In the Shadow of Vesuvius

by Daisy Dunn

  20 Pliny Panegyricus 48.3–5; 90.5.

  21 Pliny Panegyricus 49.

  22 Suetonius Life of Domitian 1.1. The house on the Quirinal Hill was later converted into the temple of Gens Flavia, which was struck by lightning in AD 96, the year of Domitian’s death. Domitian’s remains and those of his niece Julia were later deposited there; see Suetonius Life of Domitian 17.3.

  23 Pliny Panegyricus 48.3–5.

  24 Martial Epigrams 4.14; On Silius Italicus’ praise of Domitian’s poetry, see for example Punica 3.621.

  25 Silius Italicus Punica 3.607; Suetonius Life of Domitian 6.1; Tacitus Agricola 39.

  26 Tacitus Germania 30.

  27 See Syme, ‘Pliny’s Less Successful Friends’, pp. 477–95; Tacitus Annals 12.27–8.

  28 P. Southern, Domitian: Tragic Tyrant, Routledge, London and New York, 2013, pp. 80–2. As Southern notes here: ‘The reasons for the war and the course it took are not attested in any ancient source.’

  29 Tacitus Agricola 39.

  30 See Dio Cassius Roman History 67.6–7.

  31 PLY 4.11; Suetonius Life of Domitian 8.4–5.

  32 Cf. Dio Cassius Roman History 67.3; Plutarch Numa 10.4–7.

  33 PLY 4.11.6.

  34 Plutarch Numa 10.5.

  35 PLE 10.171.

  36 Hesiod Works and Days 586–8; 524–5. E. Campanile, in A. Etter, (ed.), O-o-pe-ro-si, Festschrift für Ernst Risch zum 75 Geburtstag, de Gruyter, Berlin and New York, 1986, pp. 355–62.

  37 Suetonius Life of Domitian 22; Juvenal Satires 2.32–33; PLY 4.11.

  38 PLY 4.11.11.

  39 Suetonius Life of Domitian 8 9. Cf. Dio Cassius Roman History 67.1.

  40 PLY 4.11.11. Domitian was surprisingly lenient after the senator confessed his guilt. Suetonius (Life of Domitian 8.4) says that Cornelia’s ‘lovers’ were clubbed to death, while Licinianus escaped owing to uncertainty over his involvement even after witnesses were tortured.

  41 PLY 4.11.5.

  42 PLY 4.11.12. The quote comes from Homer Iliad 18.20, and was used by Pliny’s teacher, the orator Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria 10.1.49), as a good example of brevity, as noted by B. Radice, trans., Pliny the Younger, Letters and Panegyricus, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 1969, Vol. 1, p. 272.

  43 Dio Cassius Roman History 67.13 says that Herennius Senecio stood for no office after that of quaestor.

  44 Suetonius Life of Domitian 10.3.

  45 On Pliny the Elder as Stoic see M. Beagon, Roman Nature: The Thought of Pliny the Elder, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992, pp. 94–5, who believes that his ‘view of life springs from a mainly Stoic outlook’. On some of the Stoic elements of his beliefs see also M. Griffin, ‘The Elder Pliny on Philosophers’, in E. Bispham and G. Rowe (eds), with E. Matthews, Vita Vigilia Est: Essays in Honour of Barbara Levick, Institute of Classical Studies, London, 2007, pp. 91–100.

  46 T. Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 33; 50–89. On the invention and development of encyclopaedias, see R. Fowler, ‘Encyclopaedias: Definitions and Theoretical Problems’, pp. 3–30 (and pp. 27–9 on first attested use of the word), in P. Binkley (ed.), Pre-modern Encyclopaedic Texts, Brill, Leiden, New York and Cologne, 1997.

  47 PLE 2.4.

  48 PLY 3.5.6.

  49 Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Eminent Philosophers 7.1.3. On Zeno and Stoicism see especially H. A. K. Hunt, A Physical Interpretation of the Universe: The Doctrines of Zeno the Stoic, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1976.

