RM: Yeah, yeah.
LA: We’re all so predictable.
RM: It’s almost, and you sort of have to walk through and it’s very narrow. So you know, you can’t just cruise by.
LA: Americans listening are probably going to think this is incredibly archaic. But school, I actually did a few years of Latin, and we had these Latin books that were centered around a family that lived in Pompeii. And you learned how to speak and write in Latin through…
RM: Mm-hmm.
LA: …the everyday stories of this family. The dad was called Caecilius, it’s still registered in my head.
RM: [laugh]
LA: And then you get to the end of the textbook and you’ve kind of got invested in their lives, and then they all die. It’s quite brutal as a 13-year-old.
RM: You know, it’s funny, I mean, I started Latin too and I read the same book. Caecilius est in hortō, I believe is the first sentence. Um.
LA: Oh, and I have in my head, Caecilius est in via.
RM: Oh, well both of those, probably.
LA: [laugh]
RM: At different times. But I don’t remember the eruption. Maybe I didn’t get to the end of the book. I don’t… yeah, I don’t remember that. I just remember the dog and the cheerful enslaved person, Grumio I think was his name. Actually I don’t know whether he was cheerful. But he was definitely-
LA: Deeply problematic character to be living in that book.
RM: Very problematic, yeah. Which is something we might get onto.
LA: Yeah, and there seems to have reached… those books have really like, made an impression on, I think British school children who had to learn from them. A friend of mine actually managed to find a Caecilius T-shirt on eBay that she now wears proudly.
RM: My um, son, who’s now 18, but when he was first learning to read, and like, probably, a d-… you know, like a deca… decade ago, he was really obsessed with these books. They were a series of books called I Survived and they were like, I Survived the Blitz, and I Survived the Titanic. And then with I Survived the… Pompeii, I survived the explosion of Vesuvius, and it tells the story of how, you know, of what we know from the historical record of local people kind of noticing something was up with the mountain, that they thought was dormant or extinct, I suppose. And realizing too late that it was gonna blow.
LA: You know, reading your descriptions of the sights and the lives that were led there, it becomes quite easy to forget. I found myself forgetting that these were, you know, this was real life and real humans, and then I, some detail would make me suddenly be like, oh God, yes, this was humanity, this was uh, a whole city. Did you find yourself almost starting to numb to the horrors the more that you were in Pompeii and then you would stumble across some small detail and it would all kind of come alive to you again?
