In the Shadow of Vesuvius

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 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.