Pompeii · August 24, 79 AD · 13:00
The ash fell for two days. It buried the city to a depth of four metres. And then, for 1,700 years, Pompeii waited. Perfectly preserved. Perfectly ordinary. A city that was simply interrupted.
The genius of Pompeii is not the temples or the Forum. It is the election graffiti on the walls. The price lists in the taverns. The wheel ruts worn into the stone streets. The millstone still in the bakery.
We know the names of gladiators because fans scratched them into walls. We know which snack bars were popular because the counters were worn down. We know where dogs were kept because someone painted "beware of dog" on the entrance.
Pompeii is not a ruin. It is a day — one specific, ordinary, unremarkable summer day in a provincial Roman city — that simply stopped. The completeness of it is vertiginous.
One room in a villa outside the city walls contains a frieze of painted figures — life-size, brilliantly preserved. They appear to be initiates in a Dionysian mystery rite. What exactly is happening in the painting is still debated. The secret survived the volcano. The meaning did not.
"They were so suddenly and so completely overwhelmed, that, as in the case of Herculaneum, whole families were found in the houses."
— Sir William Gell, Pompeiana, 1832
In 1863, Giuseppe Fiorelli discovered that the cavities left by decomposed bodies in the hardened ash were perfectly shaped. He injected plaster. The result was the exact form of the person, at the exact moment of death — expression, posture, clothing folds.
Some cover their faces. Some embrace. One man covers his face with his cloak. One woman appears to have put her hands over her mouth. The plaster captured what words could not.
The walls of Pompeii contain more than 11,000 inscriptions. They are election endorsements, declarations of love, insults, advertisements, gladiator fan messages, and philosophical observations scratched by bored pedestrians.
One reads: "Satura was here on September 3rd." Another: "I wonder, O wall, that you have not fallen in ruins, you who support the tedious writings of so many scribblers." A satirist was scratching back at graffiti 2,000 years ago.