Original subtitles

Two millennia ago, Mount Vesuvius rained death on the terrified people of

Pompeii.

Hummus, gas, and volcanic ash claimed victim after victim, then buried the

city and its secrets.

During the panic, 54 people made their way to a cellar.

Some brought their treasure, others just the clothes on their backs.

They escaped the fate of their neighbors for a while.

Their skeletons are now being exhumed and tested.

They have an amazing story to tell.

I'm Don Wildman. This is the crater of Mount Vesuvius, probably history's most

famous volcano.

79 AD, 2,000 years ago.

All of what I'm seeing down below me here, this entire area of southern

Italy, the Roman cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Oplontis, all sat in the

direct path of this volcano.

In one night, Vesuvius consigned them all to history.

Their buildings, their people, their way of life.

It's important to me to really understand what happened here.

My father was a history teacher. He passed on the gene.

It's been a lifetime ambition to come to Pompeii, and after years of obsessing

about it, I'm finally here.

Pompeii was a city of 12,000 people, a place where Roman aristocrats were

served by their slaves, and merchants hustled for business in what was a

bustling first-century town.

Built on the wealthiest seafront in the Empire, this was Rome's Gold Coast, the

Malibu or Palm Beach of the ancient world.

This was where Rome's super-rich built their luxury holiday homes, like the

Villa Applantis, which may have been the grandest of them all.

Historian John Clark thinks it was the family villa of Poppea, second wife of

the murderous emperor Nero.

So far, 100 rooms have been excavated.

It's painted with sumptuous frescoes, containing rare pigments from the

farthest corners of the Roman Empire.

John has studied the site for 20 years.

He's found plenty of evidence that Pompeii was where Rome's elite,

including Poppaea, came to indulge themselves.

This was the villa's private pool.

Tell me about Poppaea, who owned this pool.

Well, she was Nero's wife, but she was well known as what we would call a loose

woman. She seemed to like lots of sex with both sexes and all ages.

So if this is true, from what the ancient writers say, she was a pretty

wild woman. And we can imagine that pretty wild things went on, perhaps in

this very pool.

For the Romans, the idea of sex with a beautiful partner, whether male or

female, young or old, meant a gift to the gods, and you were to celebrate it

and to thank the gods and enjoy it as much as possible. I like that theory.

Oh, I do too. Especially when it's in a pool like this.

It wasn't just the super rich who liked to fool around, as the frescoes in this

public bathhouse reveal.

But there was much more to the city than sexual antics.

Beneath the streets, the baths, fountains, and private pools were

supplied by the most advanced water system in the ancient world.

This was a town with a well-planned infrastructure, a sophisticated street

layout, houses, shops, bars, restaurants, and Rome's oldest

amphitheater.

It all came to an abrupt end.

when Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD.

The opulent city was frozen in time, buried under a layer of thousands of

tons of ash thrown out by the volcano.

If you want to know the sheer volume of how much ash fell from

Vesuvius, just take a look at this.

70 feet of ash is beneath me here.

It may look like a wall, but it's actually a wall of ash.

So much ash that all traces of Pompeii were buried and its very existence

forgotten for more than 15 centuries.

In the 19th century, the first large-scale excavations at Pompeii

uncovered the remains of many hundreds of people who had lived and died here.

Their flesh had rotted away, leaving human-shaped cavities.

Archaeologists of the day filled these spaces with plaster to form casts of the

victims in their final agonizing moments.

These tragic figures have made Pompeii famous all over the world.

But the process that was used to create the casts contaminated the bones inside,

destroying evidence that, with today's technology, could have told modern

archaeologists so much about how these people once lived.

Skeletal remains from this period are extremely rare, because first century

Romans cremated their dead.

So those lost skeletons turned out to be quite a blow to science.

But now, there's been a major breakthrough.

During excavation work near the Villa Applantis, an adjoining cellar was found

by chance.

It contained the bones of 54 men, women, and children, also victims of Vesuvius.

Oh my.

I mean, look at this people.

These are a throng of skeletons huddled together in the back of a cellar.

People that did not know what was happening to them, that were in the

dark, frightened.

and found themselves leaning quite literally on each other back here,

hoping to survive.

