We feel extremely fortunate to sit down and talk to Jess Venner and her debut book, The Lost Voices of Pompeii. This book takes you through the final twenty-four hours in the lives of several of the residents of the city, from slaves to politicians to businesswomen.
Dr Jess Venner
Dr Jess Venner earned her PhD in Classics, Ancient History, and Archaeology from the University of Birmingham in 2018. She currently holds the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Oxford. Jess is well known for her popular outreach via her channel ‘Life in the Past Lane’, and you can check this out on TikTok, YouTube, Substack and Instagram. You can also find out more about her various achievements at her website.
Things to Look Out For:
- The importance of material culture in understanding past lives
- The role of critical fabulation in constructing history
- The life of Aulus Umbricius Scaurus – The Ketchup King of Pompeii
- The cult of Isis – we feel a serious case of Egyptomania coming on! Get a doctor, quick!
- The fate of the survivors of the eruption – an oft-overlooked group
- Exciting new projects in the works for Dr Venner – keep your eyes peeled!
Cover image of The Lost Voices of Pompeii.
We are certain that you will want to grab your own copy of The Lost Voices of Pompeii after hearing all about Dr Venner’s extensive research and huge passion for her subjects. This book manages to combine a compelling story with the lates archaeological evidence from the site. Find it where all good books are sold from April 23!
Sound Credits
Our music is by Bettina Joy de Guzman.
Automated Transcript
Dr Rad 0:54
me. Hello and welcome to a special episode of the partial historians. I am one of your hosts. Dr rad, and
Dr G 1:03
I am Dr G
Dr Rad 1:05
and Dr G, this is one for the ancient history teachers out there, particularly those based in Australia, because we are going to be talking to a very exciting guest today, all about Pompeii. Dr Jess Venner is our guest for today, she earned her PhD in classics, ancient history and archeology from the University of Birmingham in 2018 she currently holds the Leverhulme early career fellowship at the University of Oxford. Jess is well known for her popular outreach via her channel, life in the past lane, and you can check this out on Tiktok, YouTube, substack and Instagram. You can also find out more about her various achievements@www.jessvena.com Welcome to the show.
Dr Jess Venner 1:56
Dr Venner, oh, thank you so much for having me. It’s so lovely to be here. Thank you.
Dr G 2:02
We’re really thrilled to have a chat with you about your debut book, The Lost Voices of Pompeii, The Final Day in Seven Lives. And I’m wanting just to get us started. If you can give us a brief overview, I know this is a big one, brief overview of Pompeii’s history.
Dr Jess Venner 2:23
Yeah, of course. So Pompeii is quite a melting pot. In AD 79 a lot of people are coming to the region, and have been for very many years. And it hasn’t been Roman for very long either, which will surprise a lot of people. It was only Roman for just under 200 years by the time of the eruption, and we think of it obviously as a very Roman town. But Pompeii was founded by these people called the Oscans, which are locals around the seventh century BC. And they sort of set up a small settlement there by the River Sano which is why they did it, because of the water source. We think that they had about five settlements, which gives us, potentially, the name Pompeii. It’s from the word five in Oscan, Pompeii. And then we have the Greeks and Etruscans coming in and mixing with the oscans. And there’s very much mixing. There’s not so much colonizing or casting out in Pompeii’s history. So the Greeks bring their influence, particularly in the architecture. So we start having Greek temples, for example, and the Etruscans, well, they’re a mystery, but they particularly brought some many cultural things to the region, and Pompeii, but also their religion as well. The urban layout and the material culture seems to change a lot around the times these guys are coming in. And then later on, we have the Samnites, and they come down from the mountains, and around the fifth century BC, and they start to influence Pompeii as well. And as time goes on, Pompeii is, you know, it’s quite happy, but there’s a lot of unrest going on in Italy. As we go into the late Republican period, a lot of the other towns are starting to fight back against Rome because they’re fed up with having to serve them without much in return, particularly citizenship. Pompeii is at the forefront of this. They do not want to give in, and they’re fighting to the last last hair. And so finally, when Lucius Cornelius Sulla So a general in the Roman army, but one that was very, very aggressive at this time. He manages to overtake Pompeii, and they make it into a Roman colony in 80 BC. And from that point on, we have Roman control in Pompeii, and it does benefit the city, probably much To their dismay, actually, in a way. But of course, it’s a very fertile region, and so we’ve got a lot of oil and wine being produced in the local area. So in the countryside surrounding the town and inside the town, there’s a lot of specialized manufacture, and a lot of people arriving in the town via the river and the roads. So Pompeii is very, very busy. Three in AD 79 with a lot of different cultures, religions and people.
Dr G 5:04
That was very succinct for what is a highly complicated history, I have to say, well done.
Dr Rad 5:11
Now you’ve taken a novel approach to telling the story. You’ve decided to basically take the approach of telling the story of the final 24 hours before the eruption takes place for seven different historical characters and their social circles. What made you decide on this particular structure?
