Tom Hiddleston: What I discovered in Pompeii changed my life
Let me take you back in time.
The summer of 1998. In the World Cup final, France beat Brazil 3-0. England lost to Argentina on penalties in the round of 16. I didn’t have an email address; I didn’t have a mobile phone. The Nokia 3210 hadn’t been released yet. Jamiroquai, Eagle-Eye Cherry, B’Witched and Ace of Base were in the Top Ten of the UK singles charts. The Spice Girls had released Viva Forever. Michael Bay’s Armageddon and The Mask of Zorro were playing at the cinema, Tony Blair had just completed his first year as prime minister, and you could still buy an Interrail ticket for €250 and travel round Europe on any train at any time. The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
I was 17 years old, and it was my last summer before sitting my A-levels — my last run at that vast expanse of unstructured time and freedom that is the school summer holidays.
Not long after Emmanuel Petit had sealed the French victory in the World Cup final with a 93rd-minute winner, I was standing on top of the volcano of Mount Vesuvius on the edge of the crater, in the bay of Naples in Campania in Italy. I was on my first trip without adult supervision: no parents, no teachers, no guides. Just me and two friends. We had caught the Eurostar from Waterloo to Paris, a sleeper from Paris to Rome — the Forum! the Colosseum! — then Naples: three weeks packed full of pizza and history.
I’d always wanted to climb a volcano: volcanoes appealed to my young imagination and sense of adventure. Vesuvius was active but dormant — a vigorous hike up high onto the black sand and a thrilling chance to peer down and into the crater. From the top, you can see it all: the bay of Naples, Capri, Sorrento and, best of all, the gateway to the deep past, the ancient Roman town of Pompeii.
Let me take you back in time. In the summer of AD79 the volcano of Mount Vesuvius erupted, releasing more thermal energy than two atomic bombs combined, casting thousands of tonnes of magma, ash, pumice, superheated rock and gas 20 miles into the sky. A day later, when that nightmare of hellfire eventually fell back down to earth, the volcano’s pyroclastic flow buried the Roman town of Pompeii and its remaining inhabitants, preserving the city for ever in time. Eighteen hundred years later, archaeologists discovered the first buildings underneath that rich, fertile soil beneath the slopes of Vesuvius. The excavation continues to this day. It is still one of the most breathtaking, impressive, eternal archaeological sites in the world.
I love the ancient world. I always have. I grew up reading the Usborne Book of Greek Myths and Legends. By the time I was standing on the top of Mount Vesuvius, I was studying Latin and Greek at A-level alongside English literature and theatre studies. At school I had barely scratched the surface: I’d read a chapter of Virgil’s Aeneid, some Ciceronian speeches, a book or two of Tacitus’s Roman history. But until that point Rome had existed only in books, in the classroom.
At the age of 17, when I first walked through Pompeii, I felt like I was walking into the past. I felt like I was travelling back in time. I felt the 2,000 years between then and now compress and collapse. It felt like magic.
In 1845 Charles Dickens wrote in Pictures from Italy: “Stand at the bottom of the great market-place of Pompeii, and look up the silent streets, through the ruined temples [of Jupiter and Isis], over the broken houses with their inmost sanctuaries open to the day, away to Mount Vesuvius, bright and snowy in the peaceful distance; and lose all count of time.”
A whole Roman town, buried for centuries, perfectly preserved. Across the site were plaster casts of real Romans, real people, tragically frozen where they died, and every one of them left behind a story. I realised our relationship with the past was alive — not locked in dusty books on the shelf in the library. Pompeii represented a physical threshold — which anyone can step across — from the present into the past. We can learn from the lives of those ordinary Romans in Pompeii how much has changed, how little has changed, what exactly has changed about human nature, culture and the experience of being alive.
It’s the size of a real town — long streets and curving street-corners, alleyways and market places. They found at least 81 loaves of bread still baking in the oven on the day of the eruption — 2,000-year-old bread! They discovered grain mills, plumbing, public spas, bath houses and bars. Houses, apartments and private quarters. Frescoes and mosaics, depicting hunting scenes, sacred animals, images of household gods. Graffiti by old (a lot of it quite rude) and young: children’s inscriptions of two gladiators fighting, with the score line marked above it, the Roman numeral equivalent of 3–0.
I remember being unexpectedly moved. It didn’t feel like a ruin. It felt like a tomb and a time capsule — the preservation in extraordinary detail of lives ended in a moment by an unimaginable cataclysm. I remember being moved by the discovery of the plaster-cast of a dog, twisted and contorted in agony, tied to a post outside a house, abandoned there by its fleeing owners.
During the excavations, archaeologists found voids in the volcanic debris left by the decomposed bodies of people and animals and then filled the voids with plaster. Shapes of pain and trauma. We had a family dog at home at the time, a golden retriever, and I thought of her — in place of the dog in Pompeii — not being able to get away from that advancing cloud of volcanic ash. It was such a modern image to me. So real. It made me realise how ordinary these people were. How like us they were.
