16. Antiquity’s Most Famous Disaster
Mount Vesuvius’ eruption around noon on August 24th, 79 AD, was antiquity’s most famous disaster, and one of Europe’s most powerful volcanic explosions. Vesuvius blew its top with a force 100,000 times greater than that of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs, and the eruption tossed deadly debris mixed with a cloud of poisonous gasses over 20 miles up into the air. As it spewed gasses into the air, lava and hot pumice poured out of the volcano’s mouth at a rate of 1.5 million tons per second. It raced down Vesuvius’ side to devastate the surrounding region and destroy nearby towns, of which Pompeii and Herculaneum are the best known.
Pliny the Younger, a Roman author and magistrate, was 15 miles away at Cape Misenum, visiting his uncle, Pliny the Elder – a Roman admiral who would lose his life during rescue efforts. History is deeply indebted to Pliny’s detailed description of the events he saw and those told him by first-hand witnesses, which provide the best written and most thorough narrative of the event.