare the size of the hand with the drawing style and it's, yeah, we're there, five, six years.
52:24 Speaker 04 These very young children evidently had seen something in the the local amphitheatre of these bloody brutal games. You know, today we talk a lot about violence in social media and videos. And so this was real life violence. People died there. Actually, sometimes it was part of the performance in the amphitheatre. You know, to, to punish, to crucify, to, to throw people to the beasts. And, and so you could see blood and you could see people die. And it was entertainment. And you have to imagine that very young children
53:09 Speaker 04 were exposed to that kind of violence. And that's what we take from these drawings.
53:16 Tristan Hughes? It's that idea, isn't it? You have to be 18 or over to attend the amphitheatre. As you say, if those young people could go. Gabriel, it's such an amazing insight. And I remember also going to a corridor very close to both of the theatres and just next to the gladiator barracks, where I think you see some more etchings of gladiators potentially at a child's height. So once again, it's so interesting how that type of figure is so ingrained in a child's mind. Lastly, I mentioned the theatre there and I feel that brings us nicely on to the last project I want us to talk about, which I know is very close to your heart and slightly different to what we've been talking about, but no less important, which is the Sognor di Volare project. Now, Gabriel, can you tell us a bit about this and why it's so important?
54:01 Speaker 04 In archaeology and museum studies, we talk a lot about, you know, communities and heritage. And so we thought in Pompeii, how can we bridge the gap? Because we have visitors from all over the world and millions of people come here and that's great, of course. But we felt there's less involvement with the local community. And so we started working with young people, teenagers, basically children, who are doing theatre workshops during the school year. And then at the end of the year, they stage a classical play, Aristophanes. These are comedies, so it's a lot to love. In the ancient theatre of Pompeii.
54:44 Speaker 04 So the idea is that they take possession of their, our collective heritage. The site Pompeii is theirs too. And so they become actors in every sense. And it's amazing if you see people who usually don't come to Pompeii. Or if they come, they come because they are, they are forced to come with a school excursion or whatever. And if you start, you know, explaining them, well, you know, Pompeii, the wall paintings. And it's very easy to lose them in a second year. Because they have no emotional connection, they don't feel it, no interest.
55:29 Speaker 04 Whereas if you have them as part of the project, they're actually on stage. Then after that, it's, it's really again, they come, they want to see the new exhibitions. They want to see the excavations. And so by creating this kind of involvement and emotional connections, then you can really start bringing the content and the historical and art historical.
55:59 Speaker 04 Knowledge to them and it it it suddenly becomes automatic and that's really fantastic.
56:06 Tristan Hughes? I can imagine, I can also hear it in your voice Gabriel, how how rewarding a project it is for you and and how important it is as well. So I'm very glad we could mention that before we wrap up. Gabriel, it has been a privilege to have some of your time to talk about all of these projects and and the work at Pompeii. I really appreciate it. Last but certainly not least, you are of course promoting your new book and it is called?
56:30 Speaker 04 It's called The Buried City: Unearthing the Real Pompeii, the Other Pompeii, the Everyday Life Pompeii, but also the Great Art. And it's published in May. I hope you enjoy it.
56:46 Tristan Hughes? Absolutely. I hope everyone enjoys it. Who reads it? And I'm sure they will. Gabriel, it just goes to me to say one more time, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.
56:56 Speaker 04 Thank you.
57:00 Tristan Hughes? Well, there you go. There was the Director of Pompeii, Dr Gabriel Zook Tregel, giving us an hour of his time to explain and explore some of the most recent discoveries and projects that are happening at Pompeii under his watch. I hope you enjoyed the episode. That really was quite a special interview for us to get. We are really excited to now have shared it with you. Thank you once again for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd also leave us a rating, well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts
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