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Everyday Lives: Pompeii

How did work, status and shared spaces shape everyday life in Pompeii?

Pompeii preserves more than the traces of a catastrophe. Follow food, houses, baths, labour and public life to explore the relationships that made a Roman town work, and the unequal positions people occupied within it. Each chapter follows a different question through specific evidence.

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The setting

Place & time.

The historical span

Different stories. Overlapping times.

The chapter order follows a question, rather than a straight line through time.

    Approximate periods covered by each story.

    The reading path

    Follow the work. Widen the picture.

    Start with food and follow the chapters as they are added. This opening chapter can also be read on its own.

    1. Chapter 1

      Read

      What Did People Eat in Pompeii? Bread, Street Food and Status

      When
      Where

      Bread, fish sauce and a meal at a street counter bring Pompeii’s everyday world into focus. Follow food from bakery to dining room—and discover whose work made eating possible.

    2. Chapter 2

      Read

      Pompeii’s Houses: Where Home, Work and Status Met

      When
      Where

      A garden could impress guests. An atrium could become a washing basin. Follow three Pompeian properties to see how home, work and status shared the same streets.

    3. Chapter 3

      Warm natural light falls across a vaulted room with a rectangular bathing pool and a stone basin.
      Read

      How Roman Baths Worked: The Hidden Machinery of Pompeii

      When
      Where

      The warm floor was only the beginning. Beneath Pompeii’s baths lay furnaces, pipes and a chain of work that turned fire and water into an everyday pleasure.

    4. Chapter 4

      A veiled Roman woman stands in a shaded portico overlooking a sunlit forum with columns and townspeople.
      Read

      Eumachia of Pompeii: A Woman’s Power Written in Stone

      When
      Where

      A woman’s name on Pompeii’s Forum was more than a signature. Eumachia’s inscriptions and statue reveal how money, religion and public honour could make a life visible.

    5. Chapter 5

      Two workers in simple tunics prepare bread beside a lava-stone rotary mill and masonry oven in an imagined Roman workshop.
      Read

      Who Kept Pompeii Running? Bakers, Fullers and Enslaved Labour

      When
      Where

      A loaf and a clean garment each depended on a chain of work. Pompeii’s mills, ovens and fulleries reveal those processes—and force us to ask who could leave when the work was done.

    6. Chapter 6

      Two anonymous women in draped clothing stand beside a plaster wall and tavern in an imagined first-century Pompeian street.
      Read

      No Vote, Still a Voice: Women and Elections in Pompeii

      When
      Where

      Asellina’s name appeared beneath a candidate’s on a Pompeian wall. She could not cast a vote, but her recommendation belonged to the campaign. What kind of political voice did that make possible?

    7. Chapter 7

      An imagined Pompeian street beneath a towering grey eruption column, with two anonymous figures moving through the foreground.
      Read

      Ash, Earthquakes and Escape: Pompeii’s Eruption in 79 CE

      When
      Where

      Pompeii was not destroyed in one instant. As pumice accumulated, buildings failed and ash-rich currents arrived, the danger changed. Letters and buried layers reveal the sequence—and its limits.

    8. Chapter 8

      An imagined Pompeian street with modest shops, anonymous people carrying goods and a stone fountain in morning sunlight.
      Read

      One Town, Unequal Lives: What Pompeii Can Tell Us About Rome

      When
      Where

      A courtyard could be a place to relax or a place to work. Pompeii reveals how ordinary activities connected people whose freedoms were far from equal—and why one town cannot tell the whole Roman story.

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