On the edge of catastrophe: life in Pompeii as Vesuvius was about to erupt

The eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 buried Pompeii and its citizens beneath pumice, stone and ash for centuries. But as Jess Venner reveals, we can now reconstruct the lives of its citizens before the catastrophe

A four‑panel collage of scenes and artworks from Pompeii. The top left shows a stone‑paved street lined with ruined Roman buildings under a bright sky. The top right shows a fragment of a building interior with surviving frescoes beneath a wooden roof. The bottom left shows a still‑life fresco of food, vessels, and folded cloth. The bottom right shows a detailed mythological fresco with multiple human figures in classical style.

Published: May 15, 2026 at 5:00 PM

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On a morning in the last days of October AD 79, Pompeii pulsed with the energy of a city preparing for the shift into winter. Carts rattled over basalt blocks, their iron wheels grinding in grooves worn by decades of travel. Shopkeepers swept dust from their thresholds and fishmongers declared their prices across the forum in loud voices. On street corners, the names of politicians stretching back across the years – Popidius, Sabinus, Pansa – were scrawled in the same reds and blacks that coloured the city’s streets.

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A faint tremor shook the ground underfoot. Pompeii had long learned to live with the earthquakes that had plagued the region of Campania since the great quake that destroyed swathes of the city in AD 62 – a portent of the even greater catastrophe to follow 17 years later.

Among the people travelling, shopping and working in Pompeii that October were four whose stories, woven together, reveal the texture of everyday life. A businesswoman whose estate acts as a microcosm of Pompeian society. A fish-sauce producer whose name travelled across the Mediterranean. An innkeeper serving his neighbourhood. And a priest who tended the temple of an Egyptian deity rebuilt by a freedman’s family after the AD 62 earthquake.

Thanks to studies of evidence unearthed from beneath the volcanic debris, it’s possible to identify individuals and reconstruct aspects of their personal, spiritual and professional lives. Using this knowledge, we can picture what they may have been doing on the final days before the fateful eruption.

Their lives certainly overlapped and intertwined, shaped by the same streets, the same tremors and the same currents of trade, labour and belief.

An ancient Roman fresco showing two shelves. The upper shelf holds piles of silver and gold coins with a money bag between them. The lower shelf displays writing tools: a rolled scroll, a pair of wax tablets with a stylus, and an inkpot. The painted surface is cracked and worn with age.

This fresco from the house of Julia Felix depicts coins, a money bag, wax tablets and a stylus, reflecting her status as a successful businesswoman (Image by Alamy)

A woman of substance

The sounds that drifted over the walls of Julia Felix’s estate from the busy Via dell’Abbondanza would have been reassuringly familiar. Even in late October, Pompeii’s main shopping thoroughfare thrummed with activity.

Julia’s days were filled with activities typically undertaken by men: meeting tenants and clients, business dealings and negotiations. Her position in Pompeii was extraordinary: few women in the city – anywhere in the Roman world, for that matter – managed property of such scale or ambition.

Julia’s estate occupied an entire block. After the earthquake of AD 62, she had reshaped a damaged insula (city block) into a commercial complex that offered almost everything the people of Pompeii might need. Customers streamed into the luxurious baths, her tenants nurtured families in her rental apartments, and games-goers and travelling merchants drank in the four tabernae at the front of her property.

Julia Felix had created a commercial complex that offered almost everything the people of Pompeii might need

Earlier that year, she had commissioned a painter to advertise these facilities on the facade of her baths. In broad red letters, layered among election slogans and neighbours’ endorsements, was written: “To let, in the estate of Julia Felix, daughter of Spurius: elegant baths for respectable people, shops with upper rooms, and apartments… for five continuous years.”

Her choice to mention her father is unusual. His name, Spurius (meaning false or counterfeit), may hint at an illegitimate birth – something that most people would have avoided sharing. It is a curious and rather enigmatic detail, and one that likely raised as many questions about Julia’s background in the past as it does today. (Her name has led many to believe that she was a freedwoman of the Julii clan, which also gave us Julius Caesar.)

