BBC Life and Death in Herculaneum Prof Wallace Hadrill

I'm Andrew Wallace-Hadrill and for the past 30 years I've had the immense good fortune to be able to study remains from two of the most famous and exciting archaeological areas in the world. The first is Pompeii. Pompeii is a magical site. It's captured everyone's imagination for two and a half centuries. The modern exploration of Pompeii started in 1748. Now nearly two and a half million visitors come here every year. No wonder it boasts the oldest amphitheatre in the ancient world, an ancient brothel and these world-famous casts. Yet just 10 miles down the road is a place destroyed by the same eruption that for me is if anything even more fascinating. It adds colour and close-up detail to what life was really like in Roman time. This is the city of Hercules, Herculaneum. Here we have the main street and here you can see the way the houses are built to two storeys. The top storey surviving unlike Pompeii and there are the wooden shutters. We've discovered their furniture. It's a sort of ancient Ikea and even more important for a historian like me, wooden tablets containing the records of their legal disputes and squabbles. What they ate and even how they ate it. And most important of all, Herculaneum holds the largest sample of skeletons of a living population from anywhere in the ancient world. Amongst them are the first new human remains to be found in this area for 30 years. They provide detailed scientific evidence of how people lived in the years leading up to the eruption. And put all this stuff together and you can just stretch out and touch the lives of an ancient population. In 79 AD this volcano erupted. It was a disaster that would resonate from the ancient to the modern world. Here in the crater of Mount Vesuvius, I find it hard to imagine why anyone would want to live in such a dangerous and scary place. 2,000 years ago Vesuvius looked very different. Even the summit was covered in green and the inhabitants of the Roman towns below had no idea of the dangers they faced. The most famous of these is of course Pompeii. Pompeii has become world renowned for its casts of the volcano's victims. It was a brilliant discovery in 1863 when the Italian archaeologists developed a technique of making casts of the dead bodies. Because of the way the ash set around the body before it rotted away, it was possible to inject plaster of Paris and capture the precise form of someone in their death throes and even details of their clothing. This caused international sensation and it's become something of a ghoulish spectacle. What's lost in this process is the skeleton itself. Because scientists can say so much from a skeleton about a person, it's frustrating we can no longer get at these people. The preservation of Pompeii's people as casts was made possible by the layer of ash and pumice ejected from Mount Vesuvius which buried the town. In Pompeii it fell three to five meters deep. By contrast, 10 miles along the Bay of Naples at Herculaneum, the ash fall was much hotter and up to five times deeper. As it cooled it formed rock which enveloped the town and proved an archaeological godsend. This terrifying precipice is the product of just 24 hours of volcanic eruption. Herculaneum is covered in as many as 25 meters of solid rock and it's the enormous depth that means Herculaneum is exceptionally well preserved. Ancient Herculaneum was a port on the Bay of Naples but the effect of the eruption has pushed the coast 400 meters out to sea and there's something here that helps us get closer to the people of an ancient town more than any other place in the world. A vast sample of skeletons found not in a graveyard but cut off young and old at the same moment. They're just as poignant as the casts but they also give us something more important. In their bones is the blueprint of what they ate, how they lived and even the kind of work they did in the years leading up to the eruption. It was down here by the ancient shore that over 300 skeletons were found, some of them out on the shore but the majority under these vaults clustered up to 40 in each vault. The question is what were they doing down here? The vast majority found under the vaults were women and children while those found on the ancient beach were largely men. It was a strange separation. Stacked high in boxes in the storeroom are 104 samples of the 340 skeletons recovered. Amongst them are the first new skeletal remains to be recovered from this area in 30 years. Leading the investigation are anthropologists Dr Luca Pondioli and Dr Luciano Fattore. The Herculaneum group, is it special? Is it normal among the groups? It's unique, it's not special, it's unique. There is no other collection all over the world that is so important and so unique because it's not people coming from a graveyard or a necropolis. Those were live people who died from a disaster and this is unique. So you have a fantastic snapshot, a frozen moment of a real population. Exactly, to correspond not perfectly but as a good sample because we estimate that this is close to 10% of the population that was in Herculaneum. Most remarkable of all is this find, three exceptionally well preserved skeletons discovered in a niche at the back of one of the vaults by Dr Fattore. Luciano, this group of skeletons is a new discovery? This