Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com