Selfies and The Evolving Background of History
"Get out of the way you fool, you're blocking history!"
I spent the first half of last week on a rather lovely sojourn to Italy, down in Campania around Naples and Pompeii with friends on a joint thirtieth birthday celebration trip. The history of the region, most notably expressed in the ruins of Roman Pompeii and the Vesuvian eruption of 79AD was (cliché though it is) one of the big draws for me, a desire to walk amongst the ghosts of the past and see one of the nearest things we have to an Atlantean-style lost city, buried under earth, rather than water. Beyond these more poetically historical aspirations, Pompeii also provides the rare opportunity to catch glimpses into the ordinary lives of the everyday citizen, to see the marks and graffiti they left behind, and to try to piece together the mosaic of the mundane.
The only first-hand account of the 79AD eruption that we have comes from the letters of the lawyer and statesman Pliny the Younger, written about 25 years after the eruption in a letter to the historian Tacitus, who sought from Pliny a description of the death of his uncle, the Elder Pliny, in the cataclysm. His letter describes the pine tree-like nature of the eruption, the “broad sheets of fire and leaping flames” on the mountain, the desperate quest of his uncle to rescue a friend by boat, and his eventual succumbing to volcanic fumes. I took the book with me to read on top of the mountain (something of a habit of mine when dealing with historical occurrences).
Pliny’s letter is fairly typical of most of history. A consciously [aloof] and cool record, made by a member of the upper classes, and concerned with their own affairs and not much else. In a second letter to Tacitus, Pliny goes into a little more detail of how people outside of his personal sphere reacted:
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