Let Tom Hiddleston be your guide to Pompeii’s final day

让汤姆·希德勒斯顿带你重回庞贝城的最后一天

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, it spewed molten rock, pumice, and hot ash over the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, killing thousands of people. It’s one of the most famous natural disasters in human history, so naturally there have been countless documentaries about Pompeii (and at least one popular song). But only one features actor Tom Hiddleston taking on the role of a “time detective” to bring the people of Pompeii to vivid life. That would be National Geographic’s new three-part docuseries, Pompeii: Out of Time.

公元79年，维苏威火山爆发，喷涌而出的熔岩、浮石和炽热火山灰覆盖了庞贝和赫库兰尼姆两座城市，导致数千人丧生。这是人类历史上最著名的自然灾害之一，因此关于庞贝城的纪录片（以及至少一首流行歌曲）数不胜数。但只有一部纪录片由演员汤姆·希德勒斯顿（Tom Hiddleston）担任“时间侦探”，将庞贝城人民的生活生动地呈现在观众面前。这就是国家地理频道推出的三集纪录片系列——《庞贝：超越时间》（Pompeii: Out of Time）。

The Marvel connection made Out of Time happen. Executive producer Kevin Wright was also a producer on the Disney+ series Loki, which included a scene where Hiddleston’s Loki travels through time to visit Pompeii. Hiddleston also studied classics at Cambridge University and had visited the Pompeii archaeological site as a teenager, which the Marvel star attributes to indirectly influencing his career path into acting.

漫威的渊源促成了这部纪录片的诞生。执行制片人凯文·赖特（Kevin Wright）也曾担任迪士尼+剧集《洛基》（Loki）的制片人，该剧曾有一个场景是希德勒斯顿饰演的洛基穿越时空造访庞贝。希德勒斯顿本人曾在剑桥大学学习古典学，并在青少年时期参观过庞贝考古遗址，这位漫威明星认为这段经历间接影响了他走上演员的职业道路。

“There is just a passion to the way Tom tells stories that’s infectious,” Wright told Ars. “We knew that if we could capture that and put it into [the series], it might interest people who wouldn’t normally want to watch a documentary about Pompeii.”

“汤姆讲故事的方式有一种极具感染力的热情，”赖特告诉《Ars Technica》，“我们知道，如果我们能捕捉到这种热情并将其融入（纪录片）中，可能会吸引那些平时不愿看庞贝纪录片的观众。”

The docuseries combines the usual historical and scientific facts with Hiddleston’s personal journey of discovery. He homes in on three people in particular and follows them over the city’s final 24 hours to discover whether or not they survived: a teenage boy, a local businesswoman, and a Praetorian guard. Stilted re-enactments are replaced with scripted dramatic scenes and high production values to make it all feel more cinematic.

这部纪录片将常规的历史和科学事实与希德勒斯顿个人的探索之旅相结合。他重点关注了三个人，并追踪了他们在城市最后24小时的经历，以探究他们是否幸存：一名少年、一位当地女商人和一名禁卫军士兵。片中摒弃了生硬的重演，转而采用剧本化的戏剧场景和高水准的制作，使整部作品更具电影质感。

It’s an unusual approach, if only because we’re so conditioned to what a documentary “should” be. But the blended approach makes for a powerful experience. “We felt we could use the imagination to make a more human story. This isn’t just ancient history; these were real people, and their lives were not dramatically different than ours even though they lived 2,000 years ago,” said Wright.

这是一种不同寻常的方法，仅仅是因为我们已经习惯了纪录片“应该”有的样子。但这种融合的方式带来了一种震撼的体验。“我们觉得可以利用想象力来讲述一个更具人性色彩的故事。这不仅仅是古代历史；他们是真实的人，尽管生活在2000年前，但他们的生活与我们并没有本质上的不同，”赖特说。

“One of the most freeing moments was when we came to this idea of ‘historia,’ the merging of imagination and historical fact, and that ‘storytelling’ and ‘history’ in Latin are the same word. It was Hiddleston who put us onto that. When we went to our historians, our experts, with that word, we were met with nothing but enthusiasm. There seems to be a real movement in archaeology of, ‘This is how you have to approach it now.’”

“最令人感到释怀的时刻之一，是我们想到了‘historia’这个概念，即想象力与历史事实的融合，而且在拉丁语中，‘讲故事’和‘历史’是同一个词。是希德勒斯顿启发了我们。当我们带着这个词去咨询历史学家和专家时，他们表现出了极大的热情。考古学界似乎正在兴起一种共识：‘这才是现在应该采取的研究方式。’”

Factual science does get its due. Geologist and science communicator Chris Jackson, for instance, is on hand to clear up any misconceptions the general public might have about the eruption and its aftermath. “The most common misconception people have about Pompeii was the belief that people were killed by lava,” Jackson told Ars. “That’s understandable. In Pompeii and Herculaneum, around all of Naples, a lot of the buildings are made from these black hard igneous rocks, cooled lava. When you tell people that what led to the devastation in 79 AD was nothing to do with lava, their faces sort of drop. It’s a bit sad to hear that it was this more devastating thing called a pyroclastic flow.”

科学事实也得到了应有的重视。例如，地质学家兼科学传播者克里斯·杰克逊（Chris Jackson）在片中负责澄清公众对火山爆发及其后果的误解。“人们对庞贝城最常见的误解是认为人们死于熔岩，”杰克逊告诉《Ars Technica》，“这可以理解。在庞贝、赫库兰尼姆以及整个那不勒斯周边，许多建筑都是由这种黑色坚硬的火成岩——即冷却后的熔岩——建造的。当你告诉人们公元79年的灾难与熔岩无关时，他们会感到非常惊讶。听到真相其实是更具破坏性的‘火山碎屑流’，这确实令人难过。”

Outrunning those flows would not have been an option. Based on reconstructions, Jackson estimates that the pyroclastic flows would be moving between 100 and 200 kilometers per hour (60–120 mph). “Imagine the speed you can drive on the freeway in the US and double that,” he said. “You can’t outrun a car. So there was no way you were going to outrun these things. That’s what makes these so devastating.”

想要逃离这些火山碎屑流是不可能的。根据重建模型，杰克逊估计火山碎屑流的移动速度在每小时100到200公里之间。“想象一下你在美国高速公路上行驶的速度，然后将其翻倍，”他说，“你跑不过汽车，所以你根本不可能跑赢这些火山碎屑流。这就是它们如此致命的原因。”

The eruption of Vesuvius dramatically altered the geography of the Bay of Naples, per Jackson. “These pyroclastic flows actually changed the shoreline shape,” he said. “Some went through Vesuvius and Pompeii, which at the time had beaches. They were next to the sea. Now there’s some distance from it because [the flows] added new land beyond the settlement and reshaped the coastline.”

据杰克逊所述，维苏威火山的爆发彻底改变了那不勒斯湾的地理环境。“这些火山碎屑流实际上改变了海岸线的形状，”他说，“有些碎屑流穿过了维苏威火山和庞贝城，当时那里还有海滩，紧邻大海。现在它们距离海岸有一段距离，因为（火山碎屑流）在定居点之外增加了新的土地，并重塑了海岸线。”