Herculaneum

About

A smaller, wealthier seaside town of perhaps 4,000-5,000 people on a coastal spur of Vesuvius, about 8 km southeast of Neapolis. Spared the initial ash-fall that struck Pompeii (giving most residents time to flee toward the shore) but destroyed the following night and morning by a series of pyroclastic surges and flows that buried the town up to 20 m deep, carbonizing (rather than burning away) organic material — wood, food, papyrus, even some human tissue — far more completely than at Pompeii. Destroyed in the 79 CE eruption of Vesuvius, 38 years before this map's snapshot — included as a general wayfinding/city-center pin, same reasoning as the Pompeii city pin.

What happened here

Somewhere between ten thousand and a million people, packed inside a boundary, living mostly in rented rooms above shops. The street is the living room: cooking is done at a bar downstairs, water is fetched from the fountain, and the lavatory is public and sociable. Blocks are five or six storeys where the ground is expensive, built fast and prone to fire and collapse; the ground floor is retail and the higher you live the worse it gets. Nights are loud with delivery carts banned from the daytime streets. The town council pays for the water, the baths and the games, and expects deference for it. Everyone who can afford to leaves in August, and everyone who cannot complains about the smell.

In ancient writing

• Strabo, Geography 5.4.8

  Describes the town on its headland above the sea, held in turn by Oscans, Etruscans and Samnites, with air the writer thought unusually healthy.

Sources

• Pliny the Younger, Epistulae 6.16 and 6.20 (to Tacitus)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herculaneum
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-32623-3 (Scientific Reports, 2023, on the pyroclastic surge sequence at Herculaneum)