ABSTRACT
The Roman writer Pliny the Younger described the eruption of Mount Vesuvius on the Italian peninsula on 24 August 79 CE, a natural event that destroyed and buried the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum. After reporting his uncle’s heroic efforts to rescue people with ships of the fleet he commanded off the coast, Pliny records his own escape:
the flames remained some distance off; then darkness came on once more and ashes began to fall again, this time in heavy showers. We rose from time to time and shook them off, otherwise we should have been buried and crushed beneath their weight. I could boast that not a groan or cry of fear escaped me in these perils, but I admit that I derived some poor consolation in my mortal lot from the belief that the whole world was dying with me and I with it . . . At last the darkness thinned and dispersed like smoke or cloud; then there was genuine daylight, and the sun actually shone out, but yellowish as it is during an eclipse. We were terrified to see everything changed, buried deep in ashes like snowdrifts. We returned to Misenum where we attended to our physical needs as best we could and then spent an anxious night alternating between hope and fear. Fear predominated, for the earthquakes went on, and several hysterical individuals made their own and other people’s calamities seem ludicrous in comparison with their frightful predictions.
