Pompeii: New Secrets Revealed with Mary Beard

I first came to Pompeii in 1973,

and I've been here hundreds of times.

I always find a new corner to explore and new surprises.

I'm back amongst its ancient ruins because I have an unmissable

chance to experience Pompeii as I've never done before.

The very fabric of the town, its buildings and people, are undergoing

a major new forensic study.

At the centre are the famous casts - the human victims of the

volcanic eruption of AD 79.

These are such moving objects that it's always been impossible not to

imagine their stories in your head.

What must have been happening, what they must have been going through.

Over the years, all kinds of stories have been invented about who

these people were and what kind of life they might have led.

But now, using a medical CT scanner,

which can peer beneath the fragile plaster,

an international team of experts are looking to uncover the truth.

I am preparing myself for some surprises.

People I've always thought were women turning out to be men.

Children turning out not to be related to the people holding them.

'And while I get to poke around behind the scenes in locked

'storerooms and labs...'

This is absolutely disgusting.

'..a team of specialist architects, armed with the latest laser

'mapping technology, will create stunning digital replicas of

'some of the buildings.'

These will help produce the most accurate and detailed 3-D

map of Pompeii ever made.

All together, this should give us an unrivalled image of what daily

Roman life was like.

It's just metres and metres of lead pipes.

For me, these are some of the things that really close

the gap between our world and the Roman world.

Everyone knows how the people of Pompeii died...

..but this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance

to reveal their life before death.

What I love about Pompeii is that it was such an ordinary little

Roman town. Its only claim to fame was being destroyed

and buried by the eruption of the volcano Vesuvius in 79 AD.

It was then completely forgotten, until many centuries later it

was accidently found and uncovered again.

It now gives us

an absolutely unique glimpse of how ordinary Romans lived their lives.

What makes Pompeii unique is not only that we have its streets

and houses,

but we also have some of its people, in the form of the ghostly casts.

Which were recovered by a surprisingly simple process

that dates back to the 1860s,

when the archaeologists digging in Pompeii discovered that

around many of the skeletons of the victims was strange cavities.

After pouring in liquid plaster,

what emerged was an exact imprint of a human body.

And because of their twisted poses and eerie grins,

it's been all but impossible not to graft stories, even names,

onto these victims.

Like the couple in each other's arms, the old beggar and the

family with this tiny toddler.

These are people captured for ever at the exact moment of their death.

These stories are certainly evocative,

but they are at best guesswork.

Now, for the first time, the casts are being brought together into

Pompeii's amphitheatre for our forensic study,

with a CT scanner capable of finding even the smallest trace of

real evidence.

For forensic archaeologist Estelle Lazer,

this is a chance to cast new light on who the victims really

were, as well as who they were not.

It's an adventure. We have no idea

what we are going to find and that's really exciting.

Nobody has studied these before, they have had no scientific

examination and yet so much has been written about them, and to

give them back the lives they originally had

-is a wonderful opportunity.

-BEEPING

But it's not just the casts that are under examination.

Pompeii itself is in the grip of a once-in-a-generation

restoration programme.

The Great Pompeii Project is a 100-million-euro

scheme which is fighting the ravages of time and weather to save the

fabric of the town. I'm lucky enough to have been allowed behind

the scenes, still off-limits to most visitors,

to see life breathed back into some of the buildings and their frescoes.

And to help us really understand how the town worked,

we've commissioned a team of specialist architects to

create a spectacularly detailed bird's-eye view.

Using 3-D laser scanners, they're busy capturing precise digital

replicas of the buildings,

which will reveal Pompeii in a way that has never been seen before.

As we fly down streets, over roofs and even through walls.

Now for the first time, we will get to see, from previously

impossible perspectives, where the average Pompeian ate, drank,

bathed and even had it away.

And as this was a Roman town, the most spectacular and exciting

place was its amphitheatre...

..where Pompeii's gladiators did battle in front of a 20,000-strong

crowd, cheering, leering, very likely baying for blood.

