Everyday life in Pompeii and Herculaneum: HSC Ancient History

A 7-mark response on water and sanitation needs three to four substantive features with named evidence.

The Castellum Aquae and the aqueduct

Pompeii was supplied from the Aqua Augusta (the Serino aqueduct, built under Augustus c. 20 BC), one of the longest Roman aqueducts. Water entered Pompeii at the Castellum Aquae near the Porta Vesuvio (the city's highest point), where it was distributed through three lead pipes (one for public fountains, one for baths, one for private houses).

Public fountains

Around 40 public street fountains have been identified, spaced roughly 80 metres apart so no resident was more than a short walk from water. The fountains were carved with deities (Hercules, Mercury) and were a primary water source for non-elite households.

Private water

Wealthy houses with private connections (paid by a water tax) had fountains in their peristyles, decorative nymphaea, and small piped supplies to kitchens. The Praedia of Julia Felix and the House of the Vettii both preserve elaborate fountain systems.

Latrines and sewers

Houses had private latrines (often adjacent to the kitchen for waste disposal). Public latrines existed at the Forum Baths and Stabian Baths. The cardo system of streets had drains beneath some sections; rainwater flushed waste into the Sarno River. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill notes that sanitation was variable: the streets often served as overflow waste channels.

The AD 62 earthquake and water disruption

The Aqua Augusta was damaged in AD 62. Reconstruction was incomplete in AD 79; some inhabitants relied on cisterns and wells in the meantime.

Markers reward the Castellum Aquae, the named aqueduct, fountain counts, and at least one historian. Bonus marks for noting the earthquake disruption.

A 7-mark response on leisure needs four substantive types of activity with named sites and evidence.

Public baths (thermae)

The Forum Baths, Stabian Baths, Central Baths (under construction in AD 79), and Suburban Baths at Pompeii preserve frigidarium, tepidarium, caldarium, and palaestra. The Stabian Baths are the oldest (2nd century BC). Mixed and segregated bathing varied. Bathing was social as well as hygienic: Seneca (Letters 56) describes the noise of the baths in the Bay of Naples region.

Theatre and music

Pompeii had two theatres: the Large Theatre (5,000 seats, rebuilt under the Holconii) and the Odeon (covered theatre for music and recitations, around 1,500 seats). Programs of mime and pantomime are attested in graffiti. The "actor's dressing room" frescoes at the House of the Tragic Poet show the theatrical world.

Amphitheatre and games

Pompeii's Amphitheatre (c. 70 BC) is the oldest surviving stone amphitheatre and seated around 20,000. The fresco from the House of Actius Anicetus depicts the AD 59 riot between Pompeians and Nucerians at a gladiatorial show, recorded also by Tacitus (Annals 14.17). The Gladiator Barracks (Quadriporticus dei Teatri) housed the gladiators.

The Lupanare and brothels

The Lupanare on the Vicolo del Lupanare is the best-preserved Roman brothel. Painted erotic scenes, named graffiti (around 120 inscriptions naming prostitutes and clients), and small cells preserve the trade. Other cellae meretriciae are scattered throughout the city. Mary Beard cautions against treating the Lupanare as a unique site.

Drinking and gaming

Over 150 thermopolia (fast-food and drink shops) served wine and snacks. Tabernae (taverns) preserved graffiti of dice games and bets. Painting from the Caupona of Salvius shows men gambling with dice.

Markers reward four types of activity, named sites (Stabian Baths, Amphitheatre, Lupanare), and a historian (Beard, Wallace-Hadrill, Tacitus).

A 4-mark "outline" wants the correct sequence of named spaces, each with a brief accurate feature.

Point 1: The fauces

A narrow corridor leading from the street door into the house.

Point 2: The atrium

A tall reception hall with a central impluvium (rainwater basin) fed by the compluvium (roof opening) above it.

Point 3: The tablinum

The owner's reception room and office, positioned opposite the entrance so visitors could see straight through the house.

Point 4: The peristyle

A colonnaded garden courtyard at the rear, often surrounded by dining rooms (triclinia) and bedrooms (cubicula).

Markers reward the correct front-to-back sequence and one accurate feature per space; naming the spaces out of order loses marks even if all four are identified.

A 5-mark "identify and describe" wants three named evidence types, each with an accurate supporting detail.

Thermopolia

Over 150 fast-food counters with sunken dolia for hot food have been identified; the Thermopolium of Vetutius Placidus preserves a painted counter, a lararium and a cash deposit of around 1,300 sestertii.

