Pompeii wasn’t frozen in time. Its lost voices are still speaking to us.

The Forgotten Souls of Pompeii: How History’s Most Famous Catastrophe Is Being Reimagined Through the Voices of the Voiceless

When we picture Pompeii, we often imagine a city frozen in time—ash-covered bodies mid-flight, homes preserved like museum dioramas, and a civilization abruptly silenced by Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. But this image, while powerful, is incomplete. It centers the spectacle of destruction over the humanity of the people who lived, loved, and labored there. For centuries, the stories of the enslaved, the poor, the women, and the children have been overshadowed by the grandeur of Roman architecture and the drama of natural disaster. Now, a new wave of historical storytelling is challenging that narrative. By embracing a method called critical fabulation, scholars are breathing life into the silenced voices of Pompeii—not through fantasy, but through empathetic, evidence-based imagination.

This shift is not about inventing history. It’s about refusing to accept silence as the final word. As cultural historian Saidiya Hartman first articulated in her 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts,” critical fabulation is a way to confront the erasure of marginalized lives in the historical record. It uses fragments—a name on a wax tablet, a transaction record, a graffiti scrawl—as springboards to imagine the emotional and social worlds of those who left no diaries, no speeches, no monuments. In Pompeii, where over 1,500 bodies have been recovered but only a fraction of personal stories survive, this method is not just innovative—it’s essential.

The Limits of the Frozen City Myth

The popular image of Pompeii as a “snapshot” of Roman life is both captivating and misleading. While the eruption of Vesuvius did preserve structures and objects in remarkable detail, it did not preserve lives in equal measure. The city’s elite—politicians, wealthy merchants, property owners—left behind inscriptions, frescoes, and legal documents that dominate our understanding of Pompeian society. But for the enslaved, the working class, and the disenfranchised, the record is sparse. Their names appear only in passing: as property in sales records, as laborers in tax documents, or as anonymous figures in mosaics.

This imbalance has long shaped how we interpret Pompeii. We know the names of magistrates and the locations of villas, but we rarely know what a day in the life of a slave looked like, what a mother whispered to her child, or how a freedman navigated the precarious freedom that came after emancipation. The city’s preservation, paradoxically, has contributed to a kind of historical amnesia—one that privileges the visible over the lived.

Critical fabulation challenges this by asking: What if we treated the gaps in the record not as dead ends, but as spaces of possibility? Instead of saying, “We don’t know,” it dares to say, “Here’s what might have been.” This approach doesn’t fabricate evidence; it uses what we do know—about Roman slavery, urban life, social hierarchies—to reconstruct plausible, emotionally resonant narratives.

Critical Fabulation: A Tool for Empathy and Evidence

Coined by Saidiya Hartman in her groundbreaking work on the transatlantic slave trade, critical fabulation is a methodology that blends rigorous historical research with creative storytelling. Hartman used it to explore the lives of enslaved Black women in the 19th century, whose stories were systematically erased from official documents. She argued that traditional history often fails these figures because it relies too heavily on written records—records that were rarely made by the oppressed, but about them, often in dehumanizing terms.

In the context of Pompeii, this method takes on new urgency. Consider Petrinus, an enslaved man whose only known appearance in history is a transaction where he and another slave were used as collateral for a loan. That’s it—no family, no age, no story. But using critical fabulation, historian Jane Venner, in her work Lost Voices, reimagines Petrinus’s final day. She places him in the bustling streets of Pompeii, buying ingredients for a political banquet hosted by his master, Caius Cuspius Pansa. The banquet is a campaign event, a display of wealth and influence. And in a dramatic gesture, Pansa emancipates Petrinus in front of his guests—a moment that might seem liberating, but in reality, leaves Petrinus adrift in a society that offers little support to the newly freed.

This narrative is not fiction. It’s a plausible reconstruction based on what we know about Roman slavery, political patronage, and the economics of emancipation. Freedmen often struggled to find work and housing, and their freedom was frequently conditional. By imagining Petrinus’s inner world—his fear, his hope, his resentment—Venner restores complexity to a life that history had reduced to a line in a ledger.