Gladiators were big entertainment here, like everywhere

in the Roman world. There must have been troops of them

under their own money-making impresarios, who travelled

the region putting on fights in the local amphitheatres.

They lived in military-style barracks

and they were highly trained in swordplay, fighting tactics

and in putting on a good show.

Pompeii's amphitheatre is one of the best preserved in the whole

Roman world.

The noise and atmosphere would have been electric,

as each pair of gladiators made their way into the arena.

Don't think Hollywood here - we are in a little Roman town in

the lower divisions of the league.

And there wouldn't have been too much fighting to the death -

gladiators were too expensive a commodity to lose.

This was probably more like wrestling than boxing.

All the same, it would have been an occasion to look forward to.

You have to imagine the audience all on the edge of their seats,

watching what was going on in the arena.

There would be music, drums,

gladiators out there in their shiny helmets, their polished weapons

and the nets with which they trapped each other, and the crowd

would have cheered when their favourite felled an opponent.

Yeah, come on, Celadus, stick it up him!

This wasn't just adult entertainment.

Going to the games was also

a family day out, and it makes you think a bit.

Mum, Dad and a couple of kids, maybe?

Well, one such family is now amongst Pompeii's most famous casts.

Discovered in 1974, they were found cowering in a basement.

They must have come here to hide, thinking it was the safest

place in the house.

Story is that we have a father, here...

..a mother, here, still holding a young child.

And there is also a toddler, usually assumed to be part of the group.

But we don't actually know where he or she was found.

At just a couple of feet tall,

the toddler easily fits into the CT scanner.

Its tiny frame, a poignant reminder of how indiscriminate disasters are.

When you look straight at its face, you notice it's got chubby

baby lips, it's looking right at you.

You have to have a heart of stone,

not to be really touched by this. One of the things I'm looking

for here is to begin to think about families, childcare.

It looks obvious to us that it's

Mum, Dad and two children but is that the case?

BEEPING

The powerful machine can not only look through the plaster to

find the skeleton,

but also any objects trapped within.

Is this the child's belt? Is that a clasp?

If there is anything like metal in there, it will show.

It's very evocative, we have got a very small child

who died in this disaster well before its time.

As our tiny cast slides into the scanner,

I can't help imagining what life for a child might have been like

2,000 years ago.

No formal school buildings have ever been uncovered in Pompeii

and childhood here has always been a bit of a puzzle.

This is Pompeii's public park,

and bang in the middle, a great big swimming pool. I guess some days,

it would have been heaving with people.

It's right next door to the amphitheatre.

This is where the refreshment sellers

and the souvenir vendors would be, where people would camp

out overnight if they had come from a long way away.

And it's where people would have come to go to the lavatory -

the facilities in the amphitheatre itself were basic.

And in the colonnade, kids learning to read and write.

Places like this were the perfect spot for private tutors to

set up shop out of the sun, or sheltering from the rain.

The curriculum was pretty narrow - reading, writing, arithmetic

and grammar - and it could be pretty brutal, too.

There is a painting that actually survives from Pompeii -

a terrible tale - there are some very good boys on one side,

doing their reading very dutifully under the supervision of a

teacher, here. The other side, there is a naughty boy. He's been late,

he's been cheeky, hasn't done his homework. And he is being beaten.

Not just beaten, he seems to have been completely stripped,

he's propped up on the back of a teacher, here,

and his legs are pulled out behind him.

And he's being absolutely thwacked.

Some people might call it old-fashioned discipline.

To me, it looks more like cruelty to children.

Education was brutal, expensive and only for boys who could afford it.

Girls were simply expected to stay at home, while the poor had to work.

In fact, here in Pompeii, we have found rather few toys,

no sign of specifically children's clothing,

no sign of children's entertainment.

It's almost as if, in our sense, childhood was absent here.

But, of course, kids were still kids.

All over Pompeii,

we find graffiti that can only have been made by little ones.

Images of animals and people that could have been scratched yesterday.

Back in the investigation, not all of our victims will fit into our

CT scanner so Estelle's team have decamped to where the casts

are on display.

Yeah, it's really good.

And with a portable X-ray machine, they're examining specific

parts of them.

