In the Shadow of Vesuvius

by Daisy Dunn

  The dichotomy between the destructive and preservative properties of stone fascinated Pliny because he saw it at play in his own life. The experience of delivering his speech to Trajan led him to ponder how quickly words turned to dust. A marble column might stand forever provided it was not felled by an earthquake or an enemy, but a senator’s speech tended to be ‘contained by the walls of the senate house’.36 One had the permanence of stone; the other, stone rendered impermanent. Although important speeches were now preserved in bronze alongside proclamations of the emperor, Pliny was sorry that so many had already perished within the house itself.

  In the early years of Trajan’s rule, Pliny was thinking particularly deeply about his legacy. For all he boasted of being ‘much younger’ than Cicero at the same stage in his career, Pliny the Younger was beginning to feel decidedly old. The depressing thought that he had lived the best part of his life came to him suddenly when he heard that the last of Nero’s consuls had died. Silius Italicus, poet of the Punic War, had starved himself to death at the age of seventy-five after developing an incurable tumour. Pliny had never much cared for his poetry (‘more diligent than inspired’), or for his habit of buying up properties, lavishing them with treasures, and leaving his old ones to moulder.37 But his death prompted him to think about the fleetingness of his own life. To Pliny it felt like only yesterday that Nero was on the throne. Now the last surviving consul of Nero’s senate had perished. ‘Grief for the frailty of human life comes over me as I remember this,’ Pliny wrote. He had been a child in Nero’s time. Now he was in middle age, a consul himself, with no child of his own.

  Pliny had always been conscious of time slipping by, but there was a new urgency to his thinking, a fresh desperation. He began to take a graver view of the necessity of prolonging each moment. There is a famous passage in Herodotus’ Histories that describes Xerxes, King of Persia, weeping as he surveys his great army because he knows that death will soon come to thousands of his men. As Pliny read it, not for the first time in his life, he now found himself in sympathy with the despised Persian king. ‘So narrow are the limits that contain the lives of so many people,’ he explained, ‘that it seems to me that those royal tears of his ought not merely to be forgiven, but indeed to be praised.’38 In the aftermath of Silius Italicus’ suicide, Pliny renewed his call for his contemporaries to fulfil something in the short time they had: ‘Let us leave behind something by which we can prove we have lived!’39

  But if ephemerality frightened Pliny, the prospect of spending his whole life working, only to die before completing something, was more nightmarish still. ‘The deaths of those who are in the process of producing some immortal work,’ he said, ‘always seem to me to be cruel and premature. For those who live from day to day immersed in pleasures see their reasons for living completed every day; whereas those who think of posterity and prolong the period for which they will be remembered through their work, for them death is always sudden since it interrupts something before it’s finished.’40

  Death, whenever it came, would come too soon for Pliny. To achieve immortality, he believed that he needed to complete a magnum opus, but in order to do that he needed to know when to stop. When he did not allow even his days to reach their natural conclusion, extending his work far into the night, what hope did he have of ever feeling that he had done all he needed to do?

  Perhaps this is one reason why he resisted the pressure his friends put on him to write a work of history. Knowing how important it was to him to leave something behind, they urged him to turn his hand to past events. A chronicle of Rome would have more longevity than any speech delivered in the Court of One Hundred or senate. But it would also require more time, and Pliny had no way of knowing how much of that he had left. If he were to dedicate five years to writing a history of Rome, only to die before completing it, then he would have wasted five years. What would have happened to his uncle’s Natural History had Vesuvius erupted a few years earlier? Pliny did feel the impulse to write history – ancient rather than modern, he fancied – but he had to revise his speeches for publication first. He promised his friends that he would write something historical – but only when he was too old to write oratory. He perhaps also feared being compared unfavourably to his uncle and to Tacitus.