  50 PLY 7.31.2.

  51 C. E. Lutz, Musonius Rufus: ‘The Roman Socrates’, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1947; Musonius Rufus was a tutor of Epictetus. On Musonius’ teachings see J. T. Dillon, Musonius Rufus and Education in the Good Life, Dallas; University Press of America, Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford, 2004.

  52 Tacitus Histories 3.81.

  53 Dio Chrysostom Orations 31.122.

  54 PLY 1.10.5.

  55 Philostratus Life of Apollonius of Tyana 1.13.3.

  56 Philostratus Life of Apollonius of Tyana 8.7.34.

  57 PLY 1.10.6; Euphrates cited in Epictetus Discourses 4.8.

  58 See Dio Cassius Roman History 65.13; contrast Musonius Rufus, who said the beard should be left to grow (Discourses 21).

  59 Seneca Epistles 103.5.

  60 Musonius Rufus Discourses 9. He went into exile twice under Nero and once under Vespasian. Philostratus (Life of Apollonius of Tyana 7.16.2) said that Musonius Rufus had opposed Nero’s rule. He was apparently very resourceful. During one of his exiles, it was said, he was sent to Gyara, an island in the northern Cyclades, which lacked a water supply, and discovered a spring.

  61 PLY 3.11.5.

  62 Musonius Rufus Discourses 18b.

  63 Dillon, Musonius Rufus and Education in the Good Life, pp. 20–21.

  64 PLE 33.2; 2.158–9.

  65 PLE 17.96.

  66 PLE 33.1

  67 PLE 7.1–4.

  68 PLE 2.27; 2.156–7; 7.167–8. Cf. PLE 18.3. On Mithridates and antidotes (below) see A. Mayor, The Poison King, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2010.

  69 Seneca the Younger Epistles 58.36.

  70 PLE 14.51.

  71 Tacitus Annals 15.64.

  72 Dio Cassius Roman History 69.8.13.

  73 PLY 1.22.2.

  74 PLY 1.10.4.

  75 Sherwin-White, Letters ofs Pliny, p. 136; PLY 1.22.1; 6.20.7.

  SIX: Pliniana

  1 The phrase that has fallen into popular parlance is divorced from its earlier context: Seneca Epistles 87.22–5, later discussed by Augustine.

  2 PLE 2.103–4. Pliny the Elder was speaking here of the constellations restricting the reach of some elements, and encouraging the growth of others.

  3 Ovid Fasti 2.151–2.

  4 PLE 7.134.

  5 D. Camardo, ‘Herculaneum from the AD 79 eruption to the medieval period’, p. 305, notes that vegetation returned slowly to Pompeii – around twenty years after the eruption, according to recent research.

  6 PLE 21.2.

  7 A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, 2.

  8 PLE 15.102.

  9 PLE 15.103. J. Reynolds, ‘The Elder Pliny and His Times’, p. 10 in R. French and F. Greenaway (eds), Science in the Early Roman Empire: Pliny the Elder, his Sources and Influence, Croom Helm, London and Sydney, 1986, who suggests that someone of Pliny’s name introduced a new variety of tree.

  10 PLE 15.104.

  11 PLY 2.17.14–15.

  12 The first figs come in August in Horace Epistles 1.7.5.

  13 Hesiod Works and Days 679–87.

  14 PLY 9.40.3.

  15 PLE 2.122.

  16 PLE 15.74–5.

  17 PLE 12.4–5.

  18 PLE 23.117ff and 8.209. ‘111 observations’ – J. Bostock and H. T. Riley (eds), The Natural History of Pliny, Vol. 4, Henry G. Bohn, London, 1856, pp. 502–7.

  19 PLE 8.209: Pliny the Elder attributed to Marcus Apicius the method of increasing the size of goose or sow livers by cramming them with dried figs.