small group comprises two women, probably in their 40s, and a small child. Because these particular skeletons were hidden and so well preserved, we can tell exactly what possessions they had with them. Incredibly, grape seeds were found in this child's rib cage, the remains of a last meal, and these tiny silver earrings were lying encrusted with ash on either side of her skull. The skeletons are a hugely important find. Using them and all Herculaneum's other exceptionally well preserved remains, I'm going to take you on a special tour of this extraordinary town. I'll show you how it adds even more to what we know from Pompeii. First, let's see where they ate, where they shopped, and where they lived. Not just the people in swanky mansions, but in ordinary flats and bedsits too. Let's take this house, the House of the Wooden Screen, as an example of what you can see in Herculaneum, which you don't see in Pompeii. In the middle here, the impluvium, where the rain water comes in from the hole in the ceiling. There's a nice marble table on the axis which draws people's eyes in to the most important reception room in the house, the tablinum. But as we come up here, here, here's the difference. This is what you don't find in Pompeii. This is a wooden screen found in position, it's preserved now in glass to protect it, a screen which could be drawn across to cut off this main reception room. And if you come in, you can see how it changes it. Open it up and here I am, every visitor to the house can see me, it's easy for me to welcome visitors. I close it up and then it's become a private dining room. So that wooden screen is all about privacy in the Roman house, something you can see here because the wood survives. Suppose we were in Pompeii. Here's a room which you would guess was a bedroom. You would guess it, but you wouldn't know for certain. But when you actually find the bed in it, then you know it's bedroom. It may look a bit worse for wear, but in Herculaneum they've found enough wooden furniture to fill an entire showroom. The man in charge of all this is Luigi Sirano. This place is a, it's a real treasure trove. There's something of everything you want for your house. It's a sort of ancient Ikea. Do you fancy a bed? Here is an entire ancient bed. You can see the frame but also this very beautiful woodwork of the sides of the bed. What else do we have here? We have benches, linen chests, and here's a really famous object, the cradle, found in a house with the baby lying in the cradle. And a really big question for the Roman family was, what gods do you worship and where do you put them? Oh yes, over here we have a household shrine. These doors are like the doors into a temple and inside you keep your household gods. And that's a lovely insight into religion in the Roman household. I think I'd better put some gloves on here since I'm going to be handling household gods. I better treat them with respect. Now what we've got here is just a selection of the sort of gods you'd find in one of these shrines. Here is the must-have god. This is a dancing spirit of the hearth and household. You can see a little drinking horn that it's holding up. Many people, because we're in Herculaneum, wanted a Hercules and there's Hercules. You see his lion skin hanging from his hand and his beautiful six-pack and fine muscular body. And of course going with Hercules, Venus and there is the naked Venus washing her hair. You need more than strength and sex, you need money. And Mercury is the great god of how to make a profit and there he is with a bag of money. He has little wings on his helmet. With any luck he has wings on his heels too. And here we have the king of the gods, Jupiter himself, with his thunderbolt. That's a thunderbolt. I love the way his eyes seem to blaze at you. He's a scary god. And take good note, the king of the gods does not have a big brick because in antiquity they did not think a big brick was a good thing. It's a sign of a barbarian. And he has an absolutely weird link with the modern world. A Madonna and child. This splendid figure of a goddess giving suckle to a baby. Of course it's not the Madonna, this is not the Christ child, this is just an ancient scene. And that's a splendid large copy. And here's another little copy which we found when we were excavating down in the sewers. And here at the sanctuary of the Madonna in Pompeii we can see it's an image that's passed effortlessly from the ancient world to the modern. What's been missing in ancient Pompeii is this bright colour. We tend to see so much in black and white. Herculaneum, though, offers a whole new palette. Here's a find I'm particularly proud of because we made it in the Do you see this? Isn't she fantastic? And what's so fabulous about her is the colour. The moment the conservators realised that the head was there, still completely caked in ash, they said, please, no one else touch it. There may be traces of colour. And my golly, there were traces of colour. They were so careful about removing the ash. Look round the eye. Eyebrow, her eyelashes and the iris and the pupil. It's extraordinary how a few touches of colour just bring this piece of marble to life. There's been a lot of talk about did they really colour ancient statues because people think marble looks beautiful just as it is. And this shows you that