Misenum (cape and fleet base)

On the promontory of Misenum (today’s Miseno, near Bacoli) lay one of the main Roman fleets, created by Augustus. Tiberius died here on March 16, AD 37, in a villa that had once belonged to Lucullus (Suetonius, Tiberius 73; Tacitus, Annals 6.50); the circumstances of his death are uncertain, but the date and place are not. The fleet was commanded by Anicetus, a freedman and Nero’s former tutor (Tacitus, Annals 14.3), and the sailors who killed Agrippina one night in AD 59 set out from Misenum. In AD 79 it was commanded by Pliny the Elder, who sailed from here toward the erupting Vesuvius, while Pliny the Younger lived through the eruption here.