August 24 is the generally accepted anniversary date of the catastrophic, 79 AD volcanic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, which lies 5.6 miles (9 km) east of modern Naples (ancient Neapolis) in Campania, Italy. The eruption, which began around one o’clock in the afternoon, violently threw gases and tephra up to 21 miles (33 km) into the air; expelled molten rock, pumice, and ash at a rate of 1.5 million tons per second; and formed a volcanic cloud that drifted southward, blackening the sky. The subsequent pyroclastic surges and ash destroyed and buried several Roman provincial cities located around the base of Vesuvius: Pompeii, Boscoreale, Herculaneum, Stabiae, and Oplontis. Though the bodies of more than 1,500 people have been discovered, the sites remain incompletely excavated, and the ultimate death toll from among the 16,000-20,000 inhabitants of the settlements is unknown.
John Martin’s 1821 painting, Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum (shown below) captures something of the claustrophobic horror that the people of these cities must have felt as the afternoon sky darkened and seemed to close in on them.
About an hour after the eruption began, ash and pumice rained down on Pompeii, which was located downwind of Vesuvius. By five o’clock in the evening, the accumulated material caused roofs to collapse, and fist-sized rocks fell at an alarming rate. In addition, the sun was blocked out, no natural light was available to those seeking shelter, and people rushed toward Pompeii’s harbor. A gray pumice began to fall, and this continued into the evening.
Herculaneum, located west of Vesuvius, was largely spared the ash and rock that hit Pompeii earlier in the day. Rather, it was destroyed and buried by a series of pyroclastic surges and flows that began late at night and continued through the morning of August 25. The pyroclastic flow coverage would later make Herculaneum much more difficult for archaeologists to excavate than Pompeii, which was covered in relatively soft ash and pumice.
Shortly after eleven o’clock at night, the first surge hit Herculaneum, Boscoreale, and Oplontis. Then, around midnight, the volcanic column reached its maximum height of 21 miles (33 km), and it suddenly collapsed, causing a massive pyroclastic surge that barrelled down the north-west face of Vesuvius towards Herculaneum and killed everyone it touched. The dead included those who had sought shelter in the vaulted chambers of a concrete arcade near the beach.
Throughout the rest of the morning, multiple pyroclastic surges hit the area. As dawn broke, a reconstituted volcanic column collapsed for the last time, and between six and eight o’clock, huge pyroclastic surges destroyed and buried Pompeii, and darkness spread across the Bay of Naples.
Two men, both named named Pliny, are forever linked to this event by their writing and deeds, respectively. The only surviving eyewitness account of the disaster is contained in two letters, written twenty-seven years after the fact, by Pliny the Younger, a Roman administrator and poet, to the historian Tacitus. The younger Pliny, who was seventeen years old at the time of the eruption, watched the events unfold from Misenum, on the opposite side of the Bay of Naples, some 19 miles (30 km) from the volcano.
His uncle, Pliny the Elder, an author, naturalist, philosopher, and commander of the naval fleet at Misenum, sailed out to Stabiae on a rescue mission that day. He had received a messenger-delivered request for help from his friend Rectina, who was stranded on the shore following the eruption. Another of Pliny’s friends, Pomponianus, was also on Stabiae. Pliny the Younger, who later spoke to his uncle’s crew, wrote that when the elder Pliny launched the rescue fleet, he declared, “Fortune favors the brave: head for Pomponianus!” Though Pliny and his crew successfully rescued people, including Pomponianus, it is not clear whether the party ever found Rectina, and her fate is not known. Pliny the Elder’s own luck ran out on the morning of August 25, when he died during the mission, possibly of a heart attack. His body was left on Stabiae, where it was recovered three days later.
The buried cities around Vesuvius were lost until the late 16th century, when various infrastructure and construction projects, including the excavation of water channels and wells, led to the discovery of their ancient villas, streets, temples, theaters, and statues.
In the mid-to-late 19th century, an Italian archaeological mission at Pompeii, directed by Giuseppe Fiorelli, recovered and preserved data that made palpable the human dimension of the Vesuvius catastrophe. Fiorelli, regarded as one of the most meticulous and methodical archaeologists of his time, developed an innovative conservation technique that involved injecting plaster into the voids in the ground created by decomposed bodies of human and animal victims (for a selection of images see: Imprisoned in Ash: The Plaster Citizens of Pompeii). Though much has been read into the facial expressions captured by the plaster casts, some interpreting them as death throes, they reflect the aftermath of a pyroclastic surge that immediately killed any living being in its path and burned and contorted the bodies of those who had already died.
What these casts do capture are the different constellations of people who were together when death came suddenly, some related, others drawn to the same place by circumstance. Moreover, these casts break down the sense of “otherness” with which we sometimes regard ancient people, and we can see them for who they were, human beings like us who were going about their lives 1,939 years ago until disaster struck.