What Pliny Saw

It was a beautiful October afternoon in the year 79 CE. On the western coast of Italy, a seventeen-year-old boy known as Pliny the Younger was relaxing at his mother’s house. His uncle, Pliny the Elder, was inside.

At 1 o’clock, Pliny the Younger’s mother called out to him. There was something black rising into the sky from the mountain across the bay. The volcano Mount Vesuvius had just erupted.

Pliny the Younger survived the eruption, and he went on to become a lawyer and then a senator. As part of his job, he wrote many articles. They read as if they were letters to someone, but most of what he wrote was intended to be written for many people to read. He wrote about many topics, including slavery, the role of women in society, debates in the Senate, and the rise of a new religion, Christianity.

One of Pliny the Younger’s friends was a historian named Tacitus. He found out that Pliny the Younger had witnessed the eruption of Mount Vesuvius many years earlier. He asked Pliny the Younger to write about what it was like. Pliny the Younger wrote two letters describing what he remembered from the eruption.

Pliny the Younger remembered the cloud rising from the volcano. “Sometimes it looked light colored, sometimes it looked mottled and dirty with the earth and ash it had carried up,” he wrote. He described the cloud as looking like a pine tree. First, the cloud rose up in a column, like a trunk of a tree. Then, the cloud spread out like branches.

Pliny the Younger also wrote what he remembered about attempts to rescue people at the base of the volcano. When the volcano started to erupt, boats began arriving from people near the volcano begging for help. One of his uncle’s friends had written him a note. Pliny the Elder quickly gathered several quadriremes, large warships with oars on either side. Pliny the Elder and many men set off to help people at the base of Mount Vesuvius.

Pliny the Elder found his friend, but before they headed to safety, they decided to eat a meal together. Pliny the Elder was relaxed enough to even try to take a nap afterwards. But the ground began to shake even more and Mount Vesuvius spewed more ash. It was too late by the time Pliny the Elder and his friends tried to escape. Ash from the erupting Mount Vesuvius killed them both. Their bodies were found on the beach many days later.

Pliny the Younger wrote to Tacitus that he had stayed with his mother when his uncle left. They felt earthquakes from the eruption all day and through the next night. They decided to head farther inland. They felt they would be safer away from the volcano. They tried taking carts, but the shaking ground was too unsteady. So, they continued on foot.

Soon, a dark cloud covered everything around them and ash began raining down. Pliny the Younger and his mother kept stopping to shake the heavy ash from their clothes. When the cloud finally lifted, they decided to turn around and go back home. The eruption ended a little while later.

Today, those letters from Pliny the Younger contain some of the best descriptions we have of what Roman life was like during his time. His letters to Tacitus describing the eruption have helped archaeologists and geologists understand the layers of ash and dirt that cover cities like Pompeii, which were buried in the eruption. In fact, scientists today still call the type of eruption that Pliny the Younger described as a “Plinian” eruption in his honor.