By FRANCES GRANT
When Mt Vesuvius exploded on August 24, AD79, the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, in the shadow of the mountain on the Bay of Naples, didn't stand a chance.
In just one day the volcano wiped the cities off the face of the earth, killing thousands and giving the superpower of the time, the Roman Empire, a severe jolt.
The biggest natural disaster to shake the ancient world is the subject of a BBC docu-drama, Pompeii - The Last Day (Prime, tonight at 8.30), which looks at the causes of the eruption and dramatises the final hours of the cities.
Using computer-generated special effects, the programme recreates the eruption, which went through nine stages, building up to the final blast, the huge pyroclastic surge - a wave of superheated gas and ash, incinerating and poisoning everything in its path - that was the death blow to the citizens of Pompeii.
The hour-long docu-drama is part natural history, part disaster movie. But there are no heroes to avert catastrophe in this story and no happy endings for the people caught in the terror.
The Romans had no idea of the dangers posed by Vesuvius (that there is no word for volcano in Latin is one of the cultural facts thrown into the mix), which had been behaving for 1800 years.
The days before the eruption were marked by earth tremors but the local population, well-used to these, took no notice.
Inside the volcano a huge reservoir of boiling magma about 3km wide had formed, trapped inside by a plug of old magma. When the plug finally shattered, the volcano roared into life at around 1pm on a sunny, calm day.
The mountain spewed out superheated gas, ash and magma that formed a giant column in the sky to a height of 33km. As the magma cooled it turned to pumice which, with heavier rocks torn from the inside of the volcano, rained down on the cities.
In just 24 hours, Vesuvius ejected more than 4 cubic km of material, with ash from the explosion reaching as far as Africa.
The human storylines are all based on skeletons or casts of bodies of the victims found in the excavation of Pompeii, a dig which began in earnest in the 18th century and continues to this day - a third of the city is still buried.
As the eruption turns day to night, the story follows the fate of Julius Polybius and his family. Polybius is the wealthy son of a freed slave, with political ambitions. His daughter, heavily pregnant, is the reason why the family stay in the doomed city.
Other characters include an ambitious businessman, based on a skeleton found still clutching a bag of gold in the city streets, his bejewelled wife, who takes refuge in the gladiators' barracks, and a slave girl found in the ruins of a hotel with a bracelet inscribed "From the master to his slave girl" found on her arm.
The eruption is seen from across the bay by Pliny the Elder, a scholar and admiral of the Roman fleet, who mounts a doomed rescue attempt by boat.
But it is his nephew, Pliny the Younger, whose written account of that day became an astounding record of the catastrophe.
Perhaps the most salutary lesson of the disaster is how quickly the cities were dead and buried. One hundred years later Pompeii and Herculaneum were forgotten.
For New Zealanders, living in a volatile, volcanic country, the programme makes frightening viewing.
Creator and executive producer Dr Michael Mosley sees parallels between the destruction of Pompeii and the terrorist attacks of September 11 in the US.
"Rome was a mirror image of America," he says in a Sydney Morning Herald interview. "It was a superpower and it thought it was immortal, and a cataclysmic event occurred that knocked it off its pedestal.
"The events of Pompeii shook the foundations of Rome, and I think there is a message there - that even great empires crumble, that cataclysmic events, whether they are man-made, terrorist or natural, like Pompeii, can shake things."
The programme sounds another, pertinent warning. Based on its past cycle, Vesuvius, one of the world's deadliest volcanoes, is due to erupt again - and today, the Bay of Naples is home to 3.5 million people.
Eruption shook an empire
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