Before the volcano: life in ancient Pompeii

The catastrophic events of 79 AD, in which Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried beneath masses of volcanic ash and rock, produced a uniquely revealing insight into the ancient world. In our latest four-part Sunday series, Kev Lochan will be speaking to historian Jess Venner about life before those terrible events and what unfolded when Vesuvius erupted. Kicking off with today's first episode. Once a thriving Roman city, life stopped in Pompeii in AD 79 when the volcano Vesuvius erupted, burying the city and its inhabitants and preserving them forever. I'm Kev Lochan and I'm joined by Dr.

Jess Venner, a historian of the Roman world and a Pompeii expert. Jess, thank you for joining us. Thank you. I'm so, so excited to be here. In this first episode, we're going to discover what life was like in Pompeii before the eruption, the myths surrounding the volcano of Vesuvius, and discover why we can't put a date on its cataclysmic events.

Jess, I wonder as a way to start, Pompeii is such an enduring name in history. Could you give us a kind of presciate of what we're going to talk about throughout the entire series and what makes Pompeii so fascinating for us today? Yeah. Pompeii is one of those places that just captures everybody's imagination, I think, because there is so much of it that's been preserved in Pompeii. We were very lucky, but also very unfortunate in the way that it was preserved.

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