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Roman priest’s exceptionally well-preserved remains found in Pompeii

133 points by benbreen 5y ago

olegious 5y ago
The original announcement from the Archaeological Park of Pompeii has more and larger pics as well as a video: http://pompeiisites.org/en/comunicati/the-tomb-of-marcus-venerius-secundio-discovered-at-porta-sarno-with-mummified-human-remains/ http://pompeiisites.org/en/comunicati/the-tomb-of-marcus-ven...
- nousermane 5y ago
  What a nice font! On the plaque seen in that video around 56 second mark. Serifs are all uniformly oblique and rhymed with the top of "s", while main strokes are mostly vertical and ever so gently curved. Almost gothic, and at the same time unmistakably classical. I really like it.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> If he chose this manner of burial himself, that “could mean … there was a certain ideological freedom [in Pompeii],” Llorenç Alapont, an archaeologist at Universidad Europea de Valencia who participated in the excavation, tells ANSA, per Google Translate. Maybe if you want to report on something someone said in another language, have your translation checked by someone who can understand that language.
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't pick the most irritating detail in an article and then copy it into the thread to complain about it. This leads to significantly lower-quality discussion, especially when the detail is off topic. HN threads are sensitive to initial conditions, so this is particularly important when there aren't many comments yet. One thing we're working on learning as a community is how to respond to the interesting parts of an article or situation and leave superficial provocations alone. Not easy, but important for curious conversation. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - whoaisme 5y ago
    Learning as a community. LOL cut the crap. If you're going to censor have the decency to shut up with the marketing babble. Funny how other people found the comment interesting as you go about your quest to sterilize people's voices.
- asveikau 5y ago
  Interesting detail. Assuming the original was Catalan or Castilian or some other Latin language, I think a machine translation of a short phrase about "ideological freedom" is likely to be accurate. Most of Europe uses the same handful of Greek and Latin roots to express that. (In English we have "freedom" from a Germanic root, but you get the idea.)
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    I agree - in this case, the Google Translate translation is very likely to be correct without problems. But I see two problems anyway: 1. This is the kind of thing where if there is a problem, it can easily be a huge problem. One of the simplest translation mistakes you can make, for example, is to come up with exactly the opposite meaning of what the original said. 2. Smithsonian Magazine is literally adding a tag to their article that says we do not stand by our reporting. Maybe it's true, maybe it's false; they don't know and they don't care. If it's false, that is, according to them, Google's problem, not theirs. This cannot meet even the bare minimum standard of acceptable journalism.
op00to 5y ago
I wonder what the priest would think if he knew his bones were discovered so far into the future…
- p1mrx 5y ago
  I would be more interested in the method by which he obtained that information.
  - ithkuil 5y ago
    By inspection of animal entrails I suppose.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - aksss 5y ago
    5th level necromancy. A cleric or paladin can cast Raise Dead, takes an hour, consumes a diamond worth 500gp. I mean, if we can transport people to other celestial bodies and transform the light of the sun into the power of 100 horses, should be kinda easy in the scheme of things, no?
  - fsckboy 5y ago
    listen to and practice his teachings and perhaps you'll be able to ask him yourself
- raducu 5y ago
  Thinking about death, as in complete anihilation is something both awe inspiring and frightening to all, isn't it? I recently visited a salt mine/museum; as soon as I entered the enormous chamber with the low-rumbling noises, beautiful geological patterns on the wall, I was struck by the feeling that this is an inescapable tomb, our fate is sealed, an eternity passed before us and an eternity will pass after us, billuons upon billions of years and we won't get to experience them, we are both so dumb and so lucky not to think about it every day.
tryagainacct 5y ago
> The fact that Secundio was buried rather than cremated contradicts the long-held idea that Roman funeral rites were followed strictly for fear of incurring the wrath of the gods. > Mount Vesuvius’ pyroclastic flows and poisonous fumes killed around 2,000 people in Pompeii and the neighboring city of Herculaneum.
- ahmedfromtunis 5y ago
  The joke is on you. Correlation does not imply causation. On a more serious note, I wonder how people reacted to his decision to forgo cremation at the time, especially since he is a priest himself; and if there were any discussions, even privately among his relatives, on how he can get away with it because of his status (if this was really the case). It's for moment like these, not the ones immortalized by historians, that I wish there is/was (does it even matter what tense to use) a time machine.
- tus89 5y ago
  I don't think strict beliefs and Rome were really a thing until a certain Eastern religion took over.
  - aksss 5y ago
    Christianity wasn't granted legal protection until ~300AD. Prior to that, you could say that it was a strict belief that Christianity was verboten and its members subject to persecution (lions, crosses, etc). It would be another half-century before the empire started to codify what "Christianity" was in a "strict" sense (Nicaean creed, right?). The time period of Secundio's tomb is around AD 60 or so. As the article at pompeiisites.org says, "During the Roman period at Pompeii, funeral rites usually involved cremation, while only small children were buried." This burial of a 60 year old man stands out for a few reasons, but one of which is that it even exists at all given that it's contrary to custom of the pre-Christian age.
    - tus89 5y ago
      The persecution of Christianity by Rome is a myth and largely a response to it's regressive attempts to deprive others of religious freedom, and destroy classical civilization/education/philosophy more generally. I wonder how a crazed, uneducated mob that went around destroying churches and temples and murdering educated women would be treated in the US today? Rome was remarkably flexible and adaptive when it came to beliefs, including easily incorporating other religions into their belief structure, until one of them wanted to be the only one.
pandemic_region 5y ago
It's amazing how those few strings of hair turned the skeleton bones back into a real person for me. Thanks, nice post !
Koshkin 5y ago
He was born when Christ was just 10 to 15 years old. Not sure why, but this somehow fascinates me.
dukeofdoom 5y ago
Every place I visited that had a volcano, has been an amazing place filled with natural beauty. Hawaii and Costa Rica, and Washington. I can see why people want to live close to them. The meadows of Mount Rainier, The hot springs of Arenal Volcano, and Haleakala in Maui really stand out in my mind to this day.
adolph 5y ago
Folks interested in this might be interested in the Told in Stone YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/toldinstone https://www.youtube.com/c/toldinstone
Grakel 5y ago
Definitely don't take any close up pictures, I'm here for the words!
JohnGB 5y ago
This just shows that Zeus is the one true god! /s
- xdennis 5y ago
  Ahem, Jupiter!
  - jjtheblunt 5y ago
    Jupiter = [DZ]eus + Pater = Father Zeus. You are agreeing.
chrononaut 5y ago
> Roman priest’s exceptionally well-preserved remains found in Pompeii As someone not familiar with how frequently a situation like this occurs, the phrasing of the article title made me think they found another Otzi[0] or Lady of Dai[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xin_Zhui https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xin_Zhui
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
  Those are really cool thanks for linking.
vyrotek 5y ago
Is it just me or is the placement of the body in the tomb strange? A dark thought, but the first thing that came to mind is it looks like he was alive when he was sealed up in there...
- MichaelZuo 5y ago
  Roman burial practices for their clergy are pretty obscure. Maybe it was a sect?
- gerbilly 5y ago
  Maybe an earthquake moved his body to one side of the tomb?
mariuolo 5y ago
> Marcus Venerius Secundio, a formerly enslaved individual who later became a priest If he was a libertus, I wonder if he came from some remote part from the empire, possibly with different funerary customs.

