Blending evidence and imagination brings three real ancient Romans to life
Pompeii is best known as a tomb. The inhabitants of the ancient Roman city were instantly engulfed in ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, their last breaths suspended in time. But a new documentary series tells another story: that of the survivors.
Pompeii: out of timehosted by actor Tom Hiddleston of the popular Marvel franchise, follows three real Romans through the last day of Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum. Over the course of three episodes – premiering July 22 on National Geographic and July 23 on Disney+ and Hulu – we meet Avianius, a teenage apprentice bronzer, Julia Felix, a bathhouse owner, and an anonymous praetorian guard.
Their existence (and fate) has been confirmed by historical documents and archaeological evidence. The show fills in the gaps in these archives with fiction, drawing on the psychology of disasters to imagine how these people may have reacted. earthquakes shook Pompeii and the volcano began to belch ash and molten rock. By blending evidence and imagination, the series does a brilliant job of bringing ancient human stories to life. And the destructive timeline of Vesuvius is the clock that adds pressure and urgency to every scene.
Hiddleston, who studied classics at Cambridge University, explains that the Latin words for history and history are the same. Director and showrunner Tom Barbor-Might, producer Kevin Wright and Hiddleston “decided somewhat rebelliously that we wanted to invent a new form of documentary,” Hiddleston said in an interview with Scientific news.
“It’s a different way of telling a true story,” Barbor-Might told me.
In each episode, Hiddleston’s time travels seamlessly between the present of the ruins of Pompeii and the past, which are settings reconstructed with millimeter precision in Malta. It goes back in time with a simple movement of the hand to play out different scenarios. The documentary clearly shows what is supported by facts and evidence and what is dramatization.
Avianius is the first Roman we meet. The series’ creators found it in a historian’s database of inscriptions placing people in Pompeii shortly before the eruption and locating them elsewhere after the disaster. The scenarios created for Avianius are particularly poignant: he argues with his single mother and has outbursts of teenage anger. He’s ultimately a scared boy trying to survive a nightmare scenario.
Next, we meet Julia Felix, whose estate was one of the first houses ever excavated in Pompeii, says archaeologist Caitie Barrett of Cornell University. Barrett helps Hiddleston tell Felix’s story: she was unusual in Roman culture as an independent woman who owned a business. Archaeologists found no signs of horses, carts or treasure – apart from a necklace – suggesting his rich estate had been evacuated. The documentary heartbreakingly explores the decisions Felix, his guests, and his employees may have made about whether to stay or leave as conditions outside became increasingly dire.
The series imagines the final character, the Praetorian Guard, as a jaded veteran who may have helped people escape from the nearby city of Herculaneum. His story illustrates the panic that many people probably felt and the composure that might have allowed most of Herculaneum’s residents to flee before the city was buried.
Pompeii: out of time presents itself as telling the stories of survivors, so (mild spoiler) I was crushed to learn that not all the protagonists survived the disaster.
No one knows the real circumstances these people experienced, but the documentary explores plausible scenarios. It’s something historians and archaeologists often do when physical evidence is lacking, Barrett says.
“I think there’s no way to avoid using a number of hypothesis tests in the stories we tell about the past,” Barrett says. She appreciates that the series “uses an informed reconstruction of people’s biographies as a way to emotionally engage with the past, because these were real people. They had real lives.”