just with a few delicate strokes can make all the difference between a dead white marble statue and this living image. And it wasn't just on marble that the colour survived. The contents of these containers are so delicate they're kept constantly alarmed and refrigerated. They contain the timber from the only surviving wooden roof from the Roman world, found here in Herculaneum. When they were unearthed, the paint still survived. Remnants of those bright colours still exist. You can see traces of the blue and turquoise pigment. They tell of brightly coloured and intricately patterned wooden ceilings. Chemical analysis has enabled us to reconstruct them in all their glory. Nowhere is this world of colour and detail preserved better than in the house of Neptune and Amphitrite. Sylvia and her team have spent eight months conserving this mosaic. The ancient artists who made the piece and the modern restorers here share a painstaking attention to detail. As Sylvia brushed delicately away at the yellow pigment, she was astonished at what she found. The most important details were picked out with real gold. Yet we know this house was pretty modest by Herculaneum's standards. In the front of the house there's a shop, a sort of ancient off-licence. And here it is. The remains of dozens of shops survive from antiquity, but Herculaneum offers a level of preservation you just don't see anywhere else, even in Pompeii, particularly its preserved wood. Look at what we've got here. We've got a screen that cuts off a little back room for the shop. Up here there's a little balcony with amphorae, wine containers stored up on it. And then round here, here's this wonderful thing, a sort of wine rack. So you can put your wine amphorae there and you can probably tip them over and pour out a smaller container for sale to the customer. Not only that, but you've got an upper floor, a flat above the shop. You see over there there's a rather nice decorated wall and in the corner there's a bed. You can see its bronze leg. Years of studying Herculaneum, with its humble shops backed up against opulent houses, taught me that this place was the best surviving example of how a Roman town really worked. A place not of black and white contrasts between rich and poor, but a complex tapestry where people of different wealth and backgrounds were woven into an intricate mix. And it's Herculaneum's latrines from ancient shops, apartments and small businesses that have given the most tantalising window onto the lives of its people. And the contents are all down below, so to speak. What makes this block of houses so fascinating is not just the enormous amount of sewage found down in the sewer, which allows us to analyse in detail their diet, but that it's found in a social context. You can see it's a series of shops and perfectly ordinary flats. We're looking at the diet not of people at the top of the social spectrum, but way down. The contents of the sewer are being analysed, and what Herculaneum is giving us is a completely new insight into what less well-off Romans ate. It was once thought they survived on a simple diet of bread and olives, but just like everything else in Herculaneum, the reality is turning out to be much more rich and surprising than anyone could have expected. I've been working on the organic material from the Herculaneum sewer for almost 10 years. I was involved right from the beginning. I was fortunate enough not to have to excavate it. It's pretty cool because it's exactly what people were eating. It's probably as close as you can get. There's just a huge range in terms of shellfish, fish, also fruits and vegetables. We've already found over 110 different food items in the sewer. Everything from bones to seeds to eggshells has been preserved. Some of it chucked down the drain into the sewer below. But no sewer would be complete without some of these. Here is a human coprolite looking, I suppose, somewhat like a modern turd, a modern motion. This is a broken section through one of the coprolites and the darker brown material there are fish bones. What I'm doing here is carefully scraping away at the coprolite, trying to reveal a fish vertebra. See the bone there and then the general mineralised material of the coprolite itself. We know the people who lived around the Bay of Naples loved their fish. They recorded the different species in this stunning mosaic. Modern Ercolano is still a fishing port with a thriving market. And I thought I'd see whether there's anything there before the eruption that's still popular today. Fish merchant Signora Lucia has graciously offered to help. There are 46 different species of fish in the sewer. We found many different types of sea breams, anchovies, sardines, a lovely wriggling eel. Three different types of eels. There's also a little bit of evidence for sea bass, as well as I guess what we would think is more unusual species such as sharks and rays. It's clear that from the harvest of the Mediterranean, the poorer people of Herculaneum were not only enjoying a diet rich in protein, but one more varied than that of the inhabitants today. Back at the lab, they've even managed to uncover how these people ate their fish from a rarely surviving part of its anatomy, the otolith. Otoliths are located in the ear of the fish, so in the head. A lot of the otoliths show signs