“The bittersweet memory of that day, eighteen years ago, had never left him. It was the second time he had been sold in his short lifetime, reduced to nothing more than a name and number scratched on a wax tablet, and still no one came to save him. He sometimes saw Poppaea in the streets. He always made sure to avoid her eye.”

This moment is from The Lost Voices of Pompeii, a new book that follows seven historical figures in the hours leading up to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Contrary to what its novelistic style suggests, it is a work of history, not historical fiction. Its author, the historian and archeologist Jess Venner, relies on an increasingly popular research method known as critical fabulation to bring the ruins of Pompeii to life. 

As she discussed with Big Think, Lost Voices uses critical fabulation to dispel many common myths surrounding the world-famous Italian city and its inhabitants.

Giving a voice to the voiceless

Put simply, critical fabulation is the practice of using evidence to speculate about historical events for which we have few written records. Coined by cultural historian Saidiya Hartman in her 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts,” which confronts the impossibility of truly understanding the lives of enslaved Black women in the U.S. with things like personal diaries and official documents alone, the methodology helps uncover the voices of people whom history has rendered voiceless. 

“The strength of this approach,” Venner writes in her introduction, “lies in its refusal to treat gaps in the evidence as dead ends. Instead, it regards absence as a productive space, one in which we can explore historically grounded possibilities, and reconstruct plausible scenarios using our common sense as fellow human beings, rather than simply acknowledging the loss.”  

In other words, critical fabulation “allows the historian to restore complexity, agency, and emotional depth to those who were historically marginalized or flattened by dominant narratives.”

One such individual featured in Lost Voices is Petrinus, an enslaved person. The only known record of his existence is a transaction in which he and another slave served as collateral. However, general knowledge about slavery in the early Roman Empire allows Venner to imagine how Petrinus might have spent the day of the eruption. The story follows Petrinus as he buys ingredients for a banquet held to bolster the electoral campaign of his master, a local politician named Caius Cuspius Pansa. At the banquet, Pansa makes a show of his generosity by emancipating Petrinus in front of his guests — an act which, though empowering, also leaves the freedman in need of a new job and place to sleep. 

Initially met with resistance due to concerns about accuracy and bias, critical fabulation is becoming more accepted in the academic world. 

“One reason for this,” Venner tells Big Think, “is that historians are also increasingly moving away from merely reconstructing past events in favor of examining the sensory, lived experience of historical figures. Instead of saying, ‘Here’s a wall with an old painting on it,’ they’re interested in learning how people from the past would have seen and related to that wall painting.”

A cataclysm revisited

Pompeii’s historical popularity and prominent role in popular culture have given rise to more than a few misconceptions. One is that the eruption happened so suddenly that it instantly froze the town and its people in time.

“The eruption didn’t happen in seconds,” Venner clarifies. “It took over 24 hours, meaning there was a lot of time for people to escape.” Only around 10% of the city’s population — up to 20,000, including the enslaved — is thought to have perished. The rest were forced to resettle elsewhere, becoming “refugees within their own country.” 

There is also some confusion about the town’s condition. While it’s true that layers of volcanic ash helped preserve evidence that may have otherwise been lost, the city wasn’t in particularly great shape at the time of its demise. 

“Earthquakes had been taking place in the region for at least 17 years,” Venner points out. “A huge one almost completely destroyed the entire town, and it was still recovering when Vesuvius erupted.”

Even the date of the eruption itself may not be what we think. The earliest reference to the event, a letter from Pliny the Younger written two decades later, marks Pompeii’s final day as August 24. However, Venner and other scholars believe the eruption may have taken place months later. The discovery of fresh pomegranates and other fruits harvested from September onwards, not to mention the fact that several households appeared to have been firing up their braziers before the evacuation, suggests the eruption may have taken place as late as October, when the weather was growing colder.

Pompeii vs Rome

Perhaps the greatest misconception about Pompeii is that the town played an insignificant role in Roman history, its inhabitants existing disconnected from events in the imperial capital. In truth, Pompeii found itself at the forefront of Roman politics on several occasions, most notably during the so-called Social Wars, when municipalities across Italy rebelled against Rome after the Senate repeatedly refused to extend citizenship rights beyond the inhabitants of the Eternal City.

Pompeii was one of the first towns to take up arms, and one of the last to put them down, continuing the fight even after the Senate promised to grant citizenship to those who surrendered. Ultimately, the Pompeians faced off against none other than Lucius Cornelius Sulla, the general who, in the wake of all this civil strife, declared himself dictator of the Republic, paving the way for Julius Caesar. 

“Traces of the battle,” Venner writes, “are still visible today: holes left by Sulla’s ballistae [stone-throwing artillery] can be seen in the city walls.”

As punishment for their insubordination, Pompeii rejoined the Republic not as an ally but a colony. Colonizers moved into the city, taking over the wealth and power of the city’s old elite. 

“Public buildings were Romanized, Latin replaced Oscan as the dominant language. Some local families managed to retain their status, but many were deposed, their land confiscated and redistributed to the veterans of Sulla’s army,” Venner adds.

How often do you think about the Roman Empire?

We don’t know ancient Rome as well as we think we do. Surrounded by countless history books — not to mention beloved media properties like Rome and Gladiator — it’s easy to forget that an estimated 99% of ancient texts have not survived into the present. Those that have survived were written almost exclusively by members of the upper class, often decades or centuries after the events they detail, and always with ulterior motives. Were emperors Nero and Caligula really crazed tyrants, or were they slandered by historians hoping to delegitimize their rule? Did Livia, wife of Augustus, really poison several imperial heirs, or was her character assassinated by Romans critical of changing gender norms? 

In Livia’s case, Venner thinks the former. “Augustus wanted to center Roman society around an ideal Roman family, with a man at the head, and a matron behind him running the household,” she explains. After his long reign, there were fewer laws preventing women from reaching positions like those of Julia Felix, a wealthy widow in charge of her own affairs and finances, and one of the characters in Lost Voices. “By the time Vesuvius erupted, women had already been able to own property for some time. And while they technically needed to have a male guardian to help run things, most historians — myself included — think this role was largely a formality.” The aforementioned transaction, with the enslaved Petrinus as collateral, was signed between two women. No guardian mentioned. 

Unlike written sources, archeological evidence does not purposely omit, mislead, or discriminate. Though its scattered ruins may not always point to clear and obvious conclusions, Pompeii provides a direct connection to the past, unmitigated by the motivations and prejudices of people. “There’s a bit of graffiti near the amphitheater where someone wrote they love a certain person,” Venner tells us, offering one example of this connection. “Then someone else wrote a reply saying something along the lines of ‘No, she doesn’t love you, she loves me.’” 

She also points to excavations at a nearby private garden, which likely recorded a family’s final moments before the eruption began. “You could see the ash where they’d cooked their last meal and offered some food to the gods. Toys lay on the ground, probably exactly where the children had dropped them, along with a woman’s hairpin that had probably fallen out accidentally.”

Many other clues, pieced together through critical fabulation, resurrect the ancient town in a way that a written document never could. 

“Pompeii is often remembered as a dead city,” Venner says, “but we need to think of it as a living one. Otherwise, we’ll just keep talking about it as a place that is, and always has been, dead.”