The bodies are not twisted in death, like those immortalized by the famous

casts.

These bodies lie in relaxed poses.

So how did they die?

And why were they here?

The perfectly preserved skeletons are now being analyzed with state-of-the-art

science.

It's possible to work out their diet, their health, even the details of their

sex lives from the bones.

Forensic scientist Dr. Fabian Kanz is leading this investigation.

The bones are divulging a wealth of new information about how the people of

Pompeii actually lived.

In mid-August 79 AD, before the eruption, it was business as usual in

Pompeii.

Street vendors hawked their wares while slaves bought provisions for their

masters' meals.

But suddenly, business as usual came to an end.

when an earthquake struck.

Though the people of Pompeii couldn't have known it, this was just a taste of

what nature had in store.

There's evidence of this event in the Villa Oplontis.

A giant crack in the wall.

That is the effect of a huge upheaval, an earthquake, that flipped

the top part of this wall upside down.

This crack just flies in the face of the idea that this all happened out of

nowhere, that this volcano came out of the blue. There were lots of things

going on at the time. There was seismic activity, definitely. And now we're

thinking that there were several more major events that occurred leading up to

the eruption.

Italy is prone to earthquakes.

It's near the restless seam of the African and Eurasian tectonic plates.

In this part of the world, earthquakes and volcanoes are different expressions

of the same geological unease.

The August quake of 79 AD has been estimated at around 6.0 on the Richter

scale.

A destructive earthquake in a place where buildings weren't constructed to

withstand them.

Beneath the resort towns by the sea, the earth was coming alive.

A seismic trigger had been pulled, which would end with the explosion of Mount

Vesuvius. Little more than a week later.

After the earthquake in mid-August 79 AD, a great many citizens of Pompeii

packed their belongings and fled the city.

But they left up to half the population behind them, amid much destruction, in a

town on the brink of lawlessness.

Why would the 54 people who later found refuge in the cellar, or anyone, have

stayed in Pompeii under these circumstances?

Now, it's fair enough to assume that after the earthquakes struck Pompeii,

there was a lot of looting. How do we know that? Well, this is a looter's

tunnel.

Looters burrowed into the abandoned villas of the rich and helped

themselves.

Several of these have been found in Pompeii dating from this period.

Something compelled thousands to stay after the earthquake.

The urge to protect property might be one explanation.

But it couldn't have been the only reason. What if you had nothing to

protect?

Slaves wouldn't have even had a choice.

They were bound to their owners, possibly forced to stay to repair the

devastation.

Were there other reasons why both the rich and poor chose to stay in Pompeii?

Thanks to these 54 skeletons in the cellar, we can begin to unravel this

mystery.

Another thing that makes this discovery unique is that the people at death had

separated themselves into two groups.

On one side of the cellar were 26 with no possessions at all.

On the other, now packed away in boxes, were the bones of people with

considerable wealth.

Two in particular were surrounded by their riches.

Amongst their bodies lay the second biggest hall of treasure ever to be

found in Pompeii.

There was a dazzling array of intricate jewelry, much of it set with emeralds,

and a hundred and one gold coins.

These are the remains of the young woman who died alongside this impressive

hoard.

The jewelry literally stained her bones green.

All this is green. Where does this come from?

There's a reaction of metal with the bone in the soil.

How old is she? Early 20s, I would say.

But the fact that she has so much of it indicates the quantity of jewelry that

she might have been carrying.

Lying near this skeleton, known as the Green Lady, was a green man.

He was green like an alien.

Okay, so he's clearly a wealthy man because when he came down into this

cellar, he was carrying these wealthy items, this jewelry and coins, I

suppose. Who were they?

The green man was found between the two groups, indicating his importance.

Nearby were two revealing clues about his identity.

The first was a strongbox decorated in gold leaf, clearly the property of a

rich owner.

Close by was the second piece of evidence, a seal.

What does the seal mean, and what was it used for?

The seal is used for all official documents. So when you write a letter on

a scroll, you put wax on it, and then you seal it with that. I see. Any kind

of official thing.

So this was found with the skeletons?

Yes, well, in that area. Okay.

The seal still bears a name.

