In the Shadow of Vesuvius

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