In the Shadow of Vesuvius

by Daisy Dunn

  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

  The darkened rooms of the Laurentine villa proffered few distractions and, after a while, Pliny came to depend on them. At some point in his life, he developed a weakness in his eyes, a sensitivity that seemed to have been aggravated by bright light. In his efforts to soothe them he ceased reading and writing for a while and employed a slave he could dictate to instead.26 He took long baths as if the steam might alleviate the ache. He ate a plump chicken, an unorthodox medicine sent to him by a friend. He even took to travelling in a darkened carriage and enveloping his Laurentine villa in shadow.27 The windows of its lower walkway were closed. Heavy curtains were pulled over other offending apertures, stilled from the sea breeze and weighed down, perhaps, by the pear-shaped clay baubles which have since been excavated from the waterfront.28

  His home became a burrow worthy of a mole, the most ‘condemned’ creature to have featured in his uncle’s encyclopaedia. In the Natural History, the mole is likened to ‘the buried dead’, living as it does in perpetual blindness in the darkness underground.29 For Pliny the Elder, the eyes were not only mirrors of the soul – an idea he borrowed from Cicero – but ‘the most precious part of the body, because through their use of light they distinguish life from death’.30 He meant this both transitively and intransitively: the eyes enable men to distinguish what is animate and what inanimate, and being able to see distinguishes a living person from a corpse. If to be alive is to be awake, then one needs eyes one can open to the light. In Latin this idea was far clearer, for lumen meant both ‘eye’ and ‘light’, and when it meant ‘light’ it could also mean ‘life’. Both a blind man and a dead man could be said to have had ‘the light stolen from him’.31 Lamps were often placed in the tombs of the dead as if to light their journey to the Underworld.

  ‘Lamp’, too, was lumen. An extensive collection of lamps was discovered at the site of Pliny’s villa near Perugia. Lamps made of bronze and clay. Lamps adorned with gladiators and hunters. Lamps with wild boar, deer, and dogs running round their bases. One even featured a detailed study of a nude woman reclining seductively on a bed.32 The warm glow of these oil lamps may have been less offensive to Pliny’s sore eyes than sunlight, but it did nothing to elevate him among the living. The seven sisters of the Pleiades, which were said to appear in the sky in winter, at the beginning of summer, and at the coming of plough time, were too dim to brighten the mole-like hole of his Laurentine set.33 Even with ‘the remedy revealed by Nature for the darkness’ – the light of the moon – Pliny was working largely in the dark.34 Never did it occur to him that his sensitivity to daylight might be a symptom of his eye pain, and reading in the dark, its cause. Although the worst of the discomfort appears to have subsided, it is doubtful Pliny’s eyes recovered fully as he persisted in working by night.

  That so thin a veil should exist between life and death had not frightened Pliny the Elder, who had come to believe tha
t, when we die, we are as sensationless of body and soul as we are before we are born. Were we not, he asked, then what rest would we ever find?35 It was a pertinent question for a man who never rested in his lifetime. Pliny the Elder took a dim and unforgiving view of those who believed they could come back after they died, because to believe that this was possible meant believing that humans are at least partly immortal, and to believe that was plain vanitas.36 Insisting that it was better to reduce anxiety over death by remembering that we felt no anxiety before birth, he poured scorn on many stories of supernatural activity. ‘Mortals,’ he said, ‘are ingenious at fooling themselves and drawing deceptive conclusions.’37 Whether we speak of spirits wandering the earth or of gods taking human forms, we are forever coaxing ourselves into more comfortable modes of existence.38

  In his trenchant dismissal of the notion of life after death, Pliny the Elder was in sympathy with the teachings of Epicureanism. Though never particularly popular in Italy, the Greek philosophy was being read at Herculaneum at the time of the eruption. A number of carbonised scrolls, as crumpled as tree bark, have been removed from the so-called Villa of the Papyri and either unravelled or read under infrared light to reveal the influence of Epicurus.

  Here was a philosophy for banishing fears, particularly fears of death, which had found an important Roman proponent in the poet Lucretius in the first century BC. In a work dedicated to the fundamentals of life, Lucretius had suggested that ghosts were not proof of an afterlife but purely scientific phenomena. Pliny and his uncle would have been familiar with Lucretius’ explanation, which was all to do with vision. We see the objects around us, Lucretius said, because they give off a kind of film of atoms, which strikes our eyes and prompts us to see.39 Just as smoke is released from fire or winter coats shed by cicadas or skins sloughed by snakes, there are everywhere floating through the air simulacra or images given off from the surface of things. But these atomic streams can also penetrate the body, awake the mind, and stir the senses within. We suppose we are seeing a ghost when in fact our mind is responding to mere simulacra. These images are so thin that they can collide with one another in the air and combine, so that when a man says he has seen a centaur what he has actually seen is the image of a horse stuck to an image of a man. We might see such images when we are awake or when we are asleep, but they are often more frightening in our dreams because we are insufficiently alert to rationalise what is in our mind’s eye.

  Such theories held little appeal for the younger Pliny, who, like many Romans, believed in the existence of ghosts. Fascinated by the idea that the dead might haunt the world, he took to telling ghost stories with the zeal of an early novelist, relishing the drama of their twists and turns. He never doubted the veracity of the tale of Drusus’ ghost appearing to his uncle in his sleep. The episode suggested that, while sleep might carry dreams which augured death, it could also bring dreams which carried back the dead. Sleep and Death were, as often, closely united. Pliny the Elder had rejected the idea that our futures are preordained (‘Stars are not … as is commonly thought, assigned to each of us, shining brightly for rich, dimly for poor and weak’), while accepting that phenomena such as the paling of the sun could be significant, occurring as it had upon the death of Julius Caesar and during the civil war of Mark Antony.40 Pliny, by contrast, clung to the idea that sleep offered the dead a conduit to the living and found the possibility that ghosts might exist to warn us of our future fates utterly compelling.

