Hello and welcome to Home School History. I'm Greg Jenner, the historian behind TV's

Horrible Histories, and the host of the BBC Podcast, You're Dead To Me. I'm here to

deliver a snappy history lesson to entertain and educate the whole family, who says that

home schooling can't be fun. And today we are journeying back nearly 2,000 years to visit

an ancient Roman town that was frozen in time by a volcanic eruption. Yes, we're off

to Pompeii in Italy. Now Pompeii was a pretty ordinary port town with lots of ships arriving

all the time. It had lots of nice bits, but it wasn't particularly posh compared to Herculaneum,

the much fancier seaside resort next door. Now Pompeii hadn't started out as a Roman town.

It was founded centuries before by a tribe called the Sam Knights, who spoke the Oscon language.

In fact, archaeologists have found bits of Oscon graffiti scribbled on the ancient walls.

So how did Pompeii become Roman? Well, about 170 years before that volcano went,

Coo-Blang! There was a huge punch up called the Social War.

Oh! Oh! No, that's not when celebrities have arguments on Twitter, but rather was a massive

outbreak of violence among Rome's allies, known in Latin as the Socii, which resulted

in the Romans smashing the Sam Knights in 89 BCE and enforcing them to all be Romans.

We're not a west, we're not a west, we're not a west, we're not a west!

Now this was obviously a bad time for Pompeii, but not as bad as 79 CE, when life suddenly

stopped. The town was close to a massive volcano called Vesuvius, and one day it suddenly

went Coo-Blang!

Over two days, the eruption killed everyone in the area, and the town and people were

buried under meters of thick volcanic ash, and they weren't rediscovered until 1748.

This meant that everything and everyone in Pompeii was preserved in ash, frozen in that horrible

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