Content written by Steven L. Tuck, Miami University
On Aug. 24, in A. D. 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted, shooting over 3 cubic miles of debris up to 20 miles ( 32.1 kilometers ) in the air. As the dust and stone fell to Earth, it buried the old cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
According to most contemporary accounts, the tale pretty much ends it: Both towns were wiped out, their individuals frozen in time.
The city revival and the extensive digging that began in the 1740s just add to the momentum.
But recent studies has shifted the tale. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius no longer involves death; instead, it includes the accounts of those who survived and then rebuilt their existence.
Over the past ten years of my historic survey, I’ve tried to identify those who might have survived the eruption. The search for survivors and their stories has been a main focus. Some of my findings are featured in an instance of the new PBS video,” Pompeii: The New Dig“.
Making it out dead
On the coast of Italy just north of Naples, Pompeii and Herculaneum were two powerful places. A vibrant economy and lively political and financial sites were present in Pompeii, which had a population of about 30 000 people. Herculaneum, with a community of about 5, 000, had an active fish ship and a number of stone sessions. The powerful Roman villas that were built in the land were supported by both economies.
In popular culture, the eruption is usually depicted as an apocalyptic event with no survivors: In episodes of the TV series” Doctor Who” and” Loki“, everyone in Pompeii and Herculaneum dies.
However, there was always proof that someone could have escaped.
The explosion itself continued for around 18 days. Just a small percentage of the cities ‘ population is made up of human bones, and many items that you might have expected to have survived have been gone. Ships have been missing from boats, and strongboxes have been cleaned of their belongings.
All of this suggests that many, if not most, of the city’s residents would have fled if they had done so first.
Some historians have always believed that some individuals escaped. But finding them has never been a top concern.
So I developed a method to see if there were any victims that could be found. I looked for people with those titles who lived in nearby communities during the time after the volcano by using Imperial names that are unique to Pompeii or Herculaneum, quite as Numerius Popidius and Aulus Umbricius. Additionally, I looked for more proof, such as better infrastructure in nearby communities to accommodate immigrants.
I searched through tens of thousands of Roman writings on locations ranging from windows to tombstones for eight years and discovered more than 200 individuals in 12 cities. These towns are generally located in the Pompeiian region in general. But they tended to be northeast of Mount Vesuvius, outside the area of the greatest death.
Most individuals appear to have kept as near to Pompeii as possible. They favored settling down with other individuals, and as they resettled, they relyed on social and economic sites from their original towns.
Some migrants live
Some of the people who escaped were reportedly successful in their new communities.
Ostia, a key port town northwest of Pompeii and 18 miles from Rome, was where the Caltilius family settled. That, they founded a sanctuary to the Egyptian god Serapis. Serapis, who wore a box of corn on his head to enact a message of the reward of the earth, was well-known in harbor towns like Ostia, which were dominated by the corn trade. Additionally, those cities constructed a great, cheap tomb complex with large portraits of family members and inscriptions.
People of the Caltilius family married into another home of fugitives, the Munatiuses. Collectively, they created a prosperous, successful extended relatives.
The next- busiest port area in Roman Italy, Puteoli – what’s known as Pozzuoli today– even welcomed victims from Pompeii. The home of Aulus Umbricius, who was a vendor of jaggery, a common fermented fish sauce, resettled it. After reviving the family fruit business, Aulus and his wife named their second child born in their adopted city Puteolanus, or” the Puteolanean”.
People fall on hard days
Not all of the victims of the explosion were rich or developed in their fresh areas. Some people had previously experienced poverty. People seemed to have lost their home fortunes, perhaps in the volcano itself.
Fabia Secundina from Pompeii– presumably named for her father, a rich wine merchant – also ended up in Puteoli. That, she married a fighter, Aquarius the retiarius, who died at the age of 25, leaving her in dire financial straits.
Three other extremely poor people from Pompeii– the Avianii, Atilii, and Masuri people – survived and settled in a small, poorer group called Nuceria, which goes by Nocera now and is about 10 kilometers ( 16.1 meters ) south of Pompeii.
A still-existing grave claims that the Masuri home adopted a child named Avianius Felicio as a foster child. Importantly, in the 160 years of Roman Pompeii, there was no proof of any develop children, and extended families often took in orphaned kids. For this reason, it’s likely that Felicio did n’t have any surviving family members.
This brief illustration demonstrates the larger structure of migrants ‘ kindness toward different individuals and their new communities, even those who are impoverished. They also made donations to the religious and political institutions of their new homes in addition to taking care of one another.
For instance, the Vibidia family had lived in Herculaneum. Before it was destroyed by the explosion of Vesuvius, they had given richly to help finance several organizations, including a new temple of Venus, the Roman goddess of love, beauty and fertility.
One female family member who survived the explosion appears to have continued the mother’s history: Once settled in her new society, Beneventum, she donated a very small, badly made shrine to Venus on public area given by the local city council.
What kind of care would be currently given to survivors?
While the survivors resettled and established homes in their new communities, the government also played a role.
The emperors in Rome invested heavily in the region, rebuilding properties damaged by the eruption and building new infrastructure for displaced populations, including roads, water systems, amphitheaters, and temples.
This post-disaster recovery model can serve as a lesson today. The costs associated with funding the recovery have never appeared to have been up for discussion. Survivors were not forced to live in tent cities or be isolated in camps. There’s no evidence that they encountered discrimination in their new communities.
Instead, all signs indicate that communities welcomed the survivors. Many of them later founded their own businesses and held positions in local governments. And the government did the same by making sure that the new populations and their communities had the resources and infrastructure to rebuild their lives.
Steven L. Tuck is a professor of Classics at Miami University.
This article was republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
