Love your neighbour, like an ancient Roman

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2:14Good neighbors become good friends. If you've ever watched the long-running Australian drama series Neighbors, you'll recognize that ditty. According to Roman historian Dr Jess Benner, we could take a lesson on neighbourliness from ancient Rome, or more specifically, ancient Pompeii. Welcome to Life Lessons from History with me, Dave Musgrove. The concept is simple. I find a great historian and I ask them to propose a life lesson from history. Some learning from the past that will help us today to live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.

2:53Jess, welcome to the podcast. How are you? Hello. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me. All right. So the life lesson that we're going to talk about today is one that you dropped into me on email, which was try and build a sense of community like the Romans did in Pompeii. Now, there's lots of things we need to interrogate on that front, because the one thing that most people know about Pompeii is AD 79. And we're not going to talk too much about that, are we? we're going to talk about a different event. So tell me, what happened in Pompeii in the year AD 62? So yes, like you say, we all think about Pompeii, we think about the destruction.

3:31So you wouldn't necessarily think that they're necessarily resilient. And that was completely out of their control, of course. But in AD 62, all three, so we've got two different dates, we've got Seneca the Younger saying 63, and we've got Tacitus saying 62. This happens a lot with dates. But more recently, we think it's 62 scientifically. So a big earthquake hit Pompeii and it took out a lot of the city. And a lot of the people there, as Seneca tells us, were so shocked by the event that they just sort of wandered around aimlessly afterwards and didn't know what to do with themselves. A lot of people were maimed, people died as well, and a lot of buildings were destroyed in the meantime, including public and private buildings as well.

4:13And this was the start of the earthquakes that continued up to the eruption of AD 79, which we know today as being a warning sign, but they were just sort of used to it. A lot of the writers used to say, oh yeah, earthquakes happen all the time in Campania. And we actually do have, quite unusually, a freeze in the house of Caecilius Eucundus, who is a banker in Pompeii. He was quite a big banker, I think. And he may have died in this earthquake as well, because his records, his banking records, just fall off immediately after this event in AD 62 in February, the 5th of February. And he's suddenly not in the events anymore.

4:51But in his house, there is a frieze going around, so a sculptural frieze going around the altar in his house, in his atrium, that depicts the very earthquake that happened in AD 62. So you've got the Temple of Jupiter shaking and the statues falling off of their horses and things like that. So it's quite a unique thing to have a record, literary record, and then a pictorial record as well. and then also in the archaeological remains too. We've got cracks up walls, we've got them still trying to repair themselves up to AD 79 because these earthquakes continued. So it was a big important event for the Pompeians and it did set them back a little bit.

5:29Just in case any of our listeners aren't familiar with Pompeii itself, just give us a sense about what Pompeii was in the early AD 60s. What was it like, what sort of place and where was it? Yes. So it was in Campania, which was known as Campania Felix to the Pompeians and the Romans. This means that it was a very fertile, lucky place to be because of the volcanic material that made the region so fertile. It was very much known for its agriculture. So vines and olives were very big in Pompeii and the surrounding area. It was also on the coast, which we wouldn't think of today because it's quite far inland.

6:06But this is partly because of the eruption that pushed the coast out. It's near to Herculaneum, which is a very posh town in this time. But Pompeii itself was a very big melting pot of people. Because of the harbour and because of the connections to the roads and the river Sarno nearby, you had a lot of people arriving here by boat, but also by land. And so there were many different cultures here that were absorbed into the city. And around this time as well, they were, of course, in the early imperial period, they were starting to connect with places like Egypt and India there were different cultures coming into the city and the Romans were really really good at absorbing cultures but Pompeo particularly seems to have embraced it very well and we have this in the religions as well that we're seeing an uptake at this time also but it was very much a merchant city so in the first century AD we see a lot of workshops and shops popping up across the city and also a lot of gardens as well.

