Pompeii experts back Pliny's account of Mount Vesuvius eruption date | Hacker News Reader

Pompeii experts back Pliny's account of Mount Vesuvius eruption date

theguardian.com

60 pointsbookofjoe27 comments

Fun fact: we know the Vesuvius eruption, whatever the date, was on a Wednesday. How? Because we found a bread called Panis Quadratus that was only baked on Wednesdays [1].

Pompeii (and Herculaneum) are endlessly fascinating and about a third of Pompeii remains underground and hasn't been examinted yet.

[1]: https://www.visitnaples.eu/en/neapolitanity/flavours-of-napl...

What if it was from the day prior?

then it'd be stale

It _was_ stale when they found it.

The bread was found in the oven of one of the bakeries[1]. It wouldn't be in the oven if the bread was from the day before.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230406-arculata-the-bre...

Now I'm envisioning a discount rack like my local Albertson's has, in Pompeii.

"Panis Quadratis - L % off!"

I'm confused. Rome didn't have a 7 day week until Constantine introduced it in 321 CE

Rome used an 8 day cycle called "nundinal cycle". (And yes the name of the 8 day cycle contains the root of the number 9, novem, because Romans of course also invented off-by-one errors)

Days were named with letters from A to H.

What does it mean that the Panis Quadratus was baked on a Wednesday?

That sparked my curiosity and I tried to find more accounts of this alleged ritual of baking specific kinds of breads on specific days of the week but I couldn't find much.

It seems that somebody wrote a piece about panem quadratus on Wednesday and a few other types of breads and that's got copy-pasted around including some touristic website from Naples.

I call bullshit, but I may be wrong. Does anybody know more about it?

I'm not a Pompeii expert, but from what I understand Pliny the Younger was there, witnessed the eruption first-hand, and barely survived to tell the tale. Which he did, in a book that has survived to the present day. He gave the date of 24 August, year 79.

Why was this ever in doubt?

Confirming the date doesn’t mean that it was in doubt, it’s just new evidence that strengthens his account.

You are right, its the content of TFA that tells us it was in doubt.

His uncle, Pliny the Elder, was closer and died in Stabiae, a town close to Pompeii that was partially covered in ash, while attempting to rescue a friend.

Pliny the Younger was across the Bay of Naples and witnessed the eruption from a distance.

Of interest, the two letters written by Pliny the Younger:

https://igppweb.ucsd.edu/~gabi/sio15/lectures/volcanoes/plin...

( hosted at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics as being the first recorded witnessing of a volcanic eruption )

The date is likely to be accurate as Pliny the Elder's will formerly adopted Pliny the Younger as a "son" and left him a considerable fortune.

The major eruption occurred in cycles over two days, subsequent ash falls that continued to kill may have persisted a week.

It's possible that 50 years on there may be some inaccuracy in the account wrt dates as Pliny the Younger may have referenced documents that dated when his uncles estate was settled rather than the date of his death.

He saw it with his own eyes, making him a primary source. I would say that counts as "being there."

As you say, this is a life-transforming event for Pliney the Younger. For him to get the date off by an entire season is quite a stretch.

Sure. Although it's not the case that he barely survived.

But your question was why was his account of the date ever in doubt.

The answer is he wrote about it fifty years later in his 70's.

Did he have the date tattooed on his leg a day later? Did he get the date from an old newspaper he had lying about the house?

While he may be certain about his recollection of the date there is reasonable uncertainty about the certainty of a 70 year quoting a date from 5 decades past.

The question of the date currently has something like a one month window plus/minus .. so there's general agreement that it happened in the later part of 79 BC.

> For him to get the date off by an entire season is quite a stretch.

In my own experience it's not at all uncommon in the septuagenarian, octogenarian, and nonagenarian crowd to be off by that much in their stories.

what date did 9/11 happen? it was a tuesday. i'll never forget that.

I could have told you it was a weekday, because I was at work, but I'll take your word for it being specifically a Tuesday. I think 9/11 is a bit of a cheat, though, because it's world-wide referenced by it's date. How many people, a couple of generations on, would remember the precise dates of, say, JFK's assassination or the moon landing? (I know the second, but not the first, and I was a history major!)

I've read 3 or 4 detailed books about the assassination, but I don't recall the exact date because it was not interesting to me.

> How many people, a couple of generations on, would remember the precise dates

The people who witnessed Pompeii in person probably remembers it pretty well. This is why I trust his recollection, even if Pliny wrote it down decades later.

It's also not unreasonable to assume he talked about it several times between the event and when it was written down, so that it was easy to remember the details.

That was my point, too, though I can see how that was unclear.

For me it happened on 12/9

It happened on 11/9 in the rest of the world.

What was the day of the week that hurricane Katrina struck? Or any recent hurricane?

> what date did 9/11 happen? it was a tuesday. i'll never forget that.

It depends. In US is September eleven. In EU is November the nineth. /s

Pliny the older was there, and died there. Pliny the Younger was his nephew, did not want to interrupt his studying and did not escort his uncle to the boat, he saw from the other side of the bay (misenium) and wrote two letters a few decades later to describe what happened.

"Book that has survived to the present day" isn't really how it works unfortunately. (Maybe it will if we manage to recover those blackened scrolls!)

What actually survives are manuscripts which were copied from earlier manuscripts (iteratively). The ones we have are from the middle ages, usually copied by monks. It's very possible that a transcription error was made during this copying. In fact there's a whole field of study trying to second guess what the scribe might have miscopied, studying manuscripts, palimpsests and so on.

The British Museum in London has an excellent collection of manuscripts, with many now digitized: https://www.bl.uk/research/digitised-manuscripts/ (Unfortunately I can't seem to view the MS at this link, and they don't have Epistulae of Pliny the Younger which contains the two letters about Pompeii)

The article doesn't explain the charcoal inscription discrepancy?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2018/10/16/ne... says:

> it is not known whether the Oct 17 graffito referred to that day, or a day in the past or the future

The last option would explain it, potentially.

On a recent tv reconstruction by an italian TV show about historically events ("una giornata particolare") it seems that the archeologists are finding remains of food typical of the autumn

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