OConnor - What Was Pompeii?

On the morning of August 24, 79 AD, the people in the town of Pompeii went about their normal routines. It seemed like any other day. Shopkeepers opened up their stores. In the center of town, people gathered in the Forum to discuss politics and shop at the outdoor market. Others prayed in one of the many temples to the Roman gods and goddesses.

In other parts of the city, people went to the public baths and played sports. Just outside Pompeii, farmers tended their fields. They grew olives and grapes and tended flocks of sheep. The land around Pompeii was rich and fertile.

A little farther away, five miles from town, stood Vesuvius. Vesuvius looked like a mountain. But it wasnt a mountain. It was a volcano. No one in Pompeii worried about Vesuvius. It hadnt erupted in seven hundred years. However, in the past weeks there had been small earthquakes. People could feel the ground shaking under their feet.

Still, no one in Pompeii expected anything terrible to happen. No one guessed that the earthquakes were a warning sign. Vesuvius was about to erupt. And when it did erupt, early in the afternoon of August 24, it destroyed the entire town of Pompeii. By the end of the following day, Pompeii had disappeared under sixty feet of volcanic ash. It was as if the town had never existed.

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The Roman Empire

Pompeii was a thriving harbor city located at the mouth of the Sarno River on the Bay of Naples, and it was part of the Roman Empire. By the end of the first century AD, the vast Roman Empire stretched from Great Britain through France, Germany, Italy, Greece, east across the Mediterranean Sea into what are now the countries of Iraq, Israel, and Egypt, and down into North Africa. Rome was the center of the empire and the most important city. (Pompeii was 150 miles south of Rome.) A network of paved roads connected many outlying areas to Rome. Roman boats crisscrossed the Mediterranean Sea carrying spices, cloth, wine, olive oil, and other goods to all parts of the empire. The powerful Roman army and navy kept order for the emperor, who ruled with absolute power.

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On that terrible day in 79 AD, a young man watched Vesuvius erupting. He was called Pliny the Younger. (His uncle was known as Pliny the Elder.) Pliny was a safe distance away, in a town just across the Bay of Naples from Pompeii.

In a couple letters written many years later, he described everything that he saw. What Pliny wrote is the only eyewitness account of the destruction of Pompeii.

... in the early afternoon my mother drew attention to a cloud of unusual size and appearance.... It was not clear at that distance from which mountain the cloud was rising. (It was afterwards known to be Vesuvius.) Its general appearance can best be expressed as being like an umbrella pine, for it rose to a great height on a sort of trunk and then split off into branches.... It spread out and gradually dispersed. In places it looked white, elsewhere blotched and dirty.

Plinys description is an accurate one. However, he could only see what was happening from afar. He had no way of knowing what effect the eruption had on all the people living in Pompeii. To them, it must have seemed as if they were witnessing the end of the world. When Vesuvius erupted, it shot up a column of dark ash and sharp, lightweight powdery rock called pumice. (You say it like this: puhm-iss.) The column rose about 15,000 feet into the air. (Thats about three miles high.) The winds blew the ash and rocks toward Pompeii, turning the sky pitch-black.

Anyone caught at home had no chance of surviving. They were buried by the falling ash and rocks. Many of those who managed to get past the city gates didnt survive, either. They, too, were caught in the hot downpour and suffocated. Before the eruption, there had been almost 20,000 people living in Pompeii. About 2,000 were killed inside the city. But there is simply no way to know how many others died trying to escape. For eighteen hours the ash and rock kept falling, layer upon layer. It piled up until sixty feet covered the city. Sixty feet! Thats the height of a five-story building! Soon there was no trace of Pompeii.