The Last Days of Pompeii

In the doomed city of Pompeii, weeks before Vesuvius erupts, the Athenian Glaucus loves the beautiful Ione, and both are caught in the schemes of the sinister Egyptian priest Arbaces. Around them moves Nydia, a blind flower girl whose hopeless devotion to Glaucus will decide more than one fate when the mountain finally wakes. Bulwer-Lytton fills his pages with gladiators, feasts, Christian converts, and the everyday life of a Roman town, all shadowed by the catastrophe the reader knows is coming. Wildly popular in its day, the novel shaped how generations pictured Pompeii and still delivers a vivid, headlong story. Free to download as a PDF or EPUB.