Dr Jess Venner 5:33
I really wanted to focus on the people of Pompeii, because so often we focus on the destruction of the city and its afterlife, and what we don’t look at are the people and their stories. You know, there are certain people that come out and we know about because they’re talked about fairly often so and a good example is Julia Felix, who I did choose to represent, but this was for good reason, because she hadn’t really been represented from the perspective of archeological remains, in the sense of the most likely personality for her, and so I wanted to depict her life in the last 24 hours. And the same goes for the other characters. But we don’t really know about them. I do, because I’ve been studying them for about 12 years, and I felt like we hadn’t really spoken about it. So we’ve got the slave, we’ve got a politician. So we’ve got the, you know, the cut of Roman society. And that was mainly my, my aim was to have a cross section of culture and and politics and social status. We’ve also got women as well. Working women in particular was important to me. We have working men as well. So like the innkeeper euxines, he is one of those. But we also have someone at the top of that, also at top of their game, Alice and bricius scorus, who is a Pompa. He’s the Pompeii’s garum or fish sauce magnate. So he’s basically the ketchup CEO of Pompeii. So and then we have the priest as well. And again, religion doesn’t really get a huge amount of attention. In Pompeii, a lot of people ask about it. You know, how religious were they really? But in terms of things like Egyptian cults, which is a mystery cult, but we know a lot about it from the remains at Pompeii, so I really wanted to start telling their stories from what we had, and trying to do that as accurately as possible, so that they could have their voices back.
Dr G 7:22
I think it’s a really impressive approach, because it does something in terms of allowing you to dip into the imagination of like thinking about how people did actually live their lives. And the tragedy of Pompeii, in many respects, is the things that we do have that we can see today, which are things like the plaster casts and and you feel this the weight of the terror of the moment. But how do you go back further than that, and how do you reimagine it in a new way? And you talk about your methodology for this book as critical fabulation, and I’m wondering if you can tell us a little bit more about some of the advantages and maybe disadvantages of taking an approach like this.
Dr Jess Venner 8:04
Yeah, absolutely so critical fabulation was a term that was new to me as well. Until I’d written the book, I hadn’t realized that’s what I was doing this woman called Saidiya Hartman, I’m Hope from saying her name right, she coined this term, and it’s essentially a way to reconstruct the experiences of people in the past, particularly marginalized groups, from the material remains that they leave behind, and also literary evidence too. But of course, literary evidence, as we know, can be very biased, and so the archeological record, or whatever material culture that we have remaining is a very good start to reconstructing people’s lives, and the basis of it is using our humanity and our common sense as human beings to reconstruct what could have plausibly or probably happened in their days. And so knowing Pompeii, so well as I do from my research and knowing these particular people that I kept coming across, I was able to reconstruct a day of a Roman so I started with the Roman day, actually. So this is generally accepted the structure of a Roman day. And they were pretty, pretty stuck to it, to be honest. You know, obviously today we do a lot of different things as our in our routines, as people, but they were pretty stuck to it, particularly if
Dr Rad 9:25
you were elite. The Romans stuck in their ways.
Speaker 1 9:27
What? Oh, I can’t even imagine. Imagine no
Dr Jess Venner 9:34
breaking news. I know exactly. So I’m starting with the elite, who we who are predictable. And so I start with Pansa, for example. So I started with a slave and trying to reconstruct how he would be supporting an elite man, because we know what the elite man would be doing, and I worked out from there. And so critical fabulation is perfect for that, because with someone like a slave Petrinus in the book, is a composite of slaves Petrinus did exist in. Pompeii, because he exists in a lone record between two women in the city. And so I started with him, but I was able to reconstruct his his day, from going backwards almost, and from the material remains. Otherwise, his story would be completely lost. Because, of course, we don’t have any records first hand from a slave, some from freedmen, but they’re very much trying to get away from their past, so they’re not really talking about it. So that was, that’s how this is perfect
Dr Rad 10:29
for that. Yeah, yeah. I must admit it reminded me a little bit of the way that Natalie Zemon Davis worked when she was writing. You know, that idea of having to bring a certain level of imagination, but like expert imagination, in order to recover the voices of stories that are too scattered to be like a clear cut narrative or anything in the sources that are left behind
Dr Jess Venner 10:57
exactly and you know, If it didn’t plausibly happen, or didn’t happen. I didn’t include it. I was very stuck on that, because there were some people that would say, Oh, why don’t you do you know, a murder? And I’d be like, I don’t know that there was a verdict. There might have been, but it’s not in my evidence, so I’m not putting it in there. But it went down as granular as you know, fish scales on the floor. Yes, having to be there for me to have a fish seller, you know, it was very, very granular. So, yeah, you wouldn’t believe the
Dr Rad 11:30
detail and you have noted throughout the book, you know, you have put little footnotes in to connect the story that you’ve constructed with the evidence that you’re using, not all the time, but just as a guide, so yeah, that people can see where you’re coming from. Basically Exactly, yeah. Now we did notice when we were reading the book that a theme throughout a lot of the stories is the impact of the sizable earthquake that happened in this area around 62 or 63 CE, what made you decide to include this as a bit of a focal point?
