Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Daisy Dunn 2019

Cover image: Vesuvius, 1985 (screenprint in colours),

Warhol, Andy (1928–87) / Private Collection Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images.

Daisy Dunn asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Maps by Martin Brown

Lines from ‘The Barn’ from Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney reproduced courtesy of Faber and Faber Ltd.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008211097

Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780008211103

Version: 2019-04-24

Dedication

For my grandparents, Don and Wendy Short

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Copyright

Maps

Nota

PART ONE: Aut-

Prologue: Darker than Night

1. Roots and Trees

PART TWO: Winter

2. Illusions of Immortality

3. To Be Alive is to Be Awake

4. Solitary as an Oyster

5. The Gift of Poison

PART THREE: Spring

6. Pliniana

7. The Shadow of Verona

8. Portrait of a Man

9. The Death of Principle

PART FOUR: Summer

10. The Imitation of Nature

11. A Difficult, Arduous, Fastidious Thing

12. Head, Heart, Womb

13. After the Solstice

PART FIVE: -umn

14. Life in Concrete

15. Depraved Belief

Epilogue: Resurrection

Picture Section

Timeline

List of Illustrations

Footnotes

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Maps

Nota

This book explores the ways in which the Plinys – Younger and Elder – thought about life, death and the natural world. At its heart is a biography of the younger, better-documented Pliny, whom I have pursued through his Letters together with his uncle Pliny the Elder’s extraordinary encyclopaedia, the Natural History. It is also a celebration of the enduring appeal of both men, their work and the treatment of their ideas through the passage of time.

Reading the Letters and Natural History in Latin is very involving and requires much to-ing and fro-ing between sources – from Roman histories to satires; from ancient Greek poetry and medical tracts to the writings of the Church fathers. Among Pliny the Younger’s regular correspondents were the historian Tacitus and biographer Suetonius, whose celebrated accounts of the emperors post-date his letters by a number of years and supplement several of his descriptions of events in Rome. There are also a good many surviving but largely forgotten inscriptions and archaeological remains which are relevant to the lives of the two Plinys. I have brought these together with the literary sources in order to provide a three-dimensional view of the world from which they came. All translations from the Greek and Latin are my own, unless indicated otherwise.

In the spirit of both Plinys, I have eschewed a strictly chronological narrative and followed rather the seasons of the Younger’s life, while drawing on the Natural History throughout. The shape of the book gives a flavour of Pliny the Younger’s year, which was structured slightly differently from ours. Julius Caesar had reformed the calendar in the first century BC because it had fallen out of step with the seasons – the discrepancy caused by the fact that it was based on the cycle of the moon. Caesar had it replaced with a solar calendar. There were now twelve months divided into thirty or thirty-one days each, with the exception of February which, as today, had twenty-eight, or twenty-nine every leap year. Although Pliny the Elder confessed that there was still little exactitude in ascertaining the proper time for a star to appear, or in marking the beginning of a new season when change is so gradual and weather so unpredictable, the Julian Calendar offered a stable framework. Pliny the Elder had winter begin on 11 November, spring on 8 February, summer on 10 May and autumn on 8 or 11 August.

PART ONE

PROLOGUE
Darker than Night

Lucky, I think, are those men with a god-given gift for doing what deserves to be written about or writing what deserves to be read – and very lucky are those who can do both. Through his own books and yours, my uncle will be one of these.

Pliny the Younger to Tacitus, Letter 6.16

The crisis began early one afternoon when Pliny the Younger was seventeen and staying with his mother and uncle in a villa overlooking the Bay of Naples. His mother noticed it first, ‘a cloud, both strange and enormous in appearance’, forming in the sky in the distance. Pliny said that it looked like an umbrella pine tree, ‘for it was raised high on a kind of very tall trunk and spread out into branches’. But it was also like a mushroom: as light as sea foam – white, but gradually turning dirty, elevated on a stem, potentially deadly.¹ They were too far away to be certain which mountain the mushroom cloud was coming from, but Pliny later discovered it was Vesuvius, some thirty kilometres from Misenum, where he and his mother Plinia were watching.

The cape of Misenum was famous for its sea urchins and even more so for its harbour, which was home to one of Rome’s two imperial fleets.² Its name preserved the memory of Misenus, trumpeter of Aeneas, who fought alongside Hector in the Trojan War and escaped the burning citadel only to perish ‘in a death he did not deserve’. ‘In his foolishness,’ said Virgil, ‘he happened to fill the waves with sound by blowing into a seashell, and summon the gods to a song contest.’³ Triton, son of the sea god Neptune, drowned him in his envy. It was in the course of gathering wood for Misenus’ funeral pyre, in the volcanic region of Cumae, that Aeneas discovered the golden bough that secured his entry to the Underworld.

Pliny the Elder, Pliny’s maternal uncle, was admiral of the fleet, in charge of maintaining and fitting out the boats which served predominantly ‘as protectors’ of the seas off Italy.⁴ On the morning the cloud appeared, he had risen early as usual, bathed, lunched, and was working when, at around midday, his sister came to tell him what she had seen. Abandoning his reading and calling for his shoes, he made his way to a higher vantage point for a better view.

Pliny the Elder was a historian and a naturalist as well as an admiral. He had recently finished writing his thirty-seven-volume encyclopaedia on natural history, a few passages of which were concerned with the world’s volcanoes. He had described Mount Etna in Sicily glowing through the night and ‘covering in frost the ash it ejects’ when snow lay over its surface.⁵ He had described, too, the volcano Cophantus in Bactria, north of the Hindu Kush, and Mount Chimaera in Lycia (in southern Turkey), where the fires allegedly grew when it rained but could be extinguished by earth or manure. He had written of a crater in Babylon that threw up flames like fish, and of volcanoes in Persia, Ethiopia, and the Aeolian islands. But not of Vesuvius. In the Natural History, Vesuvius is simply a vineyard-covered mountain watered by the River Sarno and visible from Pompeii.⁶ If Pliny the Elder knew it was a volcano at all, he thought it was extinct.

He gave the impression that the region of Campania was too green and well-watered to burn, with ‘plains so fertile, hills so sunny, glades so safe, woods so rich in shade, so many bountiful kinds of forest, so many mountain breezes, such fertility of crops and vines and olives, fleeces of sheep so handsome, bulls with such excellent necks, so many lakes, and rivers and springs which are so abundant in their flow, so many seas and ports, the bosom of its lands open to commerce on all sides and running out into the sea with such eagerness to help mankind!’.⁷ ‘Lucky Campania’, mused Pliny the Elder, was where Nature had gathered all her gifts.

The grapevines were especially famous. An ancient wall painting from the region shows the wine god Bacchus, dressed in a handsome bodysuit of grapes, surveying the vines on the lower slopes of a mountain – in all likelihood Vesuvius itself. An enormous snake, the ‘Good Spirit’ of vineyards, is depicted in the foreground of the painting. It was by snapping off these long, trailing vines, weaving them into ladders, and lowering themselves onto a plain beneath the slopes of Vesuvius that Spartacus and his men had managed to launch a surprise attack on the Romans, drive them back, and take over their camp during their uprising in 73 BC.⁸ Almost a century after Spartacus was defeated, the Greek geographer Strabo noted the presence of blackened stones towards the summit of the mountain and suggested that the ash of fires ‘since quenched’ had contributed to the fertility of the soil, as it had upon Mount Etna.⁹ If fires were responsible for the success of Vesuvius’s grapevines, however, there was no suggestion that they had not been extinguished for good. Vesuvius first erupted about 23,000 years before and had now been dormant for approximately 700 years – dormant, but as alive as the crops which enveloped it.¹⁰ Like a snake, it was now sloughing its skin.fn1

The process had begun perhaps two hours before Pliny’s mother first noticed it. A relatively small eruption had presaged the larger one that formed the cloud.¹¹ Taller and taller the pine tree grew, propelled from its chamber and sucked up into the sky through convection.¹² At its peak, it would reach a height of thirty-three kilometres.¹³ Pliny the Elder decided that this ‘phenomenon’ warranted further investigation. After taking in what he could from his lookout point he made up his mind to leave Misenum to draw nearer to its source. Earlier in the day he had given his nephew something to write. When he now asked him whether he wanted to accompany him, Pliny refused, insisting that he would prefer to stay behind with his mother in order to work. Pliny the Elder would go without him. He gave orders for a boat to be fitted out and was just leaving the villa when he received a written message from his friend Rectina, who lived beneath Vesuvius. Terrified, she was begging for his help, for there was now ‘no escape except by boat’. It was then, Pliny recalled, that his uncle ‘changed his plan and what he had begun as an intellectual pursuit he completed with all he had’.¹⁴ Admiral Pliny had the entire fleet at his disposal and launched the quadriremes – large, but surprisingly swift ships equipped with two banks of rowers, two men per oar – with the intention of bringing help not only to Rectina, but to as many on that populated shore as he could.

For several hours, the fleet held course across the Bay of Naples. Despite heading in the very direction whence others were now fleeing, Pliny’s uncle was said to have been so fearless that ‘he described and noted down every movement, every shape of that evil thing, as it appeared before his eyes’.¹⁵ To any sailors who survived to tell the tale of their admiral’s fortitude, the chance of reaching land in safety must have seemed increasingly remote as they proceeded across the water. First ash rained down on them, then pumice, then ‘even black stones, burned and broken by fire’. This was no hail storm. The fall of grey-white pumice is thought to have lasted eighteen hours in total.¹⁶ On average, it was falling at a rate of 40,000 cubic metres a second.¹⁷ By the time the quadriremes had come within sight of the coast, the pumice had formed island-like masses on the sea, impeding them from advancing any further. When the helmsman advised turning back, Pliny the Elder adamantly refused. ‘Fortune favours the brave,’ he said.

Although the pumice prevented them from reaching Rectina, they determined to put in where they could. Stabiae, a port town just south of Pompeii, lay about sixteen kilometres from Vesuvius. A contemporary image reveals the town’s harbour to have had long elegant promontories, criss-cross balustrades, sand-coloured pediments and towering columns crowned with sculptures of men.¹⁸ By the time the fleet arrived here, the columns would have been mere shadows, with evening falling across the bay.

As ash and pumice continued to pour down, Pliny the Elder went to find a friend, Pomponianus, who had already stowed his possessions aboard a ship, ‘set on flight if the opposing wind settled’. Pliny the Elder embraced him and requested a bath before joining him for dinner. ‘Either he was content,’ Pliny speculated later, ‘or he showed a semblance of contentment, which was just as great-hearted.’¹⁹ As his host and his household watched flames leaping from the mountain and lighting up the night sky, Pliny the Elder told them that they were witnessing merely ‘the bonfires of peasants, abandoned through terror, and empty houses on fire’.²⁰ As if soothed by his own deception, he soon fell asleep. He was fifty-five years old, corpulent and had a weak windpipe.²¹ As the hot ash and pumice began to mount up on the pavement outside the doorway, his raw and narrow airwaves – call it asthma – for once proved to be a blessing. He might have been trapped inside had his noisy breathing not alerted Pomponianus’ household to his continued presence inside the house. Rousing him from his bedchamber, they gathered to make a final decision as to whether to stay put or leave while they still could. The weight of the pumice and repeated earth tremors had now begun to cause buildings to collapse. If they remained in the villa they might be crushed. If they ventured outside, then the pumice could still throw other structures down on top of them. About two metres of it would fall on the town of Stabiae alone.²²

The inhabitants of Campania had felt the tremors for days, but they were used to these movements, this background noise. As Pliny observed, ‘they were not particularly frightening because they were so commonplace’.²³ Over sixteen years had passed since the last truly devastating earthquake had struck, demolishing temples, baths and municipal buildings in Pompeii and the surrounding towns.²⁴ Some citizens had fled after that earthquake and vowed never to come back.²⁵ More had stayed, only to witness their neighbours wander in a sort of madness, their livestock – over 600 sheep – dying as noxious gases permeated the atmosphere.²⁶ It would not occur to the people of Campania to connect these events with the eruption that was now taking place. It must have been inconceivable that what was unravelling so quickly had been set in train so many years earlier.

The earthquake of ad 63 had been as unexpected in its timing as it had in its force. Striking on 5 February, when Pliny the Younger was little more than a year old, it made a mockery of the ancient belief that earthquakes never happen in winter.²⁷ Theories put forward over the past 600 years for the cause of earthquakes ranged from wrathful gods to the movement of water beneath the earth and activity of fire or air.²⁸ Pliny the Elder, for his part, subscribed to a theory of ‘opposing winds’.²⁹ He believed that the earth and all things upon it were full of life-giving breath; that winds lurked deep beneath the ground in even the darkest hollows and ravines. Left alone, these winds were quite content within their burrows. They would make room for any fresh air that tried to insinuate its way into their caverns by leaving through chinks in the earth.³⁰ Strato of Lampsacus, a philosopher from the school of Aristotle, had discovered that hot and cold repel one another. The winds beneath the earth would do all they could to recede from the cool, incoming air. If they could find no chinks through which to escape, however, and air continued to filter in, then a mighty struggle would ensue. It was in the midst of this battle between winds that the earth burst open to relieve the pressure mounting inside. Neither Pliny the Elder nor anyone else yet knew of the existence of tectonic plates, but his theory showed an understanding of the role that opposing forces play in triggering earthquakes.

The winds theory even partially accounted for what happened next. It was rightly presumed that the sheep that died in AD 63 did so as a result of bowing their heads so close to the earth from which gases such as carbon dioxide and sulphur were now emanating. The death of livestock is a common occurrence in volcanic regions. In the spring of 2015, over five thousand sheep died in Iceland as a result of intoxication by volcanic sulphur. Humans hold their heads sufficiently high to inhale the poison in smaller doses. Their heady confusion tends to pass. But what no one realised in AD 63 was that this earthquake and gaseous release was evidence not of winds moving beneath the earth but of magma rising within Vesuvius. Earthquakes had continued to plague southern Italy over the next sixteen years of the younger Pliny’s life as – slowly – the volcano began to wake.