A bronze tripod sculpture supported by three dancing satyrs arranged in a triangle. Each satyr has a muscular human torso, goat‑like legs, and outstretched arms lifting an ornate bowl above their heads. The bowl is decorated with a frieze of small figures and a patterned rim. The metal surface shows age and dark patina.

Priapic satyrs form the legs of a bronze tripod brazier found in Julia Felix’s house – another reminder of her wealth, reflecting a level of success and business activity unusual for a Roman woman (Image by Getty Images)

The more we find at Pompeii, the more we realise that women such as Julia Felix were at the heart of the Roman economy. Their legal and social freedom to engage in business helps explain why the Roman world was, economically speaking, far more dynamic than the Greek city states that preceded it. Women appear in inscriptions and wax writing tablets from Pompeii as moneylenders, traders, property owners, priestesses and workshop supervisors.

One such woman, Poppaea Note, took loans at interest. Umbricia Fortunata, a worker and, likely, freedwoman of Aulus Umbricius Scaurus – about whom we’ll read more later – sold garum (fermented fish sauce) to the people of Pompeii. The well-connected entrepreneur and priestess Eumachia constructed buildings in the forum. Other women, such as Sutoria Primigenia, wrote electoral graffiti outside their homes, despite not having the right to vote.

These realities intersected at Julia’s estate. In the city’s final days, she moved through her home surrounded by images of the world she had built: frescos showing wax tablets, purses of money, traders at work in the forum. Meanwhile, slaves prepared the dining room that opened onto her inner garden, the air cooled by water cascading over glistening marble.

A well‑preserved ancient Roman courtyard garden with neatly trimmed, geometric shrubs arranged around stone-lined paths or channels. Roofed colonnades with weathered columns frame the space, and partially ruined stone walls stand behind them. Tall umbrella pines and cypress trees rise in the background against a clear blue sky.

The lush garden of Julia Felix’s estate featured a series of pools forming a channel designed to evoke the river Nile – a nod to the land of the owner’s favourite deity, the Egyptian goddess Isis (Image by Alamy)

Inside was a triclinium: three marble couches adorned with rich fabrics and cushions, on which Romans reclined. Around them was laid out a cornucopia of produce picked from Julia’s walled kitchen garden. The walls were painted with scenes from the Nile: of people fishing, feasting and quarrelling among reeds and riverbanks. Across the garden, set back from the long euripus channel designed to evoke the Nile itself, stood a shrine honouring Julia’s favoured deity, the Egyptian goddess Isis.

Everyman priest

The influence of the cult of Isis reached far beyond the walls of Julia Felix’s estate. Just south of the forum, where Pompeii’s busiest streets led into the theatre district, actors rehearsed in the Greek Theatre and gladiators trained in the barracks nearby. Here, somewhat isolated from that street noise within high precinct walls, stood the Temple of Isis, where the priest Amisusius was based.

Red letters above the doorway record the reconstruction of the temple: “Numerius Popidius Celsinus, son of Numerius, rebuilt the Temple of Isis from the foundations at his own expense, after it had collapsed in an earthquake. Because of his generosity, despite his age of six years, the decurions [city senators] enrolled him among their number without charge.” This confirms that Isis was seen as important to civic life, so repairing her temple was not simply pious but socially strategic, translating religious generosity into visibility and advancement.

A weathered Roman marble slab carved with several lines of Latin text in tall, evenly spaced capital letters. The surface is cracked and worn, with chips along the edges, but the inscription remains mostly legible against the pale stone.

