The Buried City by Gabriel Zuchtriegel: Dead city that is still erupting with secrets

Daily Mail​

19-05-2025

The Buried City: Unearthing The Real Pompeii by Gabriel Zuchtriegel (Hodder £22, 256pp)
It seems incredible that a city that ceased to exist almost 2,000 years ago is still making headlines today. But so it is.
Only last week we learned of how some desperate people, on that fateful summer's day in a Roman city in 79AD, tried to block up the door of a room with a bed, in a desperate attempt to save their lives...
That city was of course Pompeii, a city like no other. Because of the catastrophic way in which it was destroyed, first by a rain of tiny volcanic stones, then colossal amounts of super-heated dust and ash, Pompeii was also preserved for centuries, as if frozen in time.
Not only its 'houses, shops, bakeries, brothels, pubs, fountains, squares, temples and cemeteries', but 'pots on stoves, loaves in ovens, coins in tills and even unmade beds in bedrooms.' All were buried eventually by this terrible rain from heaven, when the huge mushroom cloud above Vesuvius finally collapsed in on itself.
As the author puts it, the effect was like a tower block collapsing in on itself – only a tower block 32km high, ejecting dust at up to 300C.
The city ended up buried under 2.5 metres of this dust, a toxic blanket under which nothing could survive. Organic matter eventually rotted away to leave perfect statues in negative, as it were, from which experts have created dramatic and moving casts.
Why didn't people escape, incidentally? Well, some did. But the monstrous eruption turned day into night. It was pitch black, the air was choking, and people naturally fled indoors and barred their doors, where they were eventually buried alive.
The head of the archaeological excavations today, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, has just brought out this fascinating new book about what we are still learning about this most haunting of all
lost cities. Why wasn't the ancient city rebuilt, he asks? In fact, in immediate response to the disaster, the Emperor Titus sent officials down there to do just that. A matter of Roman pride.
But viewing the site of the disaster, the officials were horrified to realise that any such reconstruction was quite impossible. There was literally nothing left.
In remarkably short time, the doomed city was lost and forgotten, nature returned with amazing speed, vegetation colonising the enriched volcanic soils, becoming a place where 'sheep graze among the olive trees and vines'.
Thus it stayed hidden until the first excavations in 1748, excavations which have continued ever since, with startling new revelations – such as that door being blocked by a bed – literally spilling out of the ground almost weekly.
One major shock took place only in the last ten years, when the very size of Pompeii had to be radically revised. For a long time, it was reckoned that this glittering, somewhat decadent seaside resort favoured by the celebs and super-rich of Imperial Rome – think Cannes today, perhaps, or Malibu – was thought to have had a population of some 12,000 people, based upon the number of houses.
But in 2017 a remarkable funerary inscription was discovered, in which one wealthy local, Gnaeus Alleius Nigidius Maius, proudly recorded that he had once thrown a dinner party 'consisting of 456 tricliniums with 15 men at each triclinium'.
A triclinium was a dining table surrounded on three sides by long couches. So his guests numbered 6,840 men. But these were all enfranchised male citizens.
Add their wives and children, non-citizens, and the vast armies of slaves, and this would imply that Pompeii was a city of 45,000 people, some living in elegant villas but many living in appallingly overcrowded slums and slave quarters, often little more than a cellar or a subterranean hovel.
As the author reminds us, if we look merely to Latin literature and history, we find it concerns almost solely 'a tiny minority of rich and powerful people'. Details of the daily lives of slaves are few indeed.
But now, thanks to Pompeii, here is a snapshot: three slaves who lived in a cellar just 16 metres square, on three campbeds, sleeping under woollen blankets. One of the three was a child. The cellar had one tiny window and one chamber pot.
And in case we picture Pompeii as always hot and sunny, remember that our mental image of Ancient Rome often comes from Hollywood movies, necessarily filmed in bright sunshine. Winters in Rome or Pompeii could be bitterly cold.
Zuchtriegel also writes wryly about his own profession. First there are archaeological finds, and then there are interpretations. And archaeologists can disagree with each other here, often vociferously.
One example is the famous Villa of the Mysteries, as it's called, the frescoed walls of which appear to depict all kinds of dark shenanigans. There's a wall-painting of Dionysus, the orgiastic god of wine, along with a female consort.
A mysterious object is hidden under a cloth, just about to be unveiled: probably a statuette of an erect phallus. On another wall there is a depiction of 'ritual flagellation and naked dancing'. Crikey, what on earth was this place? Surely the centre of some depraved and drunken cult?
Ah, but it's all in the interpretation. Today some scholars think it wasn't really a Villa of Mysteries at all, but more like a Marriage Villa. The Romans were quite an earthy lot, and the wall paintings are simply images of marriage, fertility and childbirth to inspire a newly wedded couple, 'wrapped in places in humorous allegory'.
Another site perhaps needs less interpretation. One public bath had extra rooms upstairs, their walls decorated with some really rude paintings. Almost surely a brothel. But all this easy classical nudity can cause unexpected problems with modern social media.
At one point, the author's team tried to post some images of marble statues of naked goddesses on their Facebook page, only for them to be blocked as 'inappropriate'!
So the story of doomed and tragic Pompeii continues even in the 21st century, and the discoveries will continue for many years yet. And they can be as deeply moving as any film or novel, admits the author, whether it's the preserved outline of a child of five or six, in the throes of death, clutching the nearest adult, or some innocent drawings in charcoal on walls, of little stick men, gladiators, animals, and in one corner, 'the outline of a tiny hand'.