The History and Destruction of Vesuvius and Pompeii Essay

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Pompeii was a great city in ancient Rome that was abruptly destroyed when the seemingly harmless and docile Mt. Vesuvius unexpectedly erupted destroying the city of Pompeii and the bordering city of Herculaneum. Before this tragedy struck Pompeii was a very wealthy city and a staple of Roman culture. Located just 10 Kilometers from Mount Vesuvius, Pompeii appeared to be nothing more than a wealthy city with a view of great mountain until its one defining moment in history changed everything. Where you could once find a beacon of life and culture you can now only find deserted buildings and plaster casts of the casualties caused by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. When the ruins of Pompeii were discovered we as a culture were exposed to a …show more content…
The city had never been fully restored after the earthquake of 62 do to ongoing tremors making it very difficult to continue to fix the city. While the earthquake of 62 did not by any means drive all the citizens out of the city, there were definitely people who refused to return either due to fear of a second coming or the lack of wealth that was required to rebuild the property that had been subsequently destroyed. August, 24 79 C.E., will forever be a day of infamy due to the large scale of chaos and destruction that had never been seen before. On this faithful day that started the same as any other, a city was frozen in time, and then buried for centuries. Mount Vesuvius actually contained to peaks that were capable of producing volcanic activity. The first peak, called Somma, was inactive at the time, while the second peak, Vesuvio was very active and was the peak that caused all of the damage on that faithful August day. The destruction caused by Mt. Vesuvius acted as a time capsule so that we could one day dig it up and learn what life was truly like in first century Rome. The day began like any other in Pompeii, when many of the inhabitants began to notice a strange smoke filling the skies (Grant 28). One man who survived the destruction was a young army man who was stationed in the area at Misenum and is known as Pliny the Youth. He wrote down everything that he saw and
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