The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Pompeii is one of the most well-known events in ancient Roman history – so you’d think that we would know all there is to know about it by now. But in the almost 2000 years since the disaster, historians still haven’t agreed on one key detail: when it actually happened.
“The traditional date that we've all been told is 24 August, AD 79,” Dr Jess Venner, an ancient historian and archaeologist at the University of Oxford, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, says. “But I don't think that it was then. And there's a lot of people that don't think it was then, for very good reason.”
Most of the information we have about the explosion comes from a firsthand account by Pliny the Younger that he recorded in his letters to Tacitus, a famous historian. He was watching the eruption from across the bay in Misenum, and gives a very detailed account of what happened and how people reacted in his letters.
His letters say that the eruption happened on 24 August – but historians have questioned this since the 17th century.
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