Tom Hiddleston Rebuilds Pompeii With Science and Story
Two Lenses Focus on the Same Lost City
Archaeologists and disaster psychologists examine the same evidence from Pompeii but ask different questions. Archaeologist Caitie Barrett of Cornell University helps Tom Hiddleston interpret the estate of Julia Felix, a wealthy businesswoman whose house was one of the first ever excavated in Pompeii. [1] Barrett explains that Felix was unusual in Roman culture as an independent woman who owned a bathhouse business. The physical evidence shows no sign of horses, carts, or treasures except a single necklace, which suggests the estate was evacuated before the eruption.
Disaster psychologists bring a second lens to the same archaeological data. The series consults a disaster psychologist to imagine how real people may have reacted when earthquakes shook Pompeii and the volcano began belching ash and molten rock This field studies how humans behave during catastrophes and applies those patterns to ancient situations where physical evidence is missing. The psychologist helps the show create plausible scenarios for why some people stayed while others fled.
The two approaches converge on a single finding: most of Herculaneum’s residents likely escaped before the city was buried. The Praetorian guard’s story illustrates the panic many people probably experienced, but also the calm thinking that could have allowed evacuation Archaeologists found no mass graves in Herculaneum comparable to those in Pompeii, confirming that many residents fled successfully. The disaster psychologist explains that in modern catastrophes, most deaths occur not from the primary event but from delayed decisions to evacuate.
A Question That Has Remained Open for Centuries
The question of what actually happened in Pompeii has remained open since the first excavations began in the 1700s For over two centuries, scholars have debated whether the people whose bodies were preserved in ash died instantly or suffered prolonged terror. The Latin words for history and story are the same, as Hiddleston notes, and this linguistic connection has shaped how scholars present their findings.
Director Tom Barbor-Might, producer Kevin Wright, and Hiddleston decided ‘somewhat rebelliously that we wanted to invent a new form of documentary,’ Hiddleston said in an interview with Science News. The team wanted to combine historical evidence with dramatic storytelling in a way that had not been done before. Barbor-Might told Science News that “this is a different way of telling a true story.”
The series uses a historian’s database of inscriptions to place three real people in Pompeii shortly before the eruption. Avianius was a teenage bronzesmith apprentice whose name appears in records locating him in Pompeii before the disaster and elsewhere after it. Julia Felix’s estate was excavated and documented extensively. The Praetorian guard is known only from a single inscription found near Herculaneum.
Scholars Already
Working on the Next Stage
Classics professor Steven L. Tuck has already created the database that makes this new approach possible. Tuck’s simple spreadsheet tracks actual residents of Pompeii using inscriptions and archaeological evidence. The database allows researchers to follow individuals across time and space, showing where they lived before the eruption and where they ended up afterward.
Archaeologist Caitie Barrett continues to work on understanding Julia Felix’s estate and what it reveals about Roman women in business. Barrett says that “there’s no way to avoid using some amount of hypothesis testing in the stories we tell about the past.” She appreciates that the series “uses informed reconstruction of people’s biographies as a way to emotionally engage” viewers while remaining grounded in evidence.
The production team built sets with millimeter precision in Malta to recreate the streets of Pompeii and Herculaneum. These sets allow Hiddleston to time travel seamlessly between the present in Pompeii’s ruins and reconstructed past scenes. The documentary is clear about what is backed by facts and evidence and what is dramatization, with Hiddleston rewinding time with a twist of his hand to play out different scenarios.
Sources
2. Science News