  Pliny had a long list of reasons for putting it off: history-writing and speech-writing are incompatible. Each discipline had its own rhythm, its own vocabulary, its own tone. History was concerned with great events but oratory merely with sordida – the lowly things in life. In his view there was no viable method of writing both side by side. This was not what Pliny’s uncle had said. Pliny the Elder had described his Natural History as a record not of ‘expeditions or speeches or conversations or any manner of exotic events’, but rather ‘of the nature of things, which is life, and often within this, the very basest of matters – sordidissima’.41 Pliny the Elder dealt in sordidissima, not speeches. Pliny composed speeches on sordida. Their two worlds were far closer than Pliny was prepared to accept. His letters were in themselves a form of history.

  It was only some time after Pliny had delivered his speech for Trajan that he realised that speeches were not so very different from history after all. The solution to his stalemate came when he resolved to rewrite and extend the speech. Once he had this in hand he could treat it just as he would a work of history. There was no need for his speech to die within the walls of the senate house or to be swept away on the Tiber. He would do all he could to give it the permanence of stone.

  He began by giving a full-length reading of it to his friends at Rome.42 He may have regretted telling them to come only ‘if it’s convenient’ or ‘if you’re really free (though it’s never convenient and no one is really free to listen to a recital at Rome …)’ when he awoke to ‘the foulest storms’ over the city, but not even the inclement weather could keep them away. If the appeal of the Panegyricus is often lost on modern ears, it was not on its early audiences, who forced Pliny to continue into a third day when ‘modesty’ led him to bring his two-day reading to an end. The long speech was written down in its entirety and copied out with such enthusiasm and commitment down the centuries that it flourished far beyond the confines of human memory to become the earliest Latin speech since Cicero’s Philippics to survive antiquity.43

  FIFTEEN

  Depraved Belief

  Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you.

  Leviticus 11:12

  The most important journey Pliny ever made was to Bithynia, the sprawling Roman province on the north coast of what is now Turkey. Dispatched there one autumn between AD 109 and 111 as an ‘imperial legate’, Pliny was to serve as a personal representative of Trajan himself.1 He boarded a galley, crossed the seas towards Greece, rounded Cape Malea in the Peloponnese, and finally put in at Ephesus.2 Despite the chill and perils of traversing what his uncle had considered ‘the most savage section of Nature’, the sea, Pliny managed to stay well enough during the long voyage from Italy to Asia Minor. It was only when he reached terra firma that he became unwell.3 He had planned to proceed from Ephesus to Bithynia by both coastal boat and land, but after developing a fever in the sudden heat, was forced to pause at Pergamum.4

  He was fortunate not to be travelling alone. There were his crew and attendants. There was also Calpurnia. Senators used to object to women accompanying their husbands to postings overseas, believing them to be weak, susceptible to befriending the worst kind of people, and a liability to the smooth running of things.5 The provinces, however, were by and large less hostile than they used to be, and over time most senators had come to the conclusion that they should not suffer for the sake of their predecessors’ failures to keep their women ‘in line’. Some took their wives abroad with a mind to protecting them from the temptations of adultery at home. Pliny presumably took Calpurnia because he could not bear to be parted from her.

  Shortly before Pliny and Calpurnia set out, Trajan be
stowed upon them the rights ordinarily reserved for parents of three or more children. There was little Pliny could do with the ius trium liberorum, which entitled fathers of three to stand for political office before the usual age requirements and their wives to inherit property with greater ease than their childless counterparts, but he accepted the honour.6 His friend Martial had received the same rights after composing a series of epigrams on the Colosseum.7 And after thanking the gods for not having granted him children in the ‘most lamentable age’ of Domitian, and praying that Calpurnia might now be more fortunate and conceive again, Pliny asked Trajan whether he might consider extending the honour to some of his other friends as well.8 Suetonius had experienced Pliny’s kindness in the past when he was a young man embarking upon his career. Now around forty years old, he had found himself suffering a childless marriage of his own.9 Trajan wrote back to Pliny to say that, though he only rarely conferred such honours upon anyone, he would do so upon Suetonius at his request.