of digestion, so smoothing around the edges, which means that they were probably consumed, passed through the human digestive tract intact. But since they're in the head of the fish, this means that people ate their fish whole a lot of the times. The Romans liked the fish crunchy. This tradition must surely have died out with the eruption. Okay. When you look at fish, there's very little difference between what was there in the Mediterranean antiquity and what you find in a fish stall now. Fruit and veg is a very different thing. Some is just the same as in antiquity. Apples, now that's a good ancient Roman apple, so to speak. Pears, also the Romans very fond of pears. But what about oranges? Oranges come probably from the Arab world in the Middle Ages. So oranges and lemons, lemons the joy of the Bay of Naples, don't exist in antiquity. There's one fruit, however, that sustained its popularity in Ercolano for nearly 2,000 years. I'm so pleased with what I've just found here. This is Herculaneum figs. Herculaneum and antiquity famous for figs. And here we have the real figs of modern Herculaneum. Beautifully cooked. Thank you. The food uncovered in the sewer can still be found in today's market in Ercolano. It tells us about the surprising range of nutrition in this ancient town. And now our skeletons are providing even more evidence. A scientific method called collagen testing, which determines the origin of protein in the bones, is being used for the first time to tell us who ate what here. The traditional view is that only the rich could afford meat and fish in the ancient world. So we might expect a small minority of our skeletons who've enjoyed this diet, while the rest ate only vegetable matter. Rather than this division, what Luca found was more surprising. In Herculaneum, we have found a uniform distribution through all the possible kind of diets, from vegetarians to meat. Here we have one adult male. Here we have a young lady, she'll be around 20 years old. She was almost vegetarian. She ate almost no meat, while this adult male ate, we can estimate, close to 60% of his protein intake from seafood. So does that mean we've got really two different groups of the population? The lucky ones who are having plenty of fish, and the unlucky ones who just have a vegetarian diet? No, no, no. He could have been the cook of the master. And maybe, look, he was the person who bought the food in the market. So we don't know. And she, maybe she was the daughter of the master, and for some religious or any other kind of thing, she preferred not to eat meat. So it's difficult. They were very complex. It was a complex society. Back in the lab, it's not just the food that Erika and Mark have uncovered, but even the way it was prepared. Until recently, some assumed poor people didn't prepare their own food at home here. However, microscopic analysis has now revealed nine different undigested herbs and spices, including celery seeds, coriander and fennel. It seems that, like their modern Italian counterparts, even the poorer people of Herculaneum practiced a sophisticated level of cookery. And what's more, their tastes stretched far beyond the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. The black pepper is by far the most exotic food item, as it would have come all the way from India. And I actually found two peppercorns at different locations in the sewer, which means that two different sets of people living in different apartments would have been able to buy black pepper. It would be another one and a half millennia before the poor in Britain could afford the same taste. They clearly also cared a lot about food and flavour and what they were eating. So the people in Herculaneum were definitely living to eat, not just eating to live. The analysis of the material from the sewer tells us the diet of Herculaneum's people was rich and varied. The fact that a sewer was built here at all tells us something else about this place. Some people imagine that a Roman town was a filthy, unhealthy place, rather like a medieval city, or even Victorian London. But the Romans had an obsession with hygiene. Their doctor said you need to bathe regularly, and a town like Herculaneum has an abundant provision of public baths. Here we're in the suburban baths. This is the cold dip, and you can see that the water would come right up here. And you can get, what, a dozen, even more people here at the same time. And if you're worried that the water's going to get a bit dirty with all those people, never fear. Here's the plug hole to let it out. They can change the water regularly. We can't be sure if the entire population of Herculaneum was allowed to use the baths, but what we do know is that everyone had access to a clean water supply. Were Roman towns filthy, unhealthy places, as some people seem to think? Look around you, and you see the Romans really care about hygiene. Their town is provided with running water, public fountains. Look at this one. It's even got this lovely figure of Venus, and what's she doing? She's washing her hair. Beautiful. She cares about the body, keeping clean. And it's not just a public fountain. Private houses have running water, too. Here we've got part of the water distribution system of the town. Up on the top, there was a cistern. You've got lead pipes running up, and that gives