It’s unlikely this man died doing what he loved
One image that has recently gone viral is that of a male Pompeii victim seemingly spending his last few moments on earth doing what—to put it delicately—he may have loved doing best. Simultaneously holding onto both himself and his loved one, his plaster cast reveals a facial expression of either immense pleasure or intense pain (considering the circumstances of his death, the latter was unfortunately, a given). But what can a closer look at this somewhat manual Pompeian man tell us about how he died?
Of the 1,150 bodies recovered, it’s believed that 394 were killed by falling pumice, described vividly in the contemporary account of Pliny the Younger: “They went out then, having pillows tied upon their heads with napkins; and this was their whole defence against the storm of stones that fell around them.” This man, however, doesn’t fall into this category. For a start, there’s no sign of cranial trauma; the only trauma instead coming from people unwittingly exposed to the image today in public or while at work.
Instead, we can confidently count him among the victims of the pyroclastic flow: a lightening fast current of boiling-hot gas and assorted volcanic matter which exploded from the volcano after a long, intense build-up of pressure (innuendo thoroughly intended). The sheer heat of this, estimated to have been at least 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit, would have made those unfortunate enough to be in its path enter cadaveric shock. And a part of this involves what’s called cadaveric spasm, which involves the involuntary stiffening of one’s muscles.
So, as much as we may like to imagine that this man became frozen in time mid-way through a one-man Roman orgy; fiddling while Rome burned; determinedly finishing what he’d started as day turned to night and the apocalypse seemed to descend around him, in reality, it seems his death was to do with something completely different: an enormous eruption followed by involuntary muscle spasms.