When Pompeii froze in the heat

The visitor to the city of Pompeii in AD79 might have had to squeeze past the shoppers and hawkers, the wealthy and the slaves at the Sarno Gate before strolling down the rutted main street, the Via dell’Abbondanza.

To his left would have been the amphitheatre, advertising “a hunt, athletics and sprinklings of perfume”, and the complex of shops and homes owned by the entrepreneur Julia Felix, who also ran a café with masonry chairs and tables. Perhaps an advertisement painted on a wall caught his eye for five-year leases on “elegant baths for respectable people, shops with upper rooms and apartments ...”

He might have admired the grand villa owned by one Decimus Octavius Quarto, with its large garden and frescoes of Narcissus and the star-crossed lovers Pyramus and Thisbe, and paused to read a notice urging him to vote for an aedile, or magistrate. Maybe he had already chosen another whose election appeal read: “I beg you to vote for Samellius, an upstanding young man ...”

He would have smiled at the painted sign outside the House of the Chaste Lovers which portrayed Mercury, the god of commerce. This, and the many other representations of well-endowed gentlemen, were not meant to shock or titillate, but to signal good fortune.

Weary perhaps, he could have settled down on the couch in Lucullus Vetutius Placidus’s eatery, with its marble-topped counter and dozens of vessels made of glass, clay and bronze ranged alongside storage jars full of food. A glass of beverage, perhaps? A game of backgammon?

We can imagine our visitor’s walk along the Via dell’Abbondanza in such detail because the very moment of its destruction by the eruption of the volcano, Mount Vesuvius, was also the moment of its preservation. A society was captured as if a shutter had clicked on a camera.

As Paul Roberts, curator of “Life and death in Pompeii and Herculaneum” on show at London’s British Museum, says: “We want people to feel they are walking through people’s homes.”

No one had known that Vesuvius would erupt; no one could have imagined the devastation.

On August 24 — the precise date is disputed — a plume of ash and flame rose in a great cloud 32 kilometres high. It was so dark that the Roman writer Pliny the Younger, who was staying in Misenum, 30 kilometres to the west, wrote, “There a deeper darkness prevailed than in the thickest night.”

At about midnight the cloud dissipated and ash and rocks cascaded down the flanks of the mountain at 70mph in a blazing avalanche.

In Herculaneum, with its population of about 5,000, the temperature of the ash was 400C. Nothing remains of the people who were desiccated by the conflagration, but their furniture was smothered by the ash and “baked” or carbonised. That is why so many wooden stairs, window frames, tables and chests are preserved. Even a loaf of bread remains with the name of the baker, Celer, stamped on it.

Pompeii (with a population of 12,000-15,000) was buried at 8 in the morning when the temperature of the ash had dropped to 300C. It is a gruesome realisation, but the heat “cooked” the bodies. Before the corpses rotted away, the ash had time to take their shape, allowing archaeologists to make the casts we see today.

Pompeii had many army veterans among its residents and its prosperity could be traced to agriculture, property, and the manufacture of things such as glass, pottery and lamps. To explain their lifestyle, the exhibition mimics the layout of a typical house: the atrium; the triclinium, or the dining area; the cubiculum, for sleeping; the gardens.

The detail is extraordinary. The furniture that survives in its carbonised state includes a linen chest, an inlaid stool, a garden bench and, most stirring of all, a baby’s crib, still rocking on its curved runners. We find day-to-day objects such as a lamp standard that can be unscrewed apart for storage (it still works), a silver mirror, a pair of bronze tweezers, gold earrings and bracelets.

Take the kitchen — not the room that sold the house, jokes Roberts. They were small, poky and often shared space with the toilets, but the food preserved from Herculaneum tells us what they ate — onions, chickpeas, walnuts, almonds, figs and pomegranates. There is a curious earthenware container with little shelves for acorns and containers for water which were used to fattening up that Roman delicacy, dormice.

But what really elevates the exhibition from the fascinatingly humdrum are the frescoes and mosaics.

In the atrium, the main crossroads of the house, everything was designed to impress — painted walls and ceilings and beautiful furniture and fittings.

There is an irony in the fresco that graces the House of the Centenary, which celebrates Vesuvius as a source of benevolence and prosperity. Bacchus, draped head to toe in grapes, poses cheerfully against the lower slopes that are covered in vineyard trellises

We meet Terentius Neo and his wife, who made a living from a bakery on a side street off Via dell’Abbondanza. She cuts a refined figure with her red headband, heavy pearl earrings and centrally parted hair. She holds a document and a stylus and he has a papyrus scroll, indicating their influence and learning, maybe even power. He wears a white toga, which suggests he might be a contender for public office, but she is pictured slightly in front of him, so maybe she is the one with the real influence.

The cubiculum was one of the rooms which led from the atrium. Generally used as a bedroom, it was also used for washing and dressing and even for snacks and business meetings.

A fresco of a serpent, considered a symbol of benevolence, has a message scratched alongside by a girl named Ario, warning her man to beware of Venus who is “a weaver of webs” out to ruin him.

The need to impress extended to the dining room, or triclinium. One fresco shows diners on couches: two men are in deep conversation; one drinks alone, the word “bibo” — “I’m drinking” — written above his head, while another guest looks as if he is staggering in drunkenly. Scrawled on the wall is “Valete” — “hello everyone”.

A fresco from Herculaneum shows a man and woman reclining — he is drinking, their silver cups and jugs are on a three-legged table very similar to one found in perfect, if carbonised, form.

The glory of the exhibition is the garden rooms, in which the idea of bringing the countryside into an internal garden owed much to the Roman concept of “otium” — relaxation in beautiful surroundings.

They had statues, fountains and sculptures in bronze and marble and garden benches to sit, watch and repose. And scratch messages. Above one bench a lovesick admirer has written: “I wish I were the gem on your finger ring so that when you moisten it to impress your documents I could kiss your lips.”

A fresco of Flora, the goddess of flowers and spring from nearby Stabiae, is caught in a peaceful idyll, plucking flowers to add to her cornucopia — her horn of plenty.

In the House of the Golden Bracelet, the garden room overlooks a small terrace with pools, fountains and views to the sea — a desirable residence indeed. The fresco on its three walls conjures up a permanent summer. In the lunette, doves flutter around a bronze or gold water bowl while the walls are effulgent with flowers, berries and trees through which magpies, swallows and orioles flit and fly. A lion leaps from the wild undergrowth.

Idyllic but fated. We can guess that the owners were wealthy from the splendour of the frescoes but, more, from the bracelet that was found in the house that bears its name. It weighs half a kilogram and was on the arm of the owner’s wife. She, her husband and two children are also on “display”. Casts of their twisted, tormented figures, starting back from the overwhelming heat, hands raised in futile protection, are a grim, moving reminder that on that day there was no escape.

Perhaps on his way out of the city our visitor noticed a sign which read: “Learn this: while I am alive, you, hateful death, are coming.”

- Richard Holledge is a writer based in London.

- “Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum” runs at the British Museum, London, until September 29 and “Pompeii Live” hits the cinemas in June.