  20 PLY 1.24.4.

  21 PLY 1.7.6.

  22 Martial Epigrams 3.45.

  23 PLY 7.3.2–5; 7.9.7–8.

  24 PLY 1.13.1.

  25 Suetonius Life of Titus 8.1.

  26 PLY 1.13.4–5.

  27 PLY 5.12; 5.3.9.

  28 PLY 5.3.5.

  29 Suetonius Life of Caesar 73.

  30 PLY 1.16.5; 4.14.4.

  31 PLY 1.2.6.

  32 PLY 4.27

  33 PLY 4.25.

  34 A. E. Housman, The Name and Nature of Poetry, Leslie Stephen Lecture, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1933.

  35 See, for example, Housman’s letter, dated 26 June 1906, to James Duff Duff, author of C. Plini Caecili secundi epistularum liber sextus, on PLY 6.8.6 (A. E. Housman, The Letters of A.E. Housman Vol. 1, edited by A. Burnett, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2007, p. 197).

  36 PLY 7.4.2.

  37 PLY
4.14.2; 7.4.4; 8.

  38 PLY 4.14.3–4.

  39 Sherwin-White, Letters of Pliny, pp. 71, 559, argues that Pliny married three times and that Calpurnia was his third wife. Pliny speaks of two marriages in Letter 10.2 but it is uncertain whether his marriage to Calpurnia had taken place by this point. There is no evidence in his letters of a wife prior to the (unnamed) daughter of Pompeia Celerina to whom he was married before Calpurnia. I am inclined to think that Pliny married only twice.

  40 Radice, Pliny: Letters and Panegyricus, Vol 1, p. xv, is among the scholars who date the death of Pliny’s previous wife to AD 97, citing letter 9.13.4. R. K. Gibson and R. Morello (Reading the Letters of Pliny the Younger: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2012, p. 32) suggest that Pliny remarried in or before AD 98. I also believe that Pliny remarried very soon after her death and that Calpurnia is the second of the two wives Pliny mentions to Trajan in Letter 10.2. This letter dates to the early part of his rule – AD 98, according to Sherwin-White (Letters of Pliny, p. 557). In this letter Pliny writes of how he longed to have children in the past and is still longing to now. I believe this letter post-dates Calpurnia’s miscarriage.

  41 PLY 4.19.8.

  42 PLY 1.14.8.

  43 PLY 4.19.5.

  44 On Pliny’s erotic vocabulary in Letter 7.5 see A. R. de Verger, ‘Erotic Language in Pliny, Ep. VII 5’, Glotta 74, B., 1/2. H., 1997/98, pp. 114–16.

  45 PLY 7.4.6.

  46 PLY 7.4.

  47 See W. Fitzgerald, Catullan Provocations, University of California Press, Berkeley, LA and London, 1995, pp. 44–6.

  48 PLY 7.9.

  49 PLY 2.17.3.

  50 PLE 11.11–14.

  51 PLE 2.232; Leonardo da Vinci, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, edited by J. P. Richter, Phaidon, New York, 1970, Vol. II.1029 (also 1031).

  52 PLY 4.30.4.

  53 R. Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1974, pp. 328–9. The quotes are from the preface of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

  54 Shelley, Rosalind and Helen, line 6. See J. Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography, University of Delaware Press, Newark, 2005, pp. 61, 73.

  55 Mary Shelley, The Last Man (1826), H. J. Luke, Jr. (ed.), University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London, 1993, p. 314. The description of the Pliniana in the novel is cited by R. G. Grylls, Mary Shelley: A Biography, Haskell House, New York, 1969, p. 95. Mary Shelley’s description of the Pliniana in The Last Man was inspired by her own visit to the Pliniana and the waterfall, which she recounts in her Journals, 11 April 1818: M. Shelley, The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814-1844, edited by P. R. Feldman and D. Scott-Kilvert, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1987, Vol 1., p. 204.

  56 Holmes, Shelley, p. 30.

  57 C. Clairmont, The Journals of Claire Clairmont, edited by M. K. Stocking, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1968 – Journal entry 12 April 1818, p. 91, cited by Holmes, Shelley, p. 418.

