"EARTH to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust" must be our theme today. Happily, however, our exposure to these commodities on Ash Wednesday is largely figurative, unlike those unfortunate inhabitants of the Roman city of Pompeii in AD 79 who were interred under 20 feet of what was very much the real thing.
Pompeii at the time was a bustling city of some 20,000 souls. It was situated a mile and a half from the sea, and the nearby Mount Vesuvius had uttered not so much as a single belch in living memory. It boasted public baths almost as lavish as those at Rome itself, and handsome temples where Isis, Juno, Minerva or Apollo could be worshipped in appropriate surroundings. The amphitheatre held up to 20,000 people for the gladiator contests, and there was also the smaller Odeon, where the more cultured members of Pompeian society might enjoy concerts, poetry readings, and intimate theatrical productions.
Then on the morning of August 24th, life ended in Pompeii. Vesuvius erupted very violently and unexpectedly, and in the space of a few hours the thriving town was buried under 20 feet of ash. Most of the population fled the city as soon as they realised that something very dangerous was happening. But the elderly, the sick and the infirm remained, and some of the able bodied returned in lulls to rescue their belongings. It is these, some 2,000 persons altogether, whose fossilised remains were found when the site was excavated in the early 19th century.
There have been many more spectacular and devastating volcanic eruptions in historical times than that of Vesuvius in AD 79, but none has caught the popular imagination more. There are several reasons for its notoriety.
Firstly, there was the excellent state of the remains which, preserved by ash, revealed intimate details of the city's life when they were excavated more than 1,700 years after the event. Secondly, a vivid first hand account was left by the Roman writer Pliny the Younger, who witnessed the eruption. And thirdly, the Victorian romantic novelist Edward Bulwer Lytton brought the whole catastrophe to life in The Last Days of Pompeii in 1834 his fictional account is eloquent and graphic, as he describes the angry cauldron spewing fire and smoke, the people driven to hysteria and terror, and the city crumbling under the weight of a vast thick carpet of volcanic ash. It was a bestseller in its time, and is still, indeed, a very worthwhile read.