TO LIVE AND DIE IN POMPEII
AT THE TIME POMPEII was buried by the A.D. 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius, it was a bustling, cosmopolitan Roman city. Sitting at the crossroads of major regional arteries, it was a commercial hub with a mixed population that included descendants of Greek settlers and of people known as the Samnites who had migrated to the area from the Apennine Mountains in the fifth century b.c., as well as Romans who had arrived beginning in the third century b.c. Weaving their way along busy streets, residents and travelers alike rubbed elbows at public fountains and in bars, baths, and bakeries. The city eventually spilled beyond its walls, where shops, workshops, and apartment buildings sprang up just outside some of its seven gates.
These areas, however, had long been the realm of the dead. The Samnites buried their deceased there in shallow graves. After the Romans conquered Pompeii and established it as a colony in 80 b.c., they used these same spaces for their own cemeteries. From the late first century b.c. on, Pompeians constructed aboveground monumental tombs in necropolises outside all but one of the city gates. As was the custom throughout the Italian peninsula, almost all adults in Pompeii were cremated—the Romans typically did not inter bodies, aside from those of young children—and their urns