An inscription above Pompeii’s Temple of Isis records the rebuilding of the structure by the young Numerius Popidius Celsinus, who enhanced his status with city authorities as a result (Image by Dreamstime)

Amisusius’s role was not limited to ceremony. He maintained the temple as a functioning place: overseeing its objects, its spaces and its routines, and acting as the point of contact between the goddess and her worshippers. In the house of Decimus Octavius Quartio, one of the temple’s regular visitors, was a painted portrait of Amisusius, labelled by name. For many Pompeians, he was the face of the cult – a familiar figure through whom access to the goddess was made possible.

Before dawn each morning, along with his fellow priests and priestesses, Amisusius rose from one of the small rooms within the precinct and began to prepare the temple for use. The scent of incense from the previous evening lingered in the portico, and statues of Isis, Anubis and Harpocrates stood waiting in the half-light. At the centre, Isis remained veiled until dawn. Her presence was something that had to be activated, and her priest controlled that access. The daily unveiling signified the beginning of sacred time, just as clearly as the opening of a workshop or market stall marked the start of work elsewhere in the city.

Once the temple was awake, Amisusius’s labour continued. Lamps were refilled, linen garments prepared, and ritual equipment arranged. Visitors arrived steadily: women hoping for help in childbirth, traders seeking protection for journeys or ventures, freedpeople and slaves asking for stability in uncertain lives. Isis was a goddess who listened to individuals’ concerns. Her temple functioned as a place where ordinary people could bring private anxieties into a public, structured space.

Isis was a goddess who listened to individuals’ concerns. Her temple was a place where ordinary people could bring private anxieties

In the afternoon, the statue of Isis was veiled once more, closing the day’s formal interaction with the goddess. Perhaps a faint tremor beneath the priests’ feet caused the lamps to flicker. After the earthquake of AD 62, the continued performance of ritual, not least at the temple of Isis, offered a ray of hope in an unsteady world.

A partially ruined Roman temple‑like structure with a raised stone platform and a central staircase leading up to it. Several columns—some intact, others broken—stand across the front, with worn carvings visible on the walls behind them. The surrounding area includes low stone walls and patches of greenery, indicating an open archaeological site.

The remains of the Temple of Isis – not only the focus of that deity’s cult, but also a locus of civic and social life in Pompeii (Image by Dreamstime)

Fishy business

Not far away, others conducted very different rituals with similar devotion. Success in the city’s various industries required craft and commercial ambition – and few understood that world better than Aulus Umbricius Scaurus, the man behind one of the earliest recognisable brands in history.

“The flower of garum, made of the mackerel – a product of Scaurus, from the shop of Scaurus,” read the painted labels on his jars. Garum was a fermented fish sauce – the Roman equivalent of ketchup. A popular addition to the dishes of poor and rich alike, it was stirred into dishes across the Mediterranean. Sometime in the mid-first century AD, Scaurus realised just how lucrative selling garum could be.

So widespread was his operation that nearly a third of the fish-sauce jars recovered from Pompeii and Herculaneum bear his name or those of the freedmen and slaves who helped run his shops. It was undoubtedly Scaurus’s product that caused Pliny the Elder to write admiringly of Pompeii’s fish sauce in his encyclopaedic Natural History in the first century AD, stating that the city was famous for its good garum.

A rectangular mosaic showing a light‑coloured amphora outlined in small tesserae against a dark background. The vessel has two handles and a pointed base, with the letters “LOVA LIO” arranged across its body. The mosaic surface is slightly uneven and aged.

A mosaic from the house of garum (fish sauce) tycoon Aulus Umbricius Scaurus, featuring branding used across his products (Image by AKG)

Scaurus oversaw a network of at least six garum workshops across Pompeii. In one of these, tucked down a side street close to the vineyards and orchards that studded the neighbourhood, sauce was fermented in large terracotta jars known as dolia sunk deep into the floor of what had once been a garden courtyard. The heavy, salty tang of fermenting mackerel emanating from the jars hit the noses of passers-by. Indeed, the odour was so persistent that, when excavators lifted the lids of these great containers nearly 1,900 years later, they reported an extraordinarily strong scent of fish still lingering within.

