In 79 C.E. the volcano Vesuvius blew its top and covered the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, capturing many of their citizens in flight and preserving details of Roman life indelibly for millennia. Excavations began in the 1800s and are continuing even now. Because contemporaneous accounts seldom dwell on everyday life we have leaned much about how they lived their lives through what we have dug up. An excellent source is a British Museum documentary that can be found here…

https://www.britishmuseum.org/pompeii-live

As if that weren’t bad enough on this date in 410 C.E. the Visigoths under Alaric I overran the city of Rome in its first sacking of 800 years. Yep, a bad Roman day.

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