Dr Jess Venner 12:08
Yes, so actually, it comes from my own research. In my doctoral thesis, it was during covid that I started. So as you mentioned, I started in 2018 my PhD, and I was looking at Pompeii’s urban agriculture, and I quickly realized that the data I needed to do that, because I’m trained as an archaebotanist, which is the study of botanical remains in the archeology I realized that I couldn’t go and get those from Italy or study them or anything like that. And so I really had to quickly change my plan, and I started to study the space of the city. So during my doctoral thesis, I realized that this earthquake was a very, very key moment in Pompeii’s history. It actually changed the urban landscape, not only because things were becoming damaged, but also because people seem to be responding with in an opportunistic way. And when I was studying the agricultural gardens, these were vineyards and orchards and vegetable plots inside the city, I was trying to quantify and map them, and I realized that we had a 250% increase in these gardens after the earthquake of AD 62 which tells you everything about their priorities. They were so innovative. They they are right now in the area of Naples, they always respond in a very resilient way. And so it seemed very fitting. And so I wanted to talk about that earthquake, because it was very recent in their history. It was only 17 years before the eruption, and a lot of people were still struggling to deal with it. There were ongoing quakes that were still affecting the city, and people were still rebuilding. But people like euxines, the innkeeper, had remodeled their business after this earthquake and found new opportunities by creating a pub garden, for example, and he was also feeding into new trends at the time too. So it was really important I include that, especially as we never actually talk about the fact there was crisis ongoing before the big one.
Dr G 14:11
It might have been a warning sign people didn’t realize, but something was heading their way. Yes, yes, exactly that. So much challenge in terms of the physical remains as well, and being able to trace that through the record, I think that is one of the elements of Pompeii that increases its fascination for people as well, once they start to dig into those sorts of details you’ve mentioned, just how much evidence is sitting underneath the surface of the narratives In this book, and you paint a really rich picture of everything from the food that the characters eat to the physicality of the setting. And I’m interested in what we learn about the lives of people of the past through exploring the world in this way, through those physical remains.
Dr Jess Venner 15:00
Yeah, we call it material culture in archeology, and it’s really important that we include it, because historically, it was a very easy thing to just look at spatial areas of people’s lives, you know, Okay, where did they live? What frescoes did they have on the wall? But actually putting material remains into it completely changes your perspective of how someone was using a space. A really good example of this in Roman history is the atrium house. You have an atrium, which is the entrance hall, then you have rooms that are labeled traditionally, like the cubiculum, which is supposed to be a bedroom. Now we actually have no evidence for Romans using a bedroom in that very strict sense, like the Victorians might have, for example, it actually seems like they use these spaces a lot more flexibly, and they weren’t as worried about the same things as we are. So often you’ll find things being like, weird things being stored in a room that seems to be being used for sleeping, like a statue, for example, which you know might be down to the eruption, everyone was clamoring to hide their things from the falling debris. But the point is that they didn’t seem to be as bothered about these things as we do these lines between life and so material culture can fill those gaps. So when I was writing the book, I really wanted it to be a sensory experience. I wanted to reconstruct the sites and the things that people would be hearing, because I thought that was so important to really put yourself in the shoes of these people and experience them as humans, as a lived experience, and in that way, we can really connect with them in a one to one level, because just reading a non fiction book about Pompeii, you don’t have the same tug of your heartstrings that you do as you see Petrinus walk through the street and experience prejudice, for example. And so I really, really wanted to bring those experiences into it. And, you know, I definitely brought my own emotion and grief and joy and love experiences of those emotions into the book, and so bringing material culture into that enabled me to really recreate their lives in a huge amount of detail. I think this
Dr G 17:15
is really fantastic in the sense that when we think of history often, and we’re ancient historians by training. We’re often delving with literary sources, whether it’s epigraphy, whether it’s Cicero or whatever, but it’s often, so often very elite perspectives, and it really locks you into certain class structures and certain perspectives on the way that the Roman world worked and operated. And I think there is a huge value to be had in taking material culture as a way of being able to uplift the voices of the people who weren’t able, for whatever reason, to get their words into a written form that was able to stand the test of time. So there is something really class subversive about this work, which I really love
Dr Jess Venner 17:59
exactly that. And I’m so glad that came across because, you know, I come from a working class, like, lower middle class background, and so I felt like, particularly my my experience of growing up that way, I felt like we didn’t have a voice in that way. So I come from the East End, and my family do, and East Enders don’t really get a voice. It’s sort of, we’re spoken for working class people are spoken for a lot also. And so I felt like, of course, this was the same in Pompeii as you’ve just said. You know, with the literary remains these they speak for them. And actually the material culture shows a different perspective a lot of the time. Women are especially important in that Julia Felix was a businesswoman. She had an advertisement on the outside of her house, so clearly she wasn’t experiencing female life the way that the Roman elite were writing it. They were saying women should be seen and not heard, not involved in business, particularly if their husband wasn’t involved. And she seems to have been single and doing whatever she wanted, and was very, very successful at it. And actually, when I started looking at her, I started finding all of these women along the same street that she would have known and been friends with, because they were very community based in Pompeii, with, you know, political endorsements on the outside of their house. They couldn’t vote, but they were very much involved in it and involved in public life in that way. And so again, this isn’t showing us what we’ve read in the elite texts. We’re actually seeing a completely different perspective. So exactly that you’re right. It’s it’s able to, they’re able to speak for themselves through the material culture.
Dr Rad 19:36
Yes, I did particularly enjoy those all female gatherings in your book, because we don’t often get scenes like that where it’s just the ladies.
