Hello and welcome to Coffee with Clio,
This week might be more of an evening read than a morning coffee.
It is also due a warning: this post includes discussion of death and trauma. There are no images of human remains. However, if you find detailed discussion of how people died and what happened to their bodies particularly distressing you may prefer to give this week’s post a miss. I’ve been going back and forth over writing something on this subject for a long time and finally I just couldn’t leave it alone. So, read on if you choose but please don’t feel as if you should.
The brain
It was a headline and an image that made me decide I couldn’t sit on this indefinitely.1
The image: a scrap of something black and angular. It looks like something spat out of a bad car accident or a fragment of meteor fallen to Earth.
The headline: ‘Man's brain turned to glass by hot Vesuvius ash cloud’
Wow, can you believe that was really somebody’s brain?!
I mean, seriously: that was really somebody’s brain. It was the organ that a person used to think, to feel, to understand the world around him. (The sex of the skeleton is apparently fairly clear: he was a man in his twenties.) That scrap of black matter was how he felt terror as he realised that he had made a terrible miscalculation.
You see, the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE took several days. First, the volcano spewed ash and pumice into the sky that rained down on the city. Most people fled. A few who stayed died as roofs collapsed under the weight of rock. Then people came back. This was a volcanic region. People had rebuilt after eruptions before. Even if this was a bad one and many people perhaps knew that they wouldn’t be going back to their homes permanently, they wanted to recover valuables and sentimental items and perhaps check on others who might not have left with them.
They didn’t know what was coming. Neither did modern vulcanologists. Until the last sixty years or so, it was widely thought that the one detailed, first-person description of what happened next was an exaggeration or misunderstanding. That wasn’t unreasonable. It was written by an old man, remembering events he witnessed when he was a very young man and which would count, by any definition, as traumatic.
Pliny’s own Pinion eruption
Pliny the Younger was only 18 and staying with his uncle, Pliny the Elder, near Pompeii in 79 CE. He wrote, many years later, to his friend, the historian Tacitus:
On August 24th, about one in the afternoon, my mother desired him [her brother, Pliny the Elder] to observe a cloud which appeared of a very unusual size and shape. He had just taken a turn in the sun and, after bathing himself in cold water, and making a light luncheon, gone back to his books: he immediately arose and went out upon a rising ground from whence he might get a better sight of this very uncommon appearance. A cloud, from which mountain was uncertain, at this distance (but it was found afterwards to come from Mount Vesuvius), was ascending, the appearance of which I cannot give you a more exact description of than by likening it to that of a pine tree, for it shot up to a great height in the form of a very tall trunk, which spread itself out at the top into a sort of branches; occasioned, I imagine, either by a sudden gust of air that impelled it, the force of which decreased as it advanced upwards, or the cloud itself being pressed back again by its own weight, expanded in the manner I have mentioned; it appeared sometimes bright and sometimes dark and spotted, according as it was either more or less impregnated with earth and cinders. This phenomenon seemed to a man of such learning and research as my uncle extraordinary and worth further looking into.2
His uncle, a high-ranking naval officer, made good his desire to look further into the matter and took a ship across the bay, towards Pompeii. He asked if his nephew wanted to come with him, but Pliny the Younger declined:
I said I had rather go on with my work; and it so happened, he had himself given me something to write out.
It was a sensible choice. Pliny the Elder died on his fact-finding expedition. His body was found days later with no visible injuries on a beach near the eruption and Pliny the Younger, recounting witnesses who had travelled with his uncle, suggested he died of suffocation. Still, the whole affair clearly made a deep impact on Pliny the Younger.
Because he chose not to accompany his uncle, he was across the Bay of Naples when the next chapter unfolded (edited for brevity):
Though it was now morning, the light was still exceedingly faint…; the buildings all around us tottered…: we therefore resolved to quit the town. A panic-stricken crowd followed us, and…pressed on us in dense array to drive us forward as we came out. Being at a convenient distance from the houses, we stood still, in the midst of a most dangerous and dreadful scene. The chariots, which we had ordered to be drawn out, were so agitated backwards and forwards, though upon the most level ground, that we could not keep them steady, even by supporting them with large stones. The sea seemed to roll back upon itself, and to be driven from its banks by the convulsive motion of the earth; it is certain at least the shore was considerably enlarged, and several sea animals were left upon it. On the other side, a black and dreadful cloud, broken with rapid, zigzag flashes, revealed behind it variously shaped masses of flame: these last were like sheet-lightning, but much larger... Soon afterwards, the cloud began to descend, and cover the sea. It had already surrounded and concealed the island of Capri and the promontory of Misenum.