the pressure so that the water can go into individual houses. And there are pipes running right down the pavement. You can see three pipes running there, feeding off into individual houses. It's estimated that the population of Herculaneum was around 4,000, small even by Roman standards, and no greater than some British villages today. And yet, even in the quarter of the town excavated, they had three public baths, a primary and secondary sewer system, and over 80 latrines. They enjoyed a level of public amenities not matched until modern times. Not only do they provide all these facilities, but the magistrates are really keen to keep the place clean. And here they've written up, here's the name of Marcus Rufelius Robbia and Aulus Tetius, and they're giving a pretty strict warning here, no dumping rubbish by the public fountain. And they then specify the punishment. If you're a free man, you get fined, and if you're a slave, you get flogged. And suddenly, there opens up in front of us that vast gulf between the world of the free and the slave. The slave is punished by flogging, and the flogging is a terrible thing, not just very painful, but it leaves a scar, a mark on you for life. You can never become a citizen if you've been flogged. And it's on this most infamous institution of the ancient world, slavery, that Herculaneum offers the most surprising insight of all. This was a town of slaves and their owners. The most famous of those slave owners is commemorated right here. Marcus Nonnius Balbus here was Herculaneum's biggest benefactor. He must have made a pile as a governor of a Roman province, and then he spent some of his money on his town, and the walls up above us were rebuilt by Marcus Nonnius Balbus. Another sign of his enormous wealth was the sheer number of his slaves. When a Roman gave freedom to a slave, the slave took his name. And there are over 50 people in Herculaneum who carried the name of Marcus Nonnius. It's a name that continued long after him, as this boundary marker between two home-owning ex-slaves shows. On this side is Julia, and it's her wall, private in perpetuity. And on this side is Marcus Nonnius Dama, freedman of Marcus, his wall, private in perpetuity. And we can tell where he comes from, because that name Dama is distinctive of Syria, as in Damascus. So he's come from the other side of the Mediterranean world. A tiny town like Herculaneum was attracting immigrants from Syria and beyond. Often they came as slaves, but what this place and the Roman Empire offered them was the chance to buy into something unique in the ancient world. What makes Roman slavery so different from any other slave society we know about is the way that a slave could be not just freed, but given full citizenship. It's this dynamic flow from slavery to citizenship that makes Roman society quite unique, and there's nowhere better than Herculaneum to see that. These marble tablets from Herculaneum are the only surviving documents like this from the Roman world. They list the freedmen and full citizens of the town. What they suggest is that up to 80% of the town's male citizens were ex-slaves, pointing to a huge degree of social mobility, even in the smallest of Roman towns. With over 300 skeletons, surely our anthropologists must have the evidence to work out the social makeup of our group. This female seems to bear all the hallmarks of a slave. But there's other unique evidence that can shed light on the social makeup of the town. What's special about Herculaneum is that the records survive that show that this was an upwardly mobile society, where full citizenship was the prize and slaves were battling to secure it. This system had a dual purpose, to encourage slaves to work hard and then buy into the empire by granting them citizenship. Here, in the storerooms of the Naples Museum, are kept one of the most valuable insights into the Roman world. They are the wooden tablets on which people recorded their legal affairs. Originally, these tablets had a top layer of wax on which the legal wranglings of the people of Herculaneum were painstakingly transcribed. The heat of the eruption melted the wax, but we can still read the minute scratch marks made on the carbonized wood below. Fortunately, when it came to legal matters, the Romans didn't do things by halves. Luckily, the Romans were really nervous about forgery, so they wouldn't just have one copy of a document, they had three copies. You can see here some little holes, which is the string which ties together the three copies. And by looking at these different versions, you can puzzle together a fascinating story. A wonderful example of these documents comes from the House of the Bicentenary, and there was found a dossier of dozens of documents recording a big legal battle. The argument was whether a girl called Petronia Justa was free or a slave, and that depended on whether, at the time of her birth, her mother was free or a slave. To resolve the problem, they call in members of the household, neighbours, who all give witness and all have contradictory versions. We don't know who won, but what it tells us is that, in this case, it was possible for a slave girl to challenge her status in court. Another really important bundle of documents came from the house just two doors down from Petronia Justa. It's really difficult, just from