THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY 17 &24, 2020 87
Pliny the Younger witnessed the eruption that killed his uncle, Pliny the Elder.
BOOKS
THE DAY THE EARTH
EXPLODED
Vesuvius and the Plinys.
BY JOAN ACOCELLA
ILLUSTRATION BY R. FRESSON
I
f you were writing a biography of
Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus—
or Pliny the Younger, the author of one
of the most famous collections of letters
surviving from the early Roman Em-
pire—it would be hard not to start with
the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, on the Bay
of Naples, in 79 A.D., for Pliny was the
only writer to leave us an eyewitness ac-
count of the catastrophe. The English
classicist Daisy Dunn, in her book “The
Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny”
(Liveright), wisely does not resist the
temptation. For Westerners, that explo-
sion is probably the paradigmatic natu-
ral disaster. When we think of the worst
thing Mother Nature could do to us, we
are likely to think of Vesuvius. Likewise,
Pompeii, the hardest hit of the commu-
nities lying at the base of the volcano, is,
for many people, the world’s most com-
pelling archeological site. Although some
two thousand of the town’s inhabitants
were killed, much of their world—the
tools they gardened with, the paving
stones they walked on, the graffiti they
scratched on the walls of their brothels
(“Posphorus fucked here”), the loaves of
bread left baking in the oven, marked off
into eight portions, just like a modern
pizza—survived, however altered, under
the layers of ash and pumice and rock
that the volcano dumped on it.
Today, these things stand as a kind of
textbook of how the citizens of Campa-
nia, the region over which Vesuvius
loomed, lived in the late first century.
Who, before the excavations of Pompeii,
knew that many ordinary Romans, hav-
ing only small, rudimentary kitchens,
seem to have eaten takeout for dinner?
But if you go to Pompeii, as millions of
tourists do each year, you can view the
storefront food shops with the pots, sunk
in their counters, that once contained
fish stews, boiled lentils, and so on, ready
to be bought and carried home.
And who, apart from those who have
survived a war, knew what a person dying
from thermal shock looked like? Arche-
ologists examining Pompeii and neigh-
boring cities eventually came upon rooms
full of skeletons, many of them surrounded
by a bubble of empty space, which marked
the outline of the victims’ flesh. At a town
just south of Vesuvius, known in ancient
times as Oplontis, you can see the so-
called Resin Lady, a facsimile created by
pumping transparent epoxy resin into
such a void. The Resin Lady is lying face
down and spread-eagled, just as she was
when she was found. Around her are the
objects she was carrying when she died:
some jewelry, an iron key (to what?), the
traces of a cloth bag holding a small col-
lection of coins, five silver and seven
bronze. Apparently she thought that,
wherever she was going, she might need
money. Her mouth is open, in a silent
scream. In front of this, one turns away,
ashamed of having looked.
There is more, at least quantitatively.
Herculaneum, on the coast, lay upwind
from Vesuvius, giving the inhabitants
time to seek shelter from the blast. Hun-
dreds of people, Dunn writes, “made their
way to the shore, where a series of arched
vaults, probably boat stores, was set back
from the coast.” Each vault was barely
ten feet wide by thirteen feet deep. The
people who could not fit inside one of
the vaults—many men ceded their places
to women and children—remained ex-
posed on the shore. A recent study sug-
gests that those in the shelters may in
fact have met slower and more agoniz-
ing deaths, perhaps by asphyxiation, than