This was when Pliny and his mother, who had hung back to wait for the return of Pliny the Elder, decided that it was time to leave:
My mother now besought, urged, even commanded me to make my escape at any rate, which, as I was young, I might easily do; as for herself, she said, her age and corpulency rendered all attempts of that sort impossible; however, she would willingly meet death if she could have the satisfaction of seeing that she was not the occasion of mine. But I absolutely refused to leave her, and, taking her by the hand, compelled her to go with me. She complied with great reluctance, and not without many reproaches to herself for retarding my flight. The ashes now began to fall upon us, though in no great quantity. I looked back; a dense dark mist seemed to be following us, spreading itself over the country like a cloud. "Let us turn out of the high-road," I said, "while we can still see, for fear that, should we fall in the road, we should be pressed to death in the dark, by the crowds that are following us." We had scarcely sat down when night came upon us, not such as we have when the sky is cloudy, or when there is no moon, but that of a room when it is shut up, and all the lights put out.
In the midst of this horrifying scene, Pliny recalled, even decades later, the human cost:
You might hear the shrieks of women, the screams of children, and the shouts of men; some calling for their children, others for their parents, others for their husbands, and seeking to recognise each other by the voices that replied; one lamenting his own fate, another that of his family; some wishing to die, from the very fear of dying; some lifting their hands to the gods; but the greater part convinced that there were now no gods at all, and that the final endless night of which we have heard had come upon the world. Among these there were some who augmented the real terrors by others imaginary or wilfully invented. I remember some who declared that one part of Misenum had fallen, that another was on fire; it was false, but they found people to believe them. It now grew rather lighter, which we imagined to be rather the forerunner of an approaching burst of flames (as in truth it was) than the return of day: however, the fire fell at a distance from us: then again we were immersed in thick darkness, and a heavy shower of ashes rained upon us, which we were obliged every now and then to stand up to shake off, otherwise we should have been crushed and buried in the heap… At last this dreadful darkness was dissipated by degrees, like a cloud or smoke; the real day returned, and even the sun shone out, though with a lurid light, like when an eclipse is coming on. Every object that presented itself to our eyes (which were extremely weakened) seemed changed, being covered deep with ashes as if with snow.
There is so much to pull out of an account like this. Pliny the Younger had different talents from his uncle, who wrote a huge work of natural history. His nephew was more interested in people: the spread of rumours and false information in the terrifying darkness; the people claiming the gods were gone; people wanting to die from the sheer terror of death, they all stand out with a vivid immediacy.
What Pliny described of the volcano, though, would not be documented properly until the second half of the 20th century and was named after Pliny. In a Plinian eruption, first the volcano spews out a vertical cloud of superheated ash - the cloud like a tree that made Pliny the Elder so curious.
Then, the vertical cloud collapses under its own weight. Pliny the Younger and his mother found themselves on the edge of that process. Those closer to it, who had gone back to Pompeii itself, were trapped.
Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of ash, mixed with atmospheric moisture to form rivers of searing mud and pushing superheated air in front of them, poured down the volcano’s sides. That was what turned the brain of a man in his twenties into fragments of black glass on the inside of his skull. It was what created the shadow-bodies for which Pompeii is famous: the pyroclastic flow (the technical name for that collapsed column of hot ash) surrounded them and, when the hot ash set into something like concrete, the bodies decayed and left behind moulds of people in their final moments.
One shows a young woman lying on the ground with her dress pulled up around her waist, probably as she tried to run. Another captures an adult holding up an infant child. The adult is lying on their back on the ground. Whether they were trying to lift the child above danger or hug it to them, it is an unequivocal moment of love and tragedy.
The horror within
The thing is… should that single moment, that horror, be on permanent display in a museum?
The girl with the dress around her waist lies where she fell in one of the excavated buildings in Pompeii - probably the most frightening seconds of her life have become a fixture, like the frescoes on the walls. She is trapped forever in the indignity of her most awful moment.
