He was probably nearing retirement. The soldier was more than 40 years old when he found himself on a beach, caught up in an evacuation attempt. Assuming that he had enlisted around the age of 18, as was common, he would only have a year or two left before he was discharged after 25 or 26 years’ service. If the soldier was not yet a Roman citizen, his retirement would be marked with the receipt of a bronze diploma awarding him this status, which bestowed a wealth of desirable rights. It would also make him one of the lucky ones – estimates suggest that perhaps only half of Rome’s soldiers survived to reach this milestone, with the rest succumbing to war, disease, or the simple misfortunes that dog lives of hard labour. Having got so close, the soldier on the beach could have been forgiven for starting to daydream about a peaceful future spent working a patch of good ground: one of the plots reserved for citizens. But it was not to be. For the year was AD 79, and the sand he was standing on stretched out in front of the seaside town of Herculaneum.
More than 300 people perished on that beach when Vesuvius erupted. Most of the victims were sheltering in boat sheds on the edge of town, but a few were waiting further out on the beach, presumably hoping for salvation from the sea. So far as we can see, the 40-something man was the only soldier among them. His status is marked out by a pair of military belts – the closest thing to a uniform in the era – with one supporting his dagger, and the other his short sword or gladius. There was no call for hot, heavy armour on the beach, but the soldier had attached to his dagger belt a metal-and-leather-strip groin protector that hung over his russet-red tunic. It was not just this military kit that marked out the man as a powerful presence: his bones show traces of heavily developed thigh and forearm muscles.
As the only boat found on the beach was seemingly a naval launch, it has been wondered if the soldier was a marine freshly arrived from the port at Misenum, a little further up the coast. A Roman fleet was based there, and its commander – the ancient author and curious soul Pliny the Elder – famously perished in a failed rescue attempt. Pliny’s initial rescue party is recorded turning back from landing at Herculaneum, but maybe another group was not driven away by the ash. One theory is that the skeletons on the beach are all that remain of a much larger group of victims, who were blasted into the sea by the final pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius (we know some people did end up in the sea, as bodies were washed back to shore and found atop the volcanic mass of new land that formed over the beach). The Herculaneum soldier could have had colleagues with him in the final moments.
