History: The Mystery, or… how a pomegranate can change ‘known historical facts’

Pomegranate tree from fresco in the Villa of Livia

When teaching ‘History’ the first thing I try to instil in my students is an understanding that history is not truth, it is versions and interpretations. What does this mean? 

The answer is simple. History is what we assume happened until we know better. Where it is well recorded we can know definitive things like dates of events, but the further back we go and the more reprints we have to work through the more likely even this is flawed. What we cannot know is motivations and what we deal with is interpretations. Every account of history has issues with bias and perspective. Who saw what, from where and what personal prejudices and experiences did they draw on to interpret it? And that is a first hand account, not taking into account the revisions, translations and further interpretations of countless people who carried the ‘history’ into the present.

Take for example the known history of the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in AD79. We know Mt Vesuvius erupted, we know where it happened and we know some of the effects the eruption had, we’ve seen Fiorelli’s casts of bodies right? And we have Pliny the Younger’s account to tell us when it happened and what happened.

The Problem?

Well, let’s look at the account. Not in detail, I don’t have time for that and it is not the point anyway… When Vesuvius erupted Pliny was a 17-year-old boy who viewed the eruption for the relatively safe distance of Stabiae, well across the bay. He lost his uncle, Pliny the Elder, admiral of the fleet, during the event, though Pliny senior had left junior behind in Stabiae (to eat and sleep and bathe) when he went on his rescue mission. Pliny may have died of asthma caused by being heavily overweight and trying to inhale volcanic atmosphere filled with dust and heat. We believe his body was later returned and it may have been an accompanying slave who told the family what Pliny the Elder experienced in his ultimately unsuccessful rescue mission. May is the key word. We don’t actually know. And Pliny the Younger, who recorded his account, wrote it nearly 30 years after the event. Now, I know some people have great memories, but I also know that my recollection of things that happened 30 years ago, even powerful memories, are skewed by an unlimited number of factors and are partial at best, and traumatic events often lead to distorted memories.

So again. We know Vesuvius erupted. We have the accounts of one person that witnessed it from a distance and we know it happened in AD79, if an account by Pliny has been recorded and re-recorded and translated and re-recorded all by fallible human hands is correct, this happened in August, around the 24th. But other versions of the same text have no date, or a date that may have been in early November.

When human accounts fail or conflict we need to look for other evidence and a few years ago, a proposal was put forward that the recorded date, 24th August, AD79, is likely wrong. Their reasoning is based on a single coin, a line of graffiti, heavy clothing, and the presence of braziers, walnuts and pomegranates. 

• The badly weathered coin cites Titus’ 15th distinction as Imperator. When was Titus hailed ‘Imperator’ for the 15th time? Two corroborative letters tell us that in September 79 he had attained his 14th title and so still had at least one military victory to go. To point out the obvious, September post dates an August eruption and then we still have some time to go, no one knows how long before Titus received his next acknowledgement but it must have been after September.

• A date inscribed in charcoal found in the graffito gives us October 17 but doesn’t reveal the year. It appears ‘fresh’ but was it a few days or weeks old or a year old or older?

• Then there were the pomegranates and walnuts. Neither fruit is harvested until Autumn and large volumes of them have been found, implying a date around October.

• Evidence of heavy clothes found on victims and braziers are also cited as evidence that it had been moving into the colder seasons at the time of the eruption. 

As a historian and especially as a writer of historical fiction I get to choose my interpretations of history, though I like to do so with as much evidence to support my claim as I can. I rarely make choices in plot that cannot be plausible at minimum, and likely preferably. So, in my most recent novel ‘What Remains’ in which part of the novel is set around the eruption of Vesuvius, I have chosen to go with the evidence and not the history books.