7:03They're very much rooted in the land as a Pompeian. It was a very busy place to live, but quite an ordinary town. We wouldn't think that now because it's extraordinary in the way that it was preserved, but it was a very ordinary town in the Roman period. It had also been quite a rebellious town. It had actually gone against Rome in the earlier wars and was only colonized in around 80 BC by Sulla. So it was quite a little rebel in the eyes of the Roman state. And I think this sort of marred them for a little while after that, but they didn't get much time after that to find their own, really. How much of an impact did the earthquake have on Pompeii then?

7:40So regions, so there's nine regions in Pompeii. This is a modern construct, but they definitely had neighbourhoods. And the region closest to the amphitheatre, so in the southeastern corner, regions one and two, was very much affected by this. This might be because they were building apartment blocks here between about 300 and 180 BC. It was agricultural before that, and it was very much affected at this time by the earthquake. But throughout the city, there was problems because they couldn't rebuild. They didn't get the imperial support that they hoped they would. This was quite a normal thing for emperors to give relief after an earthquake or a natural disaster.

8:23Pompeii doesn't seem to have been given this. We have local responses to it. But putting a number on it, I do have numbers in terms of gardens, if you want to hear that. Okay, so we have 47 agricultural gardens in all of Pompeii, and that's the number AD 79. But previous to that point, in regions 1 and 2, we had only about 10 or 11 agricultural gardens that were in operation. and after the earthquake we had 35 by the time of 80 79 agricultural gardens so you can see their resilient response is horticulture immediately they think okay not only have we got lots of open space and we don't know what to do with it we need to construct more things here there's more buildings it's more cost there's more risk because the earthquakes keep happening is there any point probably not there's also a demand for horticultural products we already talked about the fact Pompeii was a lucky sort of city for fertility.

9:24And so they clearly saw an opportunity here in the destruction. And this is why I fondly think of Pompeii as an incredibly resilient city. They bounced back by finding opportunity in the gaps, literally. So there were open spaces, they were taking the materials, reusing them from buildings that had been demolished, or they were demolishing them themselves. And they were opening up huge vineyards and orchards and vegetable plots in regions one and two. So yes, in terms of that, that's a huge increase. It's about 290 % increase in agricultural gardens after the earthquake. So it gives you an idea of how much was taken out as well.

10:04Now look, if the lesson we're trying to draw from this is that we can learn something about community spirit and sort of neighbourliness from the response that the Pompeians had to this disaster, we need to understand a bit more about what they did to respond to the disasters. What else did they do and how far was it a community effort? Yes, yeah, it's a really good question. So there's something that's really important, our occupational groups in the Roman period, Collegia. They were sort of sometimes an official way, well, this is what the emperors hoped, they were an official way to manage the occupational group around a trade.

10:43So there were ones that were sanctioned by the Senate, but there are other ones that popped up Because ultimately, it only benefited people, tradespeople, to have a community around them. And this is one of the best examples we have from Pompeii, because we have many, many different types of these occupational groups. We even know that they were disbanded, or at least the Senate tried to, after the riot in AD 59, which happened in Pompeii, between Pompeians and a local town during gladiatorial fights. and after that the collegia were sort of seen as a problem and they were always seen as a problem because it was groups coming together in en masse and the emperors and senate never liked that sort of thing it caused trouble in their eyes so for example and sticking with the garden idea we've got the pomari who were united fruit sellers and i found that they pop up only after ad62 too.

11:39So when we've got all these gardens popping up and so they're trying to support one another. So they were able to, these groups, provide monetary support or if you found yourself down and out but you were part of one of these groups, they would support one another. They had a united fund. This is the same if you passed away. They would often, you'd find on funerary epitaphs, this is given by this group. And this could be in the military as well. There were different types of these groups. So I think when crisis hits, you find these things becoming more obvious in towns, in the archaeological record, like with the Pomari.

12:17They suddenly pop up and they're very visible. And they may well have existed before this point, but it is unusual that they have no record before this point. And then a crisis hits, there's loads of gardens. Oh, they need a community around them. And one of the big facets of defining resilience in resilience theory is shared knowledge and being able to rely back on a group when you need it. But shared knowledge in particular would have been really important in Pompeii. They were, like I said, very rooted in agriculture, but then later on, very merchant heavy. This was all knowledge-based. They were learning from one another.

