SerpApi.Org
One of the questions that may pop up about “Pompeii: Out of Time With Tom Hiddleston” is “Why Tom Hiddleston?” Many celebrities get involved with nonfiction projects as a result of their own curiosity or advocacy, but the actor (“Loki,” “The Avengers,” “Thor”) has credentials: He studied classics at the University of Cambridge, can translate much of the Latin we encounter in this three-part series, and cites an early visit to the so-called Frozen City as inspiring not just his academic pursuits but his acting.
There has been no shortage of attention paid to Pompeii in recent years by archaeologically inclined television, but “Out of Time” takes its own tack: “This is a story / This is a history” reads the opening title to this National Geographic survey of new discoveries, including the progress being made by the Pompeii Survivors Project run by “helpful classicist” Steven Tuck. (Mr. Hiddleston gets ID’d as “amateur classicist.”) The project is designed to take names found in inscriptions collected from across the ancient Roman world and match them to names that appear after the catastrophic eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Anyone mentioned anywhere following the blast is presumed to have survived it, and perhaps lived through it. One of the phenomena examined in “Out of Time” is why more Pompeiians didn’t flee during or after the foreshadowing earthquakes, and that’s a fascinating area of study all its own.
Mr. Hiddleston connects the survivor accounts to the creative arts through a necessary use of imagination. Only so much about the subjects who are made the focus of the program can be discerned from flimsy data that’s some 2,000 years old. But plausible profiles can be constructed through circumstantial evidence, what we know about both nature and the lifestyle of Pompeiians, and where a survivor might have turned up later. Is it concrete? No, nor ash. But it makes sense. One example: Over the course of two generations, as determined through financial records, the family of a teenager named Avianius went from being upper class (grandpa paid for the paving of the streets) to being among its neediest, the young fellow apprenticed to a blacksmith and his single mother desperate. The tracking of his progress might be called speculative history.
Dramatizations of the several lives studied put figurative flesh on the petrified bodies of the volcano victims, and those who escaped such a fate. Why didn’t they all head for other hills when the big one nearby (still about 10 miles away) started making the sounds of indigestion? Someone like Cornell’s Caitie Barrett (“helpful archaeologist”) can disabuse Mr. Hiddleston (and us) of some of the presumptions held about Roman culture and its variations in Pompeii. But Sarita Robinson (“helpful disaster psychologist”) gets to the heart of one of the big Pompeii questions: “I don’t think people have changed that much in 2,000 years,” she says. Even under the worst kind of duress, they don’t want to flee their homes, their belongings, certainly not their families, despite the threatening burps of Vesuvius. Or, we see today, incipient floods, tornadoes and hurricanes. Mr. Hiddleston may be practicing speculative archaeology here and there. But the hard truths of human nature bring us closer to the people who perished in Pompeii.
Pompeii: Out of Time With Tom Hiddleston
Wednesday, 8 p.m., National Geographic
Mr. Anderson is the Journal’s TV critic.