Dr Jess Venner 19:46
Yeah, I love, I love writing that bit because we’ve all had that sort of dinner, so we’re just chatting and bitching about people. So yeah, I really liked visualizing that one. I think. That was lovely. But it was also based on a fresco that was found in the town, which is in the book, I think, and which people can see these women just having this wonderful Symposium of their own and getting drunk. I think it’s pretty I think it’s brilliant.
Dr Rad 20:15
Now I’m curious to know which of the lives was more difficult to write about. I don’t want to assume that it was the ones where there was perhaps a the least evidence, because sometimes it can be can sort of pin you in, I suppose, a little bit more if you have more evidence. But I’d just love to know which ones you found, you know, the most difficult when you came to actually
Dr Jess Venner 20:36
writing them. I rewrote Petrinus the most times, which probably isn’t a surprise, because he’s the slave. And of course, I wanted to get that experience right, and so there were certain things that I wanted to keep including or take out that didn’t feel representative of the slave experience. And we’re learning more and more about the slave experience in Pompeii from the excavations now, because rightfully so, they’re starting to prioritize non elite experiences in the archeological remains, because these used to just be glazed over and ignored, and so now we’re learning more about them. So Petrinus was one of those. He was, he was quite difficult in the sense that, like I said, he was a composite, and so I had to, but he was also the first one I wrote. So I guess I felt very fond of him, and kept going back to him the others, I think the working poor family was another one. Interestingly, I actually wrote the whole chapter from the perspective of the husband, Lucius Aelius. And then I thought, What am I doing? I’m doing exactly what everyone else is doing, and I’m saying we shouldn’t do. So I changed the whole chapter, and I rewrote it, and it’s mostly from the perspective of Umbricia Fortunata, who is the mother of the family that I’ve created, you know, as, again, as a composite, but she did exist. She was a female businesswoman in the city, and a very successful one, by the looks of things. And I it was hard to recreate her experience, because she leaves traces, from a business point of view, she leaves her fish sauce bottles. And she was, you know, in a niche area of that she was actually selling kosher fish sauce. So she was very savvy, but she was very difficult to track down, very difficult because she was a woman because she was working poor and because she just has, has herself, didn’t really there wasn’t too much on her. However, there were lots of other experiences from other women that I could put into her experience, especially from a Pompeian point of view, from a business point of view, from her status point of you from a mother, there were lots of things to put into it, and so it became more and more easy. And funnily enough, she was one of the ones where I kept having coincidences. I would write her experience. I would go from memory of my research, I would go back and check the archeological remains, and there they were supporting what I had just written. And she was one of those lovely ones where it just sort of put all of all clicked, really. But yeah, she, she was an interesting one to write. I’m very fond of her, actually.
Dr G 23:08
Oh, look, she comes across well as well, I would say. And this leads in nicely to thinking about some of the other characters as well that come through in this text. And I’m sure I’m going to mispronounce this guy’s name, but I’m going to give it a try. My Latin pronunciation is doesn’t seem no matter how long I try to read Latin. So the chapter about Amisinuius even
Dr Jess Venner 23:40
easier than that. Yes, we’ve all had this problem with me too, especially as I was reading it from a from a wall, and I thought it says Amisusius, yes, yes.
Dr G 23:48
All right, that’s where the emphasis is. I’ll keep that in mind. So this is the gentleman who is the priest of ISIS, and obviously this idea of cults, and particularly cults that come from further afield, tend to accrue a great sense of mystery and interest for people. It’s the sort of thing that really stokes people’s curiosity. So I’m interested in knowing a little bit more about the cult of ISIS and its particular role when it comes to
Dr Jess Venner 24:22
Pompeii, absolutely, it’s such an interesting part of Pompeii’s history, and it’s something that, historically, back in the 1700s when it was excavated, really captured people’s imagination. For good reason. Pompeian religion was very, very diverse, as it was in the Roman Empire, and this was one of the things that the Romans were really, really good at, was absorbing other religions and allowing them to coexist with their pantheon of gods. And ISIS was very, very popular in ancient Rome, and this is because she was the Egyptian goddess of rebirth and motherhood, and she actually encouraged. Or her cults did worship from all social strata, so from slaves up to the highest people in society would worship ISIS. Now this point of rebirth is important because Pompeii, as I mentioned with the we were talking about the earthquake of ad 62 the temple was, you know, destroyed pretty much during this it’s in the part of the city that suffered a lot of damage, and it actually is the first temple to be rebuilt. In fact, it’s rebuilt by a child, not by hand. He gives the money to do worked really hard on that. So he is from the Papirii family, and his his mum and dad think, Okay, this is a really good opportunity here politically for our child. They’re freed men, so they can’t go into politics, but their child can, and they’re very rich, so they rebuild the Temple of Isis really quickly. It’s actually the first best public building to be rebuilt in the entire city. So clearly, this is important to the Pompeians, and I think this is because of this element of rebirth. So ISIS, her husband was murdered by Seth, and his body parts were scattered across the world, and she went and found these body parts and put them together out of love and magic. So this concept of scattered parts and having to rebuild was something obviously that the Pompeians were very much feeling like themselves were in that story. So rebuilding that temple was very important to them. And The Temple of Isis has had an incredibly interesting history, even since the excavation started in 1764, and from that point on, actually, they started excavating it really well, which is unbelievable for this time, because usually it was treasure hunting at this time. So I’m, I’m very glad, because if you go to the Naples archeological museum, you can pretty much see the whole temple there. They’ve they’ve put all of the walls out. They’ve put all of the material, most of the material out, because there was a lot of material. And we know exactly where things were found in the temple. This is, this is unheard of for excavations at that time, in fact, even 100 years ago, even 50 years ago, sometimes, sadly, things are not recorded where they are, which, as we’ve talked about with material culture, is very important. You know, if a cup okay, it makes sense if a cupboard is in a hallway, but you can’t just guess that. And actually, when you look into the records of, you know, recent excavation, they’re in weird places, like we’ve talked about, so it’s really important that they’re recorded. And in the Temple of Isis they are. And so when I came to, you know, talk about Amisusius’ experiences of him moving around this temple, where the statues were, where his objects were, even where he stored his, you know, record, written records inside a statue. It’s crazy amount of detail that I could work with. And so he was an easier one to write. But he his experience as well with connecting the pompeiian people was also easy, too. They’re all over the town, the worshippers of ISIS, yeah.
