They tell us some amazing individual stories
One modestly dressed woman was found in a location now identified as a slave prison. Her cast is simple. But its only distinguishing feature—her manacles—raises a horrendous truth: she was a slave who had been shackled there, and was unable to escape. She would have been one of many thousands of Pompeii’s slaves (considering a typical Roman household might have anywhere between five to seven). But, unlike the millions of invisible, forgotten slaves of the Roman Empire, her figure has managed to weather the ages, still visible for all to see.
Another of Pompeii’s victims can be identified as a doctor, owing to the fact that his skeleton, found splayed out across the open-air exercise space of the palaestra, is still clutching onto his box of instruments. In another large house the remains of 12 people were found, including those of a heavily pregnant teenage girl (the fact that she was pregnant established by the bones of the fetus found in her abdomen). And it has led archaeologists to believe that the majority of these people were either slaves or relations, and that (unfortunately for them) they decided to stay at home and wait out the disaster rather than risk the girl’s health outside.
In Pompeii’s temporary gladiatorial barracks (the main ones were temporarily out of action), the remains of an ornately jeweled noblewoman were found in the company of several strapping men. This gave birth to the cliché rumor she was caught off guard by the eruption during an illicit visit to her gladiator lover. But as fanciful as this is, it doesn’t explain the fact that she was also found surrounded by at least 18 others, including a number of children who had taken shelter from the debris raining down from the skies.
One of Pompeii’s most famous and poignant casts is that of a man sitting down, his knees up to his chest and his hands raised to cover his face. It’s also one of the most misplaced: currently on display behind the bars of Pompeii’s site storeroom, his situation makes him more closely resemble a perpetual prisoner, lamenting his own confinement, rather than a dying man in his final moments.