Epoch Lives

Epoch Lives · Visual Essay

The Buried City

Pompeii, October 79 CE

On a Tuesday in October, a man named Lucius heated lentil soup in a clay pot set into a stone counter and opened his shop. In eighteen hours, all of it would be under four meters of ash.

Pompeii was not destroyed by a volcano. It was preserved by one. The eruption of Vesuvius buried a living city — every street, meal, election slogan, and graffiti scrawl — in a state no other ancient city survives in. This essay follows eighteen hours through the eyes of a freedman who sold lentil soup.
24Diary entries
5Acts
18hUntil burial
4mOf ash

Time compression

Act I covers ten days. Act III covers six hours. Act V covers twelve minutes. As catastrophe accelerates, the gap between entries shrinks — you feel time collapsing in the scroll itself.

Street grid

The map shows archaeologically documented streets and buildings. As you scroll, ash accumulates and the city disappears. The burial is the visualization.

Limitations

Lucius is fictional. His name, occupation, and location are composites drawn from electoral graffiti, thermopolium evidence, and freedman epigraphy in CIL IV.

Act I · The Vintage 1 / 24
Day 1 of 10
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Pompeii lay buried for 1,631 years.

When they found it, the bread was still in the ovens. The wine was still in the jars. The graffiti was still on the walls.

The ash that killed the city also saved it. Nothing else from the Roman world survives like this — not the streets, not the meals, not the election slogans someone painted on Lucius's wall without asking.

We know what they ate. We know what they wrote on walls. We know a man named Lucius sold lentil soup.

"That's what survived."

Sources and further reading

  1. Pliny the Younger, Epistulae VI.16 and VI.20 (the only literary eyewitness account of the eruption, written to Tacitus c. 106 CE).
  2. Mary Beard, Pompeii: Life in a Roman Town (2008) — social history, skeptical of romantic narratives.
  3. Haraldur Sigurdsson, Melting the Earth: The History of Ideas on Volcanic Eruptions (1999) — volcanological context.
  4. Mastrolorenzo et al., "Herculaneum victims of the 79 AD eruption," Nature 410 (2001) — pyroclastic surge lethality evidence.
  5. Rolandi et al., "The 79 AD eruption of Somma," Journal of Volcanology (2008) — evidence for October date.
  6. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum (1994).
  7. Eugene Dwyer, Pompeii's Living Statues (2010) — Fiorelli's body cast technique.
  8. CIL IV — Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, vol. IV: graffiti, electoral notices, and shop signs.