Dr Rad 28:07
And do you feel like there was a bit of Egyptomania going on? Yes, in Pompeii at this time?
Dr Jess Venner 28:14
Yes. I was just about to say, so Egyptomania was exactly that? Yeah, it was huge at this time. It’s so funny, because this seems to happen again throughout history. I think the Victorians had a bit of a moment with it too. So Egyptomania was was definitely rife in Pompeii at this time. And this is because Rome had very recently conquered Egypt within the last 100 years. And so more and more cultural influences, religion and material objects were coming over from Egypt to towns around Italy, and they absolutely loved it. It was both exotic but familiar to them. And so all across Pompeii, we can see frescoes on the wall of, you know, alligators, or are they alligators or crocodiles? God that shows my naive always get this wrong. We’ll go with crocodiles, crocodiles and hippos and little pygmies in the River Nile like fishing, this is a really common motive, and ISIS is another one. We see her worship all over the town. Julia Felix actively worshiped ISIS, even in her own house. And statues were quite common, and they would come into it in very small ways, you know, even jewelry. So they really loved Egyptian culture. And you know, Pompeii, as we mentioned, was a mercantile town. So people were frequently traveling out of Pompeii to very far flung places. And Egypt would have been one of these places. We have pictures in the town of the ships that they would have been traveling on, even in graffiti. So, yeah, yeah. Egypt, Romania was very, very rife in AD 79 Yes.
Dr Rad 29:55
It’s a disease that I think will keep recurring throughout humanity. Story just takes a tomb to be discovered, and then we’re all done. For you know, covered in angst now to turn from the Divine to something a little bit more every day. Many people have heard of garum, this famous fish sauce that was very popular in the Roman world. And there’s definitely a lot of evidence, as you’ve highlighted, for one of the biggest names in the biz in Pompeii. So please tell us a bit more about Aemilius umbricius scaurus, Aulus.
Dr Jess Venner 30:34
Sorry, that was all good. Aulus Umbricius Scaurus. And you know, it’s only, I only say, because names in Pompeii are so incredibly complicated. There’s so many that have similar, very, very similar names, and they sometimes have very similar lives. So it’s very it’s one of these things, it gets complicated. Yeah, no, that’s
Dr Rad 30:55
a legacy of where we’re at in the early Roman republic. I’m so used to saying the name Aemilius. It just, oh, I just, it just comes out when
Dr Jess Venner 31:05
I know exactly what you mean. I do this all the time. So Scaurus is fantastic. He he’s such an interesting character. We have so much information on him. So scorus was an old man by the time that Vesuvius erupted in AD 79 he’d been active in the town of Pompeii, in business for about 50 years, and he was in the fish sauce business, as you’ve mentioned. And his family seemed to have started this. And they came from a tribe just outside which was based traditionally just outside of Rome, and they seem to have come down and started being active in Pompeii for, you know, over the 50 years, of course, because he he was there for a while. And we know this partly because there’s mosaics that were made in the BCS. So I think around 20 BC there were garum bottle mosaics in scourus house put down then, I mean, these are literally ancient to him, and they’re from his own family, which is just incredible, and they have the name Scaurus in them. So this is a family business. We also know about scourus dependence too. So he has a son who sadly passes away, and we sort of see the experience of him dealing with this in the Lost Voices. But we know about this because of a tomb in Pompeii, and we also know where Scaurus lives as well. So he had an incredibly huge house overlooking the bay of Naples, which is appropriate right next to the harbor, again, appropriate for a man very involved with fish, and after the earthquake, he seems to have absorbed all these houses next to him and just made this really huge, ridiculous McMansion,
Dr Rad 32:52
appropriate for the king of ketchup.
Dr Jess Venner 32:54
Yeah. Was only suitable for a man of his status, I guess, as a Roman man, you have to be as over the top as possible. And so he created this ridiculous house, and he would have had, obviously, lots of huge extended family. Because the thing to remember, as you guys know, with Romans, is that you’re familiar extended to the slaves and freed people that you had. And he also had at least seven workshops in the city. One of them is talked about in quite detail in the book, but he was busy. And the thing is, there, there’s actually ongoing archeological excavations of some colleagues of mine into some of these workshops. There were actually more before this time, they were actually being decommissioned. And this is because he was outsourcing his production, probably to places like Portugal, which had huge, huge fish sauce making manufactories. And this was something that was going on in the mid first century, ad, and so he was a part of that his fish sauce was reaching as far as has been found in Britain and in Gaul, so in France. So it was going very, very far, probably further. We just haven’t found his bottles in other places yet, but I think we will do but he was very, very successful in business, yeah,
Dr G 34:15
just you wait, those scourus bottles could turn up anywhere next.