The Emotional Landscape of Enslavement in Pompeii

To understand Petrinus’s story is to confront the emotional reality of slavery in the Roman world. Unlike the transatlantic slave trade, Roman slavery was not based on race, but it was no less brutal. Enslaved people could be educated, skilled, and even hold positions of trust—some managed estates, taught children, or served as doctors. But they could also be beaten, sold, or killed at their master’s whim.

Petrinus’s experience—being sold twice by the age of 18—was not uncommon. The Roman economy relied heavily on slave labor, and the market for human beings was vast. Pompeii, a thriving commercial hub, was filled with enslaved people working in homes, workshops, and public spaces. Graffiti found on the walls of the city reveals glimpses of their presence: “I am here with my lover,” reads one, signed by a woman named Amabilis. Another, scratched near the baths, says, “The slave of Quintus is a thief.” These fragments suggest lives rich with emotion, conflict, and desire—lives that were rarely documented in official records.

Critical fabulation allows us to sit with these emotions. It asks us to consider not just what Petrinus did, but how he felt. The “bittersweet memory” of being sold, the fear of being seen by Poppaea—a woman who might have known him from a previous life—these are the textures of a human experience that history often flattens into statistics.

Reconstructing the Banquet: Power, Performance, and Freedom

The banquet in Venner’s reconstruction is more than a meal—it’s a performance of power. Caius Cuspius Pansa, a local politician, uses the event to bolster his electoral campaign. Food, wine, and spectacle are tools of influence. And the emancipation of Petrinus is the climax: a public act of generosity that enhances Pansa’s reputation as a benevolent leader.

But this moment of apparent liberation is deeply ambiguous. In Roman society, manumission—the act of freeing a slave—was common, but it didn’t guarantee equality. Freedmen (liberti) remained socially and economically dependent on their former masters. They often worked in the same trades, lived in the same neighborhoods, and were expected to show loyalty. Petrinus, now free, would need a job, a place to live, and a way to support himself. Without a network or resources, his freedom could feel more like abandonment than empowerment.

This complexity is what critical fabulation captures so well. It doesn’t reduce history to heroes and villains. It shows how power operates in subtle, often contradictory ways. Pansa gains prestige; Petrinus gains freedom—but at what cost? The story forces us to ask: Who benefits from liberation? And who is left to navigate its consequences?

The Role of Women and Children in the Shadows

While Petrinus’s story centers on male political power, critical fabulation also opens doors to the lives of women and children—groups even more marginalized in the historical record. Women in Pompeii could own property, run businesses, and participate in religious life, but their voices are rarely preserved. Children, especially enslaved ones, are almost invisible.

Imagine a young girl, perhaps the daughter of a freedman, watching the banquet from the kitchen doorway. She sees Petrinus being freed, hears the cheers, but knows her own future is uncertain. Or consider a mother, enslaved like Petrinus, separated from her child when sold to a new household. These are the stories that don’t make it into the inscriptions, but they are no less real.

Archaeological finds offer clues. A small doll found in a child’s grave. A bracelet inscribed with a name. A graffito that reads, “I love you, mother.” These objects, when paired with critical fabulation, become portals to emotional worlds.

Why This Matters: Reimagining History for a New Era

The shift toward critical fabulation is not just an academic trend—it’s a moral imperative. As we confront the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and systemic inequality, we must also confront the ways history has been written by the powerful. The stories of the voiceless matter not because they are tragic, but because they are human.

In Pompeii, where the past feels so close you can almost touch it, this method reminds us that history is not just about what happened—it’s about who gets to tell the story. By imagining Petrinus’s fear, his hope, his resilience, we honor not just one man, but the millions whose lives were shaped by forces beyond their control.

And perhaps, in doing so, we learn something about ourselves. About the stories we choose to remember, and the ones we’ve been taught to forget.

The lost voices of Pompeii are not truly lost. They are waiting—in the cracks of a wax tablet, in the silence between the lines, in the spaces where history hesitates to speak. All we need is the courage to listen.

This article was curated from Pompeii wasn’t frozen in time. Its lost voices are still speaking to us. via Big Think