Free Republic

The ruins of a Roman villa near Mount Vesuvius, discovered under the remnants of another villa built above it many years later, may have been where Augustus, the first Roman emperor, drew his last breath, archaeologists say.The earlier villa, which excavations suggest was inhabited before the first century A.D., seems to have been destroyed in the devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, and the later villa was built there in the second century...She noted that the site corresponds with writings by the Roman historians Tacitus, Suetonius and Cassius Dio, who recorded that Augustus died in A.D. 14 at...

The north slope of Mount Vesuvius has largely been ignored archaeologically compared to its other sides, where the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were once located. Recent work there has shown that it was no less important than these other sites during the Roman era. Having reached his mid-seventies, Rome's first emperor, Caesar Augustus, lived out his final days in a villa near the base of Mount Vesuvius. While traveling in the Bay of Naples, he fell ill and detoured to the ancestral home of his biological father's family, the Octavii, near the city of Nola. In A.D. 14, at...