The prosperous Greco-Roman city of Pompeii suddenly obliterated by the catastrophic eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. has captured the imagination of the world ever since the 18th century when some of it’s treasures first begun to be uncovered. No other sites have of antiquity offers such a wealth of material of every description miraculously preserved by the very ashes that blotted out life in every corner of the Roman world at the height of affluence 1900 years ago. Like a giant museum, it is an organic whose preserving the fabric of Greco-Roman life as it was in the 1st century A.D.

One of the most beautiful regions and the most fertile, as well, is Campania in southwestern Italy. The coastline begins approximately 90 miles southeast of Rome, which includes the Bay of Naples. Above the bay is Mt. Vesuvius, which rises in height just under 2,400 feet. West of Vesuvius is Naples, where the still remains of Herculaneum stand to the times, and Pompeii to the southeast. Vesuvius surrounded by prosperous towns at it’s feet, like a sleeping giant, keeps a watchful eye upon the bay, still remembering it’s past.

Naples was already a great town in ancient times, but Pompeii and Herculaneum were relatively small, populated with some 25,000 inhabitants. Naples was founded by the Greeks in 650 B.C., who called it Neapolis, the New City. They colonized this entire coastal area and settled at Pompeii and Herculaneum and had trading posts there. The two smaller towns, though never Naples, itself, fell under the temporary influence of one or more of the powerful Etruscan city-states which lay northwest of the still relatively minor power of Rome.

In the fifth century B.C., the dominant roll in the area fell to the Samnites, tough Italian hillsmen who came from fortified strong points in the center of the peninsula. Rome, now rapidly rising, defeated the Samnites , and annexed Campania, which became the first window upon the Mediterranean. In the process, they took Pompeii and Herculaneum (310-302 B.C.), leaving them to govern themselves, as was their wise practice. In 91 B.C., both Pompeii and Herculaneum joined a violent Italian rebellion against Roman domination. They were apparently reduced by the Roman General Sulla, who later became their dictator, who made Pompeii a “colony,” injecting a draft of Roman Settlers, leaving the place’s autonomy intact under a new system of government.

Pompeii enjoyed another century and a half of peaceful existence and prosperous growth. As a harbor town, along side the river Sarnus (Sarno), serving as a rich inland zone, it was also a small, but bustling center of wine and oil production (although Pompeiian wine was said to give one a hang-over). It’s local industries includedwoll and woolen goods, and it also exported a famous fish-sauce, fruit, volcanic stone (tufa) and millstones.

For a long time, Vesuvius had remained quiet. It had not erupted since the beginning of recored history, though, Strabo, a Greek geographer, at the turn of the Era, had concluded that the crater, once had been volcanic. A warning was given, unheeded, in the reign of Nero, during the month of February A.D. 62, when a severe earthquake badly damaged the towns around the mountain, Pompeii, being the worse of any of them. In fact, the damage had been so severe, that when the fatal eruption took place seventeen years later, only a few of the town’s public and private buildings had been fully restored.

The eruption took place in 70 A.D., soon after the accession of Emperor Titus. August 24, A.D. dawned clear and hot. There had been earth tremors for several days, and the springs had dried up, but apparently, no one seemed worried. We pretty much can tell, more or less, what took place in the days to come, from analyses of the deposits which buried the entire region, and from a famous account by Pliny, the younger, the literary nephew of the famous historian, Pliny, the elder, who happened to be, at the time, commander of the Roman fleet at Misenum (Miseno), nineteen miles away at the northwestern end of the Bay of Naples.

His nephew, Pliny the younger, wrote the eyewitness of the eruption in two letters to the historian, Ticitus.

“A vast cloud appeared across the bay, and blotted out the sun. appearing in the sky, like a ( giant umbrella ) pine rather than any other tree, for it rose to a great height on a sort of trunk and then split off into branches.” The elder Pliney, receiving a desperate message from a friend, along the coast, ordered the warships out, and made for a point near Herculaneum, west of the volcano, but, bad conditions and falling debris made it impossible for him to land, and he sailed on to Stabiae (Castellamare di Stabia) south of Vasuvius., where he spent the night at a friend’s villa, near the sea. On the following morning, Pliny, the elder, was overcome by the fumes on the beach, and fell down and died. It was not until two days of pitch darkness, broken terrifyingly by lightning and the flames of electrical storms, that his body could be recovered. By that time, Pompeii had since been obliterated. Since the eruption and started in the late morning on August 24th, more than a man’s height of ash had fallen, by what would have been sunset.

The surface of solid basalt, which had plugged the cone of the volcano since the beginning of history, was suddenly shattered by an over-whelming buildup of heat and pressure from the bowels of the earth. A vast mass of Lava and boulders leapt thousands of feet into the air, and came crashing down, like a rain of atomic bombs, followed by an impenetrable cloud of incandescent pumice, white and grayish in color, which covered the ground of Pompeii up to height of six to eight feet. In the night that followed, the sides of the old volcanic cone collapsed inward, causing a fresh series of explosive shocks which convulsed the entire region with violent earthquakes. Steam, ash, cinders, and dust rose precipitously upward into the sky and hurdled downward again, in a thick seething mass, which blackened the ground with an additional seven feet of deposit. It was not until late in the next day of the 26th that a dim light reappeared to reveal a scene of the unprecedented desolation.

A different fate had fallen Herculaneum, which had been overwhelmed not by pumice and ashes, but by a torrid sea of mud. However, the slow approach of the wave had enabled some of the population to get away in time. At Pompeii, most people had been taken by surprise, and the number of fatalities had numbered to at least two thousand. The first victims were struck down by lava, rocks, and falling masonry, while many more obviously suffocated by ash, and asphyxiation, by the sulphurous fumes and lethal chloride-impregnated gases that the belching crater emitted from the bowels of the earth.