As the earthquakes started to intensify across the Bay of Naples, buildings seemed both to be swaying on their foundations and collapsing from their debris-laden roofs. Pliny the Elder remained sufficiently rational to realise that to stay inside, while the earth shook and the sky fell in, would be fatal. He, Pomponianus and the other men and women in the house at Stabiae gathered up pillows, strapped them to their heads, and ventured out into the darkness. Pumice is light and porous – formed, as it is, when gas bubbles expand and burst inside the rising magma, which then solidifies and rapidly cools – but a large piece of rock might easily have felled them.³¹

Back in Misenum, Pliny and his mother had made a similar decision. Pliny had gone to bed early only to be woken from a short sleep. Although pumice and ash were yet to fall here, the tremors had become so strong that objects and furniture were ‘not only being moved, but turned over’.³² Fearing accident or worse, they went outside and sat on a terrace that overlooked the sea. On the previous day Pliny had been too absorbed by his work to accompany his uncle out of Misenum. On this night, being absorbed by his work might have been – might yet be – his salvation. Summoning a slave to bring him Livy’s Ab urbe condita, a recondite history of Rome, Pliny resumed his note-taking. As he read about the foundation and development of Rome and its people – and as the earth continued to shake – Pliny focused solely on the work in hand. With retrospect he asked himself whether this was not an imprudent thing to have done (he was sufficiently circumspect to realise how he must have looked – to be scribbling while masonry was crashing to the ground), but in his heart he never doubted the wisdom of his act. He was doing precisely what he imagined his uncle would be doing, wherever he was.

Morning was now rising over Stabiae, but it was unlike any morning the people had known. It was like night, only ‘blacker and denser than all the nights there have ever been’.³³ It was then that Pliny the Elder took a torch and made his way to the shore to see whether there was any chance of escape. The sea was wild. The wind was against them. And so he lay down on a cloth on the beach. He called out once, then a second time, for some cold water. He drank. Then something happened.

Fresh flames appeared and with them ‘the smell of sulphur that suggested there were more flames to come’. The people of Stabiae fled, among them Pliny the Elder’s companions. They had probably sensed the onrush of a nuée ardente – an avalanche-like ‘burning cloud’ of ash, gas and rock.³⁴ The pine-tree cloud that Pliny and his family had witnessed from Misenum on the previous day had now collapsed into itself, too dense to be supported on its trunk any longer.³⁵ Released from this collapse, a series of nuées ardentes had begun to sweep Campania at a minimum of a hundred kilometres an hour, making debris of whatever lay in their path.

Neither Pliny nor his uncle knew that deadly surges had already overwhelmed the town of Herculaneum. Pliny, sitting with his mother at Misenum, and his uncle, lying on a beach at Stabiae, were comparatively distant from the volcano. Stabiae lay sixteen kilometres to its south-east; Herculaneum, just seven kilometres to its south-west. Although Herculaneum had experienced little pumice-fall owing to the direction of the wind, the earthquakes had been catastrophic. In a bid to take cover, hundreds of its residents had made their way to the shore where a series of arched vaults, probably boat stores, was set back from the coast. Each vault was barely three metres wide by four metres deep. Those who could not fit inside one or reach their shelter in time – many men ceded their places to women and children – remained exposed on the coast.

The people of Herculaneum saw the avalanche coming. Huddled beneath the arches and spread out over the beach, they clung to each other. They were entirely helpless. As floods of volcanic matter hurtled towards them, they died upon impact with its heat. In its second stage, a nuée ardente produces pyroclastic flow, a current of magma and gas of around 400 degrees Celsius. Struck by a series of volcanic surges and flows, Herculaneum was buried deep beneath the layers of debris. The arches under which its inhabitants lay became their funeral vaults, shrouding their remains for the next two thousand years.

The panicking crowds at Stabiae were now witnessing what was probably the last of six pyroclastic surges. Two had already struck Herculaneum, a third hit Pompeii, a fourth overwhelmed any Pompeians who remained, and the fifth buried their city.³⁶ Roused from his blanket on the beach, Pliny the Elder got up, leaning on two slaves for support. He managed to stand, but then he fell, defeated.fn2

Pliny later reasoned that his uncle died because the thick fumes and air had obstructed his fragile airways. He was probably right. The surge cloud from a nuée ardente is low in oxygen and would have filled his lungs with ash, asphyxiating him.³⁷ When his body was discovered a few days later, it was said by whoever found and reported it to be intact and unharmed, with the look more of sleep than of death. The body of a victim of thermal shock does not look peaceful. It is rigid, the hands typically clenched like a boxer’s, the result of tendons contracting in the heat. Many of the bodies later uncovered at Pompeii would show signs of thermal shock.

Pliny and his mother were further away from the volcano and better placed to escape. By daybreak, the earthquakes at Misenum had become so severe that they threatened to bring the villa down on top of them, and they quickly decided to leave the town. As mother and son made their way through the streets they found themselves followed by a crowd, ‘favouring someone else’s plan to their own, which in moments of fear is akin to prudence’.³⁸ Crowd mentality steered the refugees clear of the falling buildings and into the possibility of safety.

Pliny and his mother proceeded by carriage. They were joined by one of Pliny the Elder’s friends who had recently come to visit from Spain. As the earth tremored, they darted one way then another, their vehicles twisting and turning. Over the course of their journey, they witnessed scenes which defied explanation. The sea seemed to ‘be absorbed back into itself and sort of be pushed back by the earthquake’, leaving a trail of marine life stranded in its wake.³⁹ This was either the beginning of a tsunami or simply a further effect of the force of the earthquakes. Inland, meanwhile, ‘a terrifying black cloud, burst by twisting, quaking flickers of flame, began to gape to show long fiery tongues, like lightning, only bigger’. The cloud descended upon the earth and covered the sea until neither the island of Capri, nor even the promontory of Misenum itself, was visible on the horizon. Ash began to fall, only lightly, and hardly noticeable at all against the thick gloom that pressed them from behind, spreading over the earth like a torrent. Pliny did not know it, but the cloud was very probably the edge of the nuée ardente that had already killed his uncle at Stabiae.⁴⁰ Pliny the Elder’s friend urged Pliny and his mother on before fleeing the danger himself: ‘If your brother, if your uncle, is alive, he would want you to be safe; if he has died, he would have wanted you to survive him. So why do you hesitate in your escape?’

There was now little time. Pliny’s mother begged – ordered – her son to leave her behind, knowing she would slow him. She told him that she was ‘heavy in years and body and could die happy, if only she was not the cause of [his] death’.⁴¹ Reflecting on this moment, Pliny thought of Virgil and his description of the fall of Troy. In the poem, Aeneas’ wife, Creusa, follows behind him as they make their escape. By the time Aeneas reaches safety, she has gone.

Pliny’s mother stayed close by him as the ash fell. He took her firmly by the hand so as not to repeat Aeneas’ mistake. Leaving the carriages behind, they hurried on by foot while there was still enough light to see. At Pliny’s suggestion they left the main path so as not to be trampled by the crowd in the darkness. At one point they paused to rest and the cloud made night of day.

This day, which had struck the people at Stabiae as blacker than any night they had ever experienced, seemed to Pliny ‘not so much a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp had gone out in a locked room’. He might still have been in his study had it not been for the screaming:

You could hear the wailing of women, the cries of babies, the shouting of men. Some were calling for their parents, others for their children, others for their partners, trying to make out their voices. Some wept for their own fate, others for those of their relations. There were some who prayed for death through fear of death. Many raised their hands to the gods; more reasoned that there were now no gods anywhere and that the night would last forever and ever across the universe.⁴²

Was this the end of the world? Was this the ekpyrosis the Stoic philosophers feared, the fire that closed one life cycle and opened another? Was this the moment ‘Titan Sun casts out day’ and ‘a kind of death and chaos overcomes/ all the gods together and/ death sets itself upon itself …?’⁴³

Pliny’s uncle had feared the coming of the conflagration. He had noticed that sons were now shorter than their fathers and taken this as a sign that the human seed had begun to dry in the approaching flame.⁴⁴ If anyone needed proof of how dramatic the shrivelling of man had been, then he provided it in his description in his encyclopaedia of an ancient corpse measuring twenty metres tall that had been uncovered in a mountain on Crete. Split open during an earthquake, the mountain appeared to have yielded the body of a giant. Some believed it was Orion, whom Jupiter, king of the gods, placed in the sky as a constellation. Others said it was the remains of Otus, son of Neptune. But could it not have been human? The body of mortal Orestes, son of Agamemnon, had already been exhumed and measured at over three metres tall.fn3

Pliny the Elder had resorted to myth to explain the inexplicable and now the younger Pliny imagined himself inhabiting epic. The desperate women and infants of Campania were like the souls of the Virgilian Underworld. Pliny was Aeneas, who in Virgil’s poem is surrounded by the ‘overwhelming sound of wailing/ and weeping spirits of infants, whom the black day/ stole away, ripping them from the breast at the very threshold/ of sweet life, and plunged into bitter death’.⁴⁵ He was in a living hell. He was not even particularly close to the volcano. He could only have imagined the depths of hell others had now entered. Pliny was as much a visitor to Misenum as Aeneas was to the Underworld. If only his escape could be as easy.

The people of southern Italy were not alone in their fear. The effects of the eruption were felt thousands of kilometres away, ‘the amount of dust so great, all in all, that some reached Africa and Syria and Egypt, and some reached Rome, and filled the air above and cast the sun in shade’.⁴⁶ This dust would later spread ‘sickness and terrible pestilence’ among the survivors. Its sudden appearance overhead was bewildering, even to the people of Rome, who ‘did not know and could not imagine what had happened, but considered that everything had been turned upside down, and that the sun was vanishing into the earth, and the earth being raised to the heavens’.⁴⁷ Some spoke of giants in the darkness, or spread false stories of the extent of the destruction. Others merely panicked. Pliny and his mother carried on, shaking themselves free of the ash that settled on their shoulders to avoid being ‘smothered and overcome by its weight’.⁴⁸ Unlike so many of the people around him, Pliny did not cry, because even in these dire moments he could reason, and in reasoning, he found something close to belief. His belief became his consolation when he told himself, ‘Everything is dying with me, and I am dying with it.’

It was a few days before the darkness lifted. As it did, there was a glimmer of sunlight and Pliny’s vision was restored. His first impression, upon turning back to Misenum with his mother to await news of his uncle, was that ‘Everything had changed, buried deep in ash as if in snow.’⁴⁹

ONE
Roots and Trees

Paper is made from papyrus that is cut into strips with a needle so as to be as wide as possible but very fine … Every sheet is woven on a board dampened with water from the Nile. The muddiness of the liquid serves as a glue.

Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book 13

There was a time when it was thought there was only one Pliny, a curious conflation of the Elder, who died in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, and the Younger, who survived it. The most important contribution the elder Pliny had made to history was his multi-volume encyclopaedia. The Natural History was astonishing for its breadth. Believing that ‘no book is so bad that there is nothing to be taken from it’, Pliny the Elder had crammed facts from as many as 2,000 different volumes into its pages, citing the research of Greek and Roman geographers, botanists, doctors, obstetricians, artists, and philosophers.¹ Offering observations on everything, from the moon, to elephants, to the efficacy of ground millipedes in healing ulcers, Pliny the Elder had left behind an indispensable compendium of knowledge.

His nephew was no less versatile. Though commonly confused with his namesake through Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Pliny the Younger was an important figure in his own time.² He survived the Vesuvius disaster to become a lawyer, senator, poet, collector of villas, curator of drains, and personal representative of the emperor overseas. He was also a prolific writer of letters, a couple of which contain his account of the eruption. It took a priest at the cathedral of Verona in the early fourteenth century to disentangle the orator who wrote these letters from the historian and admiral of the fleet who produced the encyclopaedia and perished beneath the volcano.³ Giovanni de Matociis, the author of a book on empire from Rome to Charlemagne, produced a critical essay which, though laden with errors, made the essential point. There was not one Pliny but two.

In around 1500, a complete manuscript containing over three hundred of Pliny the Younger’s letters – far more than de Matociis had known of – was miraculously uncovered in an abbey in Paris. The papyrus dated to the fifth century, making it one of the oldest classical manuscripts ever found (six leaves of it still survive in a library in New York). Aldus Manutius, one of the great publishers of Renaissance Venice, acquired it to produce a book of Pliny the Younger’s correspondence, for which there was now a considerable appetite.⁴ The discovery in 1419 of an incomplete manuscript in Verona (or possibly Venice) had prompted the first printed edition of the younger Pliny’s letters in 1471, two years after his uncle’s encyclopaedia was first published in print.⁵ The release of books by two Plinys in as many years was met with considerable emotion across Italy.

No sooner had the books been published than an intense intellectual dispute broke out between the cities of Verona and Como (ancient Comum) over the birthplace of the uncle and nephew. The Veronese priest de Matociis had been in no doubt that the pair were native to his home town. In the preface to his encyclopaedia, Pliny the Elder invoked Catullus, the love poet born in Verona in the first century BC, as his ‘fellow countryman’. Verona and Comum both formed part of former Gaul. The Veronese now seized upon these words as proof that Pliny the Elder was one of them. Rattled by their presumption and haughtiness, the people of Como, a town some 150 kilometres to Verona’s north-west, retrieved their copies of the Natural History and threw open its covers to reveal what was written in the frontispiece. Early editions of the encyclopaedia were prefaced by a biographical note which identified Pliny the Elder explicitly as a man of ancient Como.⁶ The Veronese refused to back down. The horror of having witnessed scholar after scholar, poet after humanist – Petrarch, Flavio Biondo, Lorenzo Valla, Niccolò Perotti – come out in support of Verona’s rivalrous claim eventually drove the people of Como to more extreme measures.⁷ In their determination to win this contest they commissioned a sculptor to produce larger-than-life-size statues of both Plinys, which they displayed prominently in their town centre. The Veronese responded by erecting a statue of the elder Pliny on the rooftop of their council building. If they could not have both Plinys they could at least have one. Standing among the most famous sons of ancient Verona – Catullus and Cornelius Nepos, the dedicatee of his poetry book, the architectural writer Vitruvius, and the poet Aemilius Macer – Pliny the Elder would watch over Verona’s Piazza dei Signori for ever after.⁸

If the people of Como were going to settle this dispute, they had no choice but to produce a definitive portrait of the lives of the Plinys in their ancient town. The task was taken up in the sixteenth century by a pair of polymaths: Paolo Giovio, a collector of art, advisor to the art historian Giorgio Vasari, and physician to Pope Clement VII, and his brother Benedetto, a notary, classical scholar, and historian.⁹ Gifted and imaginative, if not also highly impressionable, they were precisely what Como needed. Paolo put aside his copy of the Natural History, picked up the Letters and began to dream of constructing a novel kind of museum-villa in memory of Pliny the Younger. Meanwhile Paolo’s brother sought to deconstruct the Veronese claims to Pliny the Elder on textual grounds and to re-establish the connection of Pliny the Younger to the town through archaeology. It would take time and ingenuity but the Giovio brothers would prevail. The Plinys were men of ancient Como – and they were worth fighting over.

