Lindsey Davis - Vesuvius by Night

Alternatively, if the Fates had taken another view of his despicable past, for retribution he could have been made to suffer. The Fates could have trapped him in a building collapse, perhaps quite accidentally, then left him there to await death – with its coming certainty a painful punishment.

Not him.

Nonius left. Erodion’s raggedy knock-kneed horse took him and a heavy cartload of plunder safely inland. Worse, far worse for those who like justice, Nonius was even at that stage planning to come back. Once the hot slurry cooled in the devastated town, Nonius would be there again. He would find his way amongst the buried buildings, remembering where the best homes were, digging down to salvage statues, stripping out expensive marble, grabbing any portable plunder that remained. Other looters would be killed by further building collapses, but not him.

For him, what did the future hold? One day a man of great wealth would turn up in another town, under another name. Even ‘Nonius’ had never been his own. He had been born somewhere north of Campania, making his way from one town and one scam to another, evading detection, escaping the law, ducking the authorities’ notice, playing the nobody; whenever he could no longer pull it off, he slickly moved on, like any corrupt crook with blood on his hands who never left a forwarding address. He had passed through one location after another, always slipping away at the right moment, until one day in Herculaneum he had seen a benefactor’s statue near the Suburban baths. Master of acquiring power by association, he stole the name as his own validation. On leaving Pompeii he would do the same again, ‘Nonius’ becoming ‘Holconius’.

‘Are you related?’

‘Distantly, I believe…’

He would not return to live amidst ruination. Economic blight never attracts such men. So, after making huge wealth, the compulsive survivor would head towards retirement elsewhere. He left the cart to disintegrate in someone else’s orchard. Towards Erodion’s horse he felt no gratitude; for the wheezing beast there was no rewarding pasture in its old age. He handed it in to a knacker’s yard. Still, rather than being worked to death by Nonius, that horse may have welcomed being turned into pies.

The man himself would live frugally, conserving his cash as those whose wealth does not reside in land tend to do, from fear it may slip from them. He had wondered whether to apply for land, when estates that had belonged to disappeared residents were officially redistributed. There was a killing to be made there, but with his instinct for self-preservation, Nonius/Holconius chose not to subject himself to the narrow-eyed stare of a commissioner sent by a hard-headed Flavian Emperor.

With old age, he would become known as a miser. The sparse number of slaves who cared for him would lead pitiful lives, beaten and barely kept alive. He would never try to bribe them into anything that passed for loyalty, even though he was terrified of being left alone. Suspicion of others’ motives would govern him. After all, he himself had lived as the worst of men, so he expected to be cheated.

But he would stick it out for years. When the time came to take to his bed finally, it would be nothing like the bed he had once shared with Larius Lollius. That had had uneven legs, hard slats for support, a lumpen, flea-ridden mattress, one thin pillow. The retirement bed of Nonius was to be a stately wide antique, with bronze fittings (stolen) and ivory inlays (bought with loot). His mattress would be well-corded and evenly stuffed with fine Campanian wool, his pillows made from softest down, his laundered sheets smooth and his coverlet embroidered.

Nonius would die in his sleep peacefully, there in his own bed.

For others it had been different.

The peril that not even Nonius could have survived occurred close to midnight. That was when the vast cloud’s weight collapsed back into the volcano’s chamber. Super-heated material then churned with new energy into a different reaction. Mud and steam, heated to a primeval temperature, were sent rolling out of Vesuvius at ground level. The first surge headed straight for Herculaneum.

This was not a slow creep of lava, like those in other eruptions from milder mountains, that local people come to view as it gloops like red-hot porridge over slopes and fields. This was a devastating torrent that rushed at incredible speed, white-hot, yet not even a fireball for it contained too many compressed solids. The avalanche crashed into buildings, either smashing them apart or pouring through windows and doors to fix them in an eternal mould. It covered two miles from peak to coast in moments, destroying all. Battered and splintered material was caught up and carried. Where buildings spontaneously burst into flames, those flames were immediately smothered by rock, mud and detritus.

With the surge came heat. This heat was four times greater than that of boiling water. As it punched across the countryside it carbonised wood, cooked fat, evaporated moisture, desiccated bone. No living thing survived. Uprooted trees were swept away. Any cattle that had escaped previously were lost now. All the birdlife that Larius and other painters loved to portray perished, along with fish and shell-fish, snails, insects, worms, mice. The few people in their homes, the many collected on the beach all died there, and they died at once.

Out of doors, the soldier may have glimpsed the surge’s approach. He may have heard its roar approaching. Before he even gasped, that heat killed him. His corpse pitched forwards, face down, fracturing bones, while his skull split open as his brain boiled. Further along, Erodion’s wife Salvia fell dead on the beach too. Inside the boatsheds, the heat took everyone. Ollia, the watchful mother, opened her eyes instinctively as the noise exploded, yet she and her children took no last breath but were lost, while the sleeping still slept.

This death is terrible to us now. Then and there, nobody realised. No one felt terror or had time to panic. There were no cries. It came too fast for pain or understanding. They were gone. All gone.

So much physical rubble pushed across Herculaneum that the coastline permanently moved out more than a thousand yards. Meanwhile in the normally tideless bay, the sea behaved differently. Shocks deep under the ocean floor caused a great movement. Salt water was suddenly sucked out for a long distance, exposing the seabed, stranding marine life, revealing long-lost wrecks – and creating new ones. Silently, the same sea then gathered into a tall, swelling wave that moved at awesome speed as it returned again, thundered inland, then retreated to its natural place.

Captured in this was Vitalis. His labouring boat was tossed end to end, and everyone thrown out. Drowning is said to be an easy death. For those who have to endure it, it cannot be easy enough.

No one would know how many were lost in that most beautiful of bays. No one could count the people who drowned helplessly out there in the terrifying dark.

Larius would never learn that his decision to keep Marciana with him was as good as any he could have made. Oplontis was buried deep by that first pyroclastic flow, along with Herculaneum. The same unstoppable avalanche of molten mud and rock spread out over the near coast, with its immediate intolerable heat. Larius Lollius died with his eldest daughter almost at the same instant as his wife and other children. Like them, he never knew what happened.

A consequence of such intense heat, well known to firefighters, is that human tendons suddenly contract. In death by thermal heat, an involuntary spasm causes corpses to clench their fists and bring them up defensively. This might have pleased Larius. In his wry way, he would appreciate that when he was taken, he looked like somebody defying fate.