-What are we doing?

-Pelvis.

We are looking for the same kinds of features that we would look

for if we were looking at a modern mass disaster

so we want to identify individuals,

we want to find out what sex they were,

what age they were when they died.

One, two, three...

It's all within the frame,

but the plaster is really thick.

The biggest problem is that bone and plaster have the same density,

so what you are trying to find is plaster in plaster.

Yet the study is already providing its first surprise, as the team

discover some of the casts have had their bones replaced by iron rods.

What's been preserved is the form of the individual, you can see there.

And when you

look inside, there's iron bars that are used to hold the structure

together when they made the cast. The limbs are fragile.

There is nothing in there, just plaster.

This means that, from now on, we will have to rethink how these

casts were made.

It also has somewhat limited the information Estelle can

extract from the mother and father.

Even so, her team have established they were probably both

younger than originally thought.

Perhaps just into their 20s. And the child standing on the

mother's chest does contain a full set of teeth.

Although, they're not where you might expect.

This is the lower jaw of the child and it's somewhere around waist

level. It's fallen, you assume by gravity, and gone into that void.

They look a bit, erm...rickety, crooked.

They are very crooked.

So this kid had not gone to the orthodontist.

Absolutely not.

This is an exciting find

because an almost complete set of lower teeth can help Estelle

get closer to the child's age at death.

It's been suggested that this child was five or six years of age.

Because it has got some baby teeth and some adult teeth.

And doesn't seem to have lost the baby teeth yet.

And the CT scan results of the toddler have proved more

revealing. With the plaster digitally peeled away,

for the first time we can see inside this tiny evocative cast.

You can see the leg bones, you can see the vertebrae,

you can see the skull really well.

By studying the development of leg and foot bones, Estelle can

start to think about the age of this child.

The tarsal bones start to ossify around three...

Ah, so you really don't get your foot bones until you are about three

-and this kid is on the way?

-Yes.

-And that's the crown.

-That's the crown of what will be...

A molar.

But it has not yet come through?

So those are the baby teeth and these are what's forming in the gum.

-Mm-hmm.

-So that's putting him around three?

Around about three.

Knowing the age seems a relatively simple thing, but put it this way,

when you say, "This kid's just passed the terrible twos,"

he instantly seems so much more human and we can now even see

what that blob on the chest really is.

It is a brooch? It is a pin, is it?

It looks like a fastening of some sort.

I'm really pleased with that, because from the outside it looked

as if there was a clasp and that is exactly what it seems to be.

Presumably it's a case of everything having got pushed up

and what would have been around the kid's waist has ended up there.

Exactly.

The big question has always been, for me,

whether he belonged to the so-called mother,

so-called father and so-called child...but you rather hope

he is with them because otherwise he is on his own.

Of course you don't want to imagine this poor child was

all by themselves.

No, you do want him with his mum and dad, don't you?

Casts can take us some of the way,

but it's our laser scans of Pompeii's buildings that will

give us real insight into daily life here.

In the south-east corner, restoration is well underway

on one of Pompeii's most intriguing houses.

Covering two blocks,

this spectacular urban villa has multiple

two-storey buildings as well as a large private garden.

This looks like a very grand private residence but it's not all it seems.

We know that because there was a sign by the front door, advertising

what was on offer - shops, flats, bar and restaurant.

Even the baths were up for rent.

They must have been pricey,

cos they are described as "rather lovely, for classy people".

This property has been shut to the public for years. What we can

do is not only take you inside, but we can see what a visit here

2,000 years ago would have been like.

At the rear was the private residence -

probably reserved just for the owner.

While at the other end was a large private bath complex.

Which unlike Pompeii's public baths, wasn't for just anyone.

This was an exclusive and presumably expensive members-only type

of place.

No riffraff laughing at your willy here, amongst all the naked bathers.

If you wanted to take a bath, this is where you would come in.

Walked in off the street, into this quite elegant hallway.

My guess is that, there or here,

is where you would have come in, handed over your kit

and said, "Ooh, two fluffy white towels, please," and off you went.

