Pompeii’s survivors shine in a new documentary series

Pompeii is best known as a tomb. The ancient Roman city’s inhabitants were instantly encased in ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, their last breaths suspended in time. But a new documentary series tells a different story: one about survivors.

Pompeii: Out of Time, hosted by actor Tom Hiddleston of Marvel franchise fame, follows three real Romans through the last day of Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum. Across three episodes — premiering July 22 on National Geographic and July 23 on Disney+ and Hulu — we meet Avianius, a teenage bronzesmith apprentice, Julia Felix, a bathhouse owner, and an unnamed Praetorian guard.

Their existence (and fate) has been confirmed through historical records and archaeological evidence. The show fills gaps in those records with fiction, drawing insights from disaster psychology to imagine how these people may have reacted as earthquakes shook Pompeii and the volcano began belching ash and molten rock. By intermingling evidence and imagination, the series does a brilliant job bringing ancient human stories to life. And Mount Vesuvius’ destructive timeline is the ticking clock that adds pressure and urgency to every scene.

Hiddleston, who studied Classics at the University of Cambridge, explains that the Latin words for history and story are the same. Director and showrunner 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.

“This is a different way of telling a true story,” Barbor-Might told me.

In each episode, Hiddleston time travels seamlessly between the present in Pompeii’s ruins to the past, which are sets reconstructed with millimeter precision in Malta. He rewinds time with a twist of his hand to play out different scenarios. The documentary is clear about what’s backed by facts and evidence and what’s dramatization.

Avianius is the first Roman we meet. The series’ creators found him in a historian’s database of inscriptions placing people in Pompeii shortly before the eruption and locating them elsewhere after the disaster. The scenarios created for Avianius are particularly poignant: He argues with his single mother and has fits of teenage pique. He’s ultimately a scared boy trying to survive a nightmare scenario.

Next, we meet Julia Felix, whose estate was one of the first houses ever excavated in Pompeii, says archaeologist Caitie Barrett of Cornell University. Barrett helps Hiddleston tell Felix’s story: She was unusual in Roman culture as an independent woman who owned a business. Archaeologists found no sign of horses, carts or treasures — except a necklace — suggesting her wealthy estate was evacuated. The documentary heartbreakingly explores decisions that Felix, her guests and employees may have made about whether to stay or go as conditions outside become increasingly dire.

The series imagines the final character, the Praetorian guard, as a jaded veteran who may have helped people escape the nearby city Herculaneum. His story illustrates the panic many people probably experienced and the cooler heads that could have allowed most of Herculaneum’s residents to flee before the city was buried.

Pompeii: Out of Time bills itself as telling the stories of survivors, so (slight spoiler) I was crushed to learn that not all the protagonists survived the disaster.

No one knows the actual circumstances these people lived through, but the documentary explores plausible scenarios. That’s something historians and archaeologists often do when physical evidence is lacking, Barrett says.

“I think there’s no way to avoid using some amount of hypothesis testing in the stories we tell about the past,” Barrett says. She appreciates that the series “uses informed reconstruction of people’s biographies as a way to emotionally engage with the past, because these were real people. They did have real lives.”