Pliny the Elder was born Gaius Plinius Secundus in Comum in AD 23 or 24. His family was of the second highest social order, the equestrians, which meant that he was wealthy, but not so illustrious in his birth as the Julii or Claudii or any of the other great patrician families who had filled the Roman senate for centuries.fn1 He began his career, as was customary for a man of his class, with a spell of military service, which he took to with assiduity. In AD 47, thirty years prior to his appointment as admiral of the fleet, he joined a campaign off what is now the Netherlands and found himself waging ‘a naval battle against trees’.¹⁰ He was on the lakes when he saw them. They were not rolling over the surface of the water, but floating towards him as upright as ships’ masts. It was terrifying. He recalled that the trees often took the men when they were least prepared, ‘driven by the waves as if purposely against our prows when we were moored at night’. The men had no choice but to confront the huge trunks head on.

It was typical of Pliny the Elder to seek an explanation for the peculiarities of the landscapes he encountered on his tours: it was because the trees on the banks attained such heights in their ‘determination to grow’ that they could be borne along vertically on their roots when they were torn up by the wind and waves. The description sounds fanciful but it is perfectly possible for a current to carry trees along on their roots. Many stumps were carried erect down river during the eruption of Mount St Helens in Washington State in 1980.¹¹ It is thought that the petrified forests of Yellowstone National Park may also have developed as a result of trees being carried upright through water.¹²

The curiosity that drew Pliny the Elder towards Mount Vesuvius, and his death, was the product of a lifetime’s fascination with the natural world. Already as a young soldier he was making observations which he would incorporate into his Natural History. His description of trees floating across the lake was included in a section on the forests of Germania. It was a rare piece of reflection, for Pliny the Elder seldom paused to reminisce on his own experiences, and an important one, for it was in these woods, so thick that they ‘add to the cold with their shade’, that the Romans had suffered one of their most crushing defeats in recent history.

At the end of the previous century, the first Roman emperor, Augustus, had sent the Roman army into German territory in the hope of pushing their frontier north beyond the Rhine towards the River Elbe.¹³ Drusus, son of Augustus’ third wife Livia, enjoyed some formidable early successes in the campaign, but died in 9 BC following a fall from his horse. About fifty years later, Pliny the Elder dreamed that he had been visited by Drusus’ ghost. According to Pliny the Younger, it was as a result of this encounter, in which Drusus begged to be saved from ‘the injustice of being forgotten’, that his uncle went on to produce a twenty-volume account of the German Wars.¹⁴ The work is sadly now lost but proved useful to later historians, who referred to its passages on Agrippina the Elder, mother of the emperor Caligula, and her attainment of more power over the Roman army than the generals themselves.¹⁵

After Drusus died, his brother Tiberius, who would precede Caligula as emperor from AD 14 to 37, worked hard to pacify the Germanic tribes, but was recalled before the Romans could conquer all the territory they desired around the Rhine. The most catastrophic setback came in the autumn of AD 9 when a Roman legate named Varus was leading three legions through the thick Teutoburg Forest near the River Weser. Varus fatefully put his trust in a Germanic chieftain, who had formerly served with the Roman auxiliary, only to be attacked by his tribesmen.¹⁶ The Roman legions were destroyed. Although the Romans lost the land they had gained to the east of the Rhine, they managed to create a zone of provinces beneath the Danube and had made sufficient inroads to maintain troops across the Rhineland with centres at modern Mainz and Cologne. Over the following decades, insurrections, mutinies and plundering became increasingly common among the Germanic tribes, and it was in the interest of quelling the so-called Chauci that Pliny the Elder had found himself waging a war against trees in AD 47.

The Romans at home came to know the Germans by repute. They learned that they had wild blue eyes, reddish hair, large strong frames, little tolerance of thirst and heat, but natural resistance to cold and hunger owing to their climate.¹⁷ Their tribes did not live in cities but ‘scattered and far apart, wherever a fountain or plain or grove took their fancy’.¹⁸ Pliny the Elder at least had the good fortune to be confronting ‘the very noblest of the Germans, who elect to preserve their greatness through justice’.¹⁹ The Greater Chauci lived between the Elbe and Weser rivers and the Lesser between the Weser and the Ems. As the Romans’ commander, a severe but capable man named Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, led the triremes up the Rhine channel, the rest of the fleet proceeded through a network of estuaries and canals.²⁰ Pliny the Elder took one look at the territory and concluded that the Chauci were ‘a miserable people’ to inhabit country so flood-prone.²¹ He likened them in their huts on higher ground to sailors aboard a ship and then, as the waters receded, to victims of a shipwreck.

As he and his fellow soldiers set about sinking the tribesmen’s ships, Corbulo succeeded in subduing the neighbouring tribe of the Frisians, and made after the leader of the Chauci.²² No sooner had he put him to death than he received orders from Rome to withdraw his troops to the near bank of the Rhine.²³ Rome was now ruled by Claudius, son of Drusus who had died in Germania. His rise to power had come about almost by accident when, in AD 41, the Praetorian Guard murdered his nephew Caligula and supported him to take his place. Though sickly, stammering, and frequently taken for a fool, Claudius was highly astute. The last thing he wanted was to stir up war among the very tribes he hoped to pacify. The Roman empire now stretched from Hispania in the west to Pontus (north-east Turkey) and Judaea in the east, and he had ambitions of extending it further still. By the end of his rule, Claudius would have succeeded in annexing Thrace, Lycia (in southern Turkey), Noricum (Austria with some of Slovenia) and Mauretania in north Africa. In the period when Pliny the Elder was in Germania, Claudius’ attentions were firmly focused on Britain. Knowing that it would be a tremendous coup to succeed where Julius Caesar had twice failed – in conquering the ‘remotest island in the west’ – Claudius had launched an expedition to Britain in the summer of AD 43 and returned to Rome in triumph the following year.²⁴ Although it would be another forty years before the Romans had truly conquered England and Wales, Claudius had set the process in motion.

Germania, meanwhile, remained unsettled. In around AD 51, Pliny the Elder returned to the region to quell the agitations of another tribe, the Chatti. It was probably in this period that he began writing his book On Throwing the Javelin from Horseback. Like his histories of the German Wars, the work is unfortunately lost, but presumably set out the military techniques he had learned on the battlefield. His experiences might well have commended to him the German technique of hurling javelins at close quarters over the Roman tradition of firing them at long range.²⁵ Later, in his Natural History, Pliny the Elder provided the merest glimpse into how he might have soothed his aching limbs after these exercises. There were hot springs at nearby Mattiacum, modern Wiesbaden, where the water, he wrote, remained warm ‘for three days’.²⁶

Not everyone would have found military life conducive to writing, but Pliny the Elder happened to be posted under a commander who had literary ambitions of his own. Pomponius Secundus would one day be celebrated for the ‘erudition and polish’ of his plays, one of which was inspired by the story of Aeneas.²⁷ Pliny the Elder later described him as ‘a poet and very distinguished citizen’ who was so self-restrained that he never belched.²⁸ Although Pomponius failed to achieve war against the Chatti, he was greeted in Rome with triumphal honours, which were but ‘a fragment of his fame in the eyes of posterity, among whom the glory of his poems prevailed’.²⁹ On visiting him at home, Pliny the Elder was impressed to find official papers in his collection dating from almost two hundred years earlier.³⁰ These, and his experience of his command, left a lasting impression; a biography of Pomponius Secundus, written in his memory, is among Pliny the Elder’s other lost works.

Having returned from Germania, Pliny the Elder went to see Claudius put on a magnificent naval battle on a lake beside a mountain he had had bored through in central Italy. Keen to display his muscle against the backdrop of this spectacular feat of engineering, the emperor had the Roman triremes and quadriremes drawn up and boarded by an extraordinary 19,000 servicemen. Crowds from the nearest towns and from as far away as Rome arrived and filled the banks and hills ‘in their cupidity or duty to see the emperor’.³¹ Pliny the Elder’s eye, however, was drawn not to Claudius but to his fourth wife (and niece), the empress Agrippina the Younger, for she was dressed in a ‘cloak of woven gold without any other material’.³² Pliny the Elder never failed to notice a glint of luxury. He paused on Agrippina’s cloak as if it held a clue to her true character.

He would be among several historians to suggest that Agrippina was responsible for Claudius’ death a few years later. In the autumn of AD 54, the empress was said to have ordered Claudius’ plate of boleti (bolete, perhaps porcini) mushrooms to be poisoned because she feared he was grooming his natural son Britannicus as his successor rather than her own son Nero, whom she had had him adopt.³³ Succession under the Julio-Claudian emperors was never without drama. Even the emperors who were fortunate enough to have natural sons had reason to fear the emergence of rival heirs. Pliny the Elder incorporated the rumour of Agrippina’s machinations into his encyclopaedia as little more than an illustration of the dangers of mushrooms. It was his belief that, if mushrooms were not spiked by a scheming empress or poisonous by Nature, then they could still become deadly by absorbing whatever happened to be in the soil where they sprang up. The nail from a soldier’s boot, a piece of old rag, even the breath of a snake in the soil could render a mushroom noxious as it rose ‘lighter than sea foam’ from its womb-like tunic.³⁴ As far as Claudius’ mushrooms were concerned, the poison only spread. Agrippina’s act, Pliny the Elder quipped, gave the world a new ‘poison’ in the form of the teenage emperor Nero.

While initially Nero put on an honourable front – arranging an elaborate funeral for Claudius, abolishing some taxes and reducing others, hosting extravagant entertainments for the people – he soon lived up to Pliny the Elder’s assessment of him.³⁵ First he had his stepbrother Britannicus poisoned. Then, after several failed attempts, he dispatched his controlling mother to her death. Then he killed his aunt. He then kicked his pregnant wife Poppaea to death when she reproached him for returning home late from the races.³⁶ Around sixty years would pass before Suetonius recounted these murders in his Lives of Rome’s rulers, from Julius Caesar to Domitian. The Algerian-born biographer (he is thought to have come from the Romanised town of Hippo Regius) was head of the libraries at Rome and had access to the imperial archives. Even allowing for some bias in his account, it is clear that the latter part of Nero’s rule was deeply unsettled. If Pliny the Elder had hoped that he would have more freedom to pursue his literary interests after returning from his Germanic expeditions, then Nero’s impulsiveness showed him otherwise.

When a fire broke out in Rome in AD 64, the emperor was among those suspected of starting it. Nero is in fact thought to have been outside the city when the fire started, but this did not stop some historians from speculating as to why he might have been so eager to destroy it. ‘As if offended by the ugliness of the old buildings and by the narrow winding streets,’ wrote Suetonius, ‘he set fire to the city so openly, that several men of consular rank caught his attendants with tow and torches on his own estate but did not arrest them.’³⁷ The city burned for six days and seven nights. To deflect blame, Nero selected a scapegoat. He became the first Roman emperor to persecute Christians, whom he was said to have punished less for the conflagration than for their ‘hatred of the human race’.³⁸ ‘Believers’ were wrapped up in animal pelts and bitten by dogs, fixed to crosses, and used as human torches to light up the night sky over the imperial gardens. Amongst the Christians to die in Nero’s reign were the apostles Peter and Paul.

It was not only the early Christians but the Roman senators who feared for their lives as their role became increasingly redundant in the face of Nero’s autocracy. Political delatio or ‘informing’ became a profitable business in Pliny the Elder’s lifetime and would continue to plague Rome after his nephew entered the senate in the late eighties AD. A man who laid an accusation against another could achieve political advancement as well as money. If he succeeded in informing upon someone for maiestas, or treason, then he was entitled to at least a quarter of the defendant’s property (further funds went to the state treasury).³⁹ An unscrupulous emperor was only too happy to accommodate such activity if it resulted in the downfall of a senator who threatened his power. Stability in Rome had always depended upon its citizens’ willingness to monitor each other. Informers might have stolen the people’s ‘commerce in speaking and listening’, but for some men that was a small price to pay for an emperor’s protection and the opportunity for self-advancement.⁴⁰

Such was the climate when, in AD 65, a group of senators, equestrians, and members of the Praetorian Guard came together to hatch a plan to blot out Nero’s poison for good. Intent on killing him during the coming games, the conspirators gathered round a popular senator named Gaius Calpurnius Piso, who might have made an honourable substitute for Nero, if only the details of their plot were not leaked before it could be executed.⁴¹ No sooner had Nero learned what awaited him than he made after the conspirators. Among those to die for their alleged involvement in the plot were Nero’s former tutor, Seneca the Younger, Seneca’s poet nephew Lucan, and that ‘arbiter of elegance’ Petronius, a satirical writer who was accused of being friends with one of the conspirators.⁴²

Pliny the Elder played no part in the conspiracy but grew increasingly cautious about what he wrote down. In the mid to late sixties AD, when ‘every kind of study that was a little freer or more creative was rendered dangerous by the servitude of the times’, as his nephew later put it, Pliny the Elder resorted to writing only what he was certain could not offend: an eight-book treatise on The Ambiguities of Grammar.⁴³

Pliny the Younger, known here onwards as ‘Pliny’, was born in about AD 62 under Nero, the last of the Julio-Claudian emperors, matured under the Flavian dynasty – Vespasian, his elder son Titus, and younger son Domitian – and peaked under the emperors Nerva and Trajan. We know far more about him than we do his uncle because he wrote so profusely of his experiences. One of the great chroniclers of life, Pliny could be rather pompous and self-regarding, but he was also highly sensitive to the world around him. His surviving letters, which range from a couple of lines to several pages of Latin, provide a rare insight into the habits of his uncle and an unparalleled portrait of his own life at the very centre of things in the first and early second centuries AD.

This was a period in which an equestrian could advance very quickly through the ranks of society. One hundred and fifty years earlier, Cicero had felt marginalised as a ‘new man’ – the first in his family to enter the senate – in a world dominated by aristocrats. Pliny seems to have experienced no such prejudice as he proceeded in his career. He became a senator and went on to document what it was like to live and work under an emperor’s nose. Of the many rulers he lived under, Domitian, who reigned from AD 81 to 96, and Trajan, who reigned from AD 98 to 117, shaped his experience the most. Pliny’s letters post-date Domitian but frequently refer back to the events of his rule. Generally despised by the historians who described him, Domitian caused Pliny considerable unease, but must have supported him for him to have risen through the senate as he did. Pliny’s letters reveal his struggle to distance himself from the detested Domitian in the wake of his death. Trajan, by contrast, was an immensely popular ruler, his rise to power hailed in his own times as the beginning of ‘a very happy age’ in Rome’s history.⁴⁴ Pliny exchanged over a hundred letters with the ruler and honoured him with an extravagant speech. The Panegyricus, which Pliny delivered in the senate house in AD 100, is highly prized because it is the earliest complete speech to have survived from ancient Rome since Cicero’s Philippics against Mark Antony of 43 BC.⁴⁵

Pliny’s letters contain another important first: the earliest pagan sources on the tension between Romans and Christians.⁴⁶ Pliny encountered what he called the ‘depraved and unbridled superstitio’ – a subversion of what he understood by ‘religion’ – after Trajan dispatched him to Bithynia, on the south coast of the Black Sea, one of the many provinces now ruled from Rome, in the last years of his life.⁴⁷ Although Pliny could never have predicted that by the fourth century Christianity would be the central religion of the Roman empire, his understanding of its resilience as a faith must have influenced the way he engaged with the Christians he met.