Of course, how we treat the dead is incredibly culturally specific. Already in the 5th century BCE the Greek historian Herodotus used funerary customs to underline a point already made by his poetic predecessor, Pindar. Herodotus recounts a story, which he says is attributed to the Persian emperor, Darius:
When he [Darius] was king of Persia, he summoned the Greeks who happened to be present at his court, and asked them what they would take to eat the dead bodies of their fathers. They replied that they would not do it for any money in the world. Later, in the presence of the Greeks, and through an interpreter, so that they could understand what was said, he asked some Indians, of the tribe called Callatiae, who do in fact eat their parents’ dead bodies, what they would take to burn them. They uttered a cry of horror and forbade him to mention such a dreadful thing. One can see this what custom can do, and Pindar, in my opinion, was right when he called it ‘king of all’.3
There are lots of rituals of mourning that involve the display of the dead, temporarily, permanently or intermittently, to specific people or to the public at large. It can be an act of honour or disgrace.
In Catholic Europe it is not uncommon to see the bones or mummified remains of saints on partial display. Reliquaries, or containers specifically designed to house these remains, might have windows in them to give the faithful a glimpse of the holy body or relics might be taken out of closed containers and processed in public for particular festivals.
In many cultures, all over the world, the presentation of the recently deceased to family, friends or even for general view for famous or important people, is common. It is a chance for people to come together, to pay respects to the dead and to process the change in their world.
Display of the dead can be a mechanism of subverting or inverting normal practice to make a point. After the Rwanda genocide in 1994, several communities decided not to bury the bodies of those slaughtered in churches, where they had congregated for sanctuary. The bare bones, stacked in the open, are not part of traditional Rwandan practice - the country is overwhelmingly Catholic and practices burial of the dead accordingly - but they offer a stark memorial of something that was also outside any definition of normal. The dead remain as a public reminder of disjuncture and trauma.
In communist countries in the 20th century, authorities were trying to change a world of traditions very quickly. When Lenin died in 1924, the leader of the new USSR could not be treated like a tsar or like a saint, but he couldn’t be treated like any other man, either. Instead, he was embalmed and put on public display in Moscow, where, to some extent, he remains today. (I’ve written about some of the echoes of Lenin’s mausoleum here.) This probably wasn’t planned as the beginning of a new tradition, but when Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, died in 1979, his explicit wish to be cremated was overruled in favour of a public mausoleum in Beijing, where his embalmed remains are also on public display. In 1994 and 2011, the same treatment was given to Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il in North Korea.
I could go on: ossuaries in Europe display bones of people who were buried then taken out to make room for new burials, especially in places like islands, where space is short. In Indonesia, the Toraja dig up their deceased relatives every year and parade the mummified bodies around the village to be re-dressed, celebrated and gifted with cigarettes and alcohol. In Peru, caves have been found filled with the mummified bodies of people offered as sacrifices, often with only with their faces visible and in high, inaccessible places that were likely only meant to be visited by a few people.
Broadly, any way people deal with death and grief is fascinating and worthy of respect so what is my problem with the vitrified brain or the girl in the dress?
From the funeral to the horror movie
What we do with our dead is about as fundamental as it gets: it is about how we grapple with love, loss and our own existence. If we think back to the Greeks and the Callatiae at Darius’s court, doing the ‘wrong’ thing with our dead has the power to horrify us like almost nothing else.
That was, of course, something Herodotus also knew. He could have used almost any other example of how somebody else might treat their dead to make his point - burial, exposure, casting out on water. Instead he used the one he knew would trouble his readers most: consumption.
That extreme reaction, the anxiety that death so often provokes, about right or wrong treatment, can be externalised in all sorts of ways. One is fiction. Stories, songs, artwork, more recently movies - all over the world and across time, people have seemed at times to wallow in death, gore and horror. The epic sagas and poems of the Middle Ages can be stomach-turning. Recently, I found myself staring at a print of painting by Hieronymus Bosch, ‘The Temptation of St Anthony’ - hell in Technicolor. It’s art and so is ‘Silence of the Lambs’ or ‘Alien'.