12:54You'd have apprenticeships of sorts as well. So being able to rely back on these networks was really, really important. And we do see it poking through in the archaeological record every now and then. They're hard to find, but once you find them, it's rather satisfying because you think, yes, they had a network around them. Yeah. Thinking about that community, Ephos, you made an interesting point to me when we were sort of chatting about this before the interview, that the fact that they had a strong community meant that it was easier to fail. Is that right? Tell me what your thinking is there.

13:29I think the concept of failure in the ancient world is just so, so interesting because the more I think about it, the more I think they didn't have a concept of failure in the way that we do. I think they had a concept of it's how you deal with the situation at hand that can be honourable rather than the outcome that's important. And you can definitely see that in Pompeii because they're responding and trying different things out and some things wouldn't have worked. They might not, you know, remain in the archaeological record. But the things that do clearly did work. So they were finding gaps.

14:05Instead of looking at things as failure, it was an opportunity to reinvent and rechange your your society your family your occupational situation whatever it might be and so how far was that um ability to embrace opportunity as you describe because there was this sense of community in a sense that they could sort of fall back on something because there was no safety net there was no social security so what how does that manifest itself, do you think? Yeah, it's a really good question. So again, with the occupational groups, they're the biggest one. And this hierarchical situation in Roman society, where you could rely on the patron that you have, or vice versa as well.

14:52And so there's a story, and I can't remember the senator, but there's a funerary epitaph who is, he's dedicating it to his wife and saying that he was exiled for something or the other. This happened all the time. And she was his fiance say at the time. And in this epitaph, he says that she hid all of his stuff and dealt with the situation in Rome while he was exiled and waited for him to come back. So there was definitely community around her allowing that to happen. That's quite important. And he wouldn't have been able to do that without that community, for example. That's just one tiny example.

15:26But community was everything to the Romans. They considered it to be honourable and virtuous, to rely on one another and above all, well, I don't know if they really enacted this to be fair, but to be kind and Stoics thought, you know, being kind, but also making sure that everything you choose to do is virtuous in the sense that it's not stepping over other people to get there. And that relies on community, that relies on one another working with each other.

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16:40Ballot through 325. While supplies last. Soil offer excludes Alaska and Hawaii. Loyalty program subject to terms and conditions. See Lowe's.com slash terms for details. Subject to change. Point boosters subject to exclusions and more terms apply. One time only offer. This is your fix. I'm your host, Stassi Schroeder. Welcome to Tell Me Lies, the official podcast. What's the most unhinged thing of season three? Steven, because he's so evil I do think he is misunderstood You see everyone face consequences It's intoxicating The writers just know how to trick you There's always a twist in this show Tell Me Lies, the official podcast January 6th And stream the new season of Tell Me Lies January 13th on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus So it was a positive virtue to be community-minded And Rome wasn't in any way a homogenous place, was it?

17:31Ethnically or in any way, really. Loads of different people living under the umbrella of Rome. So how did they manage that idea of bringing all these disparate peoples together, do you think? Religion was a main way to do that. Yes. Religion was a really good way to do this. So, you know, there were so many different religions in Pompeii. We touched on this earlier. There were multicultural approach to religion. We had obviously the pagan gods that they worshipped. But as time went on, one of the main reasons that Rome did so well instead of Greece was because the Hellenistic culture didn't want to accept other religions into their strata.