After his uncle’s death in AD 79, Pliny became his beneficiary and worked hard to sustain his memory. He inherited his agricultural estate in the upper Tiber valley (in modern Perugia), and personal effects including 160 of his notebooks, double-sided and written in ‘the very smallest handwriting’.fn2 Pliny the Elder had once rejected an extraordinary offer of 400,000 sesterces for his notebooks in favour of leaving them to his nephew. And, as Pliny later reflected, ‘there were rather fewer’ notebooks at that time than there would be by AD 79. He also bequeathed his nephew his name.⁴⁸ Pliny the Elder had no children by the time he died and Pliny had lost his father as a boy. Pliny the Elder therefore adopted him posthumously by bequest of his will. It was in recognition of his adoption that Pliny the Younger tended to use the name ‘Plinius’, after his maternal uncle, rather than ‘Caecilius’, after his natural father.

Pliny might have struggled to remember all the facts the Natural History contained, but through his uncle’s words he gained a certain perspective on the world and impetus to establish his place within it. Despite professing to be ‘very lazy’ by comparison with the elder Pliny, he was deeply influenced by his methods for dedicating as many hours of each day as possible to scholarship. Pliny was in a sense haunted by his uncle and the scale of his achievements, which seemed to exceed what was possible in a single lifetime. The Natural History, Pliny the Elder’s sole surviving work, was a seminal achievement. Although the Greeks had produced compendia, and at least two Roman writers anticipated him in creating encyclopaedic collections of their own, the Natural History was of another order entirely.⁴⁹ The oldest extant encyclopaedia from the Graeco-Roman world, it is indigestible in its enormity. Pliny the Elder claimed that it featured 20,000 pieces of information – though it is now known to contain far more. He included a list of contents in an attempt to make it navigable. The labourer might turn to the pages on ‘Viticulture’, the artist to the sections on pigments. The Natural History was a book for everyman.

Pliny the Elder was in the midst of a discussion of insects when he paused to confess, ‘I am forever watching Nature and persuaded to think that nothing about her should be deemed impossible.’⁵⁰ In many ways a testament to that thought, his encyclopaedia was a celebration of the peculiarities of Nature over the corrupting influences of materiality. Wealth in this period was concentrated in the hands of the varied few (senators, equestrians, fortunate freedmen – former slaves), but Pliny the Elder still feared for the damage it might cause the wider world.

Perhaps the most vivid symbol of temptation and human corruptibility in the encyclopaedia was the oyster. Pliny the Elder returned to it often, revealing its qualities and health benefits as well as its dangers. He had seen men plunder the earth for gold and gems as well as oysters and feared for the earth’s future stability. If fire, war and general collapse did not lead to the destruction of the world, then he believed that man’s greed would.⁵¹ He witnessed emperors construct monumental edifices, Nero’s Golden House with its revolving dining room epitomising the needless opulence to which the affluent might aspire. Meanwhile, treasures were being carried home from overseas and whetting – or so he imagined – Roman appetites for even more. Pliny the Elder recognised that ‘globalisation’ could bring improvements, particularly in knowledge, but also challenges. Just as we have come to realise that technologies and antibiotics can be destructive when we rely too heavily upon them, he believed that the easy availability of resources and foreign medicines would weaken Rome.

In his Natural History he encouraged his readers to preserve the natural world from destruction by explaining how it could help them. Concerned that knowledge of the healing properties of plants was by now broadly confined to ‘the rustics and illiterate’, he had undertaken to study as many specimens as he could first hand to describe to his more urban readers. ‘With the exception of a few,’ he inspected them under Antonius Castor, ‘the greatest authority in that art in our age’, who lived beyond his hundredth birthday.⁵² Pliny the Elder enjoyed some success in his mission to promote natural remedies over strange concoctions from the East. Many of his treatments and cures would be extracted and republished as early as the fourth century as the Medicina Plinii. Structured predominantly ‘a capite ad calcem’ – from head to heel, an arrangement that became standard in medieval medicine books – the Medicina Plinii survived into the fourteenth century and beyond and was even known in medieval England. Several guides from this date recommended the wearing of amulets made from animal body parts to prevent pregnancy. Contraceptive advice found in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History included the insertion of parasites from a spider’s head into a deer hide worn on a woman’s arm.⁵³

In his uncle’s writings, therefore, Pliny inherited not only his pearls of wisdom, but also his warnings against the destructive forces of wealth and greed. Pliny was descended on both sides of his family from the Comum elite. Estimated to have been twice as wealthy as the average senator, he was forever at risk of descending into the life of luxury that his uncle had censured.⁵⁴ But while Pliny was not immune from indulging in his wealth, he recognised that there was more to life. He is often at his most interesting in his letters when pondering the sort of life he wants to lead. While perennially attracted to the idea of a quiet retirement spent enjoying books, baths and country air, he also savoured the spice of Rome and had ambitions of becoming a famous poet. In addition to the agricultural estate that he inherited from his uncle, he had a home on the Esquiline Hill in Rome, another on Italy’s west coast, and several in his native Comum. He was forever darting between the city, coast, countryside and lake and adapting his daily routine to each. It felt as natural to him to change houses and rooms through the year as it did to the Roman general who asked Pompey the Great, ‘Do I seem to you to have less common sense than the cranes and storks and thus not to change my living arrangements in accordance with the seasons?’⁵⁵ Believing that a man is happiest when he can be confident that this name will live forever, Pliny was strategic in the ways he divided his time. The problem was that he wanted eternal fame and daily contentment. His life would be in many ways an exercise in how to achieve both.

Pliny published most of his letters in his lifetime and arranged them himself, not chronologically, but ‘however they came to hand’.⁵⁶ The opportunity to cast himself in the best possible light was not one he always took. It is impossible to tell what Pliny added to his letters during the process of editing, but some of what he took out is obvious. There are no addresses, no measurements for the buildings he commissioned, and – most noticeably of all – no dates. Some of the letters can be dated on internal evidence, but a significant proportion of them cannot.⁵⁷ If we can wager a reason as to why Pliny ensured that they could never be arranged in precise chronological order, it would be that he wanted his life to be seen for the unpredictable journey that it was. Read out of order, his letters evoke a life of ups and downs, uncertainties, and questions rather than certain progress. How does one survive when all around are falling? Is suicide ever the best course? What separates necessity from excess? Pliny does not always find the answers, but he has a way of opening minds to the unexpected.

PART TWO

TWO
Illusions of Immortality

I have not yet, indeed, thought of a remedy for luxury. I am not sure that in a great state it is capable of a remedy, nor that the evil is in itself always so great as it is represented.

Benjamin Franklin, On Luxury, Idleness, and Industry, 1784

Pliny counted the historian and lawyer Cornelius Tacitus among his close friends. Born around AD 56, probably in southern Gaul, in the region of modern Provence, Tacitus was five, perhaps six years Pliny’s senior and, as Pliny noted, ‘exceptionally eloquent’.¹ He wrote a study of Germania and a piercing account of the second half of the first century before embarking upon his celebrated Annals of the early Roman emperors. He was also a couple of steps ahead of Pliny on the senatorial ladder. Although Pliny did not consider himself a historian, he saw in Tacitus someone he would do well ‘to imitate’. He told Tacitus that they were of a similar nature and that, if he could only follow in his successes, then he might achieve his dream ‘to be considered “second best but by a long way”’ to him.² The quote came from Virgil’s Aeneid and described the position of a Trojan soldier in a footrace. Competitive and admiring in equal measure, Pliny would write more letters to Tacitus over the course of his life than to anyone else except the emperor Trajan, to judge from what survives.

The lives of Pliny and Tacitus frequently crossed. After he lost his father as a boy, Pliny was appointed a mentor, Corellius Rufus – a senator he ‘always referred everything to’ – and a legal guardian, Verginius Rufus. When Verginius passed away many years later, at the age of eighty-three, it was Tacitus who delivered his funeral oration. Pliny was still grieving when he went to hear it. ‘I think of Verginius,’ he confessed, ‘I hear him and talk to him and I hold him.’ He had known Verginius almost his whole life. His native Comum bordered Verginius’ Mediolanum (Milan), and their families owned adjoining property.³ A successful military man, Verginius had thrice been consul and might even have been emperor, had he heeded popular pleas to accept the role at the end of Nero’s reign. To Pliny he had been less a hero than a guiding light, showing him ‘the affection of a father’ and helping him as he embarked upon his career before resuming an honourable retirement on the coast of Etruria in Italy. ‘He read the poems which were written about him,’ recalled Pliny, ‘he read histories, and was part of his own posterity.’⁴ Such scrolls, however, could be heavy, especially for an elderly man. It had been Verginius’ misfortune to drop a scroll on a polished floor, slip, and fracture his hip while attempting to retrieve it. The injury weakened him and he died.

Pliny’s grief was still raw ten years later when he visited Verginius’ former home and discovered that his tomb had not been finished, the man in charge of completing it too idle to have troubled himself over such a humble monument. ‘A mixture of anger and misery come over me,’ wrote Pliny, ‘that his ashes lie neglected without name or epitaph, although his glorious memory still wanders the world.’⁵ Tacitus’ oration, sadly now lost, had done much to perpetuate Verginius’ achievements. It was so exemplary and well pitched that Pliny had anticipated accurately that his prayers for Verginius to remain ‘in the memories of men and in conversation’ would be granted. No one could replace Verginius, but in honouring his accomplishments as beautifully as he did, Tacitus became a model for Pliny in his own right.

One day, about thirty years after the eruption of Vesuvius, Pliny took the bold step of writing a letter to Tacitus expressing his desire to be featured in his work. His books will be ‘immortal’, Pliny predicted, ‘this is why (I’ll freely admit it) I am so keen to be inserted into them’.⁶ By the very next line he had launched into a detailed report of his prosecution of a Roman general for corruption. Tacitus was generous towards Pliny but craved something more profound from him. The historian was anxious to ‘hand down to posterity a faithful account’ of the eruption that had killed Pliny’s uncle.⁷ Buoyed by the idea that the death of the elder Pliny (not to mention his own survival) might achieve ‘immortal glory’, Pliny cast his mind back to his youth. In the first of two letters to Tacitus he described the course of the eruption before concluding on a cliffhanger: ‘My mother and I, meanwhile, were at Misenum – but that is of no historical consequence and you only wanted to know about my uncle’s death.’ It had the desired effect, and Tacitus now politely requested from Pliny an account of his own experience of Vesuvius. Pliny was only too happy to oblige: ‘You will read these parts without intending to write about them,’ he prevaricated in a further letter, ‘for they’re not remotely worthy of history; indeed, if they strike you as unworthy even of a letter, then impute it to the fact that you requested them.’⁸

This was the first and last time Pliny wrote of his mother in his letters, the earliest of which date to almost twenty years after the disaster, by which time she had presumably died. Conscious of how much time had passed, Pliny vowed in his accounts to draw on what he had witnessed himself and what he had heard immediately after the eruption, ‘when the truth is most remembered’.⁹ The sole eyewitness reports of the disaster to survive antiquity, Pliny’s letters have long been admired for their detail. The passages in which he described what he had experienced for himself are particularly valuable, his account of the stages, range, and appearance of the eruption broadly consistent with the archaeological evidence.¹⁰ The picture he paints of a rising ash column followed by prolonged pumice fall is in fact so well observed that volcanologists now classify such eruptions as ‘Plinian’. It is more difficult to substantiate what Pliny described of his uncle’s bravery, but then, whatever he wrote was always going to be open to doubt. As Umberto Eco asked in 1990: ‘One wonders whether Pliny would have preferred a Reader accepting his glorious product (monument to the Elder) or a Reader realising his glorifying production (monument to the Younger)?’¹¹

Readers have, for the most part, accepted Pliny’s account of the eruption as both a remarkable tribute to the dead and a stirring enticement to adventure and risk. In the seventeenth century, the scientist and statesman Francis Bacon demonstrated just how readily Pliny the Elder’s example could be revived in the modern world.¹² Bacon had held high office as Lord Chancellor and Privy Councillor under King James I and was the author of a work of natural history of his own, the Sylva Sylvarum. Although scholars had by now begun to discredit many of the so-called facts of the elder Pliny’s ancient encyclopaedia, Bacon was fascinated by its author and his fate and, in 1626, determined to present himself as his successor for his inquisitiveness.

Bacon was travelling north through London towards Highgate on a snowy day when the thought occurred to him that snow, like salt, might provide an effective means of slowing the decay of flesh. As his coach rattled slowly on, he surveyed the whitening roads and conceived a plan for testing his theory. After gathering what snow he could, he stopped at ‘a poore woman’s howse at the bottome of Highgate hill’ and presented her with a hen to disembowel (where he acquired the bird he did not say).¹³ The poor woman did as she was told, and Bacon proceeded to stuff the carcass with the snow. Unfortunately, soon after conducting the experiment, he became unwell. When he started vomiting he was unsure ‘whether it were the stone, or some surfeit, or cold, or indeed a touch of them all three’.¹⁴ He only knew he was too unwell to make it home. He therefore travelled the short distance to the house of his friend, the Earl of Arundel. Although the earl was not home, the housekeeper was ‘very careful and diligent about [him]’ and installed him in a guest bed with a warming pan. Bacon, however, quickly deteriorated. The bed had not been slept in for over a year and was damp, apparently leaving him with a graver chill than the one he had come in with. ‘In 2 or 3 daes,’ wrote John Aubrey, ‘he dyed of suffocation.’¹⁵

‘Suffocation’ was more enterprising a death than pneumonia or opium-poisoning, now considered the likelier causes of Bacon’s demise.¹⁶ It evoked most readily Pliny the Elder, being suffocated by the volcanic ash which Pliny had so memorably compared to snow. Scholars have studied closely the letter Bacon wrote on his deathbed in Highgate, likening himself in his quest to experiment with ‘the conservation and induration of bodies’ to Pliny the Elder, ‘who lost his life by trying an experiment about the burning of the mountain Vesuvius’.¹⁷ The elder Pliny had died after launching a mission to rescue people from the eruption, but that mission, as Bacon recalled, had originated as a quest to observe the phenomenon at close quarters. The parallel between preserving flesh through snow and rescuing flesh from fire was not lost on Francis Bacon, who concluded that there were less honourable ways of losing one’s life than by experimenting with methods for preserving it.

