The People of Pompeii: Life in the Ancient City

The People of Pompeii

Before Vesuvius destroyed it in 79 AD, Pompeii was a living, breathing Roman town of roughly 11,000–12,000 people. It was not a city of emperors and senators but of merchants, bakers, fullers, innkeepers, freed slaves and the enslaved — an ordinary, prosperous port community frozen at a single moment. Because the ash preserved not just buildings but election posters, shop signs, graffiti and even the shapes of the victims, we know more about the everyday people of Pompeii than about almost any other place in the ancient world.

This page is about those people: who they were, how their society was organised, what daily life looked like, the individuals we can still name, and — finally — the archaeologists who dug them out of the ash and gave them back their names.

Who Lived in Pompeii?

Pompeii sat on a busy trade route near the mouth of the River Sarno, so its population was mixed and cosmopolitan. Roman citizens formed the core, but the town also housed Greeks, Egyptians, freed slaves and foreign merchants drawn by its wine, textile and garum trades. Inscriptions mention worshippers of Isis and other eastern gods, a sign of how far Pompeii's connections reached across the Mediterranean.

Estimates of the exact number vary — most scholars settle on about 11,000–12,000 inside the walls, with thousands more in the surrounding farms and villas. For the detailed demographics, see our dedicated page on the population of Pompeii.

Social Classes: From Elite to Enslaved

Roman society was steeply hierarchical, and Pompeii was a miniature of it. Broadly, its people fell into four groups.

• The elite — a small circle of families like the Holconii — dominated the town council (the ordo decurionum) and competed for the annual magistracies (duumviri and aediles). They advertised their status by paying for the amphitheatre, baths, temples and public games.
• Plebeians, the free working majority, ran Pompeii's countless shops, bars and workshops. Their voices survive in the painted electoral notices that still cover the walls.
• Freedmen (liberti) are one of Pompeii's most striking stories. Legally free but socially marked, many grew wealthy in trade — the brothers who built the House of the Vettii were freedmen who flaunted their success in gilded frescoes.
• Slaves were everywhere and largely invisible in the record, yet they baked the bread, stoked the baths and carried the goods that made the town work.

Daily Life in Pompeii

The rhythm of a Pompeian day revolved around the forum, the baths and the street. Business was done in the morning; the afternoon brought the public baths, a social ritual as much as a wash; evenings meant taverns, dinner parties and, on festival days, the amphitheatre.

• Food and drink: Most ordinary people ate out. The city had scores of thermopolia — counter-service fast-food bars — serving hot dishes and wine to workers who had no kitchen at home.
• Work: Pompeii lived on wine, wool and garum (a pungent fermented fish sauce exported across the empire). Bakeries, fulleries (laundries and cloth-finishers) and workshops lined the streets.
• Politics and leisure: Elections were fiercely contested, gladiatorial games filled the amphitheatre, and the walls carried everything from campaign slogans to lovers' boasts and insults — the ancient world's social media.

Famous Pompeians We Can Name

Thanks to inscriptions, wax tablets and graffiti, we know real individuals — not just "the Romans" but people with names, jobs and reputations:

• Lucius Caecilius Iucundus — a banker and auctioneer whose archive of wax tablets recorded his loans and deals; his house preserved a famous bronze portrait bust.
• Julia Felix — a shrewd businesswoman who, after the earthquake of 62 AD, converted part of her large estate into rentable baths, shops and apartments, advertising them on a painted sign.
• The Vettii brothers (Aulus Vettius Conviva and Restitutus) — freedmen made rich by trade, owners of the sumptuously decorated House of the Vettii.
• Eumachia — a wealthy priestess and patron of the fullers' guild, who funded a grand building on the forum.
• Aulus Umbricius Scaurus — the town's leading garum producer, whose brand was stamped on jars found across the region.

What the Victims Tell Us

Not everyone escaped. Around 1,150 bodies have been found across the site, and Giuseppe Fiorelli's plaster casts preserve their final postures — a family sheltering together, a man shielding his face, a chained dog. These casts turn abstract history into individual human lives, and they remain the most moving evidence of who the people of Pompeii were. Read more about them on our bodies of Pompeii page and how the casts were made.

The People Who Uncovered Pompeii

The second set of "people of Pompeii" are the archaeologists and directors who, over nearly three centuries, dug the city out of the ash.

• Giuseppe Fiorelli (director from 1863) is the father of scientific excavation here: he mapped the city into the regiones and insulae still used today and invented the body-cast technique.
• Amedeo Maiuri (1924–1961) ran Pompeii for almost four decades, opening its grand houses and long streets and pioneering the idea of leaving finds in situ.
• Massimo Osanna (2014–2021) led the EU-funded Great Pompeii Project, stabilising the ruins and producing spectacular new discoveries in Regio V.
• Gabriel Zuchtriegel, Director-General since 2021, has driven fresh excavation at Civita Giuliana and in Regio IX while widening public access — read his story on the Gabriel Zuchtriegel page.
• Igor Mitoraj, the Polish sculptor whose monumental bronzes have stood among the ruins since 2016, is a modern figure now woven into the site — see Igor Mitoraj at Pompeii.

For the full story of how the city was found and dug, see the discovery of Pompeii and its excavation.

Related Pages

• The Population of Pompeii
• The Economy of Pompeii
• The Bodies of Pompeii
• Graffiti of Pompeii
• Gabriel Zuchtriegel: Pompeii's Director
• Igor Mitoraj at Pompeii