18:10But the Romans did. They understood that syncretism, so the mixing of different religions, benefited them greatly. And so they made sure that they embraced this. And actually, it went so far as the emperors embracing these religions. themselves. So in the Doma Soria, so Nero's golden house, we have little pictures of Anubis. So the god that was a dog from Egyptian religion. There, right there in the frescoes. It was so important to them that they amalgamated all of these religions together. So yes, religion was one of those. It brought people together every day to worship if they wanted to. And it would create community in the sense that it was community is based on shared interests as well so when they were showing off their religions in their house the things that they were worshipping that was another way to do it because people were coming in and out of these houses and the main thing that was important in a house was display so from the middle class upwards you had to make sure that you had the right things on display if you were displaying the right religions let's say in Pompeii we have a lot of Isis going on in the houses in the first century AD in the decoration that wasn't an accident they were doing that on purpose this was display and this was a way to create a community around yourself so you had religion but then you had also occupational communities as well then you had your neighborhood communities so they even had shrines in the neighborhoods so on corners compitalis and they would all gather there so we've got actually graffiti from very many different people around these shrines that were saying okay so i'm so and so here is my prayer you almost never see what the prayer is by the way it's almost like they're acknowledging that there's lots of people going to be passing this and interacting with this piece of graffiti so make it as open as possible almost as a guide as you might see in a church today actually with a prayer so there were many different ways to create community around yourself and also family as well family was so so important to the romans you had obviously the head of the household the Peta Familias.

20:16And then everybody came down beyond that. And being a freedman in particular, you had the opportunity to be a part of that family that you'd been freed from, but also the wider freedman community. It was a great opportunity to become one of the Augustales, so the people that worshipped the family of Augustus. And that was open to freedmen, which is unusual. And so there's another community opportunity as well. So the more you're in, the better off you are really. So just trying to think about what we might learn from that today. I mean, sadly, religion probably isn't the unifying force in Britain that it might have been.

20:54So we need to think of some other unifying forces that might bring us together, I suppose. That's maybe what we need to think about. I think it's the being in person element that we've lost. You know, even we were talking about how you would do podcasts on Zoom more and you don't get that facial interaction and the relationship is different. And they had that every day. Pompeii was, relatively speaking, a small place. People would have known one another. And so I think we've lost that sense where, you know, in London it's very unusual to know your neighbours. You just go in and out of your house, you go to work, you come home.

21:31And it wasn't like that then. Apart from the fact that the higher-up society you got, the more you would have your front doors open deliberately so people could see in and see what you were getting up to, how many clients that you had. Ah, okay. So the bigger your atrium, the more important you were because the more clients you needed to fit in it. Some people even took out rooms on the side to make more room for an atrium, which is wild, really. They had less house to live in. But that just gives you an example of what was important to them. It's definitely visibility, but also the fact that you can walk in and out of these places.

22:03An atrium was fairly public. It was getting into the other parts of the house that was different. But I think that's what we've lost. We don't have necessarily neighbourhoods anymore, and they definitely had those. They had tribes for voting, but you would have certain benefits from being in a tribe as well. People that were made citizens were very proud on their funerary epitaphs and said that they were part of this tribe. And there's one specific example where he's only just been made a citizen and he's only just been made part of this tribe. And he's so proud of it. It meant a lot to be part of a community.

22:37if you were on your own it's very much like in nature if you were on your own you wouldn't survive so I very much think that we've got so used to living independently now and to the Romans it just wasn't a thing you know I can't think of any examples where they would have managed on their own there's a very old so it's pseudo virgilian it's not necessarily virgil we don't think but there's a poem it's called moratum and it's about a farmer who has a slave and he's pretty much living on his own and it's very much the old Roman ideal of him being very virtuous and so on and so forth but he's also depicted as very tired and worn out and lonely and he goes to market every day and he comes back home and he would have had some level of community when he went to the market because he would have known the same trades people every day but apart from that he was he was on his own not necessarily thriving and then in the first century AD we have examples all the time of people thriving, freedmen, whoever, who had community around them.

23:38There was always some discussion of, oh, I'm part of this or I'm part of that. So I think that's what we've lost today. So it sounds like they were very proactive in terms of trying to forge this community ethos and individually making sure they were part of groups. I'm reminded now of the ongoing debate. This is way out of your period. So I'm not expecting you to have thoughts on this, but the early modern historians debate the decline of neighbourliness a lot. And sort of the idea is that you move from a socially minded medieval society into a much more individualistic one after that. And I'm sure there's lots of discussion about whether that's right or not.