  The crew waited until Pliny had recovered from his fever before resuming their journey by coastal boat. They finally reached the province on 17 September. Bithynia (or ‘Bithynia-Pontus’) dominated the southern coast of the Black Sea. The province had been founded in the first century BC after the King of Bithynia bequeathed his land to Rome and Pompey the Great merged it with territory he had conquered to its east. Deeply forested with oak, beech, pine, and plane, it was desolate by comparison with the landscapes Pliny was used to. From its westernmost towns, Pliny could at least look out across the gulf towards Byzantium, which, he observed, had ‘crowds of travellers flowing into it from all sides’.10 He would examine the finances here as well. It would be almost two centuries before the emperor Diocletian chose Nicomedia (modern Izmit) as the site for his chief residence, and still decades later that Emperor Constantine relocated the Roman capital to Byzantium, but Pliny had come to a part of the world that was becoming steadily more influential.11

  Pliny’s first impressions of the place were not altogether encouraging. He found it a chaotic province, full of unfinished building projects, riddled with debt. His previous involvement in extortion cases arising from the region had convinced him that the Bithynian people were litigious but unpredictable.12 They spoke mainly Greek and suffered from an unfortunate habit of unleashing torrents of words when two would do. Initial meetings with Bithynians on their home soil did little to challenge his views. His uncle had praised the region’s cheese but Pliny struggled to do so much as that.13 Catullus had travelled to these ‘udder-rich’ plains a century and a half earlier and complained of making no profit while he set to work on the Bithynians’ account books. By the time Pliny arrived, the accounts were once again in considerable disarray. Taxes were owed to Rome, excruciating sums had been wasted on projects which had been undertaken without the completion of adequate plans and subsequently abandoned. Only the contractors had reason to smile as they filled their pockets with the proceeds of the projects which had been left behind.14 Pliny had his experience in the Roman treasuries to draw on as he inspected the finances, but his responsibilities exceeded the correction of logbooks, covering the administration of the province and its laws more widely.

  ‘Ensure it is clear to [the Bithynian people],’ Trajan instructed him, ‘that you were selected to be sent to them in my place.’15 Roman governors had been posted to the provinces during the Republic and early Empire and would continue to be dispatched for years to come. A year or two after Pliny arrived in Bithynia, Tacitus was appointed governor of Asia, the Roman province to its south-west. Pliny, however, presented himself as being as authoritative as the emperor himself. For as long as he was in this post he was to cut as stately a figure as he could imagine. If the need arose for a faster horse or stronger chariot he had only to requisition those he liked best from the local people.16 It was his duty to command the respect and obedience of everyone he came into contact with. Behind his imperious facade, however, Pliny was still obliged to seek Trajan’s approval when it came to making key decisions. He would exchange more than a hundred letters with the emperor over the two or so years he spent in the province. The letters would become less frequent as Pliny grew more familiar with the territory and parameters of his post, but they continued to arrive – concise, business-like, and quickly dashed off though they often were.

  In Rome it had been easy for Pliny to establish which messengers were the most efficient and reliable.17 Sending letters between Rome and Bithynia was far more complicated. It would take at least two months for a letter to arrive, usually much longer, especially as Pliny was frequently on the move.18 He had to endure the endless frustration of waiting for a response to arrive from Trajan even when the solution to a problem was perfectly obvious. On reaching Prusa (Bursa), a city in the west of the province, for example, Pliny found the public buildings to be in an even worse state than the finances. The baths were ‘dirty and old’ and in dire need of replacing. A perusal of the account books was all he needed to conceive a plan for constructing new baths by calling in money from those who owed it, and redirecting funds normally reserved for the public distribution of olive oil.19 Pliny waited and waited until finally a letter from Trajan arrived giving him the go-ahead – on the proviso that his plan did not burden the ordinary functioning of the city or involve additional taxation.