133 points by benbreen 5y ago

The original announcement from the Archaeological Park of Pompeii has more and larger pics as well as a video: http://pompeiisites.org/en/comunicati/the-tomb-of-marcus-venerius-secundio-discovered-at-porta-sarno-with-mummified-human-remains/ http://pompeiisites.org/en/comunicati/the-tomb-of-marcus-ven...

nousermane 5y ago
What a nice font! On the plaque seen in that video around 56 second mark. Serifs are all uniformly oblique and rhymed with the top of "s", while main strokes are mostly vertical and ever so gently curved. Almost gothic, and at the same time unmistakably classical. I really like it.

thaumasiotes 5y ago

> If he chose this manner of burial himself, that “could mean … there was a certain ideological freedom [in Pompeii],” Llorenç Alapont, an archaeologist at Universidad Europea de Valencia who participated in the excavation, tells ANSA, per Google Translate. Maybe if you want to report on something someone said in another language, have your translation checked by someone who can understand that language.

dang 5y ago
Please don't pick the most irritating detail in an article and then copy it into the thread to complain about it. This leads to significantly lower-quality discussion, especially when the detail is off topic. HN threads are sensitive to initial conditions, so this is particularly important when there aren't many comments yet. One thing we're working on learning as a community is how to respond to the interesting parts of an article or situation and leave superficial provocations alone. Not easy, but important for curious conversation. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- whoaisme 5y ago
  Learning as a community. LOL cut the crap. If you're going to censor have the decency to shut up with the marketing babble. Funny how other people found the comment interesting as you go about your quest to sterilize people's voices.
asveikau 5y ago
Interesting detail. Assuming the original was Catalan or Castilian or some other Latin language, I think a machine translation of a short phrase about "ideological freedom" is likely to be accurate. Most of Europe uses the same handful of Greek and Latin roots to express that. (In English we have "freedom" from a Germanic root, but you get the idea.)
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  I agree - in this case, the Google Translate translation is very likely to be correct without problems. But I see two problems anyway: 1. This is the kind of thing where if there is a problem, it can easily be a huge problem. One of the simplest translation mistakes you can make, for example, is to come up with exactly the opposite meaning of what the original said. 2. Smithsonian Magazine is literally adding a tag to their article that says we do not stand by our reporting. Maybe it's true, maybe it's false; they don't know and they don't care. If it's false, that is, according to them, Google's problem, not theirs. This cannot meet even the bare minimum standard of acceptable journalism.