These baths followed the same principle as all others in

the Roman world,

where you start cold and get hotter and hotter with each room

ramping up the temperature.

We can even see where all this heat came from, as behind the wall

is the wood-burning furnace that the slaves would have kept fed.

But I don't think you came here just to get clean.

My guess that there might have been other services available, you know,

massage parlour?

You know the kind of thing.

But these decidedly upmarket baths were just one part of this

flourishing business empire.

There were rents rolling in,

from the bar and restaurant, the baths and the flats

and apartments, so who was taking the profit?

I think we'd imagine it was some canny Roman businessman.

In fact, it was a canny Roman businesswoman -

and from the rental notice, we even know her name.

She was called Julia Felix, and that means "Lucky Julia".

As a woman, she couldn't vote, she wasn't allowed to enjoy

the men's section of the local baths,

but she could become a successful entrepreneur - lucky Julia!

But this establishment wasn't just for an exclusive clientele.

Anyone walking past could have popped into the street-front pub,

which offered food to take away.

You come in here, from the street,

and if you wanted to be quick, you would choose

something to eat on the go as you went.

Other people, though, would have wanted to sit down, perhaps

make an evening of it, and they would have come through here.

We've got a choice - I guess if

you really want to make a very long session of it,

you've already booked the couches in advance - the triclinium -

but most people,

a bit more of a hurry, they would have come and sat here, bolt upright

with a table in front of them. It's a great reminder that not all

Romans, all the time, ate lying down saying, "Pass the grapes, darling."

But what were they eating?

Well, actually, we know a good deal of the answer to that because

it's been preserved almost as well as the place itself.

And all that foodstuff is carefully kept under wraps, in here.

-Luigi, ciao, buona sera.

-Ciao, Mary.

This really is behind the scenes at Pompeii, it's what most of us

never get to see.

This is quite amazing for me,

as few people ever get to root around in here.

Oh, wow.

It's stuffed with some of Pompeii's most precious and delicate finds.

These are pomegranates and almonds. This is olives, and these are very

splendid nuts. What sort of nuts are they? Walnuts. Walnuts, I think.

And it can all helps us reconstruct how the ordinary people were

living just at that moment before the eruption.

Figs - this isn't posh food. Everybody's eating these.

It's a turtle shell.

You have to imagine somebody had a great feast out of this.

Luigi, what else have we got? Let's see something else

because this is an Aladdin's cave, really. Bring something...

This is the bits of fish

that went into what was almost the greatest Roman

ketchup of all - a thing called garum,

which was a sauce made out of simply rotted fish.

Oh, no. Indeed we have some.

Still made near here.

I can smell it from here. This is...

..absolutely disgusting.

I'm going to do it again, to show how very brave I am.

But...eugh! Eugh! When you think about Roman diet, you've

really got to think, everything smothered with that stuff!

This is a loaf of Pompeian Roman bread.

Is this a thumbprint?

HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

The baker has kind of put his thumbprint,

his maker's mark on the bread.

This kind of stuff, for me, is some of the most moving bits of what you

find at Pompeii because it... You kind of know that someone had made

that just before the eruption happened. It got

cooked in the oven but no-one got to eat it.

It's one of those things that shows you that kind of disruption in

life, time, tragedy and disaster because it was an ordinary loaf

and nobody ever got to eat it.

It is actually fantastically exciting to get this

close to this stuff because you really don't find this kind

of survival from anywhere else in the Roman world, apart from Pompeii.

Before the eruption,

Pompeii was home to not much more than 12,000 people.

And our study of the casts may go some way into giving us a clue

as to who some of these people were.

One of the most puzzling has been called The Beggar,

because this misshapen hand was thought to be a bag that he

used to beg for hand-outs.

While on his right foot, he has the imprint of a sandal -

easy to imagine it was the present from a generous benefactor.

But if he was a beggar,

what would life in Pompeii have been like for him?

We might just get a hint from a unique picture

originally found in the town.

This is a scene that we instantly recognise.

He's got shaggy hair, rags, a stick. He's holding out his hand

to this rather posh lady, here, who is giving him a bit of loose change.

