By Ashley Strickland, CNN
(CNN) — Pompeii is often thought of as an undisturbed time capsule, a once-bustling port that fell silent after Mount Vesuvius erupted and blanketed the ancient Roman city with a thick layer of ash in AD 79.
“It is such a great persistent narrative,” Dr. Steven Tuck, professor and head of classics at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, told CNN. “You walk around Pompeii, and you’re pretty much hit with that story: Everybody dies, everything’s wiped out.”
But Tuck’s visits to Pompeii over the years revealed what he calls “evidence via absence,” or clues from items missing that fateful day, such as empty household shrines and stables.
“When you look more closely, you realize that there’s a lot of stuff missing that should be there,” Tuck said. “There are no boats tied up on the dock and all of the strong boxes where people kept their cash in in the Roman world, they’re all empty. Eventually, it occurred to me that this doesn’t jibe with that story that everybody died.”
For the past decade, Tuck has worked on the Pompeii Survivors Project, an exhaustive search for those who managed to flee before Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum were destroyed. His findings were published in the 2025 book “Escape From Pompeii: The Great Eruption of Mount Vesuvius and its Survivors.”
He scoured online databases that international teams of scholars created to search for Latin inscriptions of names from both cities, which were chiseled into stone plaques nearly 2,000 years ago. Tuck then traced the names to see whether their stories ended on the day of the eruption.
The journeys of three of the people Tuck pursued dominate the new docuseries “Pompeii: Out of Time,” executive produced and hosted by actor Tom Hiddleston, who studied classics at the UK’s University of Cambridge and first visited the city in 1998 as a 17-year-old fascinated by history.
The series premieres Wednesday on National Geographic and will begin streaming Thursday on Disney+ and Hulu.
The docudrama blends dramatic reenactments and investigative research to take viewers inside the lives of a teenage blacksmith apprentice, a businesswoman and a Praetorian Guard on the day of the eruption — all with a timer running in the background, a countdown clock that reveals the ultimate fate of each person.
“What is so remarkable about the story of Pompeii is that we have the privilege of access to the breadth and diversity of detail about their ordinary lives,” Hiddleston said. “Pompeii is a living monument to the past. You can reach across time and feel connected to a thread of human history.”
Ongoing research at Pompeii, including projects led by experts such as Tuck featured in the series, are shedding light on previously hidden aspects of daily life for the city’s residents before and after the devastation.
The findings showcase that as the narrative changes, it becomes a deeper and more layered look at human courage and resilience in the face of an unexpected natural disaster.
A sleeping giant
At the beginning of “Pompeii: Out of Time,” an earthquake rumbles through the city, but people carry on with their daily lives, not seeming to think much of the disturbance.
“There wasn’t the awareness of the relationship between those earthquakes and what was to come later,” Christopher Jackso