those outside, who were probably killed
instantly by the heat. Other researchers
have identified some glassy black mate-
rial found in Herculaneum as the brain
matter of one of the victims, vitrified by
the eruption’s pyroclastic flow—burning
clouds of gas and ash. As this avalanche
poured down on the coast at a speed of
at least sixty miles an hour, the tempera-
ture on the ground rose to about seven
hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit.
Lead melts at six hundred and twenty-
one degrees Fahrenheit.
T
he terrible day dawned prettily. Pliny
the Younger, seventeen years old,
was staying at a villa in Misenum, across
the Bay of Naples from Vesuvius, with
his mother, Plinia, and her brother, Gaius
Plinius Secundus, usually known as Pliny
the Elder. (I will call the nephew Pliny,
and the uncle the Elder.) Plinia was the
first to notice that something strange
was going on across the bay. Atop Ve-
suvius, there was a cloud that looked like
an umbrella pine, Dunn says, “for it was
raised high on a kind of very tall trunk
and spread out into branches.”
Plinia went into the house and spoke
to her brother. The Elder was the ad-
miral of Rome’s navy, which, at that
time, was docked at Misenum. He put
down his book and called for his shoes,
so that he could climb to a higher van-
tage point and see what was happening.
The Elder, who was fifty-five, was not
just a military man. He was also a nat-
uralist—the greatest, perhaps, that the
ancient world produced. He proudly
claimed that his thirty-seven volume
“Natural History” contained facts gleaned
not just from observation but from as
many as two thousand volumes by Greek
and Roman geographers, botanists, phy-
sicians, artists, and philosophers. In the
book, he described his homeland, Cam-
pania, as a blessed spot, withplains so fertile, hills so sunny, glades so safe,
woods so rich in shade, so many bountiful kinds
of forest, so many mountain breezes, such fer-
tility of crops and vines and olives, fleeces of
sheep so handsome, bulls with such excellent
necks, so many lakes, and rivers and springs
which are so abundant in their flow, so many
seas and ports, the bosom of its lands open to
commerce on all sides and running out into
the sea with such eagerness to help mankind!The fertility of the region’s vineyards
was famous. Some said that this was be-
cause of soil enriched by volcanic explo-
sions, but Vesuvius had been dormant
for around seven hundred years. Who
remembered? There were frequent earth-
quakes in the area, but people were used
to this. They didn’t suspect that it was
owing to anything going on inside their
noble mountain.
When the Elder saw the strange cloud
over Vesuvius, he decided to set sail across
the bay to see what was going on. Al-though he gave the appearance of being
unworried, he launched several quadri-
remes—large warships with two banks
of oars, each oar pulled by two men—
presumably with the thought of evacu-
ating as many people as possible. He
asked his nephew to come with him, but
Pliny said he had some writing to do
and would rather stay home. The Elder’s
boats aimed straight for Vesuvius but
couldn’t land there, because the debris
from the eruption was falling so fast that
it formed islands in the shallows. So the
fleet turned toward Stabiae, a port nine
miles south, and there the Elder went
ashore, to the house of a friend, Pom-
ponianus. Thinking (so Pliny conjec-
tures) to set an example of calm, he asked
for a bath and dinner. Even as flames
began leaping from the mountain, he
told his companions that these were surely
just burning houses abandoned by fright-
ened peasants, and he went off to take a
nap. But, during the night, Pomponianus’
family, feeling the house sway above them,
decided it was time to leave and woke
their guest. The party strapped pillows
over their heads to protect themselves,
and made a run for it. The Elder headed
to the shore, hoping that he might find
some way to escape by sea.
Back in Misenum, meanwhile, Pliny
and his mother decided that they, too,
had to escape. They tried to go by car-
riage, but the roads were clogged with
other people fleeing, so they got out and
ran. The darkness was complete: “Not
so much a moonless or cloudy night, but
as if the lamp had gone out in a locked
room,” Pliny wrote. Plinia begged her
son to leave her and go on alone, but he
refused. The two eventually found their
way to safety. The Elder, on the oppo-
site shore, did not. When the darkness
lifted, his body was found on the beach.
He was heavyset and had a weak wind-
pipe. He probably died of asphyxiation
from the ash. Dust from the explosion
reached all the way to Africa, Pliny writes.O
f the two Plinys, Dunn focusses on
the younger. Clearly, she would
rather have done otherwise. The Elder
was more famous, rightfully so. As his
nephew said, the older man did things
that deserved to be written about and
wrote things that deserved to be read.
His “Natural History”—Penguin Clas-
sics has a good abridged translation, by“I just threw a little olive oil in the pan, then chopped and
cooked and cleaned for hours and hours and hours.”