Pompii AND THE ROMAN NAVY
COLLECTING MATERIAL for a history of the Roman Empire, the historian Tacitus sent a letter to Pliny the Younger asking for an account of the death of his famous uncle, the polymath Pliny the Elder, who had died some 25 years earlier in 79 AD. Pliny’s gripping reply is the only eyewitness account of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which devastated Campania, burying the towns of Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae. It is also the only account of Pliny the Elder’s attempted rescue of civilians from the disaster using the ships of the Roman navy – an effort that cost him his life.
An unlikely hero, Pliny was 55, overweight, asthmatic and a bookworm with a long list of published works to his name. His most famous work, his Natural History, still survives today. Published just before the eruption, it covers a huge range of natural history topics – astronomy, geography, zoology, botany, agriculture, medicinal drugs obtained from nature, mining and minerals – in 37 books. As he writes in his preface, the Natural History contains more than 20,000 facts mined from 100 authors, which he hoped would be a useful reference work for the masses, farmers and artisans. It is one of the few works to survive from antiquity, as it did indeed prove useful.
Pliny was born in Como in northern Italy at the foot of the Alps, a region that had only fairly recently been given Roman citizenship. In
