The recent popularity of the title phrase may not be the most astute indicator of how history exists in the collective memory. Yet Roman legal and social legacies survive throughout today’s West. The prominent eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79 has been immortalised in pop culture, creating a thriving tourist trade around the relics of the empire. However, recent genetic profiling of Pompeiian citizens may change the contemporary view of Roman society, revealing contradictions with modern-day values often traced back to antiquity.

In an effort to uncover the rich archaeological database from beneath the ashes, researchers have extracted nuclear and mitochondrial DNA from bone fragments taken from five plaster-casted figures, with an aim to identify the sex, health, relational, and ancestral characteristics between the individuals. Although these attributes have all been previously inferred through observations, the use of CT and X-Ray imaging techniques enabled a first non-invasive glimpse into what kind of lives these individuals might have shared together.

The findings are striking: all figures were found to be male, with no familial connections to one another, and a high genetic similarity with west Asian genes. Many prior observations identify a woman carrying her child alongside a sisterly embrace, and such imagery has shaped our understanding of family roles in ancient Rome. This new evidence however marks a change in perspective of how these figures are viewed within the wider social context, suggesting a more diverse and cosmopolitan society where family roles are less gendered and private. By default, the construction of modern social symbols – the femininity of jewellery, or the nuclear family – seems to be less strongly rooted in the past, questioning their normality today.

Interpreting Roman gender and social structures has always been fraught with difficulty, primarily due to the limited written accounts from ordinary people coupled with the challenge of translating ancient sources. Take the terms pudicitia (female chastity) and sophrosyne (male self-control), commonly used expressions which have traditionally guided our understanding of how women and men acted and interacted in Roman society. Their true meaning however can only be appraised when fully contextualised, and the discovery of a man in such a domestic setting without any relation to the family raises questions about how these ideals were actually lived out in everyday life.

Whilst interesting thought experiments, it is important to not inflate the evidence’s value based on what researchers would like to see. This demonstrates a pitfall of scientific research, where the empirical nature of the data creates a façade of impartiality. Determining the intimate lives of Romans based on genetic information is as much a red herring as inferring the role of women based on the appearance of a bracelet. Despite its apparent neutrality, interpretations of the data at hand are not as objective; considering a large proportion of the conclusions were based on highly fragmented DNA and bone samples from a single specimen, sweeping statements about Roman life in general cannot be accurately made.

Whether the evidence is reliable or not, it ultimately represents a great example of how interpreting scientific data is inevitably layered with individual biases, symbolising the difficulty of extrapolating scientific research. As many reflect on their own ‘Roman Empires’, it would be good to remember that legacies cannot always be taken at face value and their persistence today is evidence of just how multi-layered the stories they tell have become.

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