And she has her little slave with her.

Actually, that's a rather rare scene in the Roman world.

The Romans weren't big on charity and if you were

destitute in Pompeii, with no state benefits, no hostels, honestly you

would be a problem that would pretty soon solve itself because you'd die.

So which would seem better - being free but penniless,

homeless and literally starving to death?

Or being a slave with all the discrimination

and lack of freedom that that implies,

but at least with a roof over your head and supper on the table?

Which would you choose?

This cast has always been imagined as a frail old man, pleading

for hand-outs.

With this blob being his begging bag.

Certainly has no coins in it.

No.

So a bit of miscasting actually launches this whole

myth that this is a beggar.

So there is no begging bag, but what about that sandal?

The X-rays have now shown it up in much greater detail.

What's amazing here is that you really do see how smart

-they are, don't you?

-Yep, and that's the strap.

That's the strap.

And according to the reports, it had a sensible grip.

That sandal looks to me, you know, pretty posh.

Never mind the philanthropist, much more likely that this is

someone who is really quite rich - rich enough to have nice footwear.

One, two, three...

But it's the bones in the left foot that can tell us most.

You can just see the growth plate on the heel bone.

What's a growth plate?

That's the part where the two bits of bone are separated

and the growth plate is made up of cartilaginous bone.

Which is gradually fusing it together.

It's growing and eventually when growth stops, it will close up

and fuse.

So one of the key indicators then of how old somebody is

is in the joints?

Exactly.

So my picture of this is starting to...

It's really overturning, you know, the standard beggar idea.

It's not an old beggar with a bent back,

it's definitely a younger individual,

possibly with their own sandals.

As the image of our frail old beggar fades away, we start to

wonder if, in fact, he might have been a wealthy young man.

And we see a clearer picture of the real Pompeii emerging.

This wasn't a sleepy backwater, but a thriving little town with

its fair share of young and reasonably well off.

And although the sea is more than 2km away today,

these are mooring rings and they tell us

that at the time of the eruption,

boats came right up into town,

making this area to the south-west some sort of marina.

And the way that Pompeii relied on the sea is clear all over the place.

This is part of a very delicate fishing net of some ancient

Pompeian fisherman, and you can see just how beautifully woven it is.

And the Pompeian diet didn't stop at fish.

These sea urchins were a favourite delicacy.

When we get the rare opportunity to investigate

the contents of a lavatory from round here, one of the things

you almost always find is sea-urchin spikes which I think have

come through the digestive tracts of the locals.

These conch shells even had a life after they had made

someone a good meal.

These were actually ancient trumpets, used in the theatre

to kind of make a noise, to shut people up and things.

What you're supposed to do is blow down it.

I'm not going to be able to manage this but I'll have a go.

SHE BLOWS

SHE MAKES FAKE TRUMPET SOUND

That was cheating there, I'm afraid. Well, I can't get...

..a blind bit of noise

out of this thing. Opinions differ about whether it's a

nice pleasant relaxing noise or whether it's a horrible screech -

if you can get any noise out of it at all -

but it's a nice example of the sea producing all kinds of things

that Pompeians are recycling.

Just above the marina, we find some the houses of

the richest and most powerful Pompeians.

This is one of the most impressive.

It has 60 rooms, covering almost 3,000 square metres.

But what's fascinating here is, while the upper floors are under

massive restoration, our scans can help us reveal...

a secret hidden world.

Like many of the buildings in Pompeii, it was multi-levelled.

And at the very lowest level are the remains of one of the most

elusive and least understood bits of the Roman world.

This was once one of the grandest

and biggest mansions in the town. It doesn't look all that

wonderful now but you can still see one of the things that made

it special - location. We are just a stone's throw from the city

centre but, here, there was a view to die for, right over the sea.

But I am interested in something rather different - downstairs.

Sinking through the ground, a hidden Pompeii is now revealed.

Down here is where the slaves, so vital for keeping the

house running, lived their life of servitude.

Some rather steep stairs.

And what I have got into is really the service areas of the house.