24:14So it sounds like ancient Rome was very much a community minded society rather than an individualistic society. Or is that far too simplistic? Yeah, I think anything's simplistic. Sorry about that. Labels. No, no, it's any sort of labels to do with the Romans. anyone could argue is simplistic but yes at the same time it could be that because as the examples I've given you they they were very proud of being part of particular communities whether it was a trade community or a religion or family or even just their ancestry their name going all the way back or their relation to a god that was a connection to something else and at the moment you're right we sort of live as we are we have our nuclear family and we probably go back as far as our great grandparents if that they didn't do that you know they would have their funerary masks of ancestors in their atrium just to remind them that they were part of something bigger going way back and it would remind other people of that as well so they were definitely community minded I I would say so I'm sure scholars would agree with me or disagree with me but it depends how you look at it.

25:24Maybe. So we need more ancestor worship. I mean, maybe this is where the whole family history research vibe came in, that people were thinking that's the answer to our community problems. Anyway, look, we need to crack on. You just mentioned sort of the in-person experience, the ultimate in-person experience for the Romans is going to the toilet. You know, I'm very interested in toilets. I've done a lot a podcast on the history of toilets and people are always interested in communal toilets in Rome. What are your views on how far going to the toilet with your neighbours fosters a sense of community?

26:00I love this so much. It did. It was a very communal area. It seems completely wild to us now and actually it's probably like from the Victorian period onwards that we started getting really fussy about it but it was a very communal thing so you would go into the public latrines and they would often be a lot of them so benches um you'd have a semi-circular sort of cut out of them and you would sit on there and do your business and you would be sitting right next to somebody else you would be having a conversation with so-and-so down the road or across from you or whatever it was to the extent that it was that communal that they shared sponges on sticks of course to clean themselves but it was a very good place to meet and do business again similar to the baths or any communal area gladiator fights the same where you're meeting the same people over and over you would of course have neighborhoods that would just use a certain sort of literally not going to go across the city so you can keep seeing the same people it's a bit like going to the pub today so yes it was very communal in that sense and we have a lot of graffiti so people were spending a lot of time in here.

27:07You can't just quickly scratch into a wall. So they were spending a good amount of time in there. To them, it wasn't unusual to use that to their advantage, any sort of communal area to their advantage. And going to the toilet wasn't immune from that at all. So would you agree with my thesis then that we can foster a sense of community by developing communal toilets in Britain today that we all go to? Sure, let's take out the cubicles, see how it goes. I mean, obviously there's a lot of tension around toilets right now, so maybe we shouldn't do that. Okay, now look, just in terms of AD 79 and the eruption, Vesuvius eruption, which destroyed the city, presumably there was no coming back from that.

27:51They couldn't rebuild from that because most of the city was under, I don't know, several metres of volcanic debris. Exactly. Exactly. Herculaneum was completely buried. And Pompeii, if you would have gone in AD 79 after the eruption, you would have seen bits of buildings poking out. The volcanic material went up to about six meters. So it's very, very deep. And yeah, so after the eruption, like I said, there was a relief effort to go back and see, assess the situation, but it would have been a complete wasteland. I mean, you can just imagine it was like a gravestone with things popping out and people were trying to tunnel down to find their homes.

28:32I mean, they of course knew that their families weren't there. I can imagine, you would imagine that people came back to the place to find one another because I've often wondered how they would have found one another if they'd gone off somewhere else, wherever they could go. No phones. Exactly. And they would have to come back at some point probably to find one another because it was complete chaos for a whole day this eruption went on. So yes, people started tunneling down there's even graffiti in in been found that says house dug you know by in in latin so we know that they were going down to try and find stuff and like i said public buildings they were trying to repurpose with the marble and things and important materials but people are also trying to find their own houses i mean how do you do that with just a wasteland it's almost impossible isn't it and there are holes in the houses from this period but later periods as excavators, treasure hunters as well.