Ancient Herculaneum stood where the modern town is today, on a volcanic plateau falling sheer to the sea, protected to the north and south by two ravines with two streams. Its history ended in AD 79, when the eruption of Vesuvius buried it under volcanic material that later solidified into a mass of tuff.
What to see
According to the legend told by Dionysius of Halicarnassus it was founded by Hercules; Strabo attributes it to the Oscans, others to the Etruscans, but the finds go back no further than the second century BC. The first mention, under the Greek name Herakleia, is in a work by Theophrastus of 314 BC. In 89 BC, during the Social War, it was conquered by Titus Didius, Sulla's legate, and became a Roman municipium and later a holiday resort of the aristocracy. Struck by the earthquake of 62, it was still rebuilding when the eruption came: because of the wind direction it did not receive the rain of ash and lapilli that fell on Pompeii, but during the night it was hit by pyroclastic flows at over a hundred kilometres an hour, which covered it with a layer of ten to fifteen metres, later reaching twenty-five with further eruptions such as that of 1631.
The town followed the model of Hippodamus of Miletus: a grid of insulae between three decumani parallel to the coast and five cardines running down from Vesuvius to the sea, over some twenty hectares and with four to five thousand inhabitants. It had three bath complexes, a palaestra, a theatre for two thousand five hundred spectators, temples, the Basilica and the Basilica Noniana; the houses were smaller than those of Pompeii but sometimes more lavish, and the richest stood on the edge of the hill or outside the town, like the Villa of the Papyri. Most of the inhabitants managed to flee, but about three hundred bodies have been found in the harbour storerooms. The theatre was found between 1709 and 1710 by a farmer digging a well; the Bourbon explorations by tunnel followed and, in the nineteenth century, the first open-air excavations.
Visiting
The remains of the town are visited in the Herculaneum Archaeological Park. Opening hours, tickets and routes should be checked with the Park.
Our editors' tip
Unlike Pompeii, no electoral notices have been found on the walls of Herculaneum, and the language of the graffiti is less ironic. The sources describe it as a mainly residential town that lived from fishing, from farming, with olives, wheat, figs and vines, and from renting out shops and houses.