looking at a Roman house, to tell what the status of the owner was. Look at this house. Grand, lovely garden. This is very much a des res. They're very nice bedrooms in the background here, and then over here we've got a magnificent great reception room. You can hear it echoing, echoing. Wonderful. And this lovely mosaic on the floor, and everything makes you think this must be someone really smart, one of the elite of the town. As it happens, we know exactly who lived here, because in a bedroom right up here was a bundle of documents, and it's this character, Vinidius Aenecus, and he's an ex-slave. He's obviously very much a favoured slave, and he's given his freedom, and that was quite common, but he's given his freedom underage. Terrific, now I'm a free man. But that wasn't enough for him, because he wanted to be a full Roman citizen too, and it was really worth it. A citizen gets the vote, but he can also inherit property. Now, normally you have to be 30 to become a full Roman citizen, if you start as a slave, but there's a special legal loophole, and Vinidius Aenecus uses it. If you get legally married, and then have a child, declare the child before the local magistrates. They can give you a certificate that says you now merit Roman citizenship. Here we have an example of a bit written in ink, and though black ink is a little hard to make out against charcoal, if I get the light right, I can see El Vinidius Aenecus. There's his name. And here we can see he's declaring the birth of a daughter before the magistrates. That a daughter was born to him by his wife, Livia Actae. We know he achieved his ambition, and made it to full citizenship, because we can find his name in the list of citizens inscribed publicly in marble. But it was very important to him to keep the legal proof, just like his birth certificate, or other personal documents locked away in his house. Living here at the foot of a peaceful Mount Vesuvius, Vinidius Aenecus and Petronius Justus had no idea their world was about to end. And the possessions found with the skeletons are a poignant reminder of what the people of Herculaneum chose to leave and what to take with them when the catastrophe came. A dazzling array of coins, gold and jewellery, craftsmanship as intricate as the society to which they belonged. A surgeon's instruments, perhaps for a doctor to attend to the wounded. Who this medic was remains a mystery. This skeleton was a mother found clutching her child. And given the choice of what to take with him, this two-year-old was discovered with neither treasure nor toys. He was found embracing a pet dog. And then the last skeletons to be found, the group of two women and the small child with the silver earrings. 97% of the bodies found in Herculaneum were discovered here at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. Pompeii, where they were spread across the site. There must have been a reason they came here. And one that might perhaps tell us how they faced up to disaster. Look at the construction of this space. Solid Roman concrete with the strongest kind of vaulted roof. This sort of space would be ideal for taking refuge in an earthquake. And what our research has shown is that in the years running up to the eruption, there were constant earthquakes. They must have learned to use these spaces as a place of refuge, a sort of bomb shelter. Then as now, Italy is prone to devastating earthquakes. One shook Pompeii and Herculaneum in 63 AD. Its impact was such that it's recorded in a marble relief. You can see the Temple of Jupiter tipping, lopsided, as it shakes under the force of the ground beneath. In the run-up to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, this seismic activity increased. And its effects are starkly apparent on the buildings along Herculaneum's ancient shoreline. The people of Herculaneum were used to earthquake activity almost continuously for decades before the eruption, not just the big earthquake, but a process by which the crust of the earth bobbed up and down. Over here, we can see dramatic evidence of this. We have the suburban baths, and up there, we can see how the windows of the baths are half-blocked in right up there because the sea is crashing against the wall. And down here, the sand is piling against the bottom of the building. The seismic activity caused the sea level to rise and fall by as much as 5 metres, that's 16 feet, over a 20-year period. Here, I'm standing on top of a massive wall built to keep out the sea. Originally, the sea was way out there, and as it advanced and rose and came in, it came smashing against this house. This is the house of the Telephus Relief, and you can see here they've had to block in a whole series of arches. And down below, we discovered there is an entire level of the house that they have had to abandon entirely because of the rising sea. They chose to adapt to a perilous environment rather than abandoning their town. Why? The Roman writer Seneca, advising on the response to the disaster of 63, gives us one reason. He said there was no point fleeing this particular earthquake. Earthquakes could happen anywhere. Tragically for the people here, Seneca understood neither the geology of earthquakes, nor the connection between what was going on under the ground and the volcanic potential of Mount Vesuvius. And there's another