Pliny The Elder - Death

Death

Pliny had received from the now deceased Vespasian the appointment of praefect of the Roman Navy. On August 24, 79 AD, he was stationed at Misenum, at the time of the great eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which overwhelmed Pompeii and Herculaneum. He was preparing to cross the Bay of Naples to observe the phenomenon directly when a message arrived from his friend Rectina asking for rescue. Launching the galleys under his command to the evacuation of the opposite shore, he himself took "a fast-sailing cutter", a decision that may have cost him his life. His nephew, Pliny the Younger, provided an account of his death, obtained from the survivors. The nephew and his mother had decided not to go on the voyage across the bay.

As the light vessel approached the shore near Herculaneum, cinders and pumice began to fall on it. Pliny's helmsman advised turning back, to which Pliny replied "Fortune favors the brave, steer to where Pomponianus is (Stabiae, near the modern town of Castellammare di Stabia)." They landed and found Pomponianus "in the greatest consternation." Pliny hugged and comforted him. They loaded the cutter but the same winds that brought it to Stabiae prevented it from leaving. Pliny reassured his party by feasting and sleeping while waiting for the wind to abate but finally they had to leave the buildings for fear of collapse and try their luck in the pumice fall. Pliny sat down and could not get up even with assistance and was left behind. His companions theorized that he collapsed and died through inhaling poisonous gases emitted from the volcano. On their return three days later (26 August) after the plume had dispersed, his body was found under the pumice with no apparent external injuries. The problem with the toxicity theory is that his companions were unaffected by the supposedly toxic fumes, and they had no mobility problem where Pliny had to sit and could not rise. As he is described as a corpulent man, who also suffered from asthma, it is hypothesized that his friends left him because he was already dead.

The story of his last hours is told in a letter addressed twenty-seven years afterwards to Tacitus by the Elder Pliny's nephew and heir, Pliny the Younger, who also sent to another correspondent an account of his uncle's writings and his manner of life. The fragment from Suetonius (see under External links below) states a somewhat less flattering view, that Pliny approached the shore only from scientific interest and then asked a slave to kill him to avoid heat from the volcano. It is not as credible a source, as it is clear from the nephew's letter that the persons Pliny came to rescue escaped to tell the tale in detail; moreover, Suetonius hypothesizes a party witnessing events so agonizing as to destroy Pliny or cause him to order his own death and yet apparently were subject to none of these fatal events themselves.