This workshop was where the final stage of Scaurus’s business unfolded. Apprentices stirred the prized sauce, while others ladled it into small jars known as urcei, which were labelled by mostly illiterate slaves in brisk, practised strokes. Carts then carried the output towards local shops, to the harbour and on to markets beyond the city walls.

After five decades in the trade, Scaurus himself was no longer to be found elbow-deep in garum but instead in his villa overlooking the sparkling waves of the Bay of Naples. Here he was only a stone’s throw from Pompeii’s main harbour, where much of his produce entered and left the city. The moment visitors stepped inside his villa, they were met by four carefully designed floor mosaics made with small tesserae tiles depicting his finest products. Each was labelled in the usual formula. “The flower of garum, made of mackerel, a product of Scaurus, from the shop of Scaurus,” declared one panel. “The flower of liquamen,” announced another, advertising a different grade of fish sauce.

In late October, his days were filled with routine: meeting clients, reviewing shipments and keeping stock moving smoothly before winter seas made travel uncertain. And in AD 79, life was about to become more precarious than ever.

A Roman still‑life fresco showing a glass bowl filled with apples and grapes on the left, with grapes spilling over the rim. To the right, a large vessel lies on its side beside a smaller clay pot filled with dried fruit or nuts. The pale background is cracked and textured with age.

An amphora of garum (leaning) – similar to those sold by Scaurus – appears in another fresco from Julia Felix’s home (Image by Alamy)

Heart and soul

A block or so from the garum workshop of Scaurus stood Euxinus’s inn – one of the city’s ‘pub gardens’, in the heart of working-class Pompeii. Inns were spaces where customers lingered, returned daily and took part in the shared life of the neighbourhood – exchanging news, gossip and opinion while being served hearty food and drink.

That purpose was written directly onto the building itself. Election slogans jostled for space on the exterior wall in layers of faded red and black, repainted and refreshed as campaigns came and went. Among them was a shop sign designed by Euxinus himself. Below a painted phoenix perched on a shelf were Latin words meaning: “The phoenix is lucky – may you be, too.” Alongside was an election notice: “Euxinus asks you to elect Quintus Postumius and Marcus Cerrinius as aediles [magistrates], together with Iustus. Hinnulus wrote this.”

That these slogans appeared outside Euxinus’s inn is telling. Inn walls were highly visible, seen frequently by regular customers, and such messages were discussed aloud over cups of wine. Writing a notice in this space was less about persuasion than presence: a way of signalling connections, loyalties and participation in civic life. For men such as Euxinus, publicly backing candidates tied his business to the city and its people, and embedded his inn within the everyday concerns of those who gathered there.

A Roman fresco showing three birds among stylised plants. At the top, a large golden bird with a crest stands amid green foliage with red flowers. Below it, two peacocks face each other, each with long, patterned tail feathers and small crests. A short line of Latin text separates the two scenes. The colours are vivid against the aged, cracked surface.

A sign painted on the outside wall of Euxinus’s inn tempts passers-by to enter with words meaning: “The phoenix is lucky – may you be, too” (Image by Bridgeman)

Inside, the air was warm with the smell of wine and stew. The sounds of dice on tables and laughter bounced off the frescoed walls. As in most bars across the city, dolia were sunk into the counter, holding food and drink of varying quality, ready to be ladled to customers who flowed in and out throughout the day. Behind the bar, a wine amphora recorded the owner and his address for delivery: “The inn of Euxinus, near the amphitheatre.” It was a practical label, but also a declaration of place and reputation: Euxinus was well known in Pompeii.

The first-century AD poet Martial joked that “nowhere is the wine worse” than in cheap taverns, but Euxinus must have understood his clientele. They wanted affordability, familiarity and somewhere they could feel they belonged. He also tried his hand at winemaking. Beyond the garden door, customers lingered in the dappled calm of one of the two small vineyards he had planted, drinking a cup or two of his homemade wine, and enjoying a space that blurred the lines between work, leisure and home.

