Investigate and interpret sources for everyday life in Pompeii and Herculaneum, including occupations and the economy, food and dining, leisure and entertainment, religion, the roles of women, freedmen and slaves, and the evidence of graffiti, inscriptions, wall paintings and artefacts

What this dot point is asking

QCAA wants you to reconstruct daily life and social structure in Pompeii and Herculaneum from sources. You should cover work and the economy, food and dining, leisure and entertainment, religion, and the roles of women, freedmen and slaves. The richest evidence is the small-scale, everyday material: graffiti, painted electoral notices, shop signs, wall paintings, inscriptions and ordinary artefacts. The skill is using fragmentary, often anonymous evidence to build a picture of a living society.

The answer

Work and the economy

Pompeii was a working commercial town, not a resort. The evidence shows a wide range of occupations: bakers (35 bakeries identified, several with carbonised bread still in the ovens), fullers cleaning and dyeing cloth, garum (fish sauce) producers (the workshop of Aulus Umbricius Scaurus, whose product was branded on amphorae), potters, metalworkers, innkeepers and farmers working the fertile slopes. Painted shop signs and the layout of premises identify trades; amphorae and their stamps trace the wine and oil trade across the Mediterranean. The economy was diversified and outward-looking, with the Sarno port linking Pompeii to wider trade networks.

Food, dining and leisure

Diet is reconstructed from carbonised food remains (at Herculaneum especially), latrine and drain deposits, frescoes of food, and the bars themselves. People ate bread, olives, figs, grapes, fish, eggs, cheese and modest amounts of meat. The thermopolia (bars with sunken counters holding dolia for hot food) served those without kitchens, which was most of the population. Elite dining happened in the triclinium (dining room) with diners reclining on couches, surrounded by wall paintings; the garden triclinia at the House of the Vettii and elsewhere show outdoor dining.

Leisure crossed social lines. The amphitheatre's gladiatorial games, the two theatres, the public baths and the palaestra were shared spaces. Graffiti record the popularity of individual gladiators (one names a Thracian who made the girls sigh) and betting; painted notices advertised games. Board games and dice are recovered as artefacts.

Religion

Religion was layered. The state cults of Jupiter, Apollo, Venus (Pompeii's patron deity) and the deified emperors were served by the forum temples. Alongside them, the Egyptian cult of Isis had a prominent temple, rebuilt after the AD 62 earthquake, showing the spread of eastern mystery religions into Italy. Most intimate is household religion: nearly every house had a lararium (a shrine to the lares and penates, the protective household gods), often painted with serpents and the genius of the head of the household. Tomb inscriptions along the roads out of town record beliefs about death and status. The religious evidence reconstructs a society that was simultaneously civic, cosmopolitan and domestic in its worship.

Women, freedmen and slaves

The social structure was steep and is visible in the sources.

Women appear far more than in most ancient evidence. Eumachia, a wealthy public priestess, funded a major building on the forum, her statue and inscription surviving, showing that elite women could hold public religious office and act as patrons. Julia Felix rented out a large property complex, evidence of female property ownership and business. Electoral notices show women publicly endorsing candidates (women could not vote, but their endorsements were displayed). At the other end, frescoes and the lupanar (brothel), with its explicit wall paintings and graffiti, attest to enslaved women working in prostitution.

Freedmen (manumitted slaves) were a dynamic group. The Vettii brothers, freedmen who grew rich, owned one of the finest houses. Freedmen could not hold the highest magistracies but could serve as Augustales (priests of the imperial cult), a route to status recorded in inscriptions. Their prominence shows real social mobility within a slave society.

Slaves are the hardest group to recover because they rarely left their own record. They appear in others' graffiti, in the architecture of service quarters and kitchens, in the bodies found in working areas, and occasionally in inscriptions naming them. Reconstructing slave life requires reading the evidence against the grain, looking for the people who built and ran the town but were not allowed to author its records.

The value and limits of the everyday evidence

Pompeii preserves thousands of graffiti and dipinti (painted inscriptions), from political slogans and shop advertisements to insults, love notes, poetry, prices and crude drawings. This makes Pompeii and Herculaneum the best-documented ordinary communities of the ancient world. But the evidence is fragmentary, often anonymous, and skewed toward those literate enough to write or wealthy enough to commission paintings. The eruption preserved a single moment, not a continuous record, and early excavation lost context. Reconstruction therefore combines many small sources and acknowledges what cannot be known.