This finding is consistent with earlier genetic work on ancient Roman populations. A 2019 study in *Science* analyzed 127 individuals from the Roman peninsula across different historical periods and found that the population of Rome during the Imperial period showed substantial ancestry from the eastern Mediterranean — reflecting the demographic consequences of the Roman Empire’s movements of people through trade, enslavement, military service, and migration.
Pompeii in 79 CE was a port city on a major commercial route, and the material culture of the city shows the products of Mediterranean trade: goods from Spain, North Africa, Egypt, Greece, and the Levant have been found in its shops and houses. The people who sold and bought those goods, who worked in the ships that carried them, who performed the domestic and agricultural labor that sustained the households that consumed them, came from across the same geographic range.
David Reich commented in public statements on the ancestry findings by noting that the results “underscore the cosmopolitanism of the Roman Empire in this period.” Alissa Mittnik characterized the genetic diversity as reflecting “the cosmopolitan nature of Pompeii’s population.” These observations situated the specific genetic findings within a broader historical context: the individuals who died in 79 CE were not a genetically homogeneous group representing a single ethnic or regional origin, and they should not be read as the genetic representatives of any single modern national or ethnic identity.
This point has particular relevance because Pompeii has sometimes been claimed, implicitly or explicitly, as part of a specifically Italian or European heritage — the preserved city as a monument to a specifically Western past. The genetic data complicate this claim by showing that the city’s population was itself the product of the Mediterranean-wide movements that characterized Roman Imperial life. The people who lived and died in Pompeii were not ancestrally distinct from the broader population of the ancient Mediterranean world. They were the product of it.