Animated lives

Imagining such vignettes reminds us that, in the weeks before the eruption, Pompeii was not a city holding its breath but a bustling, thriving place. Days unfolded within a milieu shaped by resilience and endeavour: streets rebuilt after earthquakes, workshops sustained by trade, houses and gardens enriched by cultural exchange. From dawn to dusk, small, repetitive yet disparate interactions animated life.

A Roman fresco showing four people gathered around a small table. Two are seated and appear to be playing a game with small objects, while two others stand nearby watching. The background is faded and cracked, with areas of missing paint that reveal the fresco’s age.

A Pompeii fresco shows customers imbibing in a tavern – a place where, as Euxinus would have understood, they wanted to feel they belonged (Image by AKG)

Within this tapestry, women such as Julia Felix show us how enterprise and property were driven by female ambition as well as by male. Merchants such as Scaurus reveal an economy that reached far beyond the city walls, with Pompeian goods dispatched to distant shores. Figures such as Euxinus embody the everyday sociability and mutual reliance that kept neighbourhood life and the informal economy in motion. And religious figures, including the priests of Isis, remind us of the spiritual networks that bound together people of different origins, languages and expectations.

Taken together, these ordinary lives inform our understanding of a city defined not by its end but by its intensity. We hear voices carried across courtyards and out onto the street, with transactions, labour, ritual and ambition unfolding side by side. Up until the moment it fell silent, Pompeii was a city profoundly and restlessly alive.

We should also remember that the eruption of Vesuvius did not extinguish first-hand memories of Pompeii. Some residents survived, having left the city before, during or immediately after the disaster, and began again elsewhere along the Bay of Naples and further afield. Their experiences are difficult to recover but, in a small number of cases, traces remain.

The eruption of Vesuvius did not extinguish first-hand memories of Pompeii. Some residents left and survived

One is linked to the fish-sauce trade that flourished in Pompeii before the eruption. As we have seen, garum production was one of Pompeii’s most visible industries, and the Umbricius family was closely involved in its manufacture and distribution.

After the eruption, evidence of this trade and, seemingly, this family appears in the large port town of Puteoli, some 37 miles to the north. Puteoli was only lightly affected by the disaster, and remained one of the most important commercial centres in Roman Italy. And though we can’t say with certainty whether garum producer Aulus Umbricius Scaurus survived the eruption of Vesuvius, we do have one compelling hint that at least one member of his family may have escaped the carnage.

A framed Roman fresco showing a busy harbour scene with multi‑storey buildings, arches, and colonnades along the waterfront. Several boats and ships sit in the water, some with small figures aboard. Statues stand on top of tall columns throughout the port, and a pier or bridge extends into the harbour with people on it. The fresco is set in a dark wooden frame marked with the number 9514.

A view thought to be of Puteoli harbour, c60 AD. At least one member of Scaurus’s family may have settled here (Image by AKG)

Stamps on garum containers found elsewhere bear the name L Iunius Puteolanus. That cognomen (third name, typically passed from father to son in Roman society) means ‘of Puteoli’. Terracotta jar labels with similar wording – “The Flower of Garum of Puteolanus” – to that on Scaurus’s products suggest a close, perhaps familial, connection. Was Puteolanus a relative or descendant of Scaurus? Perhaps. It certainly seems that knowledge, methods and commercial identity travelled with those who escaped the eruption.

This evidence offers a unique perspective on the aftermath of Vesuvius. Though it is difficult to trace the stories of individuals, people likely did what people have always done in the aftermath of tragedy. Displaying admirable resilience, survivors employed their skills, contacts and, if they were fortunate, remaining wealth to begin anew.

Jess Venner is Leverhulme early career fellow at the University of Oxford, and author of The Lost Voices of Pompeii: The Final Day in Seven Lives (Mudlark, 2026)

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This article was first published in the May 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

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