And there are pokey little rooms.

You don't often get to be able to explore

where the slaves lived and worked

and that's why this one is so important.

With all these tunnels and anonymous rooms, it's quite difficult to

figure out just what went on here.

Slavery, in a sense, is defined for me

by the fact that you don't know exactly where

they slept, you don't know how many hours they worked.

They're the kind of silent part of the Roman world. In a sense,

they are defined by us sort of not being able to see them.

A house this size might have had something like 50 slaves,

doing everything from cooking and cleaning, to the gardening

and DIY.

All treated pretty much as we would treat machines today,

they were all but invisible.

You couldn't want a clearer proof of the invisibility of slaves

than this...

You've got a couple in bed, making love, behind them

is a little slave at hand. They aren't even noticing her,

she might just as well be part of the furniture.

But slaves didn't only watch. We tend to think of slavery

as domestic service but service really did mean "service" - slaves,

both male and female, were there for the pleasure of their owners.

Slavery was an integral part of the fabric of Roman society.

Because we never hear from the slaves themselves, only from

their masters, often complaining about them, it's always been a

one-sided story, and that's why this network of underground spaces

is so important. It's a unique window

into this poorly understood part of Pompeian life.

Rich or poor in Pompeii,

there is one place that almost everyone would have visited

on a regular basis.

Dotted around the town are a number of public baths.

One of the most lavish and well preserved,

just off the main square.

The Romans absolutely loved public bathing. Here, they could

relax and just let it all hang out.

This is where everyone came to get naked.

You would sit down here,

shoes off, clothes off

and then you'd shove it all in lockers up here.

I wouldn't leave your valuables, though,

this was a thieves' paradise.

The public baths were great levellers,

it was here that the young

barrow boy with the hunky body could

look down at the waddling fat cat with an overhanging belly.

Romans laughed at the odd willies they observed in the baths and joked

about the old guys with hernias. Body image, it's not a new problem.

I wouldn't have been very welcome here 2,000 years ago

because these baths were men-only.

But as our scans reveal, the distinctive cylindrical

vaults are repeated right next door.

And that's one of Pompeii's hidden secrets - the women's bathing suite.

Which is now a locked storeroom.

I have never actually been in the women's baths before

but one thing is for absolutely sure, that this was

nowhere near as grand as the men's quarters.

The modest size and decoration of these baths has a lot to say about

the position of most women in Pompeian society

but today, the stuff

piled up in here speaks of everyday Pompeian life.

That's another big one.

Closed to everyone except a few archaeologists,

I've been encouraged to have a dig around!

This is the kind of stuff you just find

everywhere in houses in Pompeii - in the kitchens,

in the servants' quarters, in the bottom of cupboards.

The top of a big jar that would've once held wine or olive oil.

I think this is cheers to you.

This must have been for weighing things. This is

the kind of thing you need on a market stall

when you're selling your produce, you know, "How much do you want?"

And this is where you come face-to-face with the human tragedy.

There must be 100 skulls here, looking at us.

And not just skulls, this wall of bones

reminds us just how many people perished in the disaster.

This is a very odd pile. What it is, loads

and loads of the little pieces of stone that once made up mosaic

floors. It's the remnants of floors that have been destroyed but the

funny thing is, this presumably is how your mosaic floor was delivered

in the first place - the builders brought round a whole pile of

this and then the layers came and made it into a beautiful pattern.

And here is just metres

and metres of lead pipes. It took water everywhere

but the truth is, rich Pompeians were more concerned to have water

delivered to their fountains than to their lavatories.

And...you can't have pipes without taps.

Which is what these are. You can't help thinking that it would be

a really good town to be a plumber in.

THUNDER CRACKS

And I think I could do with a plumber right now.

As the sudden cloudburst reveals one of Pompeii's urban problems

and solutions.

People often ask, why on earth were Pompeian pavements so high?

What on earth were those stepping stones across the street for?

Well, one answer is that as soon as it starts to rain like this,

the streets become a river. The only way you can

get across is by the stones.