Five years after Bacon’s death, Vesuvius erupted in the largest and most catastrophic explosion recorded since AD 79.¹⁸ Between three and eighteen thousand people were thought to have perished in the Plinian cloud and ensuing pyroclastic flows. Francis Bacon might have missed his chance to inspect the kind of ash that had extinguished his idol, but there were many more men like him who took the latest eruption as a cue to explore the history of the volcano. Across Europe, the eruption awoke new interest in the lives of the two Plinys. That Vesuvius had shown itself to be as deadly as Pliny claimed in his letters to Tacitus offered adventurers an unprecedented impetus to prove their daring. Inspired by Pliny’s visceral descriptions in his letters, Englishmen began to travel to Naples in increasing numbers and test their resolve in the shadow of the crater.

Among them was Sir William Hamilton. The future husband of Emma, mistress of Lord Nelson, Sir William had begun his career in the military before becoming MP for Midhurst in Sussex and being dispatched as British envoy to Naples. Upon arriving in the region in the 1760s, he witnessed a series of volcanic eruptions, which he determined to document in detail. The explosions were relatively small but even so their force surprised him. He was in his villa one morning when he saw a cloud rise from Vesuvius in ‘the exact shape of a huge pine-tree, such as Pliny the younger [sic] described in his letter to Tacitus’.¹⁹ When he was sure the lava had been released and it was safe enough to leave the house, he ventured outside to explore. Just as he was examining the lava, there was a bang, the mountain split once more, and ‘a fountain of liquid fire shot up many feet high, and then, like a torrent, rolled on directly towards us’. As the sky grew dark and the smell of sulphur became ‘very offensive’, he and his guide turned on their heels and ‘ran near three miles without stopping’, the ground trembling all the while beneath their feet.²⁰

Pliny the Elder was not alone in his fascination with natural phenomena. A banker named Lucius Caecilius Iucundus adorned the household shrine of his villa in Pompeii with scenes from the devastating earthquake of AD 63. A temple of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva and an archway to the forum are shown swaying on their foundations.

Hamilton sent observation after observation of the volcanic activity to the Royal Society, of which he was a fellow. His letters later formed the basis for a book. Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei, on the ‘flaming fields’ of Campania, was illustrated with colour prints by an artist named Pietro Fabris, who captured perfectly the sense of complacence that such a beautiful landmark could inspire in those who lived beneath it. Here was flame-crowned Vesuvius, billowing puffs of smoke into the pale skies of Italy while finely attired ladies looked on casually from across the water.

Hamilton had arrived in time to observe some of the excavations which had begun at Pompeii. It had long been known that cities lay hidden underground. Already in Francis Bacon’s time, an Italian architect had chanced upon the ruins of Pompeii while digging a canal. There is evidence that people had begun tunnelling through the ancient layers of Herculaneum too, as early as the thirteenth or fourteenth century.²¹ But it was only in the decades before Hamilton arrived, and at the instruction of King Charles III of Spain, that the process of uncovering the cities began in earnest. Excavations were first undertaken by a Spanish military engineer named Rocque Joaquin de Alcubierre in Herculaneum in 1738 and at Pompeii a decade later. As Hamilton noted, the ancient villas of Pompeii were ‘covered about ten or fifteen feet, with pumice and fragments of lava, some of which weigh three pounds’.²² Excavators at both sites made a priority of removing precious objects and wall paintings from the layers. Like the poor and displaced who had returned to the buried cities in the immediate aftermath of the disaster and squeezed into the villas to claim whatever Vesuvius had failed to, the excavators worked more greedily than methodically. Their digs were haphazard, sporadic, and limited in scope, with little thought given to stabilising the structures underground.

Preserved within the snow-like layers were imprints of the victims of the disaster of AD 79. The shapes of human bodies frozen in time were more palpable than fossils, but proved far less easy to extract from the ground. It was only some decades later, in the mid-nineteenth century, that a Neapolitan numismatist and archaeologist named Giuseppe Fiorelli developed a technique for preserving what remained of the ancient dead. Fiorelli was appointed director of excavations at the University of Naples in 1860 following a tumultuous period in his life. Arrested and imprisoned on charges of colluding with revolutionary forces, and deprived of his research notes, he was fortunate to have been released a short time later and made secretary to the Count of Syracuse.²³ Following archaeological work at Cumae, he arrived in Pompeii, and was a few years into his new post when he poured plaster into the cavities which the shapes of the dead had left behind in the volcanic deposit. The process enabled whole bodies to be cast in the positive.

Fiorelli went on to make dozens more casts through the same technique. He came as close as anyone could to raising the dead from their undignified tombs and reinstating them among the living. His casts gave each victim an identity. These were not just men, women, children, dogs. Every cowering shoulder and clenched fist represented an individual’s response to the tragedy. Each position captured something of their personality, or at least you imagine that it did; it is easy to forget that each cast is more than a work of art. The flesh had decayed over time but, in his casts, Fiorelli created the illusion of having preserved it forever.

Excavations are still ongoing in the Bay of Naples. Significant parts of Pompeii and Herculaneum are yet to be uncovered, but the process of sifting through the layers has already called into question when precisely in AD 79 Vesuvius erupted. Of all the details Pliny provides in his accounts of the eruption, the date has proven the most contentious. The manuscripts of his letters offer a range of dates, of which 24 August is the most secure textually.²⁴ But while there is evidence in the concretised ash that trees were still in leaf and the broad beans of summer still fresh at the time of the eruption, other signs suggest a later date.²⁵ Among the material remains discovered in the layers are olives, plums, figs and pomegranates, which are harvested principally in September and October.²⁶ Braziers were positioned in such a way as to heat rooms in some of the villas. Summer clothes had made way for the warmer coverings of winter.²⁷ Was Pliny mistaken over the date, or were these the fruits of another harvest, the preparations for an unseasonably cold August, the heaviest fabrics the victims could find to protect their skin from burning pumice?

The object most commonly cited in support of a post-August date is a single coin from a hoard discovered in the ‘House of the Golden Bracelet’ in Pompeii, where two adults and two children were also preserved in their final tragic moments. So embedded in the volcanic layers that it could not simply have been dropped at the site after the eruption, the coin features an inscription that led scholars to date it to post early September AD 79. The coin, however, is very poorly preserved, and a recent re-examination has revealed that its legend was misread by the original interpreter. The coin has now been dated to July or August AD 79.²⁸ The strongest evidence today for a later eruption date is the fact that the volcanic matter was dispersed in a south-easterly direction; the winds in the Bay of Naples seldom blow south-east in August.²⁹

It is entirely possible that the scribes made an error in copying the manuscripts and that 24 August was not the date Pliny originally recorded.³⁰ Of all the days the volcano could have erupted, however, this was perhaps the most dramatic. In the Roman calendar, 24 August was the day after the Vulcanalia, an annual autumn festival during which worshippers constructed towering bonfires in honour of the fire god and tossed fish from the Tiber raw into its flames. Fire and water: give Vulcan what was ordinarily out of his grasp, and he might be persuaded to spare the crops for harvest season. It was a cruel and insatiable god who fanned the flames of Vesuvius just a day after receiving his feast of fish.

We may never know whether Pliny was mistaken over the date of the eruption or, more likely, there was an error in the transcription of his letters. The merest possibility that Pliny might have been wrong is surprising because he was by nature extremely meticulous. His was a logical rather than a creative mind: attuned to detail and hard fact, obedient to protocol. Where his uncle was creative, Pliny was pedantic. You can tell from his prose how much care he took in finding the right phrase to express himself. Whereas Pliny the Elder was economical with his words but prone to write in sentences which changed direction with his every thought, Pliny favoured a more methodical and measured style, which reflected his occupation and approach to life more generally.

Less than a year after the eruption, at the age of eighteen, Pliny embarked upon a career as a lawyer in the Centumviral Court.³¹ The centre for civil cases, the court was based within the Basilica Iulia, a beautiful multi-storeyed building in the Forum Romanum. Although it was eclipsed in Republican times by other courts, the Centumviral was now considered one of the most important in Rome.³² Its work was highly technical and required Pliny to examine disputes arising over wills and inheritance and tackle cases of extortion and fraud. Though nominally a ‘Court of One Hundred Men’, who were arranged over four tribunals, the number of jurors often by now reached 180, and there was plenty of space besides for spectators.

There were few places where oratory counted for so much, for it was the jury who cast votes to determine the verdict of each case. There was a board of ‘Ten Men’ to preside over the panels of the court, and an interested emperor could overturn a verdict if he believed that it had been unfairly influenced, but responsibility for the delivery of justice lay principally with the lawyer and jury. Pliny was elected to the presiding board but also delivered speeches for the prosecution or defence. The main principles of the law he practised dated back to the fifth century BC, and although, as a senator, he had a role in shaping new laws authorised by the emperor into decrees, the focus in his letters is rather on his speeches and the characters he encountered in the courtrooms.³³ Pliny called the Centumviral Court his ‘arena’, evoking the world of blood sports.³⁴ There was no having recourse to the kind of statutes used today. His success depended on his strength of argument and performance.

‘Risk-taker’ was not the first word anyone would have used to describe Pliny, but as an orator this was what he aspired to be. He viewed his profession as an opportunity to spread his name far and wide, and understood that his reputation depended upon what people remembered of his speeches.³⁵ He likened the sort of rhetoric he tried to write to both the tightrope walker’s art and the helmsman’s skill for daring. Just as a tightrope walker summons gasps whenever she looks as though she may fall, so the orator who soars to a precipice and hovers on the very edge of possibility thrills the crowd, for the riskiest feats carry the richest rewards. The same is true of the helmsman. The one who sails a calm sea, said Pliny, will find no one waiting for him at harbour. But the one who puts in with his sail ropes shrieking, his mast bent, his rudder groaning, is ‘almost put on a level with the gods of the sea’.³⁶

The difficulty for Pliny was that the Court of One Hundred rarely attracted the most spectacular cases. Its work was necessary but, by Pliny’s own admission, very often tedious. He despaired of the ‘unknown youths’ it employed as much as he did of the applauding rent-a-crowds who received bribes for attending ‘in the middle of the basilica, as openly as if they were being given in the dining room’.³⁷ Only occasionally did Pliny land an opportunity to thrill the masses. He was once presented with a case involving a woman named Attia Viriola, her octogenarian father, and her father’s new lover. Following a ten-day romance, the elderly man had brought home ‘a stepmother’ for Attia, whose patrimony he now sought to take away. As Pliny prepared to speak in Attia’s defence, 180 jurors and almost as many spectators arrived at the basilica and proceeded to fill its benches and galleries. Pliny was surprised to find the members of the jury as divided as they were, some wholly sympathetic to the daughter, others unable to conceal their admiration for her spry father. But then he delivered his speech which, by his own account, was as intricately crafted as the armour that Vulcan forged for Aeneas in Virgil’s epic. With an eye to capturing the vividness of the poet, Pliny had composed a long speech ‘sustained by the amount of material, and its expressive structure, and the many little flights of narrative, and the variety of the style’.³⁸ It was a triumph. The case was settled in favour of the daughter.

For all its shortcomings, the Court of One Hundred offered Pliny a valuable arena in which to rehearse his most daring oratorical leaps. He modelled himself on not only Virgil but the greatest orators of history: Demosthenes, Cicero, and Calvus. Demosthenes had been a politician and formidable orator in fourth-century BC Athens and established himself as the master of the comprehensive but perfectly structured argument. Calvus had flourished as both an orator and a poet in Catullus’ set in the first century BC and impressed Pliny with the sheer force of his words. For ‘rhetorical flourishes’, meanwhile, Pliny turned to Cicero.³⁹

When Pliny wasn’t mining the orators’ texts for inspiration, he was looking to the weather. Snow was best. ‘Driven and continuous and plentiful, divinely inspired and heavenly,’ it seemed to offer itself up as a model for the daring speech-writer.⁴⁰ First came the blizzard, the storm of words. Then the let-up in the spate that allowed the finest phrases to melt into a jury’s ears. Finally, ice might be extracted from the slush and driven into them ‘like a sword at the body – for so a speech is impressed upon the mind by equal thrust and pause’.⁴¹ Snow may be incessant, but it is too varied in its consistency to be monotonous. Just as no one can stem snowfall, so Pliny believed no one ought to limit an orator or cut him short mid-flow.

He liked to remember how Odysseus stood as stiff as a skittle in the Iliad, but when he ‘spoke from his big chest his words were like the snowflakes of winter, and no other mortal could then rival Odysseus’.⁴² Such was the power of his words that they also turned those who heard them into melting snow. On returning home to Ithaca, as Pliny knew, Odysseus came before his wife Penelope in the disguise of a beggar and told her a false story that made her weep in remembrance for the husband she thought was lost to her:

As she listened her tears fell and her complexion melted.

Just as snow melts away on mountain peaks when the

West Wind pours it down and the South-East Wind melts it

And as it melts the rivers swell and flow,

So tears snowed down and melted her beautiful cheeks

As she wept for the man who was at her side.⁴³

Odysseus was a perfect model for Pliny. He showed him that, if the most innocent skies can deliver the greatest snowstorms, then the most unprepossessing men can deliver the greatest speeches. A slight man himself, Pliny took considerable comfort in the idea that even epithet-rich Odysseus cut an unpromising figure of an orator to begin with.

Indeed, Pliny liked to throw what little weight he had into his delivery, as if conscious to avoid Odysseus’ stiffness. He would imagine that he was planting ideas as he spoke like the seeds he sowed each winter: ‘barley, beans and other legumes’.⁴⁴ Pliny received his initial training under a teacher of rhetoric named Quintilian who was a firm believer in the power of hand gestures. In a detailed treatise he described several which involved bringing the fingers into contact with the thumb in a sort of plucking motion.⁴⁵ By stretching out his arms, plucking seeds from the air, and scattering them over an invisible trench, Pliny would give a visual demonstration of what little law and landowning held in common. It was rare he could bring his worlds together, but here he tried, combining what he had learned in the fields of his country estate near Perugia with what he had learned in the rhetoric schools of Rome. Nature had taught him to treat his oratory as he did his grain so as to prepare himself for every eventuality. ‘There are no fewer unanticipated and uncertain stratagems for the judges than there are for the weather and soil,’ he explained to Tacitus.⁴⁶ And so in the courtroom he would reach around, scattering his enquiry as widely as the seeds upon his farms, and reaping whatever happened to take.

