When was Pompeii really destroyed? Experts can’t seem to agree.
The true date of the eruption has long eluded—and vexed—historians of the deadly disaster. Here’s what the archaeological evidence tells us.
On August 24, A.D. 79, a Roman teenager witnessed a horrible sight: a telltale cloud rising from Mount Vesuvius.
Or did he?
Scholars disagree over whether the eruption of Vesuvius—and the disastrous burial and incineration of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii—occurred in summer or fall. Here’s why some believe the eruption occurred in October, not August—and why the debate may never be settled.
Eyewitness to a volcano
The August 24 date for the eruption of Mount Vesuvius comes from the only eyewitness report known to have survived ancient times—the recollections of Pliny the Younger, a Roman statesman who saw the eruption when he was a teenager.
He chronicled the eruption later in life in two letters to the historian Tacitus. Written around A.D. 108, nearly 30 years after the eruption, they are thought to be the first extant description of a volcanic eruption. This eruption resulted in the death of Pliny’s uncle, Pliny the Elder, an avid naturalist who headed toward Pompeii to observe the eruption’s fallout.
The intimidating smoke the boy recalled as his first sight of an erupting Vesuvius was an omen of disastrous things to come. Over two days, poison gas, ash, and even a tsunami pummeled the area around the Roman city of Pompeii.
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In the letters, Pliny tells Tacitus that his uncle’s men accompanied the scientist as he sailed toward the eruption, stopping about five miles south of Pompeii. Pliny claims the survivors told him that the older Pliny stopped in a friend’s house in Stabiae, then headed outdoors for a closer look at the volcano and its flames amid a rain of pumice with only a pillow to protect his head. Pliny’s adventurous uncle eventually suffocated due to the volcano’s fumes, Pliny tells Tacitus. In his second letter, Pliny the Younger also discusses his own experiences after the eruption, describing “extraordinary and alarming things” like a blast-induced tsunami and a terrifying black cloud that overwhelmed the entire landscape.
“I was only kept going by the consolation that the whole world was perishing with me,” Pliny the Younger recalled.
Did scribes mistranslate Pliny’s account?
Pliny’s account of the events surrounding the eruption is one of ancient history’s most famous. But since the original letter no longer exists, it is no longer possible to verify its contents firsthand. Instead, ancient manuscripts were passed from scribe to scribe over the centuries—a process known for typos, mistranslations, and mistakes.
The most widely accepted translation of the letter has the date as the equivalent of August 4. However, “Pliny’s text could possibly read 30 October, 1 November, or 23 November,” writes historian Stephen P. Kershaw.
Dueling translations complicated the issue even further: A few of the surviving manuscripts that reprint the letters use the term Novembres, which would point to an eruption date in October based on the Roman calendar system of the time. And another Roman historian, Cassius Dio, referred to the event as having happened in the fall, though he wrote about the event hundreds of years later.
Archaeological evidence of the eruption
Some hints from archaeological studies of Pompeii underscore the October theory: Evidence of fall fruits like pomegranates, figs, and walnuts unearthed from Pompeii may suggest an October eruption. However, there could be an alternative explanation for the presence of those fall fruits, as archaeologists now believe that the city was briefly reoccupied by a group of desperate survivors who sought shelter in Pompeii after A.D. 79. Those people’s remnants—including the foods they ate—may have been left behind, complicating the archaeological site once thought only to contain the trapped-in-time remains of those who perished in the eruption.
Another intriguing clue—coins thought to have been minted in July or August 79, were unearthed in a Pompeiian house during the 1970s. The existence of the money in doesn’t definitively prove that the eruption happened after September, concluded British Museum numismatist Richard Abdy. But “if the 24 August date is correct, it is remarkable that both coins will have taken just two months after minting to enter circulation and reach Pompeii before the disaster,” he wrote in 2013 in the Numismatic Chronicle.
Then, in 2018, archaeologists unearthed another clue that the eruption could have happened in October: a light charcoal inscription in a house that seems to have been undergoing a remodel at the time. The inscription refers to an October date.
“Since it was done in fragile and evanescent charcoal, which could not have been able to last long, it is highly probable that it can be dated to the October of A.D. 79, and more precisely to a week prior to the great catastrophe,” the archaeologists said in a statement at the time.
Then, they reversed their opinion after tests proving charcoal writing was not as fragile as previously thought. Those results—and a 2022 book by Pompeii scholar Pedar Voss that debunks the theory that Pliny’s letters referred to an eruption in Novembres—led the park to disavow the October date. According to Voss, there were not one, but two historic mistranslations that resulted in the confusion about Novembres. “All dates outside August 24 are pure invention,” the park now states on its website.
What we do know about the blast
Absent other bombshell evidence from the site, it’s unlikely the full truth will ever be known. And for one scientist, the important question isn’t when the volcano erupted: It’s how.
“From a volcanological perspective, the month itself makes little difference,” says Claudio Scarpati, a volcanologist at the University of Naples Federico II. Absolute dating tools can help narrow down a year, he says, but not a day or month.
(How archaeologists determine the date of ancient sites and artifacts.)
So Scarpati and his team have approached the chronology of Pompeii from another angle. In a pair of studies published in the Journal of the Geological Society in 2024 and 2025, Scarpati and colleagues used hundreds of samples from the layers of pumice and ash that settled over the area around the volcano to reconstruct what they call a “dynamic” eruption. Over 32 hours of hell, they conclude, the volcano likely created a column of ash that approached nearly 19 feet in height at times, with an eventual shift to a rain of grey pumice that began around 7 p.m. Only after a day and a half did the fallout end, the 2025 study suggests, after an “underestimated” flow of magma buried Pompeii.
A more devastating volcano
The eruption was “more complex and devastating than previously thought,” says Scarpati. He now believes that the most damaging portion of the eruption occurred due to the final pyroclastic current of magma and gas that flowed from the side of the mountain shortly after 7 a.m. on the second day of the eruption, he explains.
“Most victims died of asphyxiation from ash and were buried within this layer,” he says. “No human remains have been found above it, suggesting that the devastation that morning left no survivors.” It was “a crescendo of violence that buried Pompeii beneath meters of ash and pumice,” he says—and it remains shrouded in mysteries that still vex modern researchers.
(Did Mount Vesuvius’ ash cloud really transform a brain into glass?)
As other volcanologists continue to analyze and reinterpret the scientific evidence left behind by Vesuvius, Scarpati will continue his work at Pompeii, he says. “At Pompeii, the devastation was far from uniform, and the inhabitants died from different causes at different times, separated by many hours. These findings are invaluable, as they help us evaluate the impact of this kind of eruption and use that knowledge to predict the effects of future events.”
We may now know more about what it was like to undergo the blast. But will the August versus October date ever be laid to rest? Without more conclusive evidence, archaeology in Mount Vesuvius’ shadow will always come with a shadow of doubt about the eruption’s real timing.