Carbonised food remains

Figs, olives, bread and eggs survived as carbonised material at the House of Iulius Polybius, and carbonised loaves survive in the Bakery of Modestus.

Sewer and drain deposits

The 2008 excavation of Herculaneum's Cardo V sewer recovered fish, chicken, pork and game bones, refining the assumption that ordinary diet was mainly bread and pulses.

Markers reward three correctly named evidence types with an accurate, specific detail for each; a vague "archaeology shows what they ate" earns no marks.

A 6-mark source-analysis task needs the source USED, own knowledge beyond it, and a qualification.

Use the source

Source A's counter, sunken jars and painted price list identify it as a thermopolium, a street-front food and drink counter; the small niche at one end matches the placement of a household shrine, as at real examples where a lararium sits beside the serving counter.

Own knowledge

This matches the Thermopolium of Vetutius Placidus on the Via dell'Abbondanza, which preserves a painted counter, an attached lararium and a cash deposit of around 1,300 sestertii, and the 2020 excavation of the Thermopolium of Regio V, which recovered painted decoration of the food and animals on sale plus food residues still inside the dolia. Over 150 such counters are known at Pompeii, selling garum, wine, bread, olives, cheese and pulses; meat was traditionally seen as a luxury, though the 2008 excavation of Herculaneum's Cardo V sewer found fish, chicken, pork and game in ordinary refuse.

Qualify it

A single counter cannot show how often non-elite residents actually ate meat rather than the grain-based staples; Andrew Wallace-Hadrill cautions that any one site is only a sample, and the sewer evidence should be read as a correction to, not a wholesale rewriting of, the picture built from thermopolia and carbonised remains.

Markers reward explicit use of the source's detail (the price list, the jars, the niche), named comparative evidence (Vetutius Placidus, Regio V, the Cardo V sewer), and a stated limitation.

A 6-mark "explain" needs the mechanism, the ancient evidence for it, and the priority it reveals.

The mechanism

The Castellum Aquae, near the Porta Vesuvio at the city's highest point, received the Aqua Augusta's flow and split it through three lead pipes set at different heights: one to the roughly 40 public street fountains, one to the public baths, and one to private houses paying a water tax.

The ancient evidence

Vitruvius (De Architectura 8.6) describes exactly this kind of three-way distribution from a castellum, arranged so that if supply fell, the private pipe (the lowest priority) could be shut off first, keeping the public fountains and baths running. Historians apply this account to explain the surviving pipe fixtures at Pompeii's own Castellum Aquae.

The priority it reveals

In engineering intent at least, non-elite residents drawing water from the public fountains had a more secure supply than wealthy households with a private connection, since the private pipe was the first sacrificed in a shortfall, such as after the Aqua Augusta was damaged in the AD 62 earthquake and still under repair in AD 79.

Markers reward the three-pipe system, correct use of Vitruvius as the ancient source for the priority order, and an explicit statement of what this reveals about civic priorities.

A 6-mark "explain significance" needs the dated event, its evidence base, and its wider meaning, not just a retelling.

What happened

In AD 59 a riot broke out between Pompeians and visiting Nucerians at a gladiatorial show in Pompeii's Amphitheatre. Tacitus (Annals 14.17) records serious casualties and reports that the Senate banned gladiatorial games at Pompeii for ten years; a fresco from the House of Actius Anicetus depicts the fighting spreading from the seating into the surrounding area.

Why it is significant

The riot shows that shared civic leisure, watched by up to around 20,000 people, more than Pompeii's own free population, could turn into serious inter-town violence rather than always reinforcing harmony. It also shows Rome intervening directly in a local town's everyday leisure life, since the ban came from the Senate, not from Pompeii's own magistrates.

Qualify it

The ban was eventually lifted, probably after the AD 62 earthquake, and games resumed, suggesting the amphitheatre's civic value to the town outweighed the disorder in the long run.

Markers reward the correct date and sources (Tacitus, Annals 14.17; the House of Actius Anicetus fresco), the ten-year ban, and an explicit statement of significance beyond narrating the event.

A 10-mark "evaluate" needs origin/motive/audience, BALANCED usefulness and reliability, corroboration, and a judgement.

Origin, motive, audience

Source B is a private house decoration, commissioned by a Pompeian householder to commemorate or dramatise a notorious local event, not an official or documentary record; it was made for the pride or interest of the household and its visitors, not for a court or a historian.

Usefulness

The image is genuinely useful because it visualises the SPATIAL spread of the violence, from the arena's seating out into the porticoes, in a way a written account alone does not, and it corroborates the basic fact of serious disorder recorded independently by Tacitus (Annals 14.17).

