Of course, it goes through the Renaissance and through Elizabethan England—all of those extraordinary intellects, those great writers, Shakespeare and the Founding Fathers of America, they were all eminent classicists. And all over the world are archaeological sites, like Pompeii, where you can visit the ancient world as a living, breathing place.
Why return to Pompeii? What’s the allure of that city and that moment for you—and for everyone, really?
We tell stories about the past to understand something about our present, and somewhere like Pompeii is a gateway where the 2,000 years that exist between us and the past compress. So it all feels like it happened yesterday, and the reason I love it so much is I realize that human beings haven’t changed at all. Of course, our technologies have changed, and the way we communicate, and various kinds of systems. But the primary elements of the experience of being alive are the same. We still have the same questions—philosophical questions, existential questions—about what it means to be part of a political community, what it means to be alive and to be mortal on this Earth. They were fascinated by those questions, and we still are. Any reading of the ancient world only enlivens one’s imagination, and personally, it makes me feel less alone in the world to know that they were thinking about the same things.
That relatability between us and ancient Romans really comes out in the series through its dramatization of the lives of everyday people. Why was that approach important?
That’s what I find so moving. On that fateful day when Mount Vesuvius erupts, there were ordinary people going about their daily routine. I suppose the goal is to invite the audience to empathize with those people. Here’s this kid who is just at the beginning of his life, and he’s got his first job. He’s trying to make his mother proud, and they’ve fallen on hard times, and it’s not easy for him. You have this businesswoman who is in a position of responsibility—then to see that when the eruption happens, she has all these clients who she’s responsible for, and her first thought is for their safety and security. And then the soldier, who is on leave in an upmarket resort town, Herculaneum, but he’s got the perfect training. He’s the right man in the wrong place at the wrong time, but his training could be implemented to help get people into the boats and off the beach.