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Unusual Historic Crises and Calamities

Khalid Elhassan April 16, 2020 34 min

16. Antiquity’s Most Famous Disaster

The Last Day of Pompeii, by Karl Brulov. Google Art Project

Mount Vesuvius’ eruption around noon on August 24^th, 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.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.