  Trajan did not have to reply personally to every letter Pliny sent his way. His private secretary could compose a response following a brief conversation. But several of the letters in Pliny’s collection resound with the voice of authority. It is easiest to detect Trajan’s tone in the most sharply phrased of his letters. Time and again, Pliny wrote to ask Trajan whether architects and land surveyors might be sent from Rome to assist him in his work. Time and again, Trajan wrote back to remind him that the best men did not always come from Rome: ‘no province lacks in skilled and trained men’.20 There were hardly enough architects in the city as it was, Trajan curtly told him, which was not surprising, given his grand visions for the harbour at Centum Cellae: ‘You shouldn’t think it would be quicker to have them sent from the city when in fact they usually come to us from Greece!’21

  Whether more through reluctance to trust the skills of the locals or determination to develop his own, Pliny decided to take on some of the technical work himself. North-east of Prusa lay Nicomedia, the former home of the kings of Bithynia, and its splendid lake. Realising that the people of Nicomedia might export their produce more efficiently if their lake could be connected to the Sea of Marmara, Pliny called in the local people to assess whether doing so would risk draining the lake, as Trajan feared. While the Bithynians attempted to measure its depths, Pliny composed another letter to Trajan requesting an engineer or architect to travel from Rome to assess whether or not it lay above sea level. While he waited for a reply, he carried out an investigation of his own. On noticing an unfinished canal he conceived the idea of connecting the lake to the sea by means of a similar structure.22 He went no further in his plans until the experts arrived. This time Trajan agreed to send a specialist from Rome.

  Pliny had moved on from Nicomedia to another part of the province when he heard news that an enormous fire had broken out and destroyed dozens of the city’s buildings. Rerouting the lake could no longer be a priority when houses had been reduced to ashes, the headquarters of the city’s elders levelled, and the temple of Isis gutted by flames.23 The fire had been spread by strong winds and ‘the inertia of the people’, who had stood by watching helplessly because they lacked the means to put it out. When Pliny heard what happened he gave orders to supply Nicomedia with fire-fighting equipment. At Rome people fought fires with woollen blankets dipped in water and vinegar and ingenious hydraulic water pumps powered by siphons. Pliny also drew up plans to appoint a body of 150 fire marshals to guard against future disasters. He was even prepared to oversee the marshals himself, he told Trajan, assuring him that ‘it will not be difficult to keep guard over so few’. Trajan was not convinced. It w
ould be sufficient to issue the townsmen with equipment and teach the Bithynians how to use it. They could fight fires themselves and call upon the crowds to assist if they needed to. For when people come together in common purpose, Trajan explained, they can form hetaeriae – political clubs.24 Trajan did more than just quell Pliny’s plans to establish a band of fire marshals. He instructed Pliny to issue an edict on his behalf banning the formation of such groups altogether.

  It was only when Pliny proceeded eastwards into the heartlands of old Pontus that he witnessed the dangers of hetaeriae for himself.25 In these remote parts of the province he became used to locals approaching him with their grievances. He handled financial disputes and addressed the problems left behind by errant builders. But nothing he had experienced so far, either here or in Rome, could have prepared him for what he heard next. As if from nowhere, a number of Bithynians were now led before him under accusation of being ‘Christian’.

  Pliny had heard of Jews who had been banished and taxed throughout his lifetime, but this was his first personal experience of Christians. After Tiberius expelled Jews from Rome in AD 19, Emperor Claudius had felt compelled to exile ‘the Jews who were continually causing disturbance at the instigation of Chrestus’, by whom Suetonius surely meant Christ.26 In their bemusement Romans conflated Christianity and Judaism. Peter, after all, would tell the Gentiles to abide by Jewish law. Christianity was still young and remained mysterious to the Romans, even after their engagement in the Jewish War. Pliny was only a child when Titus besieged Jerusalem, but he was in his early thirties when Domitian put his own cousin to death in Rome on suspicions of ‘atheism’ – for adopting the Jewish or Christian faith.