Officials at the dangerously beloved Archaeological Park of Pompeii are sticking by Pliny the Younger’s date for the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The latest entry in their ongoing e-journal outlines rebuttals to recurring claims that the disaster went down in October or November of 79 C.E., rather than the widely accepted date of August 24.
Pliny the Younger wrote two letters about the eruption the Roman historian Tacitus between 107 C.E. and 108 C.E.. Today, these constitute the earliest eyewitness account detailing the tragedy. They’re also the only documents that offer a precise date—August 24. But, the original copies of Pliny’s letters are long-lost. As they’ve been translated over time, scholars have misinterpreted their meaning. The new study outlines the common mistakes such experts have made on this front over the centuries.
Neapolitan bishop Carlo Maria Rosini became the first to alter the eruption’s purported date in 1797, when he projected it happened on November 23. That claim more closely aligned with Cassius Dio’s assertion that Vesuvius erupted in Autumn. But, as the new study noted, the Romans said fall started in early August, since solstices and equinoxes were the apotheoses, not beginnings, of the seasons.
The archeological site of Pompeii. Photo: Tiziana Fabi / AFP via Getty Images.
In 2018, the great date debate resurfaced as academics unpacked a charcoal inscription that turned up amidst excavations in the House of the Garden. There, archaeologists found a note likely inscribed by a construction worker who’d restored the villa. “The sixteenth day before the kalends of November, he indulged in food in an immoderate way,” it read, meaning it had been written on October 17. “Since it was done in fragile and evanescent charcoal, which could not have been able to last long, it is highly probable that it can be dated to the October of C.E. 79,” experts concluded, according to the BBC.
Pompeii park officials addressed this inscription by conducting an experiment based on a 2023 study by Massimo Osanna, which claims that charcoal like this could have lasted up to a year. On October 12, 2023, experts left their own charcoal note on the same wall that the inscription turned up on. “Ten months later, i.e. on August 24, 2024, the text was still perfectly readable as well as quite fresh looking,” their paper reported. “We cannot exclude that the inscription was made on 17 October 78 [C.E.], therefore just over ten months after the Plinian date of the eruption.”
Scraps of season-specific foods like chestnuts found throughout Pompeii are also often cited to support a later date for Vesuvius’s eruption. The study rebuts that by noting that earth’s climate has always shifted—it didn’t start with fossil fuels. Other such foods, like pomegranates, may have been stored and used for household purposes, like dyeing fabrics.
Although the Archaeological Park of Pompeii has made its case, it doesn’t consider this paper the argument’s conclusion. “Pliny the Younger may have wrong,” the paper concludes. “In fact, archaeological excavations in Vesuvian cities have provided elements suitable for questioning the August date.” Instead, their latest effort is an attempt to set the record straight, so experts can someday find a factual, concrete answer.