Birmingham Museum Of Art: Pompeii Exhibition
Birmingham Museum of Art Presents:
Pompeii: Tales From An Eruption
"Many strange things happened to us there, and we had much to fear."
Pliny the Younger
The quote above comes to us from one of the letters of Pliny the Younger, the namesake of the man who was the commander of the Roman Fleet in 79 A.D. Pliny the Elder was last seen by his nephew as he prepared to sail across the Bay of Naples to Pompeii; the older man would perish in an attempt to rescue citizens of a coastal Italian town fated for obliteration before he boarded his ship.
Vesuvius erupted on Aug. 24, in 79 A.D., the day after the citizens of Pompeii would have celebrated the festival of Vulcanalia, making crafts by candlelight to honor the god of tools, smithing, fire and the forge. The fiery eruption of lava and volcanic stone continued all day and night through Aug. 25, covering Pompeii and the surrounding towns in a relentless rain of ash. In the neighboring settlements of Herculaneum, Terzigno, Moregine and Oplontis and the city of Pompeii itself, those who were unable to escape seem to have met death one of two ways hot and fast, seared in an instant, scarcely conscious that the end had come, or slow and excruciating beyond comprehension, with each breath harder to take than the last. The eruption leveled all signs of life.
The younger Pliny's letters are a rarity an eyewitness account of a disaster that is understood in the modern world largely through a desperate, if deliberate and methodical, groping. Archaeologists, adventurers, scholars and scavengers have all studied Pompeii and the other towns burned up and buried at the foot of Vesuvius. These places were forgotten for nearly 2,000 years then rediscovered by accident in the 18th century. After more than 200 years of continuous excavation, still only a fraction of the story is fully understood and the digging for meaning is bound to continue for centuries.
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