There's no underground drains here,

and what takes the water away is the roadway.

So much for Roman brilliance at drainage!

It's clear that living in Pompeii before the eruption would

have had its challenges.

We can see some of the ways its people try to cope, but who

were these people?

Where did they come from?

-What are we doing?

-Lateral on the skull.

There's one cast that might give us a clue.

Found more than 100 years ago,

it was supposed to be of a man

coming from North Africa. It was then known as The Moor.

The idea was it was a river port,

that there might have been Africans or African slaves and that

this might have been the remains of a slave.

Is there anything in this skull which suggests ethnicity at all?

No, sadly most of it's disappeared.

So this area's gone, this area's gone.

We've got a bit of the bone around the eye socket,

and the features there are more consistent with male than female.

What sticks out for me

here is his teeth. Can you decode the teeth a bit?

Yeah, the teeth are actually quite good. The wisdom teeth haven't

erupted yet. There's no tooth decay and there is not much wear

on the teeth so that all suggests

a younger rather than an older individual.

So he's a young man,

but no suggestion that he's from North Africa

like it's usually claimed.

So another layer of myth is peeled away

and what's emerging is significant.

There certainly seem to be, in the cases that we are looking at,

fairly young individuals so far.

One of the things that has often been said is that the young

and healthy were those who actually managed to cut

and run and get away and the people that were left were the pregnant

ladies and granny and the toddlers.

That's definitely not true.

The fact that many of these victims were young and fit

can't help but change the way I look at them.

As night falls,

you get a real sense of how Pompeii's character changes, too.

My guess is that respectable people didn't venture out much after dark

and certainly not elderly ladies.

For a start, the streets were so uneven you could easily break

your ankle in broad daylight. Night-time, they were a death trap.

I very much doubt that the whole place was crime-free,

I am thinking about muggers lurking and pickpockets

and general ne'er-do-wells and there is no police force.

Either to keep the streets safe or to report a crime to

after the event.

And anyway, Roman law was really only interested in the problems

of the rich.

If you were an ordinary crime victim

and you thought you knew who the culprit was,

your best bet would've been to get your mates together

and just go and sort him out.

And this was a particularly seedy part of town.

This is the town brothel.

There's five small cubicles. We are now missing the soft

furnishings, there must have been cushions on the bed

and, I guess, a curtain here for a bit of privacy.

Who used this place?

We can't really be sure, but certainly not

the Pompeian rich, who would

have had slaves at home for that kind of thing.

We must be dealing with the poorer sort of locals, who didn't

have that kind of facility.

And people passing through, people from the port,

travellers of any sort.

One satisfied customer has written here, "futui",

and there's no prizes for guessing what that means.

The girls who worked here must all have been

slaves, and my heart goes out to them. No woman with any

options in life could possibly have wanted to work in this place.

For most people, daily life in Pompeii must in truth have been

fairly unpleasant.

A hot climate, limited drainage and the streets

filled with animal waste, probably added up to quite a stench.

And there was one group of workers who were considered

to have it worse than most.

Yet strangely, they worked in this elegant residence

which, for years, has been closed for restoration.

I've come to see how this once private house was

converted into the local laundry.

By laundry, I don't mean this is where you brought your tunics

and your smalls.

There was some cleaning of old cloth here but it was mainly

about the large-scale processing of new, raw coarse cloth.

And that meant washing and rinsing, battering and softening,

bleaching and degreasing.

And it involved an odd mixture of substances.

Clay, soda, sulphur and human urine,

and the story was that the canny launderers collected that by leaving

pots outside their front door for the convenience of the passers-by.

This noxious concoction was all mixed together in here.

Here's the main series of rinsing tanks

and these are the treading stalls, where the launderers spent all

day treading the cloth with their bare feet.

I guess about ten people would have worked here - slaves

and free side by side, and it was pretty nasty work. But you

do get a sense of friendship and camaraderie about the place.

And when other people went past laundries, they said they not

only smelled them but they heard them,

because the launderers were busy

shouting and singing at their work...

