Pliny the Elder sailed toward erupting Vesuvius to study it and stayed to rescue people
In August 79, when Mount Vesuvius erupted, a Roman naval commander living at Misenum across the bay decided to go and take a closer look. Pliny the Elder, author of a 37-volume encyclopedia of nature, was diverted by a plea for help from his friend Rectina, joined the rescue effort, and died at Stabiae.
Pliny was born in Como around AD 23 or 24; his age is worked out from the eruption and his nephew's statement that he died in his fifty-sixth year. His parents' names survive only on a broken inscription found in a field near Verona, which once fed a mistaken theory that he came from that city. Como Cathedral now honours him with a statue on its front.
Like other young men of equestrian rank, he joined the army at about 23 in AD 46 and served along the Rhine. He helped build a canal between the Maas and the Rhine and described ships in the river fending off drifting trees at night. A bronze harness ornament bearing his name has turned up at Xanten, once a major Roman base. He disapproved of one commander who hauled around some 12,000 pounds of silver tableware on campaign. In winter quarters he wrote a manual on throwing javelins from horseback, and a dream in which the ghost of the general Drusus begged not to be forgotten set him writing a twenty-volume history of Rome's German wars.
That history, a key source for Tacitus, is lost, as are all his works except the Natural History; he produced seven titles in 102 volumes altogether. Under Nero he kept his head down in Rome, practising law and writing on safe topics such as grammar and rhetoric. He watched Nero's Golden House rise after the great fire of 64. After Nero fell in 68 and the Flavian dynasty took over, demand for his services was so great that he gave up law, and he became a friend of the emperor Vespasian.
Pliny never married. His nephew, who shared his house at Misenum, described his relentless study habits and plain breakfasts, and inherited his estate under a will that also adopted him. That young man is known as Pliny the Younger.
Source: Pliny the Elder
