Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore.” Embracing plaster figures of Pompeiiįor centuries their bodies were buried beneath 30 feet of mud and ash, until excavations in the early 1800s unearthed them. People bewailed their own fate or that of their relatives, and there were some who prayed for death in their terror of dying. “Some were calling their parents”, Pliny the Younger goes on to say, “others their children or their wives, trying to recognize them by their voices. Then, a roaring Mount Vesuvius erupted and pulverized molten rock and hot ash hundreds of feet into the air for 18 hours straight, releasing 100,000 times the thermal energy of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki atomic bombs. “You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men”, wrote Roman magistrate and writer Pliny the Younger in a letter to historian Tacitus, recalling the tragedy that hit the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the fall of 79 AD.
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