Well, this is an amazing find.

This says Lucius Crassius Tertius.

It's abbreviated. And this is a seal that would have belonged to the person

who owned the villa.

And sure enough, above the cellar are plenty of clues as to what sort of place

this villa really was.

Let's get our orientation here. I'm actually standing on the ground floor

here above the cellar where the skeletons were found, okay? That's right

below my feet.

Look at this very, very impressive structure.

Two full stories.

All the way up there. I mean, it has the look of one of these luxurious villas of

this area, but it really isn't. And they know this because, I mean, look at this

pillar here.

It's rough-hewn. I mean, in another kind of structure, one of these residences

would have been a much finer kind of construction.

Look down here. This is a real giveaway.

These indentations here are made from constant use of cartwheels. You know,

the wagons and things coming up here, making a dent right in there.

Why? Because there was a lot of business going on here.

Deliveries of figs, pomegranates, wine, olive oil. Everything was brought here

to be priced, split up, and sent elsewhere.

These passageways, constant activity.

Carts being brought in here with deliveries of all kinds of goods from

all around the region.

In Pompeii, an enterprising merchant could strike it rich.

There would have been small-time street vendors in the city and market farmers

selling produce on the outskirts of town.

But a super-rich clientele such as Pompeii's would have required a reliable

supplier of high-quality food and drink.

Essentially, this is like a warehouse distribution center, all right? Look

over here.

You can see a pile of amphorae. These were containers that were standard

practice of the day, how you distributed goods.

These would be filled with wine, olive oil, grain. Pretty much anything could

be put inside of these containers.

So these people would come in.

Supplies would have been stored in here or moved out, put into each one of these

storerooms around the passageways.

These goods...

would have been getting distributed to the people of Pompeii and places beyond.

It would have been a hive of activity.

I mean, the proprietor who owned this place, he would have been a very, very

wealthy man.

The Green Man and Crassius Tertius seemed to be one and the same.

If Crassius had abandoned Pompeii after the earthquake, he risked losing

everything. His money, his warehouse, his life's work.

It's clear why he would have decided to stay.

What about the Green Lady?

Why didn't she flee the city when the earthquake struck?

Her bones tell a different story.

Why do you think she stayed in here? What was her condition?

What we found within her pelvic area, another pelvic bone, a very small bone.

So this is a pregnant woman.

This was a pregnant woman.

So, I mean, she's later on in her pregnancy here. If the fetus actually

has a pelvis of this size.

It was in the last month of her pregnancy. Oh, my goodness. All right.

And I think she got the feeling that she will be safe here.

It's a really tragic picture, isn't it, to think of this woman coming down here

trying to save not only her own life, but the life that is within her.

If she was nine months pregnant, it would have been very difficult for the

Green Lady to leave the city.

Both she and Crassius Tertius decided to stay.

They had only a week or so to live.

The people who stayed in Pompeii after the earthquake started to repair their

damaged city.

Life seems to have gone back to normal.

Many Pompeians fed themselves at open-air eateries like this one.

Small change has been found on the ancient counters, evidence that they

operated right up to the last minute.

One of the skeletons in the cellar was found with dozens of such coins.

Take a look at this pile of coinage. Lots of gold, silver, all kinds of

things were found among these skeletons. But this is very interesting. These are

all small denominations, all bronze coins found with one body.

Now, the interesting thing is that it suggests who this man was and the type

of business that he really ran. I mean, if you were...

Dealing in small change, it might have been a shop, a bar, someplace like that.

Perhaps this man stayed in Pompeii after the earthquake because he knew there was

still plenty of money to be made there.

What about the other skeletons in the cellar?

One young man was found with two gold rings and a sword.

He may have been armed to protect his belongings from robbers unleashed by the

earthquake.

Another skeleton looked very different from the rest of the group.

Who is this person?

We think it's a young African male, about 25 to 30.

Am I correct to say that this would be possibly a slave of this area?

I think slave is pretty much the picture we have in our mind. But as you can see

here, this skull is also green.

Ah, okay.

The skull was found among the people who died with jewelry and valuable coins.

suggesting this African was anything but a slave.

Slavery in Rome wasn't based on race, nor was it a life sentence.

