Perhaps because it was so terrifying, the eruption became an event that people seemed to want to erase from history. When I asked street expert Eric Poehler about it, he marveled at how almost nothing is said about such a major event in the Roman world. But he said it became less mysterious to him after he learned about the idea, taken from 20th-century history, of a “generation of silence” that comes in the wake of disaster. A similar kind of cultural silence followed the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1919, which slaughtered over 675,000 Americans in a matter of months—more than had died during all
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