Pompeii’s secrets come back to light

They say Pompeii lets visitors travel through time. Walking at the foot of Vesuvius, among houses, plaster casts and the ancient forum, I felt that time stop in the middle of a city whose life ended nearly 2,000 years ago.

Pompeii had long existed in my family stories. I remembered my father describing his honeymoon trip to Rome with my mother, when their conversation would eventually turn to the frozen city of Campania. This August, I finally visited it for a few hours. Among the ruins, I could almost feel the energy of 20,000 inhabitants still simmering beneath the silence.

The eruption of AD 79 appears to have frozen a single moment. Pompeii covered 660 acres, less than 500 of which have been excavated, and had the features of a complete city. The disaster traditionally dated to August 24 did not strike Pompeii alone. A few kilometers away, neighboring Herculaneum was buried first, beneath 20 meters of volcanic material, compared with five meters at Pompeii.

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Pompeii lets you travel through time.

After returning to Athens, I watched National Geographic’s new Disney+ docudrama, “Pompeii: Out of Time With Tom Hiddleston.” Across three episodes and 133 minutes, the series combines dramatization with academic research and challenges the image of Pompeii as a city that simply vanished into darkness. It follows the real biographies of three people from Pompeii and Herculaneum: the young apprentice coppersmith Avianius Felicius, the wealthy businesswoman Julia Felix and a soldier in the Praetorian Guard. As the final 24 hours count down, their stories become a desperate attempt to escape. The reconstruction of the “bakery-prison,” where enslaved workers labored in inhumane conditions, adds another dimension to the story.

Four scientists who have devoted their lives to Pompeii guided my search for the city’s names and its newest archaeological clues. Their work points to a place that never disappeared completely, but continued through the people who survived. Steven L. Tuck, a professor of History and Classics at Miami University of Ohio and the documentary’s central adviser, estimates that about 80% of Pompeii’s population escaped. His recent book, “Escape from Pompeii: The Great Eruption of Mount Vesuvius and Its Survivors,” records his research into those survivors. As he observed, the objects missing from the site, including money, jewelry and small statues of deities, are precisely the things people would carry when fleeing.

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Walking through the site, I realized that the objects that were missing, money, jewelry and small statues of deities, are exactly what people take when they flee.