Slaves could become free men and move up the social and economic ladder.

It's even possible that Crassius had slave blood in his ancestry.

Fifteen miles up the coast from Pompeii was also buried by volcanic ash.

Professor Andrew Wallace Hadrill is unearthing evidence here of a society

where up to three-quarters of the residents were freed slaves.

So this was common in Rome at the time, that you could actually move from

slavery to being a free man and become a wealthy man yourself.

It's one of the most distinctive things about slavery in the Roman world. It

wasn't the same in the Greek world, absolutely not the same in America, that

you could move from slave to free, but not only free, but to enjoy the full

rights of a citizen, make money, enjoy dignity.

Slaves and their owners.

In fact, everyone in a household lived much closer together than we do today,

in ways we wouldn't dream of.

This is a Roman toilet, unearthed at Herculaneum.

This is a typical arrangement in a Roman house.

It's a massive one. You can see that there's this slot round the back. That's

for the seat. OK, so I just sit right up here.

That's right.

You can make yourself comfortable.

And, in fact, there's room for two. Oh, isn't that nice?

It's a curious thing about the Roman city. They regarded it as a sociable

thing to do. Really?

So everyone was using this? Yeah, sure, sure, of course. Both slave and master.

Probably not at the same time, but they would have to use the same facility.

We know that for a certain, because this guy is a slave, and he wrote his name

right up here. It says Apollinaris here had a good dump.

Really? Yeah.

And under this street is where the human waste ended up.

These buildings were lived in by ordinary Romans.

The sewer below has just been excavated and contains something quite amazing.

Man, here, here's a really interesting bit.

Do you see up there? That's a downpipe. And in fact, here you can see... The

flow. The flow stuck to the wall. It's brown. Very nice.

Look here, you can see the brownness of it very clearly.

All right, even 2,000 years later, it's disgusting.

And this is why we were so excited about this, because we thought, okay, down

here we find a bag of excrement, and we can work out what those guys, more or

less, were eating.

And after 2,000 years, here it is.

This is the material which we recovered from down in the sewers. Bags of human

excrement, essentially. They are 774. Very good.

And you recover an extraordinary variety of stuff.

You've got the whole diet there. You can see these little fish bones.

You can see eggshells.

So good food was being consumed.

Exactly. Even in a neighborhood like this. All the fruit, nuts, fish, meat.

A good, wide-ranging, balanced diet.

So good food for most citizens.

But what of the slaves and the poor?

Fabian Kanz's investigation of the bones from the cellar has led to a brand new

finding.

Can you tell any difference in the diet, what these people were eating, be they

rich or poor?

There was no significant difference between the poor and the rich.

Fascinating. So all people in this area were enjoying a very good nutrition, a

balanced diet.

I think so. I think so. At least in this cellar.

So in 79 AD, food was plentiful for rich and poor alike in Pompeii.

but sometime during the week between the earthquake and the eruption the same

could not be said for drink the water seems to have stopped flowing

to pompeii due to either earthquake damage or the trouble brewing beneath

mount vesuvius

With August temperatures around 100 degrees and little or no water, life

would have become tough very quickly for Crassius, the Green Lady, and everyone

else who had remained in Pompeii after the earthquake.

Stallholders wouldn't have been able to clean their produce.

Fruit on trees or vines would have begun to wither and rot without water for

irrigation.

But some businesses appear to have kept going in spite of deteriorating

conditions.

The town had a thriving sex industry.

And there's no evidence that seismic activity slowed it down.

But Pompeii's sex trade had consequences.

On the side of the cellar, where the poor were huddled, are remains that

could rewrite the history of sexually transmitted disease.

These are the teeth of what look like two 12-year-old girls.

What is unusual about these children?

As you can see here, they have really strong deformations, both individuals.

This is the reason why we think they might have been twins.

You can better see it on the screen over there.

It's just a very strong deformation of the incisors.

In the front, it's not smooth. So these are the indentations that shouldn't be

there. Yeah, that's right. These are deformities.

These deformities were first recognized by Kansa's colleague, Maciej Hennenberg.

Deformities this severe suggest the girls had a horrific disease.

