Paestum, Pompeii, and Herculaneum

Our day started bright and clear, with a drive south to Paestum. Between 800 and 700 BCE, many Greek city-states ran into problems with overpopulation. Their solution was to send people away to form colonies on foreign soil.  They established new city-states all over the coast of the Mediterranean and Black Seas. The southern half of Italy was home to many of these--to the point that the Romans called this part of Italy "Magna Graecia"--Great Greece.

The people of Paestum built these magnificent temples in the 600s BCE. The stone was imported from far away by ship.  Below we see the Temple of Poseidon (Neptune to the Romans).

Here is our intrepid group in front of the temple.

This is the Temple of Hera (Juno to the Romans)

Here is the Temple of Athena (Minerva for the Romans)

From Paestum, we hopped on the bus and drove north to Pompeii. Pompeii was buried by volcanic ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE. We wandered through quite a bit of the ruins, though Pompeii was as crowded as I have ever experienced. Beautiful weather and a Sunday brought people out in huge numbers.  Like Paestum, Pompeii was originally a Greek colony, taken over by the Romans around 300 BCE.

Here is the theater. 

Right outside the theater was a food shop. The large terra cotta containers would have contained some sort of warm soup, chowder or stew, served by the bowl.

Here is the outside of the gymnasium showing some bas relief artwork

After the initial eruption, during which the residents of Pompeii fled, many returned thinking the danger had passed. The city was covered in ash, which was still falling. Suddenly, a wave of hot gasses flowed down from the mountain, killing those who had come back and covering them with more ash. When archaeologists began excavating the city in the 1800s, they found these empty pockets in the ash layer. One man had the brilliant idea of pouring plaster into the pockets and allowing it to dry before continuing the excavation. Though parts of Pompeii are still being excavated, and more of these pockets have been found, they no longer make plaster casts because it ruins the human remains in the pocket.

Pompeii was a port city, and did its best to meet the needs of the visiting sailors. One of the most famous places in Pompeii was the brothel. Each cubicle inside had a painting over the door, indicating the specialty performed by its resident.

The Romans believed the phallic symbol was a sign of fertility, prosperity, and a ward against evil spirits. One can see many examples all over Pompeii. Here is one.

This is the view from the forum in Pompeii, showing Mount Vesuvius looming in the background. Though the top is obscured by clouds, you can get an idea of how much of the mountain blew up in the eruption by following the slope on the right and left upward to where they would meet. The eruption of 79 CE was similar to the eruption of Mount St. Helens in the US in 1980, though Vesuvius was estimated to be greater than three times more powerful.

From Pompeii, we went to Herculaneum, another town buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Unlike Pompeii, which was covered in volcanic ash, Herculaneum was buried under what is known as a pyroclastic flow--volcanic mud. Where the temperature in Pompeii reached 300 degrees (Fahrenheit), in Herculaneum, it reached 600 degrees. Because the volcanic mud was much harder to dig, much less of Herculaneum has been excavated. Roughly 85 percent of the town is still buried.

Herculaneum was smaller than Pompeii but wealthier--more of a resort for wealthy Romans. When Vesuvius erupted, people tried to escape by sea. In those days, the coast was just in front of the boathouse pictured below. In the 1980s, they excavated the boathouse and found the skeletons of people who died waiting for a rescue that never arrived. The bones in the picture are copies, not originals.

Here you can see Vesuvius lurking over Herculaneum.

When they excavated the boathouses, they also found a boat overturned, under which people had been hiding. In Pompeii, almost all the wood burned, because the porous nature of volcanic ash allowed oxygen to reach the wood and support burning. Herculaneum's mud covering scorched the wood but deprived it of oxygen, so it did not burn.

The interior of the boat.

Here we see the inside of the house of a wealthy resident from just inside the front door. The Romans designed their houses to impress visitors. First would be a large atrium, with an impluvium (the square in the center), designed to catch rainwater from the roof and feed it into a cistern. Beyond that is the tablinum, where the important resident, a patron, would greet his clients every morning in what was called the salutatio. Between the atrium and tablinum are sliding wooden doors (now black) which survived. Behind the tablinum was an inner garden--again, to impress the visitor. Urban real estate was expensive and devoting a large number of square feet to a decorative garden was a power move.

Here are the remains of a laundry. The wooden clothes press survived due to being covered by mud. Roman laundries used urine as bleach due to the ammonia content. The emperor Vespasian famously imposed a tax on urine. His son Titus complained that this was unseemly. His father replied, "Pecunia non olet." (Money doesn't smell).

This is an interior room, decorated with frescoes.

This is the changing room in the public baths in Herculaneum. The mosaic depicts the sea god Triton.

This mosaic is in the tepidarium--the "sort of" warm room.

The Romans had sophisticated tastes and liked to surround themselves with beautiful things. This mosaic was found in a smaller house that had no garden. It depicts the god Neptune with his wife. According to the Greeks, she was Amphitrite. The Romans claimed he had a different wife named Salacia.

Another mosaic from the same room.

That concludes our adventures earlier today. Tomorrow, we will visit Cuma and the Cave of the Sibyl. The Sibyl was the second-most famous oracle in the ancient world, after the Oracle of Delphi. After Cuma, we travel to Tivoli to see Hadiran's Villa.

Ciao!