Pompeii’s ‘Two Maidens’ locked in dying embrace are a heterosexual couple, DNA analysis suggests

Famous victims of volcanic disaster found to be unrelated according to new research

Two famous victims of the volcanic eruption that devastated Pompeii 2,000 years ago, long thought to be women and dubbed the “Two Maidens”, may have in fact been a heterosexual couple, DNA studies have revealed.
Locked in an eternal embrace after the ancient Roman town was hit by suffocating clouds of ash and volcanic debris, the couple are among the most well-known victims of the disaster.
However, new tests have revealed that far from being sisters or perhaps a mother and daughter, at least one of the “Two Maidens” was a man. Experts say they could have been lovers – although that will be impossible to definitively prove.
The discovery that one of the two victims was a man “excludes the possibility that the pair were sisters or a mother and daughter”, scientists from Harvard and the University of Florence said.
The fresh analysis of 14 adults and children who died when Mt Vesuvius smothered Pompeii in AD79 has upended long-held assumptions about who they were and how they were related to each other.
A huddled group of two adults and two small children were thought to have been a family fleeing for their lives.
Discovered in 1979, one of the adults wore a golden bracelet and was believed to be a mother with her child on her lap.
But DNA evidence now reveals that the “mother” was a man who was unrelated to the child. In fact, none of the four people in the group were related.
“Both the mitochondrial DNA and whole-genome data found no evidence of biological relatedness between any of the individuals, falsifying the prevailing narrative of these four victims as a genetically related family,” scientists said.
They may have been a mix of master and slave, thrown together by the terror and chaos of the eruption, but the truth will probably never be known.
“It could be that the man was fleeing the eruption and had grabbed the bracelet because it was so precious and then came across an unknown child in the street and scooped him up to try to save him,” said Valeria Amoretti, from the research laboratory at Pompeii. “It was a huge catastrophe. We have to imagine the entire population being seized by panic.”
Victims of the eruption were entombed in the ash and pumice that spewed from Vesuvius.
As their soft tissue disintegrated, body-shaped cavities were left behind in the volcanic deposits. Archaeologists in the 19th century perfected a technique of filling these holes with plaster, producing perfect casts of the dead.
They guessed at the age and gender of the little groups of victims, coming up with backstories and names for them – the group of two adults and two children was dubbed the “Family of the House of the Golden Bracelet” while the two supposed women, calcified forever in a last embrace, were named the “Two Maidens”.
“These discoveries challenge long-standing interpretations, such as associating jewellery with femininity or interpreting physical closeness as an indicator of biological relationships,” scientists said in the study, which was published in the journal Current Biology.
This is the first time that scientists have examined the scraps of DNA from skeletal material that remained in the plaster body casts.
“We examined 14 casts but we were able to obtain usable DNA from only seven of them,” said David Caramelli from the University of Florence.
The study also found that Pompeii was even more of an ethnic melting pot than previously thought, with inhabitants coming from across the empire, particularly the eastern Mediterranean, including the Levant and Greece, as well as from Jewish communities in North Africa.
The ethnic diversity, described by the researchers as an example of “premodern globalisation”, was propelled by conquest, trade, the seizing of slaves and migration from the provinces. The finding “underscores the cosmopolitanism” of the Roman Empire.
“We knew that the empire was a melting pot but the variety of genomes surprised us,” said Dr Amoretti.
The latest findings confirm an earlier analysis of the plaster casts, which first suggested that at least one of the “Two Maidens” was a man.
That analysis, carried out in 2017, also revealed that a cast known as the Pregnant Woman had not been pregnant and might not even have been a woman. The person’s apparently swollen belly may in fact have been formed by bunched up clothing, scientists said.
Archaeologists have so far found around 1,000 victims of the eruption in Pompeii and have made plaster casts of 104 of them.