The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. Those buildings in Pompeii contain the memories of our ancestors. You can touch the past. See how they ate, how they worshipped, how they lived, how they loved. They were families, farmers and fishermen. Mothers and sons, business owners, bakers, blacksmiths, soldiers, lovers and friends. We are reminded that we are bound for ever to a thread of human history which connects us all.
I found that first experience of Pompeii sad, stimulating, humbling somehow. The thought that our ancestors were not so different from us was comforting. It made me feel less alone in the world. The ordinariness of life in Pompeii is part of its magical appeal.
Ancient Romans understood the concept of fama (from where we derive the idea of “fame”): an expectation that a life would be remembered by history. These were the lives of generals, senators and emperors. What is remarkable about Pompeii is that it has preserved the lives of ordinary people who would never have expected to have been recorded by history, remembered for ever.
After that trip in 1998, I went on to read Classics at university from 1999 to 2002. My first serious passion and source of curiosity. I studied ancient Greek and Roman culture in its entirety: Homer, Greek tragedy, Greek philosophy, the customs and culture of 5th-century BC Athens and also the whole history of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire: the places, the politics, the people. The birth of democracy, the origin of our systems of thinking, our systems of language — the same ancient world forcefully reimagined by the intellectual energy of the Renaissance, by Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Michel de Montaigne; the same ancient political system reconceived by the founding fathers (classical scholars) of the United States of America, authors of the American constitution, who would breathe new life into the ideas of a “democratic republic”, where a “senate” was the upper chamber of congress.
It must be said, too, that our modern world has been created by the convergence of so many influences and traditions: by millennia of Judeo-Christian beliefs, values and traditions, by the history and culture of the Middle East, by the vast collection of African history and experience, by the culture and inheritance of Asia, Australia, Oceania, Polynesia, by the indigenous communities of North and South America.
And our inheritance of the ancient world is everywhere. The New York Stock Exchange and the British Museum look like Greek temples: classical columns, a pediment and a frieze. Shakespeare wrote Roman plays: Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra. In the 1950s and 1960s, Hollywood produced a run of Roman epics: Ben-Hur, Spartacus, The Fall of the Roman Empire and Cleopatra. In the 2000s, Ridley Scott made Gladiator, HBO made Rome. Last year, Gladiator II. This year, The Odyssey.
We tell stories about the past to understand something about our present. We go back to the ancient world to tell stories about then, to understand who we are now.
I was given the chance to go back to Pompeii once more in my new series for National Geographic and Disney+ Pompeii: Out of Time. In the show, with the help of classicists, archaeologists, ancient historians, geoscientists and psychologists, thanks to new research based on the plethora of inscriptions and graffiti on site, I am able to trace the lives of three real Romans in Pompeii on that fateful day in 79 AD: a teenager, not much older than I was when I first visited Pompeii, a businesswoman and an elite Roman soldier. I follow the facts — facts matter — to build a truthful picture painted by the collected fragments of the archaeological record.
The teenage boy, Avianius, was working at a blacksmiths on the edge of the city and ran back into the centre of town to find his mother. The businesswoman, Julia Felix, organised a full-scale evacuation of her property, a bath house for respectable clients and guests. An elite soldier in nearby Herculaneum — a member of the Praetorian Guard, the emperor’s personal bodyguard — volunteered to help as many people as he could to load into boats and make their escape across the sea in the Bay of Naples.
I spent time with experts from different disciplines: Professor Stephen Tuck, whose work on Pompeii’s survivors is at the cutting edge, the archaeologist Dr Caitie Barrett, the ancient historian Dr Darius Arya, the geoscientist Professor Chris Jackson, who helped me understand each distinct phase of the volcanic eruption. I even spoke to a survival psychologist, Dr Sarita Robinson, who helped me to understand how people behave in an emergency, in any crisis, across every time and across every culture. They were each full of insight and also encouraging of our process. When there is a gap between fragments in history, all you can do is make an educated guess. When the evidence runs out, empathy connects the dots.
I wanted to go back in time, to replay that day in the summer of AD79, when ordinary people were caught up in that extraordinary moment. At every turn, our telling of the story of Pompeii asks us to pause, rewind, reflect, rethink, replay, rework, reimagine. The process of writing history is itself a process of redrafting, redrawing the picture, as new pieces of the jigsaw puzzle — new fragments of evidence — become available.
Is the past a foreign country? Do they do things differently there? I discovered many new things, chief among them that there were survivors. I learnt that in the single day between the volcanic eruption and the city’s burial, ordinary people made extraordinary choices. I learnt the reassuring truth that in a crisis — an emergency or natural disaster — human beings will come together to help each other to safety, to survival.
Perhaps, if we can have empathy for ordinary people from 2,000 years ago, we might have more empathy for each other now.
National Geographic’s Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston is on Disney+ from July 23
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