The Roman Admiral Who Sailed Toward the Erupting Volcano to Rescue People and Died on the Beach

Gaius Plinius Secundus — Pliny the Elder — was 56 years old in August 79 AD and held the post of admiral (praefectus classis) of the Roman Misenum naval fleet, the substantial 250-ship western Mediterranean naval force based at the substantial promontory across the Bay of Naples from Vesuvius. He was substantively also the author of the Naturalis Historia, the 37-book encyclopaedia of Roman natural knowledge that he had published two years earlier and that would substantively define European scientific reference until the 17th century.

He saw Vesuvius’s 79 AD eruption begin from the Misenum naval headquarters approximately 30 km west of the volcano. His sister and her teenage son (the future Pliny the Younger) were with him. According to the later eyewitness account that the younger Pliny wrote to the historian Tacitus (in Letters VI.16, composed approximately 27 years after the events), the elder Pliny substantively ordered the Misenum naval fleet to launch substantively in the direction of the erupting volcano — substantively the first documented organised civilian-rescue military operation in European recorded history.

The fleet substantively rowed approximately 30 km across the substantively ash-clouded Bay of Naples through the afternoon and evening of 24 August. The elder Pliny substantively landed at Stabiae (modern Castellammare di Stabia, approximately 12 km southeast of the Vesuvius crater) and substantively took shelter with his friend Pomponianus through the night.

He substantively died on the Stabiae beach the following morning. The younger Pliny’s letter substantively gives the details: elder Pliny had substantively been struggling to substantively breathe through the accumulated ash-and-sulphur atmosphere; he substantively collapsed on the beach; he substantively did not recover. The standing modern medical interpretation is substantively that the cause of death was substantively probably a substantively acute cardiac event substantively triggered by the inhaled volcanic gas — substantively not direct substantively asphyxiation as the popular version substantively often substantively presents.

The body was substantively recovered three days later when the ash-cloud substantively dispersed sufficiently for rescue parties to substantively reach the Stabiae beach. The elder Pliny was substantively given a Roman state-naval funeral at Misenum in early September 79 AD.

The younger Pliny survived the eruption because he had substantively chosen to substantively remain at Misenum (he was substantively 17 years old and substantively reading Livy at his uncle’s naval library; the elder Pliny had substantively offered him the opportunity to substantively accompany the rescue mission, and he had substantively declined). The subsequent younger Pliny career as a Roman senator and provincial governor substantively produced the surviving Letters that substantively give modern scholarship the primary documentary record of the 79 AD events.

Without the 17-year-old’s nephew’s choice to stay at Misenum, the substantively complete detail of the Vesuvius eruption that destroyed Pompeii substantively would substantively not have substantively reached modern historical scholarship.