Cities Under Ash — Titus: A Cloud Like a Pine Tree

Beneath the cloud lies Pompeii, about ten kilometers from the crater, downwind. From early afternoon pumice rains down here: light pebbles, first white, then gray, layer upon layer, for more than a dozen hours. Roofs break under the weight. Those who can, flee.

Herculaneum lies closer to the mountain, but the wind blows the other way and there is almost no pumice there. At night an avalanche of hot gas and ash slides down the mountain. The inhabitants shelter in the boathouses by the beach — most likely waiting for ships. The ships do not come. On the morning of the second day such avalanches reach Pompeii, and then Stabiae.

Cassius Dio, who writes about this more than a hundred years later, adds giants seen in the smoke and the sound of trumpets. According to him the ash reached Africa, Syria and Egypt, and in Rome it blotted out the sun. He adds that Pompeii was buried while the people were sitting in the theater (66.22–23). The excavations do not confirm this: the victims were found in houses and on roads.

The cities vanish for more than fifteen hundred years. In 1738, on the order of the King of Naples, excavations begin at Herculaneum, in 1748 at Pompeii. That this really is Pompeii is known for certain only in 1763, when an inscription with the name of the city is unearthed. In 1863 the archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli has the idea of filling the empty spaces in the ash with plaster. That is how the shapes of people in their last moment survived. We do not show them: these are people, not exhibits.

Pompeii also gave the 19th century a legend. A Roman sentry stands at the gate while everyone flees, and dies at his post. It was made famous by Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel “The Last Days of Pompeii” (1834), and in 1865 Edward Poynter painted him.

One mystery remains: when did it happen? Pliny’s letters, as they have reached us, read: the ninth day before the Kalends of September, that is, August 24. For centuries no one doubted this. But the letters were copied by medieval scribes, and some manuscripts give the date differently. And the soil of Pompeii tells its own story.

And the emperor? Titus chooses commissioners by lot from among the former consuls to rescue Campania. He assigns the estates of those who died without living heirs to rebuilding the buried cities (Suetonius, Titus 8). Dio adds that he accepts gifts from no one — neither from individuals, nor from cities, nor from kings — though many offer them. He pays from what is in the treasury (66.24). But no one will ever rebuild Pompeii.

A year later Titus is in Campania, overseeing the rebuilding. Then a fire breaks out in Rome.