# Dee-dee-diddy-dee-dee-dee

# Dee-dee-diddy-dee-dee-dee

# Dee-dee-diddy-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee Di-dee-di-dee... #

As life is breathed back into the buildings of Pompeii,

we are reminded that this is the best glimpse of the everyday

world of the Romans that we can ever get.

Oh, my goodness me. There's blue, there's orange...

'Some little pots of pigment were found in painters' workshops,

'others abandoned by a half-finished fresco. It's an exquisite example of

'how everyday life was suddenly and violently disrupted by the volcano.'

This is clearly not for painting

the whole of the side of a wall, this isn't the kind of big interior

decoration. This is the detailed stuff.

When you put the lovely little patterns down the side,

put your finger in it... (Orange).

It's quite exciting.

When you look at all the paint there is in Pompeii,

on walls, richly and lavishly painted,

it's easy to forget that they were made by painters

and those painters were sourcing and mixing

and transporting their paint pots everywhere.

That blue one is really good.

With our map complete, we are now getting a much clearer picture

of what Pompeii was really like.

It was an ordinary town with a busy little port.

There were painters and plumbers, teachers and launderers,

all going about their daily lives.

But we've also found industrious entrepreneurs who'd built up

flourishing businesses serving Pompeii's rich.

And we've even managed to catch sight of Pompeii's invisible

population - its slaves.

Yet many of these lives were abruptly cut short when,

in AD 79, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius

destroyed and buried Pompeii.

The reason we know so much about the eruption is

that we actually have an eye-witness account of it.

A young man called Pliny was staying about 30km away,

across the Bay of Naples, and he watched what was going on

and later wrote it all down.

He describes the earth tremors in the days leading up to the

eruption, the column of smoke that poured out of the volcano,

people putting cushions on their heads to protect

themselves from falling debris.

We know that over 1,600 people perished in Pompeii.

Although it's only been possible to make casts of just over 100 of them.

Two of the most moving are known as The Embracing Couple.

They were found in 1914, desperately clinging together, or so it seems.

Often thought to be two women, perhaps a mother with her daughter,

or two sisters.

Or maybe just strangers, offering comfort in their last moments.

They are found together.

Is there any clue about which is the older and which is the younger?

Well, this one was presumed to be the younger one just

because the development of the bones.

And the teeth are not of a very old

person so their wisdom teeth aren't erupted.

Male or female?

Erm, more female than male.

But what Estelle's most interested in are these features on the skull.

Can you see the sutures? They're the areas along here where the

bone grows.

And about 20% of Pompeians appear with an extra bone here

and about 35% on this side and 39% on that side,

so they are population markers.

And what it tells us is that this person was sharing the same

environment when growing up.

What it is suggesting, then, is that we have got at least a good

nucleus of people here who are Pompeians born and bred.

We are seeing that as a feature that is quite distinctive to this area?

There certainly seems to be a level of homogeneity that is

unexpected for a river port.

I think your homogeneity is my Pompeian born and bred, Estelle!

OK, fine.

We can't say who this couple really were, but we do know they

died together and they were probably native to Pompeii.

Even in that port town, there were plenty who were born there

and never left.

And as many of the casualties have turned out to be young and

fit, it makes you wonder who escaped, who didn't and why?

I suspect that many of the victims were people

with something to lose, reluctant to leave their homes or

the businesses they'd built up, and with nowhere else to go.

And that's just one of the ways in which we've been brought

a little bit closer to the people of Pompeii.

We may have intruded on their peace a bit

but I think that we owe it to them to help them tell their true

story, not just to be victims of our fantasies.

In a garden at the very southern edge of town, we find one such

group who perhaps left it too late.

Known simply as The Fugitives, we know very little about their story.

But for me, looking at these men, women and children,

I forget about the science, archaeology and history.

All I see is just that, lives interrupted.

This group of people have been left exactly where they died.

Men, women and little children found at the edge of town,

desperately hoping to get to safety.

They didn't make it.

But what is clear is that, amidst the dreadful darkness,

the panic and the terrible noise of falling debris and human screams,

these people chose to stick together.

I hope that is what we would do, too.