clue as to why people didn't leave. Here in the Naples Museum, they're busy packing stuff up to go on exhibition. We're just in time to capture this one, which is a bit of a favourite. Favourite because it's a picture of Vesuvius. It's over on its side, but you can just about make out here is the volcano. And by the volcano is a figure of a god, the god of wine, Bacchus, and he's completely clad in grapes. And that points to the enormous fertility of the slopes of Vesuvius. Here you can even see vines growing in rows. And there's another interesting thing about this. Vesuvius has got a cone on top. It hasn't yet blown its top off. And that tells us two things. For the Romans, Vesuvius is a safe place, no eruptions, and it's an enormously fertile place. Why would anyone want to leave it? The people were then, and are now, deeply attached to their landscape. Signor Ambrosio runs a vineyard on the ash-rich slopes of Vesuvius and is very proud of his wine. The colour of lava. The wine is called Lacrima Christi, literally the tears of Christ, and its production was thought to date back to the 18th century, till Signor Ambrosio uncovered some extraordinary new evidence in his vineyard. Oh, you've made me a happy man. A Roman dolium. That's what I like to see. This is a trace. This is amazing. This is ancient Roman wine on the lip here. This is the must. And actually, if I run my finger there, it's rough. And here, it's smooth and slightly sticky. They've conducted DNA analysis of the must here, and it emerges that it is the same as the modern wine. And with his wine, vineyard and land at stake, Signor Ambrosio has too much to lose by leaving Mount Vesuvius, just like his Roman forefathers. Back in 79 AD, no-one in Herculaneum had any idea that it might erupt, let alone the scale of the catastrophe that was about to unfold. The disaster took many hours to play out, probably more than 12 hours before the final lethal surge that killed people arrived. In the meantime, the population must have agonised about how to save themselves. Perhaps thinking of what they did in earthquakes in the past, many of them came down here to the ancient shore. Some were out on the beach, some inside these arches. The vast majority found in the arches were women or children, whilst those on the beach were nearly all male. Perhaps the timescale can explain this strange separation and how these people organised themselves before disaster struck. The humans tend to react to crises differently if the crisis is sudden, or a very short time, or the crisis is long. And when the crisis is sudden, the stronger they survive, the males. Adult, males, young. When the crisis is much longer, so there is more possibility to organise, there is a protection for the weakest, so children and women. It depends how much time you have. If this is collapsing now, we rush away. If they tell us in 15 minutes this ceiling will collapse, we organise. For instance, it happened on the Titanic, where they had hours. So, at the end, more women and children survived than males. With Herculaneum, you have even more hours. And are we seeing special treatment, are we seeing different treatment of women and children from males? They put the family inside the chamber, and the males were looking around what we do, what's going on. But it's rather nice, because you've got the Romans being real gentlemen. Oh, yes. They're saying, women and children, please take refuge from this disaster, and we'll be brave, we'll stay outside. The fact that there were so many men out on the beach suggests an act of self-sacrifice. But by the final phase of the eruption, escape was impossible. The ash was now falling at a rate of over a metre an hour, and would envelop our skeletons, capturing their last moments of life. A mother embracing her baby, a boy clasping his pet dog, and two women cradling a girl with silver earrings. The arches offered protection from earthquakes, not from the wrath of Mount Vesuvius. Nothing could have prepared these people for what happened here. But these skeletons are more than a grisly reminder of death and disaster. Like so much else in Herculaneum, they give us a vivid and sharply focused picture of people's lives. And it's a surprising picture. From their homes, to what they ate, to how they ate it, and the values they held dear. It's tempting to talk about the ordinary Roman, but it's difficult to pigeonhole Vanidius Aenecus, Petronius Justus, or the skeletons from the arches in this way. We tend to think of the Roman world as one of brutal contrasts between rich and poor, master and slave. Herculaneum shows us a more complex and a more fluid society. It gives us back the people in the middle. And far from being what we think of as ordinary, they are quite extraordinary. This was a place where slaves could be flogged, but also a town where they could be freed, earn citizenship, own property, and gain dignity. Where immigrants from across the empire and beyond could strive in a land of opportunity to enjoy a quality of life unparalleled for antiquity. And as full citizens, make themselves at home in this new Roman world. A world that would continue to flourish for another three centuries after the destruction of Herculaneum. What has monkeys' earwax to do with Einstein? James May's Things You Need To Know, tomorrow at 10 here on BBC Two.