In Pliny’s eyes such thoroughness was a virtue because it guaranteed that he would alight upon all the important aspects of a case and bring justice to bear. For others, his conscientious approach suggested a blindness, a lack of instinct, an inability to get to the heart of the matter through intuition alone. Marcus Aquilius Regulus, one of Pliny’s contemporaries at the Court of One Hundred, thought fit to taunt him:

‘You think all angles ought to be pursued during a case, but I see the jugular straight away, and go for it.’

‘But what you think is the jugular might well be the knee or the ankle,’ Pliny wittily retorted. ‘I can’t see the jugular,’ he continued, with less embarrassment than pride, ‘so I try everything, explore everything, “I leave no stone unturned”, as the Greeks say.’⁴⁷

Of all the many things that troubled Pliny about the court in which they both worked, Regulus troubled him most of all. He despised him and his aggressive jugular-grasping approach to the law. In his boyhood Regulus had seen his father go into exile and his property be handed over to his creditors.⁴⁸ As far as Pliny could discern, Regulus had spent the rest of his life trying to compensate for his early losses, acquiring as much money as possible by the least ethical means possible. He had been little more than a youth when he informed upon some of the most prominent men in Nero’s senate and saw three of them put to death. The senator who proceeded to try to prosecute Regulus in turn went so far as to accuse him of literally having an appetite for human flesh. Senator Montanus, whose party trick was to distinguish ‘at first bite’ whether an oyster came from the Lucrine Lake, Circeo (between Anzio and Gaeta in Italy), or from Richborough in Kent, made the incredible claim that Regulus had so despised the brother of one of the senators he had informed upon that he had paid his assassin and proceeded to take a bite out of his corpse’s head.⁴⁹ Defended in court by his own brother, Regulus had been dismissed without charge.

A contemporary once called Regulus ‘the most obnoxious of all two-footed creatures’, which seemed about right.⁵⁰ Pliny told a story in which he characterised him as a ruthless legacy hunter. He described Regulus forcing a lady to open her will and stealing the clothes off her back. He recounted how he encouraged some doctors to prolong a man’s life just long enough for him to change his will before asking them why they persisted in ‘torturing’ the poor man by keeping him alive.⁵¹ ‘Legacy-hunting’ – known to the Romans as captatio – was a common enough crime for Pliny’s words to have had the ring of truth. Members of the Court of One Hundred had a responsibility to protect the sanctity of wills, not corrupt them. Pliny’s gossip about Regulus showed just how deeply he cared about some of the less sensational work of their court.

Pliny could never understand how Regulus managed to attract to the courtroom the crowds he did. He had ‘weak lungs, garbled speech, a stammer, he is very slow to make connections, has no memory, indeed he has nothing except a mad creativity’.⁵² He was jittery and pale and so bad at memorising his speeches that he relied upon writing them down.⁵³ Pliny disapproved of reading speeches aloud because he believed that an orator needed his hands and eyes to be free in order engage the crowd.⁵⁴

Regulus cut not only a dull figure but a ridiculous one; he insisted on wearing an eye patch – over his right eye if he was speaking for the prosecution and over his left if for the defence. A sign of gross superstition, his patch also had the useful effect of reminding him which side he was speaking for.⁵⁵ He used to consult soothsayers on the outcome of his cases and examine livers for signs of future prosperity. Pliny once caught him in the process of divining his own fortune. Having discovered a double set of entrails inside a sacrificial animal, Regulus boasted that he would not be worth 60 million sesterces, as he had originally predicted, but twice that. Pliny did not doubt him.⁵⁶ He was considerably richer than Pliny. Among his many properties Regulus kept gardens with exquisite statues and enormous colonnades on the banks of the Tiber.⁵⁷ One day he was very nearly killed by a collapsing colonnade on the ‘road to the chill heights of Herculean Tibur, where white Albula is vaporous with sulphurous waters’.fn1

But for all Pliny cared, Regulus might have been crushed and ‘dispersed’ like the columns ‘in a cloud of dust’.⁵⁸

THREE
To Be Alive is to Be Awake

If you have a garden in your library, you’ll lack nothing

Cicero, Ad Familiares, 9.4

Pliny the Elder had lived as breathlessly as he died. An exception to his own rule that ‘there is nothing in Nature that does not like the change provided by holidays, after the example of day and night’, he had worked through darkness and daylight.¹

He was not like the beasts of burden who ‘enjoy rolling around when they’re freed from the yoke’, or the dogs who do the same after the chase, or the tree that ‘rejoices to be relieved of its continuous weight, like a man recovering his breath’. Believing that a moment away from his books was a moment wasted, Pliny the Elder had developed an extraordinary ability to study in any situation: not only while he ate and while he sunbathed, but even while he was rubbed down after his bath (he used to pause only for the bath itself). On one occasion when he was taking notes over dinner, a guest deigned to correct the pronunciation of the slave who was reading to them from a book: ‘But you must have understood him?’ Pliny the Elder asked. ‘Then why did you make him repeat the word? We have lost at least ten verses because of your interruption!’² Pliny remembered how he used to chastise him for walking everywhere when he might have travelled by sedan chair, as he did, ‘You could avoid losing those hours!’

After his spell of writing inoffensive grammar books during the latter years of Nero’s reign, Pliny the Elder had found a new direction in his studies, completing a history of modern Rome begun by a historian named Aufidius Bassus and finally getting down to work on the Natural History. The change in his routine had come about with the rise of a new dynasty of emperors under Vespasian in AD 69. The scion of an ‘obscure’ family of tax collectors, Vespasian was a senator and exemplary military man and one of the most capable of Nero’s generals. He had already commanded a legion in Germania and conducted a tour of Britain – where ‘he brought under [Roman] control two very powerful tribes and over twenty towns and the Isle of Wight, which is next to Britain’ – when Nero sent him east to quell a Jewish uprising.³

Tensions had been escalating ever since Emperor Augustus established Judaea as a Roman province in AD 6. Claudius had attempted to relieve hostilities between Jews and Gentiles across Alexandria and Caesarea, and granted power over Judaea to King Herod Agrippa, grandson of Herod the Great. But the death of the king in AD 44 and reversion of Judaea to a Roman province had deepened the troubles both there and in Rome, and in AD 66 the Jews, long frustrated at being subject to Roman control and taxation, finally revolted.⁴ The trigger to what would be known as the Jewish War came when Nero’s governor seized funds from the Temple of Jerusalem. In a bid to restore stability amid the ensuing riots, the Roman governor of Syria led his forces towards the city but ultimately withdrew in defeat. The Romans could delay no longer.

Pliny the Elder was probably in Rome when Vespasian left for Galilee with intentions of proceeding south and eventually capturing Jerusalem.⁵ He was about a year into the war when his forces laid siege to Jotapata (Yodfat). The commander of the Jews, Josephus, later recounted the events in his Jewish War.⁶ He described how he avoided being killed by his men for his desire to surrender to the Romans rather than die. If the Romans were willing to show mercy and spare them, he said, then they ought to show mercy to themselves. The circumstances in which suicide might be considered permissible would continue to be debated by Jews down the centuries, as indeed they would in the Christian Church (the most sustained argument against Christian suicide would come in St Augustine’s City of God in the fifth century).⁷

Josephus presented suicide as a crime against nature and impiety against God: since the soul is immortal and part of the divinity, and life a gift from God, then it ought to be God’s decision as to when to take it away. His description of Jewish suicides entering the darkness might well have reminded Romans of the souls of suicides wandering Hades in Virgil’s Aeneid. Josephus failed to shake the Jews of their resolve. He therefore suggested that they take lots to kill one another so as to avoid dying by their own hands. Lots were duly taken, but when Josephus emerged as one of the last two to have to die, he ensured he did not have to by surrendering to the Romans. As if in possession of a divine prophecy, he addressed Vespasian as though he were already emperor, allegedly thereby sowing the seed of his ambition.

Around a year later, in AD 68, came news that Nero had died. Years of cruelty and overspending had left him isolated. Abandoned by his guard, he was recalled to Rome only to be declared an enemy of the state by the senate. He avoided brutal execution by taking a dagger to his own throat. Nero’s death without issue left a power vacuum into which men poured like lava. AD 69 went down in history as the ‘Year of the Four Emperors’ and ‘almost the last year of the state’, as civil war broke out over the succession.⁸ First to succeed Nero was Galba, governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, the easternmost of Rome’s provinces in Spain. The Praetorian Guard assassinated him after seven months and installed his deputy, Otho, in his place. Otho ruled for three months. The Roman legions replaced him with their commander Vitellius. Finally, Vespasian was hailed emperor by his troops. He was fortunate enough to have the support of the governors of Egypt and Syria and the benefit of a strong army, who defeated Vitellius’ men at Cremona in northern Italy. As Vespasian assumed power with the blessing of the senate at Rome, his son Titus set about completing the conquest of Judaea.

Pliny the Elder had come to know Titus well as a young man. Born in about AD 39 to Vespasian and his wife in a ‘pokey dark bedroom’ in a ‘squalid’ seven-storeyed building in Rome, he had grown up at the imperial court with Claudius’ son Britannicus in a rare conferral of honour.⁹ Although the young Titus was said to have been rather too keen on eunuchs and parties, he soon redeemed himself through his military prowess.¹⁰ Having impressed everyone around him with his ‘receptiveness to learning almost all the arts of war and peace’ and skill in arms and horsemanship, he left for Germania, which was where he met Pliny the Elder.¹¹

Following his campaign against the tribe of the Chatti, Pliny the Elder had returned to the region once more with the Roman army. In the course of his travels he came to Vetera, modern Xanten, near the Rhine, the very camp where Drusus had established his headquarters in 11 BC. Remarkably, some horse trappings bearing Pliny the Elder’s name and post were discovered at the site in the nineteenth century. Made of brass overlaid in silver, the adornments are exquisitely detailed. Several roundels, four of which feature portrait heads, are connected by chains which would have fitted to the harness of the horse. The roundel inscribed with Pliny the Elder’s name has at its centre a portrait of a wide-eyed man with a fringe. Was this a stylised portrait of Pliny the Elder? Could the roundel have hung from his horse? It is very tempting to picture the trapping flapping around Pliny the Elder’s shins as he stormed through the thick German forests. While it is possible that the portrait does indeed show Pliny the Elder, it is more likely to depict Emperor Claudius or the young Nero.¹² Inscribed with the names of two further men besides, the trappings might well have belonged to Pliny the Elder before being passed down to officers stationed under his command.¹³ Whether the object passed through Pliny the Elder’s hands or not, it is a tantalising relic of the authority he had attained in the Roman cavalry at the time he met the young Titus.

When Pliny the Elder came to write his encyclopaedia, he reflected fondly on Titus as his former contubernalis, or ‘tent-mate’. It is a pity that he did not describe in his Natural History the kind of life they shared in Germania. The period was evidently instructive for them both, and Titus would not forget Pliny the Elder when he became emperor two decades later. In the short term, his experience in a German camp must have been valuable preparation for the military career that he pursued under his father in the Jewish War. Once Vespasian had embarked upon his duties as emperor, Titus was entrusted with leading the legions to besiege Jerusalem, where fighting had broken out between rival groups of Zealots. As a struggle ensued between the Jews and Roman forces in AD 70, the Temple of Jerusalem was set alight. Treasures salvaged from the flames were carried to Rome and paraded the following year when Titus and Vespasian celebrated a joint triumph for their efforts. By the time the Jewish War ended with the siege of Masada in AD 73–4, hundreds of thousands of Jews, maybe more, had lost their lives. Josephus, the Jew who had predicted Vespasian’s rise, enjoyed the rare privilege of living out the rest of his life in Rome as a Roman citizen.

Pliny the Elder did not describe the atrocities of the Jewish War in his encyclopaedia. The closest he came to acknowledging the destruction the Romans wreaked was when he referred to the former town of Engadda as ‘second to Jerusalem in fertility and palm groves, now another funeral pyre’.¹⁴ Masada was merely ‘a fortress on a rock’. Judaea was evoked to provide context for descriptions of the discovery or trade of plants such as its native balsam.¹⁵ Pliny the Elder did however experience Vespasian’s rule from close quarters. The death of Nero and return of relative stability to Rome after the catastrophic Year of the Four Emperors enabled him to emerge from his quietude and earn a place on the imperial council. Every morning in the city, clientes (‘clients’) paid a formal greeting or salutatio to their patrons in the halls of their homes. Pliny the Elder, who made a habit of rising soon after midnight in the autumn and winter months, was among those who attended the emperor. An ‘early riser’ himself, Vespasian received his greeting before he had so much as put on his shoes.¹⁶ Once the meeting was adjourned and he had dealt with any necessary business, Vespasian would return to bed, usually with one of his concubines (he was already a widower when he came to power).

Having re-established control over Judaea, Vespasian was determined to put the empire back on an even keel. Increasing – and in some cases doubling – the tribute which the provinces owed Rome, he earned a reputation for cupidity, but went some way towards recovering the financial losses Rome had suffered through Nero’s profligacy.¹⁷ Pliny the Elder played an increasingly important role in his administration. In the seventies AD, he was appointed to a series of civil posts or ‘procuratorships’ overseas. Although the details of his employments are unknown, he is said to have ‘conducted very splendid and continuous procuratorships with the utmost integrity’, one of which took him to Tarraconensis, the largest Roman province in Hispania, to oversee the imperial finances.¹⁸

Between his work for the imperial council and his promotion following his procuratorships to the admiralty of the fleet, Pliny the Elder had little time for conducting his own research. He had no more opportunity to pursue his own interests when, in AD 79, Vespasian died at the age of sixty-nine, anticipating his posthumous deification with the words: ‘I think I’m becoming a god.’¹⁹ His successor, Titus, was only too pleased to retain his former tent-mate in the imperial administration. Pliny the Elder had little choice but to persevere with his studies in the rare hours he had to himself. As he explained to the new emperor, he dedicated his days to him, and his nights to producing his encyclopaedia.²⁰

A furious night-writer, Pliny the Elder was fortunate to possess what his nephew called ‘a sharp intellect, incomparable concentration, and formidable ability to stay awake’.²¹ There were moments when he nodded off during the day, but these were as nothing to the time other people wasted. If his passion for night-writing was born of necessity, then it was driven by the need he felt to make the most of the time he had. Humans are not wronged by the fact that their lives are brief, he wrote, but do wrong by spending the life they do have asleep. For to sleep is to lose half of one’s allotted time – more than half, given that infancy, ailing old age, indeed the hours lost to insomnia, cannot truly constitute living.²² He went so far as to establish a memorable formula to express these beliefs. Vita vigilia est, he wrote: ‘To be alive is to be awake.’²³

The idea was a logical solution to a theme found in Homer. If wakefulness was life, then it was because sleep was akin to death. The Homeric epics taught that Sleep and Death were brothers. When Zeus’s mortal son Sarpedon falls at Troy in the Iliad, Sleep and Death carry his body from the battlefield. A painting of them straining beneath the weight of the warrior’s bleeding corpse became the unlikely adornment for a wine bowl in the late sixth century BC.²⁴ The brothers are formidable figures, with richly textured wings, armoured body plates and long dark beards. One grasps Sarpedon’s legs, the other his gigantic shoulders, while blood gushes from his wounds like wine from a ruptured wine skin. Distributing his weight between them, Sleep and Death raise him from the ground as the god Hermes watches. There is life in Sarpedon’s tendons yet, but his head is slumped, the final insult to the divine father who could not save him. To preserve what is left of his dignity, Sleep and Death must carry his body to his native Lycia for burial.

