In the Shadow of Vesuvius

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.