Flirting creatively with our fears of death probably isn’t quite as universal as the rituals of caring that go with the real dead. It is still very common, though. The horror of the dead who won’t stay dead or the living who mistreat the dead (whether they killed them in the first place or not) recurs in stories across time and space. It seems reasonable to suggest that it is one of the ways we deal with our anxieties. Again, so far, so good. Culture is king.
The blurred line
The thing is, however realistic it is (and by some lights, the more realistic, the better!), when we settle in for a horror movie, we know it isn’t real. It’s a thrill to imagine. What would it feel like? What would I do? (Tip: never suggest that everybody split up and wander around in the dark on their own! It never ends well.) We can enjoy the jump scares (if you enjoy jump scares) and the adrenaline rush as something almost too horrible to imagine is suddenly made graphically (almost) real. And at the end, you can laugh it off because, in the end we know we’re safe. It wasn’t real.
You can see how important this line is in the social anxieties around things that blur the line. The current media fashion for fictionalised dramas about true crime has caused controversy. People have questioned the impact on living relatives but they have also questioned the depiction and treatment of victims - the ones who can’t speak for themselves. Similar questions have been raised about fictionalised dramas like ‘The Crown’, dealing with the recent past.
How long is too long?
Now this is where we come back to the vitrified brain. I see that picture and I read that headline (‘Man's brain turned to glass by hot Vesuvius ash cloud’) and what I see is horror movie - something almost unbelievable (but just believable enough to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end). It is scary, grotesque, but also safe and fun.
The problem, at least as I see it, is that the man in Pompeii was real.
The girl in Pompeii was real.
And to me it just doesn’t make sense. Why is it okay to treat the remains of somebody so differently because they died 2000 years ago, or 20? This isn’t a case of honouring a different culture. Nothing we know about Roman culture suggests that these people would have been anything other than horrified to have their final moments and their human remains bandied about in the way they are.
In the last few weeks, I’ve opened my chosen news sites more times than I’ve kept count of to be told about some amazing new discovery from Antiquity or the Middle Ages, headlining with photographs of jumbled skeletons, decapitated skulls or hacked bones. The discoveries really are fascinating. Obviously, I’m a believer in researching the past, but do we need a full colour photograph of somebody’s bones to be told that we don’t yet understand why Roman bodies were sometimes buried with the head removed and placed by the feet? If somebody describes what the condition of bones from Bronze Age Britain reveal about an extremely unusual attack on a whole community at a time that was generally quite peaceful, do we need a happy snap of a handful of bones?
How long ago does somebody need to have died for them not to deserve our care and respect?
I’m sure that each of these discoveries has been made by people who deeply care about their work and the people they study. I’m certainly not the first person to think about how we treat human remains and there are many different points of view.
At the end of this, hopefully you’ve found Pliny the Younger an incredible eye witness and enjoyed Herodotus making a point by stirring up his audience a little bit. Maybe you think my bigger point is silly. Maybe you think I’ve defeated my own case: culture is king and if most people think it is okay to display the bodies of the long-dead, then it must be okay. And that is completely fine.
Life and death: they will always be a mixture of heart and mind.
But if this is something you haven’t thought about before and now you have, or if this has got you thinking about it again, thank you. That is all I ask.
And the next time you see one of those headlines or a display of human remains, you won’t hurt my feelings if you read it or go for a visit but if you start getting that vibe, the hairs standing up on the back of your neck, the hint of a joke, hiding just out of sight, the feeling that, any moment now, Tim Curry is going to leap out at you in a clown mask, ask yourself what the horror story really is: the man with the vitrified brain or the society two thousand years in the future that gets a kick out of seeing pictures of it?
I won’t be sharing the link but if you just type ‘vitrified brain’ and ‘BBC’ into your search engine you’ll almost certainly get the right article. And I’m not taking a swing at the BBC in particular: that is just where I generally go for my morning news check and so that is where I often see things first.
Pliny the Younger’s letters are available in various editions and translations, but I’ve edited these extracts from the full copies available here. They are taken, in turn, from the translation of the Letters of Pliny by William Melmoth, first published in 1746. You can find the whole work here and the two letters about the eruption of Vesuvius are in Book 6, letters 16 and 20.
This text, which is very famous in studies of Herodotus, comes from Book 3, chapter 38. I am using this translation: Herodotus, The Histories, trans. by de Sélincourt, Aubrey and Marincola, John, Further revised edition (Penguin Classics, 2003).