Reliability

Reliability is limited because a single painted scene reflects one artist's or patron's chosen, dramatised moment; overturned stalls and fleeing figures may be exaggerated for visual impact, and no second pictorial version survives to check it against. Historians such as Mary Beard caution generally that vivid Pompeian imagery, however dramatic, depicts a single chosen moment and needs corroboration before being read as straightforward documentary record.

Corroboration and judgement

Corroborated against Tacitus's independent written account (from Rome's perspective) and against the historical fact of the Senate's resulting ten-year ban, the image is a useful illustration of a real, serious event, but its details of composition should not be taken as a literal, accurate record of exactly what happened.

Marker's note: top answers state a clear judgement on usefulness versus reliability, use origin/motive/audience explicitly, and corroborate the image against Tacitus and the ban rather than simply describing what the picture shows.

A band-6 essay sustains a judgement on "to what extent," deploys specific dated and named evidence across housing, water, food and leisure, and integrates historiography as argument. This is a plan plus a model paragraph.

Thesis

The evidence shows real inequality, sharpest in housing, but everyday life was not cleanly split into elite comfort and non-elite hardship: shared civic infrastructure and leisure culture, and archaeological correction of assumptions about non-elite diet, reveal a society of gradations rather than two separate worlds.

Argument line 1: Housing as the sharpest divide

The House of the Faun (about 3,000 square metres, the Alexander Mosaic) and the House of the Vettii sit within the same city blocks as rented upper rooms above shops and the Praedia of Julia Felix, a rental complex let out to non-elite tenants. Physical space was shared street by street even where wealth was not.

Argument line 2: Water supply as a partial equaliser

Around 40 public street fountains, spaced roughly 80 metres apart and fed via the Castellum Aquae's public pipe, gave ordinary residents a guaranteed baseline supply; Vitruvius (De Architectura 8.6) describes the private pipe as the first cut off in a shortage, meaning wealthy private subscribers, not the public fountains, bore the brunt of the AD 62 earthquake's damage to the Aqua Augusta. Elite houses added private fountains and nymphaea (as at the House of the Vettii) as a luxury layered on top of a shared civic floor, not a replacement for it.

Argument line 3: Food and leisure complicate a simple "hardship" narrative. Over 150 thermopolia served ordinary residents daily, and the 2008 Cardo V sewer excavation at Herculaneum found fish, chicken, pork and game in everyday refuse, correcting the assumption that non-elite diet was uniformly grain-based hardship. The amphitheatre (built c. 70 BC) seated around 20,000, more than Pompeii's free population, meaning leisure culture, even when it turned violent in the AD 59 riot (Tacitus, Annals 14.17), was genuinely shared rather than segregated by wealth.

Historiography

Andrew Wallace-Hadrill (Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum, 1994) argues that Roman houses mixed domestic, economic and display space, undermining a clean architectural line between rich and poor. Mary Beard (Pompeii, 2008) stresses that famous houses are unrepresentative outliers and that most residents lived modestly, though modestly is not the same as destitute. Penelope Allison (Pompeian Households, 2004) cautions that literary room names such as "triclinium" often do not match where objects were actually found, warning against reading a fixed social hierarchy directly off a house plan.

Model paragraph (argument line 2)

Water supply is the clearest evidence against a picture of stark, undifferentiated hardship. The Castellum Aquae divided Pompeii's aqueduct water through three lead pipes, and Vitruvius's description of exactly this arrangement (De Architectura 8.6) makes clear that the private pipe, not the public one, was designed to be sacrificed first when supply ran short. When the Aqua Augusta was damaged in the AD 62 earthquake, it was therefore the households wealthy enough to have paid for a private connection whose supply was most at risk, while the roughly 40 public fountains, spaced so that no resident was more than a short walk from water, continued to serve the wider population. Elite houses layered private fountains and nymphaea on top of this shared floor as visible luxury, but the floor itself, as Wallace-Hadrill's account of mixed-use housing implies more broadly, was common civic infrastructure, not an elite preserve.

Conclusion

Housing shows the sharpest and most durable inequality; water, food and shared leisure culture show a floor of common provision and experience beneath it. A verdict of "real but partial and uneven division" is defensible and sustained throughout.

Marker's note: band 6 responses answer "to what extent" with an explicit, sustained verdict, draw specific dated and named evidence from AT LEAST housing, water and one of food/leisure, and use two or more named historians as argument (Wallace-Hadrill, Beard, Allison), not as a decorative list. A response that only describes elite versus non-elite evidence without weighing division against shared provision caps at mid-band.