Congenital syphilis causes deformation like this. Congenital syphilis. Yeah.

Okay. What would be the symptoms that these children would be suffering from?

The symptoms are that you get problems of your eyes, problems of your ears,

massive problems.

You're not hearing well.

Pus and teariness and difficulty hearing. A very painful experience.

They needed a lot of medical care, social care, strong family support.

Congenital syphilis is passed down from parent to child.

it's probable that the twins contracted it through no fault of their own.

All Kahn's results are provisional at this stage.

But if he's right, this is the oldest recorded case of syphilis in Europe, 1

,400 years before it was thought to have existed here.

For centuries, Christopher Columbus and his crew have been blamed for bringing

it back from the New World.

If this discovery is confirmed by other experts, it's a medical bombshell.

In any case, it wouldn't be the disease that killed the twins.

On an August afternoon in 79 AD, Pompeians were gathering for their

summer games at the foot of Mount Vesuvius.

For many in Pompeii, the show went on quite literally to the last minute.

One Roman chronicle records that it was here in the amphitheater in Pompeii, the

oldest in the Roman world, that around 1 p.m., 24th of August, 79 A.D., the

spectators in here first noticed the great column of ash rising from the top

of Vesuvius.

They'd never seen anything like this.

What they saw was recorded in an eyewitness account.

A plume of smoke rising from the crater of Mount Vesuvius, 20 miles high.

The people of Pompeii must have been terrified.

Just picture the scene, would you? I mean, right behind me here, you can see

Vesuvius, everything, the city of Pompeii, right in the path.

People from all over this neighborhood would be gathering, you know, where they

normally would, in the town of the fountains here, trying to check with

each other. What are you going to do? Where am I going to go? How am I going

to get away?

The choices that Crassius, the green woman, and every single person in

Pompeii made in the next 12 hours would determine if, when, and how they died.

Mount Vesuvius had not erupted for 1,500 years.

Most people in Pompeii had no idea it was even a volcano.

As the eruption began, first comes this material from the sky, a lightweight

pumice, small material known as lapillae. Then the rocks begin to get

bigger and bigger still. With the prevailing winds from Vesuvius, Pompeii

is right in the direct path of the onslaught.

The pumice was light and hollow, ejected at a velocity of 800 miles per hour,

falling thousands of feet.

It could be deadly.

This was followed by bigger, more lethal debris from deep inside the volcano.

Crassius tertius must have been torn.

Even now, escape from this horror would have been possible.

And it wasn't only humans running for their lives.

You can hardly imagine the kind of terror they were feeling.

These animals in the stable are also struggling for their lives.

Tethered to the wall, they are pulling on the ropes, slowly but surely, and the

ash is burying them where they stand.

This animal breaks free.

Makes for the door, the only one of this collection here that almost got out. But

even he doesn't make it any farther.

He's struck down right here at the door, buried alive like everything and

everyone else in Pompeii.

By 3 p.m., the road out of Pompeii was choked with desperate people.

Hundreds were crushed to death in the chaos.

By 5 p.m., as the volume of ash from Vesuvius rapidly increased, those

fleeing the town began to suffocate as they inhaled the deadly fumes from the

volcano.

The 19th century casts speak volumes about the fugitives' last agonizing

moments.

This group looks like a family.

They were found near the city gate.

It just breaks your heart to see this.

This is a boy who couldn't be more than three or so, even younger here.

I mean, you can imagine the mothers and fathers just trying to save their

children's lives, let alone their own.

Many didn't try to escape.

They sought refuge in their houses.

But they were killed as the weight of the volcanic debris flattened entire

buildings.

This mother and her children were crushed by a falling staircase.

By 5.30 p.m., it probably dawned on Crassius that he could no longer remain

in his living quarters.

He searched for somewhere safer.

His cellars were barrel-vaulted, strong enough to remain intact even if the

buildings above collapsed.

Maybe this was a place to ride out the nightmare.

Crassius wrapped up his business and emptied his strongbox.

The green woman grabbed her emeralds and pearls and followed him, as did other

friends, neighbors, and colleagues, rich and poor.

By 6 p.m., the volcanic ash in the air had turned day to night.

