Dr. Jessica Venner

You know, it looks like it's been charred.

And he's kind of thinking again, okay, this is looking like elsewhere.

You know, and they were aware of the earthquakes in the area and they would have made the connection in a way, but no one specifically said this is a volcano.

And so...

You know, again, it was just inklings.

They had no cultural memory within recent enough memory for it to have passed down as that fact.

Yes, exactly.

So they had that point of reference.

And of course, the earthquakes were very commonplace in Campania.

We have these mentioned fairly regularly.

And, you know, they say Campania is plagued by earthquakes.

earthquakes.

They even wonder whether there's giants living under the volcano and things that are causing these rumbles.

They're making links, but no one specifically comes out and says, okay, Vesuvius is a volcano.

Yes.

So in 62 AD, there was a huge earthquake which hit the town on the 5th of February specifically.

We do.

So it was between 5 and 6 on the Richter scale.

So it's fairly large, but it caused widespread destruction.

Pompeii was very badly damaged.