No no, you don't get it, listen:
There were symptoms for days, weeks even. Earthquakes, rumblings, smoke coming from the mountain (which at the time nobody knew was a volcano); for a day and a half it rained a light pumice that wasn't heavy enough to kill you, and as long as you kept moving you could walk out of Pompeii over the pebbles. People had already been evacuating for some time when the first unsurvivable pyroclastic flow hit. We know the majority - the vast majority - of Pompeiians looked up from their annual Vulcan festival and thought "You know, maybe these aren't good signs."
The people who died were the people who had a chance to flee but didn't.
Some of them couldn't; we've found remains of people who were injured, disabled, pregnant, or just old, and if those people didn't have a good enough support system to evacuate them, there was really nothing they could do.
But the majority of remains we've found were perfectly healthy individuals, and at a glance that might seem strange.
But here's the thing that breaks my heart:
Of the 2,000-4,000 people who died in Pompeii, at least 90% of those people were slaves.
Because roughly 90% of the population of all of Rome were slaves. Which meant they couldn't evacuate even if they wanted to. It's not like they could even mutiny or defect or just run, because the only people in Rome with a worse quality of life than slaves were escaped slaves.
Which meant that even if you realized that you were going to die if you stayed in Pompeii, but your master didn't let you leave because he was more worried about looters than about having to replace you, you had to just consign yourself to death. We know plenty of accounts of wealthy people who fled with their families to safety, but made all their slaves stay put, with the tied-up livestock.
We still see this! Think of how many people in the last 3 years have gotten Covid at work because they were entirely aware of the danger but their boss insisted that they maintain productivity and keep coming in - even if the boss didn't.
I once called into work because all the roads around my house were flooded, and my boss, who I'd called at his house because he couldn't get there either, asked in all seriousness if I could somehow access a boat. I hung up on him.
I was written up for insubordination.
And that's all my modern boss did to me, because that's all he was allowed to do. Imagine if we lived in a culture where my boss had the legal right to flog and/or murder me for defying him.
We can make jokes about it, but remember: if something like this happened today, you wouldn't be the only guy who'd manage to like Kung Fu punch the volcano into submission or whatever.
You'd be one of the many thousand people who died because your boss, on his way out the door, told you you were dead meat if you didn't stay and guard his stuff.