Dr Jess Venner 34:19
You never know.
Dr Rad 34:21
Yeah, the fish sauce just does not appeal to me as someone who’s very iffy about seafood. So I’m just like, how, how is this man so crazy rich?
Dr Jess Venner 34:29
Oh, my God, I totally know. And, like, it was pungent as well, because when excavators found one of his workshops with the dollier so the terracotta jars in the floor, yeah, they were sealed, and they opened them up and they still smelt a fish sauce,
Dr G 34:46
right? And that is how you know you’re getting a quality product. And it’s over 2000 years I have a big surprise we reveal to everybody. Yeah, amazing. Okay, I would not want to have been on the site on that day.
Dr Jess Venner 35:07
No, oh, my god, no. They literally write it in their diaries. They’re like, the smell is unbelievable. I can’t believe it, but it was fermented fish, so I guess it would still be there. Crazy. Lasted 2000 years almost.
Dr G 35:22
That’s incredible. So when we think about Pompeii, and then we also think about the other places that were caught up in the eruption, notably Herculaneum, which, for people who, if you have the opportunity to visit the area, you need to visit both, please put both into your calendar. Both are worthwhile. But for a lot of thinking and writing about these topics, it often stops at the eruption, and then it’s post eruption, and it’s everything to do with the aftermath, in terms not of the people, but of the place. And you include some really vivid scenes of what is happening for survivors in the aftermath. Why do you think it was important to include this as part of the story?
Dr Jess Venner 36:08
Yeah, so this was a really hard bit to write, because this felt like the most human bit is dealing with grief that is out of your control, and a lot of us have experienced that, and know the pain of it. And I thought it was really important, because, again, it creates this human connection between us and them nearly 2000 years ago. Because that never changes. Our response to grief and disaster doesn’t change, and we tend to pull together in those moments. But we’re also, in a sense of in a state of shock. And I thought that, you know, again, we talk about the excavations of Pompeii. We talk about it now, you know, as a tourist site, we tend not to speak about the part just after the eruption, what the survivors were doing, you know, the refugees of this city and of all the other cities in the surrounding area. You mentioned Herculaneum. You know, Herculaneum was buried under 20 meters of volcanic material. You weren’t getting down there again. And it even extended the coastline other towns, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of villas in the surrounding area. This was, this was huge. It wasn’t just Pompeii. And so I wanted to make people realize that there were different things going on afterwards. It wasn’t just like, okay, it got covered up and we move on. Unfortunately, the Roman state kind of did. They realized that there wasn’t anything they could do. They set up a Relief Fund. The emperitus went to the area. He looked at it, he said, You know, God, this is terrible. There’s nothing we can do. But, like, they started digging down to try and get some, you know, statues, because you could kind of see the tops of buildings in Pompeii, because it was about six meters deep the volcanic material, so you could see the tops of the amphitheater or the temples. So they started digging down to get materials to reuse those, because that was something that was very common in the Roman period. But apart from that, they sort of had to move on. And some people lived on top of the site, which is now again being found in excavations, which is really interesting, and it makes total sense. Where else would they go, you know? And of course, as we mentioned, it’s a very fertile area, and so it started being farmed again quite soon, because it had to be. They had to have this source of nutritional income from Italy and Campania was that it was described by Cicero, I think he said these, you know, the storehouse of Italy, so that they didn’t have to fully rely on other places like Egypt and so sadly, they had to. They just had to move on. But we don’t really know where anyone went. There’s some evidence of some families, but it’s disputed in the academic world still, and we’re still waiting for more evidence. But it’s like we said, with the names and how confusing they are, you know, to remember all the different names that are very, very similar. This is exactly the point. And a lot of people shared names. A lot of people were in extended families, and so tracing their names is, you know, it’s like trying to find John Smith from one country to another. It’s, it’s impossible to prove
Dr Rad 39:06
you’re all practical joke that the Romans played on all of us that they have such similar names.
Dr Jess Venner 39:11
No, literally, I think they would have been as confused as we are. I just don’t understand why they were all so similar. But, um, yeah, exactly so, so finding those people is is next to impossible with certainty. There are some, and I think I discussed them in the book, but yeah, it’s still disputed. So yes, going back to your question, I really wanted to create a human experience. And you know, for the when I was writing the conclusion, which is the eruption, I spent the week watching disaster videos, which was probably one of the worst weeks ever. But it felt incredibly necessary to understand how people respond in those immediate moments to something out of their control. And it’s it’s always very similar, and so I wrote those real events. Since 911 I drew on quite because it’s very, very similar disaster. And so I drew on on that, and spoke to people and put that into the book as well. So, yes, I think that was very, very important
Dr Rad 40:15
to do. Yeah, I think particularly the way that our climate is heading, capturing those moments, I think, is really important, because there are just so many people who, as you say, are facing these sorts of situations which are completely something that they cannot control. And unfortunately for a lot of people in the world, there is no safety net when those sorts of things happen. So it’s something I hadn’t really seen before in a work on Pompeii. And I thought, oh god, that’s a really interesting addition to this story, because so often we do just finish with the eruption and then we’ll go straight to, you know, the excavations, or we’ll be talking about the plaster casts or that sort of thing, but you don’t really think about the people that were left with nothing, presumably, and God knows what they had to depend on after that moment.