Sleep and Death were united in Pliny the Elder’s mind in the same way as they were on the archaic pot. They were strange and inimitable brothers, shadows of one another, complementing each other in their work. To embrace Sleep as the brother of Death was to recognise wakefulness as the sister of life. It was by doing precisely this that Pliny the Elder was able to complete his encyclopaedia in time to dedicate it to Titus. ‘You are to me such as you were in camp as my tent-mate,’ he wrote to him in the preface. ‘Not even the improvement in your fortunes has changed you, except in so far as you can now bestow as much as you want to.’²⁵

Titus was given the opportunity to prove his generosity when, just a few months after he succeeded his father as emperor, Vesuvius erupted. Faced with the cruel task of recovering his empire from ruin, he proved himself to be a man of the utmost pragmatism. Although there was no straightforward way of rebuilding the cities when the foundations were so unstable, Titus hastened to the disaster zone and appointed a pair of senators to plan the restoration of the few salvageable buildings and oversee the construction of new ones. The property of those who had died without issue was harnessed to fund the relief effort. The imperial purse made no profit from the tragedy.²⁶ Titus’ clemency in the wake of the disaster was the kindest tribute he could have paid the learned friend who, after a lifetime of being awake, had finally been carried off in the arms of Sleep and Death.

Pliny the Elder had pushed the boundaries of mortal achievement. His publication of over 20,000 pieces of information exceeded anything his predecessors had produced. His encyclopaedia was an attempt to overcome the frailty of human life and human memory: a record of everything man had learned and risked losing through neglect and the passage of time. It was his most precious legacy, evidence of how much one could do when one’s life was structured in a certain way.

Pliny longed to establish a comparable legacy for himself. ‘Day and night,’ he wrote, as often quoting Virgil, ‘I think “how I too might raise myself from the earth”; for that would fulfil and indeed surpass my prayer “to fly victorious over the lips of men”.’²⁷ Another man might have been anxious to keep such ambitions to himself, but Pliny felt no shame in front of his friends and relatives. The poet Martial had found him bent over his desk enough times at his home on the Esquiline Hill to issue a warning to others against disturbing him in the middle of the day. In a poem Pliny recorded in his letters, Martial advised his reader:

Don’t you knock on his clever door

Drunk and whenever suits you.

He gives all his days over to gloomy Minerva

While he prepares for the ears of the One Hundred

This speech, which the coming ages can

Liken to the pages of Cicero himself.

Safer to go when the lamps burn low.

This is your hour, when Bacchus is frenzied,

When the rose is triumphant, the hair wet with unguent.

At that hour even a dour Cato would read me.²⁸

Martial’s teasing poem provided Pliny with further incentive to exchange unguents for ink. For all that Pliny admired his wit – he was ‘original, incisive, and sharp’ – he doubted whether Martial would achieve his own dream of living forever ‘on the lips of men’.

Almost a quarter of a century Pliny’s senior, Martial came from Bilbilis, in the Aragon region of modern Spain, but had established himself as a keen satirist of Rome. He wrote as enthusiastically of everyday life in the city – its dinners, its gossip, its most notorious fiends – as he did of its architecture. His poetry captured the rhythm of the times with an ease and humour that is often absent from Pliny’s letters. Yet Pliny could not help but wonder what interest there would be in the characters Martial skewered in his poems when he was dead and gone. Martial might reasonably have wondered how he fared in Pliny’s estimation and would no doubt have been surprised at his modest hopes for his legacy. Pliny was so outwardly supportive of him that he even paid for him to make a journey home. Perturbed that poets no longer received money or promotion for their praise poetry, as they had in ancient times, Pliny had endeavoured to compensate Martial, if only ‘out of respect for our friendship and the verses which he had composed about me’. It is little thanks to Pliny that Martial remains one of the most popular poets of ancient Rome.²⁹

Had Martial followed his own advice and waited until the lamps burned low in Pliny’s house, he would still have found him working. Bacchus was seldom frenzied when Pliny was in Rome. He was still stoppered and, if Pliny had his way, destined to remain so for as long as there were hours he could steal from night and day. Inspired by his uncle’s choice of life over deadly sleep, Pliny had established a rigorous routine of his own. In the winter months he rose early, albeit some hours later than his uncle, and worked continuously throughout the day, dispensing with both the afternoon siesta and after-dinner entertainment he normally enjoyed in summer in order to persevere with his notes. His uncle had shielded his hands from the cold with gloves, ‘so that not even the bitterness of the weather could snatch any time away from his studies’.³⁰ Pliny relied on his underfloor heating.

There is no clearer reflection in Pliny’s letters of the kind of orderly, upright and morally unblemished life he aspired to live than in his descriptions of his occasional dinners. Pliny was almost irritatingly exacting about their composition. However much he tried to make light of it with his friends, there was no concealing the pedant inside him:

To Septicius Clarus,

How dare you! You promise to come to dinner, but never show up? Here’s your sentence: you shall reimburse the full costs to the penny. They’re not small. We had prepared: a lettuce each, three snails, two eggs, spelt with honeyed wine and snow (you shall pay for this too, a particular expense since it melts into the dish), olives, beetroot, gourds, onions, and many other choice items. You would have heard a comedy or a reader or a lyre-player or – if I was feeling generous – all three. But you no doubt chose instead to dine with someone who gave you oysters, womb of sow, sea urchins and dancing girls from Cadiz …

Plinius.³¹

Lettuce, snails, eggs, spelt, snow, olives, onions: these were Pliny’s hors d’oeuvres. Too frugal to be particularly appetising and too precise in their arrangement to put a man at ease, they were the plate form of his considered and compartmentalised life.³² Lettuce, sown upon the winter solstice, was served to aid digestion, promote sleep, and regulate the appetite (‘no other food stimulates the palate more while also curbing it’).³³ Eggs soothed the stomach and throat. Olives were picked for salt, and onions sliced for sweetness. Not too much of anything. Each ingredient was self-contained and recognisable to the Roman eye, the snow alone seeping everywhere.

Snow imagery was not uncommon in Pliny’s work in the years following the eruption of Vesuvius. At once a symbol of force and frailty, snow acquired a fresh resonance in his life, featuring as prominently in his oratory as it did on his dinner plates. On one level, Pliny permitted this ‘particular expense’ because it illustrated his commitment to variety. Long before William Cowper declared, in his poem of 1785, that ‘Variety’s the very spice of life,/ That gives it all its flavour’, Pliny forged a culinary metaphor for the merits of alternation. He had a friend who seemed to spend his life doing nothing. ‘For how long will your shoes go nowhere, your toga be on holiday and your day be completely empty?’ Pliny asked him.³⁴ ‘If I were to make you dinner,’ he continued, ‘I would mix the savoury and spicy foods with sweet.’

In reality, Pliny struck more balance in his menus than he did in his daily routine. Like his uncle before him, he prioritised work over everything else, food included. The snow was his one extravagance which, in its habit of losing form and metamorphosing into valueless water, must have reminded him of how consuming but unstable life and its luxuries could be. The Romans used both snow and ice to refrigerate food during transit but also, as Pliny did, to chill their drinks. Pliny the Elder found the use of snow to chill wine in summer particularly offensive because to ‘turn the curse of mountains into a pleasure for the throat’ in this season meant that thought had been given as to how to keep the snow cold for the other months.³⁵ This made the serving of snow not a simple act of recklessness, but a conscious and determined inversion of Nature.

In the sixteenth century, the essayist Michel de Montaigne observed that the ancients also had ‘cellars of snow to cool their wine; and some there were who made use of snow in winter, not thinking their wine cool enough, even at that cold season of the year’.³⁶ Among the classical quotations Montaigne had inscribed upon the roof beams of his chateau in Bordeaux was the following, adapted from the Natural History:

solum certum nihil esse certi

et homine nihil miserius aut superbius

The only certainty is that nothing is certain

And nothing more miserable or arrogant than man.

These words hung over Montaigne’s meditative life.³⁷ They spoke as hauntingly to him in Renaissance France as they did to their first readers, encapsulating the idea that, of all living things, man alone struggles to accept the capriciousness of fate. Man’s desire and quest for certainty is presumptuous and arrogant; his eternal failure to achieve it, a recipe for misery.

Given his thoughts on uncertainty, we might have expected Pliny the Elder to have been the one to promote snow as a paradigm for human fortune. But it was to his nephew’s credit that he went beyond his uncle’s moralising to present snow as not merely a luxury, but as something as changeable as life itself. Pliny the Elder and Montaigne saw man’s successes in preserving snow throughout the seasons. Pliny saw rather his failures. He might strive for certainty, protecting his snow from the heat so that it retained its shape, but as someone who served snow at dinner parties, he knew only too well that even the best efforts failed. Whether it took one hour or one day, snow always melted away.

For all his uncle’s distaste for it and the similarity it bore to the ash that had eventually killed him, snow did not develop in Pliny’s mind the negative associations that it might have done. Pliny reserved his disapproval instead for the luxuries he believed to be more damaging to morality. Snow seemed less offensive in this regard than the fruits of the sea it was sometimes served with, in what his uncle viewed as a wanton ‘mixing of mountaintops and seabed’.³⁸ In his encyclopaedia, Pliny the Elder had expressed a particular dislike of the combining of oysters and ‘snow’ – probably in this case crushed ice – as a delicacy. Ignoring the benefits of snow as a preservative, Pliny the Elder focused on how extravagant and unnatural it was that anyone should intrude upon two ends of the earth for the sake of satisfying his stomach. An oyster at the bottom of the ocean is no more likely to encounter snow than a snow-capped mountain is to host an oyster.³⁹

Pages and pages of the Natural History were dedicated to expounding the dangers and ubiquity of seafood. In the fourth century BC, a poet from Sicily named Archestratus had published a collection of exotic recipes for shellfish in his Greek poem, ‘On the Life of Luxury’. Shellfish had been spreading their poison across the Greek world and into Rome for centuries. ‘It wasn’t enough,’ Pliny the Elder despaired, ‘that the gifts of the sea were being pushed down our throats before they were worn on the hands, ears, head, and all over the body by men as much as by women.’⁴⁰ The sea creatures corrupted with their treasures as much as with their taste: oysters yielded their glistening pearls to grasping fishermen, while one species of predatory murex mollusc secreted a substance, which was used by the wealthy to dye their garments ‘Tyrian’ purple.

Pliny the Elder related that Alexander the Great and his men had encountered oysters a foot long in the seas off India. Although the Romans had not yet been so fortunate, they knew of oysters large enough to merit the name ‘Three Bites’.⁴¹ The encyclopaedist had studied oysters closely and concluded that their growth depended not only upon the moon, which controlled the tides, but also upon the progress of the seasons. The oyster as he describes it in his encyclopaedia opens its shell at the beginning of summer, as the heat of the first sun penetrates the water. As it does so, it is as though it is ‘yawning’, an image that is all the more striking for the fact that the oyster’s head is ‘indistinguishable’ and lacks eyes.⁴² In the heat, the oyster begins to swell with a milk-like juice – a sort of dew that it absorbs and incubates to produce pearls. (In actual fact, oysters can be hermaphroditic and switch between the two genders, developing pearls when layers of nacre build up around foreign bodies trapped in their shells.)

Oysters in deeper waters are small, wrote Pliny the Elder, because it is dark and ‘in their sadness they look less for food’.⁴³ Their depression was presumably only deepened by the fact that they were also the first to be searched for fine pearls (the finest were often found far beneath the surface). Quite the best thing about pearls is that no two are the same: in Latin, a pearl is sometimes called simply unio, ‘uniqueness’, whence ‘onion’, a vegetable of iridescent layers. A pearl, said Pliny the Elder, may take on the cloudiness of morning sky or be aborted or ‘miscarried’ by a storm; the oyster is so alarmed by thunder that it will slam its shell shut before the pearl is fully formed. If the weather is sunny, the pearl may develop a reddish hue, losing its whiteness ‘like the human body’ suffering sunburn.⁴⁴ (He similarly believed that Ethiopians had been scorched by their proximity to the sun, while inhabitants of icy climates had white skin and fair hair.⁴⁵) On this logic, Pliny the Elder attributed reddish pearls to sunny Spain, tawny pearls to Illyricum, in the Balkans, and black pearls and oyster shells to stormy Circeo in Italy.⁴⁶

Pliny the Elder could not take credit for being the first man to speak of the oyster and pearl’s susceptibility. Over a century before him, Sergius Orata, the first Italian to cultivate oyster farms at decadent Baiae in the Bay of Naples, had taken to transporting oysters from Brundisium (Brindisi) in Italy’s heel and depositing them in the Lucrine Lake in Campania.⁴⁷ Once the oysters, ordinarily farmed on ropes, had absorbed the lake’s delicious waters, it did not matter where they started life. Their high price depended on people’s belief in their ability to absorb the richness of their surroundings.

Pliny the Elder had not liked the idea of Romans risking their lives to retrieve oysters from the depths when they might have grown all they needed in simple kitchen gardens. If he quaffed the occasional one it was not because he aspired to eat ‘the palm of our tables’.⁴⁸ Provided an oyster was good – sealed, not too slimy, not too meaty, more striking for its thickness than diameter, caught neither in mud nor on sand but on a hard surface like a rock – he believed that the odd one might benefit his health. Oysters, he said, can settle the stomach and soften the bowels, restore the appetite and plump the skin, purge ulcers from the bladder, chase chilblains from the toes, and reduce the size of swollen glands.⁴⁹ The oyster was therefore a paradox. Luxurious on the one hand and healing on the other, it defied the kind of clear moral classification that Pliny the Elder liked to apply to the things around him. While the oyster was multifarious enough to earn his interest, Pliny the Elder was on balance reproachful: ‘There is no greater cause for the destruction of morals and rise of luxury than shellfish.’⁵⁰ Given his friends’ manners, his nephew Pliny was inclined to agree.