op00to 5y ago

I wonder what the priest would think if he knew his bones were discovered so far into the future…

p1mrx 5y ago
I would be more interested in the method by which he obtained that information.
- ithkuil 5y ago
  By inspection of animal entrails I suppose.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- aksss 5y ago
  5th level necromancy. A cleric or paladin can cast Raise Dead, takes an hour, consumes a diamond worth 500gp. I mean, if we can transport people to other celestial bodies and transform the light of the sun into the power of 100 horses, should be kinda easy in the scheme of things, no?
- fsckboy 5y ago
  listen to and practice his teachings and perhaps you'll be able to ask him yourself
raducu 5y ago
Thinking about death, as in complete anihilation is something both awe inspiring and frightening to all, isn't it? I recently visited a salt mine/museum; as soon as I entered the enormous chamber with the low-rumbling noises, beautiful geological patterns on the wall, I was struck by the feeling that this is an inescapable tomb, our fate is sealed, an eternity passed before us and an eternity will pass after us, billuons upon billions of years and we won't get to experience them, we are both so dumb and so lucky not to think about it every day.

tryagainacct 5y ago

> The fact that Secundio was buried rather than cremated contradicts the long-held idea that Roman funeral rites were followed strictly for fear of incurring the wrath of the gods. > Mount Vesuvius’ pyroclastic flows and poisonous fumes killed around 2,000 people in Pompeii and the neighboring city of Herculaneum.

ahmedfromtunis 5y ago
The joke is on you. Correlation does not imply causation. On a more serious note, I wonder how people reacted to his decision to forgo cremation at the time, especially since he is a priest himself; and if there were any discussions, even privately among his relatives, on how he can get away with it because of his status (if this was really the case). It's for moment like these, not the ones immortalized by historians, that I wish there is/was (does it even matter what tense to use) a time machine.
tus89 5y ago
I don't think strict beliefs and Rome were really a thing until a certain Eastern religion took over.
- aksss 5y ago
  Christianity wasn't granted legal protection until ~300AD. Prior to that, you could say that it was a strict belief that Christianity was verboten and its members subject to persecution (lions, crosses, etc). It would be another half-century before the empire started to codify what "Christianity" was in a "strict" sense (Nicaean creed, right?). The time period of Secundio's tomb is around AD 60 or so. As the article at pompeiisites.org says, "During the Roman period at Pompeii, funeral rites usually involved cremation, while only small children were buried." This burial of a 60 year old man stands out for a few reasons, but one of which is that it even exists at all given that it's contrary to custom of the pre-Christian age.
  - tus89 5y ago
    The persecution of Christianity by Rome is a myth and largely a response to it's regressive attempts to deprive others of religious freedom, and destroy classical civilization/education/philosophy more generally. I wonder how a crazed, uneducated mob that went around destroying churches and temples and murdering educated women would be treated in the US today? Rome was remarkably flexible and adaptive when it came to beliefs, including easily incorporating other religions into their belief structure, until one of them wanted to be the only one.

pandemic_region 5y ago

It's amazing how those few strings of hair turned the skeleton bones back into a real person for me. Thanks, nice post !

Koshkin 5y ago

He was born when Christ was just 10 to 15 years old. Not sure why, but this somehow fascinates me.

dukeofdoom 5y ago

Every place I visited that had a volcano, has been an amazing place filled with natural beauty. Hawaii and Costa Rica, and Washington. I can see why people want to live close to them. The meadows of Mount Rainier, The hot springs of Arenal Volcano, and Haleakala in Maui really stand out in my mind to this day.

adolph 5y ago

Folks interested in this might be interested in the Told in Stone YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/toldinstone https://www.youtube.com/c/toldinstone

Grakel 5y ago

Definitely don't take any close up pictures, I'm here for the words!

JohnGB 5y ago

This just shows that Zeus is the one true god! /s

xdennis 5y ago
Ahem, Jupiter!
- jjtheblunt 5y ago
  Jupiter = [DZ]eus + Pater = Father Zeus. You are agreeing.

chrononaut 5y ago

> Roman priest’s exceptionally well-preserved remains found in Pompeii As someone not familiar with how frequently a situation like this occurs, the phrasing of the article title made me think they found another Otzi[0] or Lady of Dai[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xin_Zhui https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xin_Zhui

nickthemagicman 5y ago
Those are really cool thanks for linking.

vyrotek 5y ago

Is it just me or is the placement of the body in the tomb strange? A dark thought, but the first thing that came to mind is it looks like he was alive when he was sealed up in there...

MichaelZuo 5y ago
Roman burial practices for their clergy are pretty obscure. Maybe it was a sect?
gerbilly 5y ago
Maybe an earthquake moved his body to one side of the tomb?

mariuolo 5y ago

> Marcus Venerius Secundio, a formerly enslaved individual who later became a priest If he was a libertus, I wonder if he came from some remote part from the empire, possibly with different funerary customs.