<P> Pliny and his party saw flames coming from several parts of the mountain, which Pliny and his friends attributed to burning villages . After staying overnight, the party was driven from the building by an accumulation of material which threatened to block all egress . They woke Pliny, who had been napping and emitting loud snoring . They elected to take to the fields with pillows tied to their heads to protect them from rockfall . They approached the beach again but the wind had not changed . Pliny sat down on a sail that had been spread for him and could not rise even with assistance when his friends departed, escaping ultimately by land . Very likely, he had collapsed and died, which is the most popular explanation of why his friends abandoned him, although Suetonius offers an alternative story of his ordering a slave to kill him to avoid the pain of incineration . How the slave would have escaped to tell the tale remains a mystery . There is no mention of such an event in his nephew's letters . </P> <P> In the first letter to Tacitus his nephew suggested that his death was due to the reaction of his weak lungs to a cloud of poisonous, sulphurous gas that wafted over the group . However, Stabiae was 16 km (9.9 mi) from the vent (roughly where the modern town of Castellammare di Stabia is situated) and his companions were apparently unaffected by the fumes, and so it is more likely that the corpulent Pliny died from some other cause, such as a stroke or heart attack . An asthmatic attack is also not out of the question . His body was found with no apparent injuries on the next day, after dispersal of the plume . </P> <P> Along with Pliny the Elder, the only other notable casualties of the eruption to be known by name were Agrippa (a son of the Jewish princess Drusilla and the procurator Antonius Felix) and his wife . </P> <P> By 2003 around 1,044 casts made from impressions of bodies in the ash deposits had been recovered in and around Pompeii, with the scattered bones of another 100 . The remains of about 332 bodies have been found at Herculaneum (300 in arched vaults discovered in 1980). What percentage these numbers are of the total dead or the percentage of the dead to the total number at risk remain completely unknown . </P>

What caused the mt vesuvius eruption 79 ad