VESUVIUS DESTROYS POMPEII AND HERCULANEUM

Have you ever contemplated what a precarious position we are in on this earth? We sit on top of a sphere-shaped planet nearly twenty-five thousand miles in diameter with a molten hot core reaching twelve thousand degrees. Covering this is a mantle of rock with a thin crust on which continents, oceans, and mountains formed. We spin round on an axis every twenty-four hours as we revolve around a super-hot star with our sister planets. All this whirling about is held in place by the inexplicable force of gravity. We can’t see it, so we have to take it for granted that it’s there. If it ever let go, we would whiz off into the oblivion of outer space, which might be fun if you are so inclined. Food for thought.
If this situation weren’t harrowing enough, conditions on earth aren’t so great, either. Earthquakes rumble and change the topography; oceans swell and rivers overflow, causing death and destruction; planes crash, fires destroy, ships sink, epidemics rage. As if that weren’t enough to kill off the 6.4 billion people stuck on this planet, we fight wars among ourselves because we can’t seem to solve problems any other way. Our brains are still in a savage state.

 Vesuvius Destroys Pompeii and Herculaneum.


Romans living in the busy port towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum believed that the nearby volcano called Mount Vesuvius was extinct. Vesuvius actually had not erupted for thousands of years, and in a.d. 79, farmers cultivated the mountain slopes with olives and grapes.
But that was about to change. On the afternoon of August 24 a.d 79 the mountain exploded, blasting a column of pumice twelve miles into the air. Pliny the Younger, who was staying at a villa across the bay, saw it as “a cloud of unusual size and appearance, like an umbrella pine.” His uncle Pliny the Elder, who commanded a Roman fleet, took some galleys to rescue friends who lived near the volcano at Stabiae, not far from Pompeii. As the ship headed toward the roaring volcano, “ashes were already falling, hotter and thicker as the ships drew near, followed by bits of pumice and blackened stones, charred and cracked by the flames.” The rain of pumice descended at the rate of six inches an hour, and by late afternoon, roofs of houses near the volcano began to collapse under the weight.
By this time many of Pompeii’s twenty thousand citizens, along with thousands from Herculaneum and other towns near the volcano, had fled the area. But some six thousand people in Pompeii and Herculaneum either refused to go or could not leave.
The elder Pliny was forced to land some miles from Stabiae, and traveled the rest of the way by land. By nightfall he saw “broad sheets of fire and leaping flames” blazing on the mountaintop. To reassure his companions, he insisted that it was only bonfires abandoned by the peasants when they fled the mountain in terror. But as the night wore on, terrible tremors emanated from Vesuvius. While resting at a friend’s villa before attempting to return to his ship, Pliny noted “the buildings were now shaking with violent shocks, and seemed to be swaying to and fro as if they were torn from their foundations.” Then, about midnight, a burning avalanche of hot gases, rocks, and pumice poured down the mountainside.
Daylight never arrived on the morning on August 25. Instead, the morning was “blacker and denser than any ordinary night,” according to Pliny. The air was so thick with ash and sulfurous gases that it choked Pliny the Elder to death before he could reach his ships.
Meanwhile, Pliny the Younger described the “fearful black cloud rent by forked and quivering bursts of flame, and parted to reveal great tongues of fire, like flashes of lightning magnified in size.” In the darkness the people panicked: “You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of the men. . . . There were some who prayed for death in their terror of dying. Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness forevermore.”

By eight-thirty on the morning of August 25, a centuries-long darkness had in fact descended upon Pompeii and Herculaneum—the two cities were now completely buried beneath a layer of ash some fifteen to twenty feet thick. And when light finally came on the morning of August 26, Pliny the Younger wrote, “We were terrified to see everything changed, buried deep in ashes like snowdrift.” The top of Mount Vesuvius had been blasted completely away, and some sixteen thousand people living in cities and towns around the base of the volcano had been killed.
Pompeii and Herculaneum were all but forgotten until 1748, when systematic excavations of the two cities began.

Excerps from the book "The Pessimist’s Guide to History" writed by Doris Flexner and Stuart Berg Flexner, Harper-Collins Publishers USA, 1992. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.