Pompeii

About

A prosperous Campanian town of ~11,000-12,000 people at the mouth of the Sarno river, buried under ~4-6 m of pumice and ash in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius on 24-25 August 79 CE and never reoccupied. Destroyed in the 79 CE eruption of Vesuvius, 38 years before this map's 117 CE snapshot — included as a general wayfinding/city-center pin so the site reads on the map even though nothing here was standing at Trajan's death; individual landmark pins carry the architectural detail. Point marks a representative centroid near the Forum.

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

• Seneca the Younger, Naturales Quaestiones 6.1.1–2

  Reports the earthquake of 62 CE that wrecked Pompeii and damaged the towns around it, and notes the town was still being rebuilt.

• Pliny the Younger, Letters 6.16

  The eruption of 79 seen from across the bay, written twenty-five years later for Tacitus: the cloud shaped like an umbrella pine, ash falling hotter and thicker as the ships close in.

Sources

• Pliny the Younger, Epistulae 6.16 and 6.20 (to Tacitus, eyewitness account of the eruption)
• https://pleiades.stoa.org/places/433032 (Pompeii)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pompeii