What Happened to the Survivors of Pompeii? | The Records Rome Kept And The Stories Never Told

Two thousand dead. That is the figure repeated in documentaries, in museum captions, in the small print under the plaster casts. It is wrong. The excavations have been running for two hundred and seventy years. Nearly the whole city has been uncovered. And across all of it, archaeologists have recovered the remains of roughly eleven hundred people — in a town where about eleven thousand lived. So the question that has been sitting in plain sight for two and a half centuries is the one almost nobody asks. Where did the other ten thousand go? They went north. They went to Cumae, to Naples, to Nuceria, to Puteoli. They carried what they could and they left the rest, and Rome wrote some of it down — in tombstones cut in the wrong cemetery, in marriage records between families who had never met before, in a bath house built in a hurry for a town that suddenly had too many people in it, in an imperial commission nobody remembers. This is what the records say happened next. CHAPTERS 0:00 The number everyone knows is wrong 1:11 Eleven thousand people, eleven hundred bodies 2:15 The date that moved 4:36 The city that was already broken 9:40 Part One — The man who went back 25:24 Part Two — The name on the stone at Cumae 38:20 Part Three — The three hundred in the boat sheds 54:15 Part Four — The boy at Misenum 1:06:03 Part Five — The commission 1:19:24 Part Six — The marriages 1:30:23 Part Seven — The arithmetic 1:43:13 The same mountain 1:46:33 Where the other ten thousand went SOURCES AND EVIDENCE The surviving letters of Pliny the Younger to Tacitus. The Sulpicii tablets from Murecine. The charcoal inscription on the Via del Vesuvio that moved the date of the eruption from August to October. The skeletal evidence from the Herculaneum boat sheds, including the soldier and the Ring Lady. The epigraphic record from Cumae, Naples, Nuceria and Puteoli. The election notices and graffiti of Pompeii — some eleven thousand pieces of writing, more than any other Roman town has left us. Reconstructions in this film are built from that evidence. Where the record runs out, the film says so. Thanks for watching Time Warp Cities. If you want more reconstructions like this one, subscribe — it costs you nothing and it decides whether the next one gets made.