In 79 CE, Mount Vesuvius erupted with tremendous force, burying the nearby Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum—and possibly around 16,000 people—under ash and pumice. Almost 2000 years later, archaeological investigations continue to reveal the victims’ final moments, immortalized in the solidified volcanic debris.
Recent excavations at the house of Elle and Frisso—a Pompeii home named after a mythological fresco in one of its rooms—have unearthed the building’s main interior spaces. Archaeologists also uncovered heart-wrenching details of the inhabitants’ desperate attempts to shield themselves from the eruption, a discovery detailed in the E-Journal of Pompeii’s Excavations.
“Excavating and visiting Pompeii means coming face to face with the beauty of art but also with the precariousness of our lives,” Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, said in a park statement.
Archaeologists unearthed the building’s entrance, along with a central hall with a water-collecting basin, a bedroom, and a banquet room decorated with frescoes—including the one depicting Elle and Frisso. They also found a room with an open roof designed to collect rainwater. In the bedroom, the remains of at least four people were discovered, including a child, alongside an amulet likely belonging to them.
The most striking discovery was a bed pushed sideways across the room’s entrance—likely an attempt by the inhabitants, possibly a family, to protect themselves from lapilli, the small volcanic fragments flowing in through the roof’s opening. While the bed’s wood has long since decomposed, archaeologists were able to make a plaster cast of the empty spaces it left behind in the solidified volcanic debris.
“In this small, wonderfully decorated house we found traces of the inhabitants who tried to save themselves,” Zuchtriegel explained. “They didn’t make it, in the end the pyroclastic flow arrived, a violent flow of very hot ash that filled here, as elsewhere, every room.”
Archaeologists also found bronze pottery including a ladle, a jug, a shell-shaped cup, and amphorae, some of which once stored the iconic ancient Roman fish sauce called garum. Furthermore, traces of masonry materials and incomplete decorations suggest that the house was under renovation at the time of the eruption. As is common today, the inhabitants of the house decided not to relocate during the work.
In the myth of Elle and Frisso, also known as Helle and Phrixus, the two siblings’ stepmother tricks their father into sacrificing them to the gods. Their mother Nephele sends a flying golden-fleece ram to save them, but Elle falls off its back and into the sea, named Hellespont (the modern-day Dardanelles) in her honor. The fresco in the Pompeii home depicts the moment Elle falls, at which point, depending on the version, she either drowns or Poseidon turns her into a sea-goddess.
The individual who commissioned the fresco for his or her home couldn’t have imagined that the mythical tragedy would one day witness one of the most famous catastrophes of the ancient world.