In his abstemiousness and censoriousness towards shellfish, Pliny proved himself to be very much his uncle’s son. When his friend and fellow equestrian Septicius Clarus failed to show at his snow-and-spelt dinner, he assumed it had been because he had gone after the oysters and sea urchins on offer elsewhere. It was not like him to be tempted away by oysters: Pliny counted no one in his acquaintance ‘truer or more straightforward, accomplished or trustworthy’.⁵¹ On close enough terms with Pliny to have him assist in promoting his nephew to the senate, Septicius must have taken his teasing letter in good grace. Sue him for every morsel of food he had missed? He must be joking. The few surviving details of Septicius’ life shed light on his respectability. He was named as the dedicatee of Pliny’s collected letters as well as the most important biographical work of the age, Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars.

Some years after Pliny’s death, Septicius Clarus and Suetonius travelled to Britain. Following their landings under Claudius, the Romans had suppressed the revolt of Boudicca in AD 60 or 61 and worked their way steadily northwards to conquer much of England and Wales. In AD 122, Trajan’s successor, Hadrian, launched an expedition to settle pockets of unrest and begin work on the wall that would eventually stretch from the east coast to the west and mark the northernmost frontier of the Roman empire. Septicius was praetorian prefect, Suetonius private secretary to the emperor. Both were powerful roles into which they appear to have relaxed only too easily. In the course of the British campaign they were dismissed from their posts, both allegedly on grounds of overfamiliarity with Hadrian’s wife.⁵² It was a late and fallible source that cited the reason for their dismissal, but it may just be that Septicius finally got his comeuppance for the shameless social climbing Pliny had scolded him for.

As for Suetonius, Pliny would have been surprised he had it in him. Before becoming a prolific author, Suetonius had cut a shy and self-doubting figure, at least when Pliny was around. He was less than ten years younger than Pliny but emerges almost boy-like from the Letters.⁵³ Reticence was his defining characteristic. Pliny once helped him to secure a small estate and, as a first step towards public office, a military tribunate, or junior post, which Suetonius passed on to a relative.⁵⁴ While Septicius Clarus ‘often urged’ Pliny to publish his letters, Pliny practically implored Suetonius to publish work of his own. Prior to his Lives, Suetonius completed a biographical compendium of famous men, including Pliny the Elder, which Pliny must have been eager to see released into the world.⁵⁵ Within their circle of mutual encouragement, Pliny confessed to being ‘hesitant about publishing’, but Suetonius outdid ‘even’ him in his ‘dallying and delaying’.⁵⁶

By the time Suetonius decided to try his hand at law, he was suffering from nightmares. He must have been in his late twenties when he wrote to Pliny seeking an adjournment to a trial on the basis of having had bad dreams. A more bullish lawyer might have told him to pull himself together, but Pliny was sympathetic. A perfectionist who was ‘never so prepared as to not rejoice at a delay’, Pliny had also experienced dreams in the past which appeared to augur ill for his cases.⁵⁷ Around the time he embarked upon his legal career Pliny married for the first time. Nothing is known of his first wife, but he recalled in a letter how he was about to proclaim against ‘very powerful citizens and even friends of the emperor’ when he dreamed that his mother-in-law got down on her knees and begged him not to go through with the trial. The Romans believed that dreams merited deep consideration on the basis that they might have some bearing upon waking life. Like the Greeks before them, they realised that, while some dreams come to pass, others presage a less obvious result.

Any dream involving a mother figure was always ripe for discussion. On the Interpretation of Dreams, a definitive guide in five volumes, was published a generation after Pliny died and laid out what could come of nightly visits by matriarchs. The book was an important influence on Sigmund Freud, who read it before writing his Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, and described a number of possible scenarios. A senator like Pliny who might dream of having sex with his mother had reason to rejoice, provided he had adopted the missionary position; the mother symbolised the state, and one who governed his partner sexually could be sure to govern well politically.⁵⁸ But a man of fragile health who dreamed of having sex with his mother on top, might predict his own death – for earth, Mother Earth, does not lie above the living. Such earthy thoughts could not have been further from Pliny’s conscious, but at their root lay the old idea that, for all the many things a dream can symbolise, Sleep is little more than a shadow of Death.

Since adjournments were not permitted in the Court of One Hundred, Pliny had had no choice but to ignore the warning of his dream and go through with his trial. The words he had used to reassure himself then were the words he used now to reassure Suetonius: ‘The best thing is to fight for one’s country.’⁵⁹ With this hearty expression of patriotism, a quote from Homer’s IIiad, the young Pliny had stormed into the basilica, confronted the opposition, and promptly won his case. He recommended that Suetonius did the same. If his dream rendered the prospect of doing so too frightening, then Suetonius was well advised to interpret it to a better outcome. As Homer had illustrated, dreams were meaningful or meaningless depending on which of two gates they issued from. There was a gate made of horn and another of ivory. Dreams which poured through the ivory gate, according to Odysseus’ wife Penelope, were empty. But those which passed through the horn gate ‘bring the truth to pass whenever a mortal sees them’.⁶⁰ It was to the gate of ivory, through which ‘the spirits of the dead send false dreams towards the sky’, that Aeneas and the Sibyl were led as they prepared to leave Hades in Virgil’s Aeneid.⁶¹ By departing through the gate of false dreams it was as if their journey to the land of the dead had never happened.

Pliny anticipated that Suetonius might still struggle and told him that he would attempt to delay his case. ‘It’s difficult, but I’ll try,’ he promised, for as Homer said, ‘a dream is from Zeus.’⁶² The line was a wry comment on the difficulty of interpreting one’s own dreams, for as he knew only too well, even dreams from Zeus could be deceptive. In the Iliad, Agamemnon, commander of the Greek army, was famously deceived into thinking that he could take Troy at once after the King of Pylos appeared to speak to him in a dream.⁶³ On waking he decided first to test his men’s resolve by encouraging them to abandon the war and return home, since they had no hope of sacking Troy. Far from rejecting his plan and rallying to fight all the more defiantly, his soldiers shamefully got up to leave. It was up to Odysseus to talk them into staying. There was no chance of concluding the war after nine years in a single day. The dream was false. Vita vigilia est.

FOUR
Solitary as an Oyster

‘You are fettered,’ said Scrooge, trembling. ‘Tell me why?’

‘I wear the chain I forged in life,’ replied the Ghost. ‘I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?’

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 1843, Stave I

The festival of the Saturnalia was for most Romans, though not for Pliny, ‘the very best of days’.¹ A week of wine and banquets, presents and practical jokes, it took place around the solstice each December and honoured Saturn, the Roman god of time and the seasons. Work ceased, togas were hung up, festive robes and caps put on, bottles opened, meat sliced, dice thrown, and roles reversed.² Pliny had a couple of choices as to where to spend the holiday. He could stay in Rome and look at flamingos from the Nile, pheasants from Georgia, guinea fowl from Numidia (all the birds his uncle had discouraged Romans from travelling the world to see), while feasting – in the presence of dwarves and female gladiators – on nuts from Pontus, dates from Palestine, plums from Damascus, figs from Ibiza, and jars upon jars of wine.³ Or he could travel thirty kilometres south-west to the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea and recline alone in a room that ‘not the voices of the younger slaves, nor the murmur of the sea, nor thunder nor lightning, nor light of day could reach, provided the windows were not open’.⁴ Pliny chose the latter.

There was something of Scrooge to Pliny come midwinter, ‘secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster’.⁵ The arrival of the Saturnalia each year was his prompt to retreat to his ‘Laurentine’ villa and its most isolated rooms. Lying just south of Ostia, on Italy’s west coast, Laurentum was close enough to Rome that he could retire there for the season ‘when the day was done’.⁶ Built in the early first century on layers of oyster shells – sand, mortar, oyster shells, mortar again, pottery sherds, more crushed oyster shells – the village was delightful in its rusticity.⁷ Since the roads were liable to become too sandy to drive a carriage over, Pliny thought it best to complete the final leg of the journey from Rome by horse. On horseback one would gain sufficient height to see the crowns of the trees which grew in the woods inland. Emperor Tiberius had kept an elephant menagerie and guild of gamekeepers in woods around here, while an orator named Hortensius had created his own game preserve, to which he would invite friends for dinner and watch as his musician, Orpheus, summoned forth a parade of deer and wild boar to provide ‘no less distinguished a spectacle … than when the hunts of the aediles [junior politicians] take place in the Circus Maximus without African beasts’.⁸

Elephants had always struck Pliny’s uncle as closest to men in sensibility. Though less faithful than dogs and horses, they were intelligent, obedient and fired by ‘a desire for love and glory’.⁹ It was Pliny the Elder who first recorded their fear of mice.fn1 He had drawn on the research of Aristotle, who had undertaken an investigation into ‘the nature of animals’ for his pupil Alexander the Great, in the fourth century BC.¹⁰ Using information gathered from thousands of animal keepers and hunters across Greece and Asia, Aristotle had produced a comprehensive study of animals in almost fifty volumes, which Pliny the Elder commended to his readers. Aristotle described the elephant as the most well tempered and easily tamed of species, a view borne out in Pliny the Elder’s description of Romans teaching the beasts to walk tightropes, memorise the Greek alphabet, and engage in gladiatorial contests in the circus.¹¹ Pliny, for his part, rarely found these entertainments anything other than disappointing. There was an occasion when one of his friends put on a show of exotic beasts in the amphitheatre at Verona. But owing to bad weather, the African panthers he was promised never arrived.

Victor Emmanuel II, the first king of unified Italy, is credited with rediscovering Pliny’s village in 1874 when Laurentum had again become a royal hunting preserve.¹² While in Pliny’s time the villa-lined seafront was said to have borne ‘the appearance of many cities’, the village itself was revealed to be fairly compact and unimposing. More recent excavations have exposed part of the town plan as it developed. Beyond the houses was a road that led to Rome, some public baths (Pliny said there were three), and a forum so small that a visitor might easily have missed it.¹³ A few temples, a colonnade of shops, a meeting house, a restaurant with a winsome view over a fountain and public sculptures – Laurentum ‘met one’s basic needs’. Land near Pliny’s villa provided pasture for horses, cattle, and sheep, so there must have been milk and cheese. And though the sea off Laurentum was not ‘abundant in good fish’, it did have sole and prawns. For more extravagant things Pliny could always go to Ostia but, for all it might have seemed otherwise, it was never for extravagance that he came here.

Laurentum was where he wrote the most.¹⁴ He called it his Moυσεîoν after the ‘Seat of the Muses’ which contained the library of ancient Alexandria, but it was distinctly Italian.¹⁵ The Romans traced their origins to the landscapes of Laurentum. In Virgil’s epic, Aeneas is said to meet his bride Lavinia here. The place was named after the laurel tree, sacred to the poetry god Apollo, that grew in the courtyard of Lavinia’s father’s palace.¹⁶ Laurentum was for Pliny, too, a place of beginnings. He was descended from the Oufentina, a former tribe established in 318 BC and named after the river Oufens which flowed through it.¹⁷ If he could not write in a villa built upon the laurel-rich landscapes of the Romans’ ancestors (not to mention his own), then he might as well have given up.

The library of his Moυσεîoν was located in the winter quarters of his villa near some bedrooms and a dining room that was angled in such a way as to retain the sun’s heat, but keep out the sound of all winds ‘except those which bring in the clouds’.¹⁸ During the Saturnalia, however, not even these rooms were quiet enough. Leaving his slaves to send their ‘festive cheer’ echoing through the halls, Pliny retired instead to the living room, snug, bedroom with folding doors, and darkened cell which together comprised a sort of Saturnalian suite. It was this wing of his villa – not the D-shaped portico, nor the covered courtyard, nor the dining room with a view through bay windows ‘as if over three seas’, nor the ball court, nor the larger bedrooms, nor the walkway that ‘stretched almost to the size of a public monument’, nor the baths, nor the two towers with the dining rooms, bedroom and granary they contained – that he liked best.¹⁹ He had commissioned the suite himself and it was his ‘true love’.

Scrooge had his dark set (sitting room, bedroom, lumber room) and Pliny his private suite. The fact that the Saturnalia fell upon the solstice, when the day is that much shorter than the night, did nothing to dissuade Pliny from shutting himself away.²⁰ Like a diligent schoolboy concealing his prep, he would pretend to friends that he was having a high old time revelling in the celebrations.²¹ Not to be fooled, Tacitus sent him a book to critique, knowing full well that it would reach him while he was still at his desk. Tacitus assumed, if not the role of guardian to Pliny, then that of idol and teacher, and Pliny was only too happy to play along. He wrote back to Tacitus at once, feigning outrage at being called ‘back to school’ in the middle of the holiday. For all Pliny fantasised about posterity reflecting in wonderment that ‘two men more or less equal in age and repute … should have nurtured each other’s work’, for much of the time he felt that he was indeed little more than Tacitus’ pupil.²² And so he sat at his desk, fretful that he had not produced enough work to send and thereby punish him for so knowingly summoning him back to the classroom in midwinter.

It was tradition during the Saturnalia for slaves to be dismissed from their chores and waited on by their masters. But not in Pliny’s house. The satisfaction of working when no one else was seems to have outweighed any pressure Pliny felt to engage with his staff over the holiday. His decision was perhaps more practical than selfish. He owned at least 500 slaves across his various properties by the time of his death.²³ Rather than spoil them once a year he showed them his favour in other ways. Whenever he was looking to employ one, he would make a point of relying on his ‘ears rather than eyes’, believing that reputation was a more accurate measure of a man than the state of his hair and clothes. Every slave who entered his service was then allowed to leave a list of instructions for his belongings to be shared among other slaves in the household after he died.²⁴ Pliny was not always kind, but he never chained his slaves, and throughout his life freed a great many of them. He even paid for one of his freedmen to travel to Egypt and Gaul in order to recuperate when he became ill and started coughing up blood. Such acts of generosity more than compensated for his reluctance to partake in their ‘idle gossip’ over the Saturnalia. The slaves were free to keep their holiday in their way, provided they let Pliny keep it in his: ensconced in rooms so secret, self-contained and solitary, that he felt like he had ‘left the house entirely’.²⁵

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