We know almost nothing about who these tunnellers were (but the fact that the message, though written in Latin, was in Greek characters is a pretty clear sign that they were bilingual, part of the Greco-Roman community of South Italy which we shall explore in Chapter 1). Nor do we know exactly when they made their raid: post-eruption Roman coins have been found in the ruins of Pompeii, dating from the end of the first century CE to the beginning of the fourth. But whenever, and for whatever reason, later Romans decided to dig down to the buried town, it was a phenomenally dangerous activity, driven by the hopes of recovering substantial quantities of the family wealth, or coming away with a prize haul of loot. The tunnels must have been perilous, dingy and narrow, and in places – if the size of the holes in some of the walls is anything to go by – only accessible by children. Even where it was possible to walk more freely, in pockets unfilled by the volcanic debris, the walls and ceilings would have been in danger of imminent collapse.
The irony is that some of the skeletons that have been found are almost certainly not the remains of the victims of the eruption, but of those risking a return to the city in the months, years or centuries that followed. So, for example, in a smart room off the garden courtyard of the House of the Menander – a modern name, taken from the painting of the Greek dramatist Menander found there (Ill. 44) – the remains of a little party of three have been discovered, two adults and child, equipped with a pick and a hoe. Were these, as some archaeologists believe, a group of residents, maybe slaves, trying to batter a way out of the house as it became engulfed, and losing their lives in the attempt? Or was it, as others imagine, a party of looters, battering their way in, killed perhaps as their fragile tunnel collapsed on top of them?
This picture of a disrupted city is made even more complicated by an earlier natural disaster. Seventeen years before the eruption of Vesuvius, in 62 CE the town had been badly damaged by an earthquake. According to the historian Tacitus, ‘a large part of Pompeii collapsed’. And the event is almost certainly depicted in a pair of sculptured panels found in the house of a Pompeian banker, Lucius Caecilius Jucundus. These show two areas of the city rocked by the quake: the Forum, and the area around the northern gate of the city facing towards Vesuvius. In one the Temple of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva leans alarmingly to the left; the equestrian statues on either side of the temple seem almost to come alive, the riders unseated from their mounts (Ill. 5). In the other the Vesuvian Gate takes an ominous lurch to the right, parting company with the large water reservoir on its left. This disaster raises some of the trickiest questions in the history of Pompeii. What was its effect on life in the town? How long did it take the city to recover? In fact, did it ever recover? Or were the Pompeians in 79 CE still living in the wreckage – the Forum, temples and baths, not to mention many private houses, not yet restored?
There have been theories aplenty. One idea is that a social revolution struck Pompeii after the earthquake. Many of the traditional aristocracy decided to leave town once and for all, no doubt to family properties elsewhere. Their departure not only left the way open for the rise of ex-slaves and other nouveaux riches, but it also started the ‘decline’ of some of Pompeii’s more elegant houses, hastily converted into fulleries, bakeries, inns and other commercial or industrial uses. In fact, that pile of gardening tools in the dining room could itself be a sign of just such a change of use: a once upmarket residence dragged dramatically downward by new occupants who had turned it into the base for a market gardening business.
Maybe so. And we may have here yet another reason to see the state of the city as anything but ‘normal’ when it was overwhelmed in 79. Yet we cannot be certain that all these changes were a direct result of the earthquake. Some of the industrial conversions probably happened before the disaster anyway. Some – if not many – were almost certainly part of the regular pattern of shifts in wealth, use and prestige that marks the history of any town, ancient or modern. Not to mention the hint of ‘officer class’ prejudices in many modern archaeologists who have so confidently equated social mobility and the rise of new money with revolution or decline.
Another big claim is that in 79 Pompeii had still not finished the long process of repair. So far as we can tell from the archaeological evidence, Tacitus’ assertion that ‘a large part of Pompeii collapsed’ was something of an exaggeration. But the state of many of the public buildings (only one set of public baths, for example, were in fully working order in 79) and the fact that, as we shall see, so many private houses had the decorators in at the time of the eruption seems to suggest not only that the damage had been considerable, but that it had not yet been put right. For a Roman city to pass seventeen years with most of its public baths out of action, several of its main temples unusable and its private houses in disarray points either to a serious shortage of cash or to an alarming degree of institutional dysfunction, or both. What on earth was the town council doing for nearly two decades? Sitting back and watching the place crumble?
But here too everything is not as it may at first seem. Can we be certain that all the repairs going on when the eruption struck were in response to the earthquake? Leaving aside the obvious point that there is almost always a lot of building work under way in any town (the repair and construction industry is at the centre of urban life, ancient or modern), there is the ‘one earthquake or more?’ question which has fiercely divided archaeologists who study Pompeii. Some still stick firmly to the view that there was just one single devastating earthquake in 62 and – yes – the city was in such a shambles that many repairs were still unfinished years later. More now emphasise the series of tremors that there must have been in the days, and perhaps months, leading up to the eruption. That is what you would expect before a major volcanic explosion, vulcanologists assure us, and it is, in any case, exactly what Pliny described: ‘For many days previously,’ he wrote, ‘there had been earth tremors.’ If there was a flurry of decorating going on, so this argument runs, then it was much more likely to be patching up the damage that had just occurred, not a belated and ill-timed attempt finally to clear up the mess of seventeen years.
As for the state of the town more generally, and especially the public buildings, here again the issue of later looting turns out to be a complicating factor. It is quite clear that in 79 some public buildings were in ruins. One huge temple overlooking the sea, and usually assumed to have been dedicated to the goddess Venus, was still a building site – though it seems as if the restoration was intended to be on an even grander scale than what it replaced. Others were very much back in working order. It was business as usual in the Temple of Isis, for example, which had been reconstructed and richly redecorated with what are now some of the most famous paintings from the city (Ill. 6).