COULD THE POPULATION OF POMPEII BE SAVED?

Everyone knows what happened at Pompeii. A mountain exploded, a city was buried, and its people were caught mid-gesture and preserved forever in the ash. It is one of the few facts about the ancient world that almost nobody bothers to doubt. It is also, in its most important particular, wrong. The city held something on the order of eleven thousand people. The excavated dead number roughly eleven hundred. The overwhelming majority of Pompeians walked out of Pompeii, resettled along the coast within a day's travel of the ruin, married, prospered, paid for public buildings, and were absorbed so completely into the towns that took them in that historians needed two thousand years and a database of family names to find them again. Which turns the famous question inside out. The mystery is not why they died. It is why anyone was standing there in the first place - on a mountain that had done exactly this before, to a Bronze Age population that also fled, also mostly survived, and was also forgotten. And why, today, seven hundred thousand people live inside an evacuation zone drawn around an assumption, on the slopes of a volcano that has been sealed shut and accumulating pressure since 1944. This book follows three threads through the same catastrophe: the physics of why the mountain kills the way it does, the recovered hours of individual people whose last decisions we can now reconstruct almost minute by minute, and the uncomfortable discovery that societies are magnificent at helping the survivors of a disaster and nearly incapable of preventing one. Along the way it introduces the geologists, classicists, geneticists, and civil-protection officials who have spent their careers arguing about all of it, occasionally changing their minds in public, and once announcing that the history books would have to be rewritten only to quietly un-rewrite them four years later. The past does not repeat itself here. It simply waits, at a tempo longer than any institution can hold in mind. Keywords: Pompeii, Vesuvius, volcanology, archaeology, disaster preparedness, risk, ancient Rome