Pliny the Younger—Caius Plinius Cæcilius Secundus—was perhaps, the most cultivated and graceful man of letters of the first century a.d. Literally a man of letters, he left ten books of his "Epistles," which he himself collected—probably even wrote with a view to publication—and their fluent charm still pleases the taste of the reader. One of his letters, written while he was Governor of Bithynia, asks instructions from the Emperor Trajan as to what policy should be pursued against the sect of Christians.
In other epistles he tells two excellent ghost stories. But the two letters which are most vital in their human interest, and which record the most thrilling events, are the two addressed to his friend, the historian Tacitus, concerning the great eruption of Vesuvius on August 24, a.d. 79. Pliny was only seventeen years of age when he witnessed this eruption, which destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum, and in which his uncle, the elder Pliny, author of the celebrated natural history, perished.
Until the year 79 Vesuvius was not suspected of being a volcano. The mountain was covered with vegetation, and the ancient crater was like a circular bowl scooped from the summit. Then came the explosion which buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. Never since has the volcano long remained quiet. The most serious eruptions have been those of 203, 472, 512, 685, 983, 1066, 1631, 1779, 1794, 1822, 1855, 1865, 1872, 1878, 1880, 1895, and 1906.
Pliny's descriptions of the scenes on the slopes of the vengeful volcano—the raining ashes; the fleeing, terrified crowds—are as fresh and vivid to-day as those Roman frescoes which it has been the good fortune of the modern archeologist to uncover after two thousand years of burial beneath the Vesuvian scoriæ.
Letter No. 1.
Your request that I would send you an account of my uncle's death, in order to transmit a more exact relation of it to posterity, deserves my acknowledgments, for if this accident shall be celebrated by your pen the glory of it, I am well assured, will be rendered forever illustrious. And notwithstanding he perished by a misfortune which, as it involved at the same time a most beautiful country in ruins, and destroyed so many populous cities, seems to promise him an everlasting remembrance; notwithstanding he has himself composed many and lasting works, yet I am persuaded the mentioning of him in your immortal writings will greatly contribute to render his name immortal.
Happy I esteem those to be to whom by the provision of the gods has been granted the ability either to do such actions as are worthy of being related or to relate them in a manner worthy of being read; but peculiarly happy are they who are blessed with both these uncommon talents, in the number of which my uncle, as his own writings and your history will evidently prove, may justly be ranked.
It is with extreme willingness, therefore, that I execute your commands, and should indeed have demanded the task if you had not enjoined it. He was at that time with the fleet under his command at Misenum.
On the 24th of August, about one in the afternoon, my mother desired him to observe a cloud which appeared of a very unusual size and shape. He had just taken a turn in the sun and, after bathing himself in cold water and making a light luncheon, gone back to his books; he immediately arose and went out upon a rising ground from whence he might get a better sight of this very uncommon appearance.
A cloud, from which mountain was uncertain at this distance (but it was found afterward to come from Mount Vesuvius), was ascending, the appearance of which I cannot give you a more exact description of than by likening it to that of a pine-tree, for it shot up to a great height in the form of a very tall trunk, which spread itself out at the top into a sort of branches, occasioned, I imagine, either by a sudden gust of air that impelled it, the force of which decreased as it advanced upward, or the cloud itself being pressed back again by its own weight, expanded in the manner I have mentioned; it appeared sometimes bright and sometimes dark and spotted, according as it was either more or less impregnated with earth and cinders.