Missing Persons
Greg Woolf · The Times Literary Supplement
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Summary
Greg Woolf reviews Stephen L. Tuck’s Escape from Pompeii and Jess Venner’s The Lost Voices of Pompeii, arguing that both replace the romanticized image of Pompeii as a city frozen in time with a messier account of evacuation, survival, and loss. Tuck uses material evidence and names found in neighboring communities to build a cautious case that many inhabitants escaped and blended into nearby towns, although such names cannot conclusively identify refugees. Venner reconstructs seven Pompeians from inscriptions, graffiti, financial records, objects, and urban remains through “critical fabulation,” producing vivid but necessarily less secure biographies, especially of enslaved people. Together, the books suggest that leaving the city did not ensure safety: some survivors returned or resettled, while others died beyond the walls awaiting rescue.
Highlights
- The ancients had no word for volcano. They had no conception of the molten rock that occasionally welled up to the surface beneath them; nor did they know that the city of Rome sat among the relics of past volcanoes, from the crater lakes of Bracciano and Bolsena, to the north, to the Castelli Romani, to its south, where emperors and, later, popes had their summer residences.
- ...when the traces of marine molluscs on the columns of the Temple of Serapis there showed that dry land had been plunged underwater in historical times. Then there is Vesuvius, whose rich volcanic soil produces the wine Lacryma Christi, the tears of Christ.
- But none of these warnings could prepare the inhabitants of Pompeii, Herculaneum and their surroundings for the Big One, the eruption that took place over a few days in 79 CE, either in late August (the conventional date, followed by Stephen L. Tuck in Escape from Pompeii) or a couple of months later (as Jess Venner in The Lost Voices of Pompeii prefers).
- The destruction wrought by the volcano was a high-profile disaster, attracting the immediate (but largely ineffective) attention of the young emperor, Titus, as it devastated the homes of some of the richest members of the Senate. Think Pacific Palisades, but without the emergency services.
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s romanticized The Last Days of Pompeii.
- Tuck is looking for missing persons – not the dead, but those who escaped from the disaster. The grotesque traces of bodies, preserved by plastercasts made from the cavities they left behind as their flesh decomposed, are well known.
- Some people presumably attempted to escape by sea. The stables, too, were mostly empty. Some would have fled by road, on cart or in carriages.
- But efforts of that kind cannot account for the fact that nearly 98 per cent of household shrines had been emptied of their gods. Like Aeneas fleeing a burning Troy in Virgil’s epic, the inhabitants of Pompeii had carried their gods away with them, along with their children and aged parents.
- (The enslaved, when freed, took on two of their former owner’s names.)Equally, it might simply reflect movement generated by marriage or business, or even personal conflict.
- Despite these difficulties, Tuck cautiously builds up a plausible picture of escapees blending into the communities that surrounded their former homes.
- She also includes the wealthy, independent Julia Felix and her women friends, who pass the Bechdel test in ways no woman described in Latin literature ever did. The enslaved, however, left lighter footprints, so Venner’s “Petrinus” is constructed from the fragments of many more scantily attested individuals.
- Escaping the fires of Pompeii was just the first step, and a long way from reaching the safety of even a nearby town. Some bodies have been found beyond the walls, sheltering in farms or simply waiting for a rescue that did not come.
Notes
Imagine that Hephaestus’ fire is on the verge of erupting. What would the consequences be for society -- and for the individual? Would some people escape? If so, who would make it out, and what would survival even look like? Cryptic as ever, the article suggests that something may happen soon: Hephaestus’ fire could erupt, disrupting the wealthy enclaves of the world’s leaders and elites. Such an upheaval might do more than destroy the existing order -- it could redistribute power and establish entirely new structures of authority across the Earth.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) was a prolific Victorian novelist, playwright, and politician who served in Parliament and briefly as Secretary of State for the Colonies, while also building one of the era’s most popular literary careers. He moved fluidly between fashionable “silver-fork” fiction, meticulously researched historical novels, and occult romances, and his prose -- especially the opening line of Paul Clifford -- later gave rise to the tongue-in-cheek Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for deliberately terrible sentences.
The Last Days of Pompeii (1834): Published in 1834 after Bulwer-Lytton was struck by Karl Briullov’s painting of the same disaster in Milan, the novel follows the Athenian Glaucus and his love Ione as the sinister Egyptian priest Arbaces schemes against them, all building toward the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. Beneath the romance, the book stages a clash between Greek, Egyptian, and nascent Christian worldviews, using Roman decadence and the coming faith as a lens on the ancient world’s spiritual crisis, and it is generally regarded as Bulwer-Lytton’s finest historical novel. What happens to the Athenian Glaucus? Glaucus survives. Wrongly condemned to be killed by a lion, he is saved amid the eruption of Vesuvius, then reunited with Ione and led through the ash-darkened streets to the shore by the blind Nydia. They escape Pompeii by boat, but Nydia -- who loves Glaucus without hope of return -- quietly drowns herself during the night. Ten years later, Glaucus and Ione are living happily in Athens; they have converted to Christianity, erected a tomb to Nydia, and remember her with gratitude and grief.
Zanoni (1842), often called Bulwer-Lytton’s Rosicrucian tale, centers on an immortal adept of an ancient secret brotherhood who falls in love with the young singer Viola Pisani, a passion that costs him the detachment his eternal life requires. Set against the Reign of Terror, the novel draws on Platonic ideas of divine “mania” and esoteric initiation, and ultimately dramatizes the conflict between pure intellect (embodied by Zanoni’s master Mejnour) and love, ending with Zanoni sacrificing his immortality to save his wife.
Source
- Author
- Greg Woolf
- Publication
- The Times Literary Supplement
- Date
- August 21, 2026
- Reviewed work
- Escape from Pompeii by Stephen L. Tuck; The Lost Voices of Pompeii by Jess Venner