Dr Jess Venner 41:07
Yeah, exactly. And you know, it’s all it’s all very well. It’s exactly like you’re saying. It’s all very well today setting up a relief fund. But Is anyone actually checking on those people? Probably not. And you know, it’s a very human response to focus on the depersonalized experience of a disaster, such as an eruption, and not think about the people that are actually being affected or that we’re experiencing that it’s much easier for us as humans to cope with that and and put it into our heads and process it if it’s just a disaster, but if it’s about an individual story of a woman who loses her children, that’s very different, you know, and it’s harder to cope with as humans, and so it’s usually ignored. And this is why, historically, I think we’ve done the same with Pompeii, because it’s it’s easier to just think, okay, yes, exactly like you said. It stops at the eruption. Okay, next, you know, next historical story, and it wasn’t like that. And you know, sadly it was for the Roman state. They did treat it that way, but we should remember the people that were dealing with the fallout of that, who lost their homes, who lost family members, friends, they lost their occupations, they lost everything. And that is so sad.
Dr G 42:24
I think it is, and I think this gets to the core of, how do people even become historians in the first place? Like, Why does anybody go and look at the past? Because it’s something deeply human in us to want to understand how other people live their lives, and what drove them and what grief they faced. So by including that, I think, you open the gateway for more people who understand humanity innately within themselves, and want to understand more about the history of where we’ve all come from, because these are profound griefs that we will all share at some point, maybe not in the strict sense of an eruption of a volcano, because I don’t live on a continent that has any but chances are that there will be great grief in our in all of our lives at some point, for whatever reason. And so finding a way to empathize with others is a way of better understanding ourselves. So I think you’ve done a great service by including this kind of approach.
Dr Jess Venner 43:26
Thank you so much. Yeah, yeah. I really appreciate that, because it is. It was very hard to write, and obviously putting your own grief into a book is very exposing also, and how you deal with those but I think, like I said, they’re universal, so I think everyone will be able to see themselves in that and hopefully connect with these people in a new way, and see Pompeii in a new way. Because every time I go to Pompeii, I’m an archeologist, and, you know, I still, you know, I look at it as material remains for my job, in a very diplomatic, rational way. I can’t get emotional about that, but when I go to Pompeii and I see the garden of the fugitives with multiple people on the floor, including children, looking at each other, I can’t help but tear up. It’s something that will never stop pulling at my heartstrings and making me exceptionally sad for those people that just didn’t have any option, didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what was happening. Some of them couldn’t leave. Some of them didn’t know to leave. You know, some of them went back during the eruption, when there was a lull, and that’s something that I will never, probably never get over, and I don’t think I should either.
Dr Rad 44:39
Now look, I think it’s been so valuable to chat to you today, because your passion for the past, and in particular for the city of Pompeii, really comes across. But I suppose the surprising thing is, our audience may not be aware that you didn’t actually originally intend to study classics, ancient history and archeology, the triple threat. Can you tell us a little bit about how you found yourself pursuing. Studies of ancient Rome.
Dr Jess Venner 45:01
Yeah. So I started reading a book on the first first empresses of Rome, or the first ladies of Rome. Loved the book, but I was doing a BA in publishing at the time at the University of the Arts in London, and I just got completely addicted to it. I’m actually moving house, but you this would usually be full of some of the books that I would it would look like your background. It was like, you know, I devoured everything to do with it, ancient texts, modern takes on it, and I just couldn’t stop. And my parents were like, No, you’ve got to, you’ve got to finish your ba which I was glad that they did. But when I finished that, I did a small course in Pompeii at the University of Oxford, one of their continuing education courses, and it was just sort of a test of seeing, okay, do I really like it, or is it just no loved it. And then I looked into doing a master’s, but I realized I couldn’t do classics because I didn’t have Latin. And it went back to my, you know, my education background not supporting me in that sense. And you guys were talking earlier about how your curriculum has ancient history in it in Australia, which I think is just brilliant. I’m so happy to hear that, because at older ages, it’s not taught at all. It’s taught at primary, as far as I understand, but it’s becoming less and less of a priority. And so I suffered from that, and had to go around the houses, and I did classical civilization instead, which is the study of people. It’s more of an anthropological point of view. Actually, best thing that could have happened, because I’ve never been very good at Latin, and I wasn’t really into the text as much. And as I’ve probably passionately put across, I’m not really an elite kind of person. And so I was really fascinated by these normal, ordinary people that I could find in, you know, their stories. And so I started looking for a PhD after that, and I got my scholarship from the AHRC to do so. And yes, and now I’m, you know, I’ve just been back from Rome at the school at Rome with an award there, and I’m also doing my Leverhulme early career fellowship at the University of Oxford now for three years, which was very long and a hard, long process to get that but it feels like a very sort of round, round circle that I started with this tiny course at Oxford, unofficial course, and now I’m now, I’m working there full time, but, yeah, it’s quite, quite a challenge of a career, but a really fun and exciting one. Never know what’s coming next. It’s the power
Dr G 47:33
of history driving you all the way. I love it.
