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Vesuvius CE79: How Archaeology, Art and Fiction transformed a natural disaster into a human tragedy
by Dr John Brewer
Today the eruption of Vesuvius 79CE has become an exemplary case of human tragedy in the face of an all-powerful destructive nature. But it was not ever thus. In the mid-eighteenth century the death toll from the eruption was estimated at a mere couple of hundred. When asked about the worst that Vesuvius had done, most Neapolitans and many savants pointed to the eruption of 1631. But by the mid-nineteenth century the alleged death toll had risen to 250,000, and Vesuvius, though far from being the largest or most dangerous volcano, had become the exemplary killer. The Vesuvius we think of today was an invention of the Romantic era.
How did this happen? The simple and well-known answer is that the discovery and excavation of the Buried Cities of Pompeii transformed perceptions of Vesuvius, amplifying our sense of its power and destructiveness. But this was a gradual and complex process that unfolded over many decades in three distinct but overlapping phases. The first, between the 1740s and 1770s was about objects: about the uncovering and preservation of everyday antiquity; the second, dating from the 1770s, was about bodies: about a growing sense that the eruption was a human tragedy, with which the visitor could sympathize; the third, a product of the early nineteenth century, was about stories: moralizing tales – found in novels, poems, and paintings – that combined artifacts and individual lives, refashioning the volcano as a conservative moral force that punished the wicked and saved the righteous and their heritage. This reformulation of Vesuvius as historic conservator was a deliberate riposte to the French Revolutionary view of the volcano as a natural force of regenerative destruction, though it still shapes our view of Vesuvius today.
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