  Perhaps his eyes were weak enough for the shadows to play tricks on them, or perhaps he was inspired by curious activity upon the winter solstice, when ‘the herb of dried pennyroyal, suspended from the ceiling, comes into flower’ as if to order.41 Whatever it was that convinced Pliny of the existence of ghosts, it was not something tangible that he could easily explain. While he accepted that the idle mind will conjure its own sights and sounds, he had heard too many stories to shake off his suspicion that there existed, too, beyond the mind, ghosts with ‘a shape and power of their own’.42

  Pliny told a particularly thrilling tale about a philosopher named Athenodorus and his haunting by the spirit of a man in chains that reads like an early draft of Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol.

  Athenodorus has moved into an old house in Athens which is said to be haunted by the ghost of a petulant old man, ‘emaciated and dirty, with a long beard and matted hair, wearing fetters on his legs and shaking chains in his hands’.43 Athenodorus resolves to wait up for the ghost in the hallway of the house with his lamp and books beside him. Just as ‘a clanking noise … as if some person were dragging a heavy chain over the casks in the wine-merchant’s cellar’ announces the arrival of Jacob Marley’s spirit in Charles Dickens’s tale, so in Pliny’s story, ‘through the silence of the night, the clanking of iron could be heard and, if you listened more closely, the sound of chains, distant to begin with, but then close by’. Dickens probably drew inspiration from Pliny’s description.44 Like Athenodorus, Scrooge is haunted by the noisy chain-bearing ghost of a man at the dead of night. Like Athenodorus, he tries to avoid meeting his gaze. In his introduction to Dickens’s Christmas Books, the nineteenth-century novelist and critic Andrew Lang described the ‘old-fashioned phenomenon of clanking chains’ of Dickens’s story as ‘derived from classical superstition’.45 In Dickens’s library at Gadshill Place, his country home in Kent, was a copy of a book that contained a translation of Pliny’s ghost story. Entitled The Philosophy of Mystery, the volume was concerned with faith and scepticism, apparitions and dreams, and was written by a surgeon named W. C. Dendy two years before The Christmas Carol.46

  In Dickens’s, story, Scrooge eventually converses with Marley’s ghost, but in Pliny’s tale, Athenodorus does his best not to engage with the approaching spirit. Fixing his eyes firmly on his work, the philosopher tightens his grasp on his stylus and concentrates on not imagining the things he fears. The clanking noise grows nearer and then the ghost reveals itself to him in all its hideousness, standing ‘and sort of summoning him with his finger’. Like the young Pliny reading Livy in the middle of the eruption of Vesuvius, Athenodorus endeavours to sharpen his focus on his studies, but this proves impossible when the phantom starts shaking his chains aggressively over his head. Confirming Pliny’s suspicion that ghosts are more than ‘manifestations of our fears’, the manacled old man draws so close to Athenodorus that it becomes impossible for him to carry on. When the ghost summons him to the courtyard of the house, he follows. The ghost then disappears. At a loss as to what else he could do, Athenodorus crouches down and marks with leaves the precise spot where the ghost paused, and then goes back to bed. On the next day he gives orders for the terrace to be dug. Beneath the ground he finds bones in chains – the remains of an unfortunate old slave. The bones are given due burial and the ghost is never seen again.

  Ghost stories with happy endings may have been the equivalent of what Pliny the Elder called ‘the soothing you’d give a child’, but they also represented an attempt to understand the capriciousness of fate and to perpetuate the memory of those who had lost their lives to it. Pliny’s ghost stories created illusions of immortality in much the same way Fiorelli’s plaster casts of the eruption victims had in the nineteenth century. They kept the past alive when events contrived to bury it.

  FIVE

  The Gift of Poison

  Human brutes, like other beasts, find snares and poison in the provisions of life, and are allured by their appetites to their destruction.

  Jonathan Swift, ‘Thoughts on Various Subjects’, 1727

  Pliny returned to Rome from Laurentum one January and joined Tacitus in speaking for the prosecution of Marius Priscus, a Roman senator accused of extortion during his governorship in north Africa.1 Pliny would prosecute a number of crooked governors for extortion in his lifetime, and while the letters in which he described those trials are not always the most scintillating, they attest to the difficulties which confronted the Romans as their empire approached it
s largest extent. The emperor could not be everywhere at once. He needed governors he could trust to keep order in the provinces, but the wider and more complex Rome’s power base became, the more opportunity there would be for abuses to go undetected. Towards the end of his life, Pliny would experience the challenges of governing a province for himself. In his younger years, he took seriously his duty to represent those provincials who carried reports of mismanagement by Roman officials.

  Since the defendant in this case was a senator and it was his professional conduct that was being called into question, the trial was scheduled for the senate house rather than the Court of One Hundred. Senatorial trials, in which senators voted to determine the fate of their colleagues, often roused Pliny’s anxieties, for he knew how willing senators could be to protect their own. If the general nature of the trial did not fluster him, there was the fact that it was taking place at the beginning of the new political year, when Rome was at its busiest, and in the presence of the emperor.

  The trial got off to an unpredictable start. First, Marius Priscus pleaded guilty and even appeared willing to pay back the 700,000 sesterces he had embezzled. Then there was a problem with one of the witnesses. Of the two called in connection with the case, one was alleged to have issued a bribe to secure the exile of a fellow Roman and the death of seven of his friends, while the other was said to have paid for a Roman equestrian to be struck with a club, condemned to the mines, and then strangled to death in prison. The first witness died before the case even commenced.