Herculaneum was covered with the same materials; they were not, however, deposited in regular strata, but were mixed together, and being drenched with water, hardened into a kind of tufa which in places reaches a depth of sixty-five feet. Excavating at Herculaneum is in consequence extremely difficult; and the difficulty is further increased by the fact that a modern city, Resina, extends over the greater part of the ancient site. The excavations thus far attempted have in most cases been conducted by means of underground passageways. The statement that Herculaneum was overflowed by a stream of lava, though frequently repeated, is erroneous.
Fig. 7.—Cast of a man.
The woodwork of buildings in Pompeii has in many cases been preserved, but in a completely charred condition. Frequently where walls were painted with yellow ochre it has turned red, especially when brought immediately into contact with the stratum of dust—a change which this color undergoes when it is exposed to heat. Nevertheless, the inference would be unwarranted that the products of the eruption fell upon the city red-hot and caused a general conflagration. The fragments of pumice stone could scarcely have retained a great degree of heat after having been so long in the air; it is evident from Pliny's narrative that they were not hot.
With the dust a copious rain must have fallen; for the bodies of those who perished in the storm of dust left perfect moulds, into a number of which soft plaster of Paris has been poured, making those casts of human figures which lend a melancholy interest to the collections in the little Museum at Pompeii ([Fig. 7]). The extraordinary freshness of these figures, without any suggestion of the wasting away after death, is explicable only on the supposition that the enveloping dust was damp, and so commenced immediately to harden into a permanent shape. If the dust had been dry and had packed down and hardened afterwards, we should be able to trace at least the beginnings of decay.
Neither the pumice stone nor the dust, then, could have set wood on fire. The woodwork must have become charred gradually from the effect of moisture, as in the case of coal, and the change in the color of the yellow ochre must be due to some other cause than the presence of heat. This is all the more evident from the fact that vestiges of local conflagrations, confined within narrow limits, can here and there be traced, kindled by the masses of glowing slag which fell at the same time with the pumice stone, or by the fires left burning in the houses.
From the number of skeletons discovered in the past few decades, since an accurate record has been kept, it has been estimated that in Pompeii itself, about two thousand persons perished. As the city contained a population of twenty thousand or more, it is evident that the majority of the inhabitants fled; since the eruption commenced in the morning, while the hail of pumice stone did not begin till afternoon, those who appreciated the greatness of the danger had time to escape. It is, however, impossible to say how many fled when it was already too late, and lost their lives outside the city. Mention has already been made of some who perished at the harbor; others who went out earlier to the Sarno may have made good their escape. Of those who remained in the city part were buried in the houses—so with twenty persons whose skeletons were found in the cellar of the villa of Diomedes; others, as the hail of pumice stone ceased, ventured out into the streets, where they soon succumbed to the shower of dust that immediately followed. As the bodies wasted away little except the bones was left in the hollows formed by the dust that hardened around them, and the casts already referred to, which have been made from time to time since 1863, give in some cases a remarkably clear and sharp representation of the victims.
The Emperor Titus sent a commission of senators into Campania to report in what way help could best be rendered. A plan was formed to rebuild the cities that had been destroyed, and the property of those who died without heirs was set aside for this purpose. Nothing came of it, however, so far as our knowledge goes. Pompeii is indeed mentioned in the Peutinger Table, a map for travellers made in the third century, but the name was apparently given to a post station in memory of the former city. Conclusive evidence against the existence of a new city is the absence of any inscriptions referring to it.