Dr Jess Venner 47:36
And I’m very, very lucky that I’ve, you know, had the opportunity to apply for funding, but I’ve got to say, you know, for anyone out there, it’s, it’s very, very hard, but don’t give up, because I have experienced a huge amount of rejection and a huge amount of barriers because of my background, not having the classical background. And so I just want anyone listening to know that you can make it if you want to, if you just keep your passion at the forefront and remember why you’re doing it and and I always wanted to be able to give back and inspire other people, which hopefully I’m doing now, and also talk about the ordinary people and give them a voice too. No, I think
Dr Rad 48:17
that’s fantastic as someone who Dr G and I also come from, I think, similar ish backgrounds to yourself and our education in high school, don’t get me wrong, I had a good education, but certainly classical languages. I didn’t even know that was a thing in high school, and so when I got to university and was thinking of taking up the study of ancient history more seriously, my lack of any language background was a real barrier, and it continues to be a bit of a problem in some ways, but a podcast is a way around that listeners,
Dr G 48:51
yeah, my misconceptions around how ancient languages worked really didn’t sort of come clear to me until I was about in my second year of a history degree, and I was like, Oh, but I thought they’d been translated, aren’t we just reading the translation? I have to translate it. Like, what? Why exactly? So baffled. I was like, they’re like, you can’t be considered a serious historian unless you’re reading it in the original language. I was like, what?
Dr Jess Venner 49:22
Was like, what I know, I know I was the same. And, you know, I tried to take this intensive Latin course because I quit my job during this point. By the way, after my master’s, I thought, I’m just going to quit my job, I’m going to save up, I’m going to quit my job, and I’m going to retrain to do all of these things that you’re mentioning. Latin was one of them. And I was like, art is going on. Oh, my God. And I had like, three weeks of this intensive course every day, you know, like eight hours. And I am just terrible. And I’m, I’m happy to admit it, it’s really not great at it, you know, but I’m. The same, and it’s still something that’s like, you
Dr Rad 50:02
can join my club. I consider myself the poster girl for someone who’s terrible with languages but still loves history anyway, yeah,
Dr G 50:12
look, there’s a lot that you can do to get by with these sorts of things, and it should not be a barrier. And I think that’s the real thing to emphasize with people listening that there are different pathways into a study of history. It doesn’t just involve language expertise, and if you can gain it, that’s amazing. But it’s not the only path, and it’s certainly not something that should hold you back from your love of history in any way or shape or form.
Dr Jess Venner 50:39
Correct? Yes, exactly it great message
Dr Rad 50:42
with this book coming out and moving house and all this is probably the kind of question that’s going to make you want to punch me through the screen. But are there any upcoming projects that you’d like to tease for us before we wrap up our discussion?
Dr Jess Venner 50:55
Yes, I’m always very busy. So apart from my academic world, I am writing my second book now, which I’m very excited about. It’ll be, I think, of a similar ilk, that’s the plan. And I’m very much enjoying writing it. It’s a new challenge for me. It sort of under wraps at the moment, but, yeah, I can say that it’s fairly similar sort of way
Dr Rad 51:19
to do it, the last voices of Herculaneum. I’m just going to put it out there.
Dr Jess Venner 51:28
But I think people will really enjoy the perspective that I hopefully that I can bring. And then in other In other terms, my social media is called Life in the Past Lane, and for quite some time, I’ve been planning a new educational platform to bridge this gap that we’ve just been talking about, to bring opportunities to people that maybe want to switch career or just interested in ancient history. So that will be on YouTube, which I am on already, but it will also be a platform that I’m working on and hopefully launching at the end of this year. So so keep an eye out for that. It will be very exciting to bring people new things in that way. So yes, we will keep an eye out.
Dr Rad 52:10
Fantastic. Sounds like so many exciting things to look out for. Well, thank you so much for joining us again, listeners, as I’m sure you heard, but I’m going to repeat it again. The book is The Lost Voices of Pompeii, and you will definitely want to pick up a copy if you want the perfect blend of storytelling and expertise.
Dr Jess Venner 52:29
Well, thank you. That’s so lovely. Thank you so much. I’ve been it’s been so lovely chatting to you both. So thank you.
Dr Rad 52:45
Thank you for listening to this special episode of the Partial Historians. You can find our sources sound credits and an automated transcript in our show notes. Our music is by Bettina Joy De Guzman. The partial historians is part of the memory collective, creators and educators dedicated to sharing knowledge that is accessible, contextualized, socially conscious and inclusive, to find more from the memory collective head to collectivemem.com you too can support our show and help us to produce more engaging content about the ancient world by becoming a Patreon in return, you receive exclusive early access to our special episodes and ad free content. If monthly patronage is not your style, we have merch. We have a book, or you can just buy us a coffee on ko fi. And we’d like to say a big thank you to all our Patreon supporters for making special episodes like this. One possible. However, if your Imperial coffers do not overflow us, one of the easiest and most important ways to help us is to tell someone about the show or give us a five star review wherever you listen until next time we are yours in ancient Rome.
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