So the refugees used lamps to light the way.

Remember, as the eruption is occurring, it gets pitch black outside.

These people are desperate, stumbling around in the dark. All they have to

light their way are small lamps like this, carried just like I am here.

I mean, it's not much light.

compounded by the fact that this is an ash cloud surrounding them. So all a

person can do is try to find their way through the most horrific circumstances

with only this much light.

53 terrified people found their way into the cellar of Crassius Tertius.

They were black and white, rich and poor, young and old.

In their bones were the blueprints of their lives, along with their most

intimate secrets.

Back in the cellar, minds would have been focused on future survival, rather

than past indiscretions.

Under the concrete roof of the barrel vault, they were safe.

Or so they must have believed.

Outside, an area 20 miles square was enveloped in an ash cloud.

In cities like Pompeii and Herculaneum, the debris was falling at a rate of four

feet every hour.

Before the eruption, these were splendid seaside towns.

But the volume of ash which fell from Vesuvius pushed the sea back.

Today, the ruined cities sit a quarter of a mile inland.

For more than 1500 years, they were buried in ash.

What the people in the cellar couldn't have known was that the ash and the

pumice were not all the volcano had in store.

The final phase of the eruption was about to begin.

In the

cellar of his warehouse, Crassius and the 53 fugitives survived the first 12

hours of the eruption.

They couldn't have known that outside,

Up to a quarter of the population of Pompeii was already dead.

At around midnight on the evening of the 24th of August, the column of gas from

Mount Vesuvius began to collapse in on itself and surge down the sides of the

volcano.

At speeds of up to 300 miles an hour, and a temperature of 400 degrees

Fahrenheit, the pyroclastic flow was unsurvivable.

Herculaneum and Pompeii were directly in its path.

If I'm a citizen of Herculaneum, my options are narrowing fast.

I mean, I'm heading for one of the gates. The roads are clogged beneath

there, but there's still some hope of survival.

Now, late in the night, the pyroclastic surges begin.

Moving down the mountain, it takes four minutes for this surge to move from the

top of Vesuvius down to here. From that moment, all hope is gone.

I'm stuck here.

The same flow hit the Villa Aplantis at around 1 a.m.

It swept everything in its path.

And this time, there was no escape.

The 400-degree flows grilled people alive.

This is what happened to many of those who became the famous casts.

But Kahn's investigation shows that the people in the cellar escaped this fate.

Now, I was under the impression that everyone in this whole area was

basically burned alive by the pyroclastic surge.

How can you tell this was different?

Because there are no cracks on the bone, there was no very long-lasting heat.

It would literally shatter the bone.

Yeah, a lot of cracks. We don't have it here.

You can see here they're lying quite relaxed and not flexed. So if some human

being had died being grilled alive, basically their body reacts differently.

Is that what you're saying? Yeah, it's cramping. Their muscles contract and

they end up in this kind of position, which is different than this sort of

relaxed. recluse that we see here.

Crassius and the people in the cellar had been correct about the safety of the

barrel vault.

It protected them from the heat.

The surge seems to have flowed around it.

But there was one thing the cellar couldn't save them from.

Toxic gas and minute volcanic fragments that filled the air they breathed.

As they choked, they wouldn't have known what was going on around them.

The chemical reaction between the two formed a kind of cement inside the

lungs. The people in the cellar suffocated.

After death, they were buried in ash.

But even in death, they clung on to the possessions that gave meaning to life.

The green woman to her earrings, clasping her unborn child.

The boy to his gold rings and sword.

The man to his purse full of small change.

While Crassius Tertius died in the vault, Clinging to the property he had

refused to abandon.

These people, so different from different places in the world and

different lifestyles, all end up in this same space seeking refuge and all

tragically die together.

But they've given us The best window to understand this world.

The way they died, but also the way they lived.

2,000 years ago.

And what extraordinary lives they had in this place.

A place where the poor could eat a diet as healthy as the rich.

Where slaves could earn their freedom and become as wealthy as their masters.

where race was not a barrier to privilege or success.

They were lives to which, in some ways, we still aspire today, but which

were cut short only because they did not know that the mountain under which they

flourished was actually a mountain of fire.