  58 I draw here on Holmes, Shelley, pp. 417–18; 421; 471–2, who suggests that the Shelleys’ failure to acquire the Villa Pliniana might have been linked to a curious incident involving a pistol. Shelley is thought to have fathered a child with one of his servants while he was at Como. Holmes suggests that the pistol incident might be understood in light of Shelley’s probable impregnation of Elise, the servant.

  59 Mary Shelley, Rambles in Germany and Italy, Edward Moxon, London, 1844, Vol. 1, p. 89 (15 August 1840); cited by L. Morrison and S. L. Stone, A Mary Shelley Encyclopaedia, Greenwood Press, Connecticut and London, 2003, p. 343.

  60 Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 1667–70.

  61 PLY 6.30.

  62 Dio Cassius Roman History 68.15.

  63 Martial Epigrams 7.47. In this poem Martial rejoices in Licinius Sura’s narrow escape from death. In Epigram 1.49, meanwhile, Martial celebrates Licinius Sura’s coming to Spain.

  64 Pliny may not have been familiar with the curious wine-pouring automata of Philon of Byzantium which were powered by similar siphon mechanisms.

  65 PLY 5.6.36–7.

  SEVEN: The Shadow of Verona

  1 W. Pater, The Renaissance, Macmillan & Co., London, 1873, p. 153.

  2 PLY 8.20.5.

  3 See Livy Ab urbe condita 33.36.

  4 Information retrieved at the baths and museum at Viale Lecco, Como.

  5 CIL V 5279. See F. Sacchi, ‘Como romana: Gli aspetti monumentali della città e del surburbio’, in G. Luraschi (ed.), Storia di Como, Storia di Como, Como: Luglio, 2013, Vol. 1, pp. 154–5.

  6 A. Sartori, Le Iscrizioni Romane, Musei Civici Como, Como, 1994, p. 37. See also T. Mommsen, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 4, Weidmann, Berlin, 1906, pp. 394–5, who suggests that this Lucius Caecilius Cilo was Pliny’s father, and that of the sons named in the inscription, Publius Caecilius Secundus was Pliny as he was known prior to his adoption. Sherwin-White (Letters of Pliny, p. 70) believes that Lucius Caecilius Cilo is rather ‘a collateral relation’ of Pliny.

  7 It is possible that the baths at Viale Lecco, Como, were those Pliny bestowed upon the town; see G. Luraschi, Storia di Como, Vol. 1, p. 30.

  8 PLY 5.11.2.

  9 CIL V, Suppl. 747. This inscription was discovered in Como in the late nineteenth century – A. Sartori, Le Iscrizioni Romane, pp. 34–5. Lucius Caecilius Secundus dedicated the temple in the name of his daughter, Caecilia, so if he was Pliny’s father, then Pliny had a sister whom he never mentioned in his letters. She might have died young.

  10 The portrait head of Augustus as Chief Priest dates to the first century BC and was acquired by Paolo Giovio. It is on display at the Museo Civico in Como. A number of suggestions have been made for the location of the forum, but the argument for Piazza San Fedele remains the most persuasive. See particularly the discussion of S. Maggi, ‘L’urbanistica di Como romana’, pp. 131–47 in Luraschi (ed.), Storia di Como, Vol. 1.

  11 Remains of the building have been discovered on the corner between Viale Varese and Via Benzi in Como – information retrieved from Museo Civico, Como.

  12 PLY 1.3.1; see Catullus Carmina 2.

  13 PLY 2.8.2.

  14 Marble relief sculpture dated to the second half of the first century AD and discovered on Piazza San Fedele, probable site of the forum. If Pliny looked up from this frieze to the panel above it, then he would have seen a more familiar panorama. Young men of his social class, the equestrians, parade in ceremonial procession on horseback, as he himself might well have had done in his youth.

  15 PLY 1.3.1.

  16 G. Luraschi, Aspetti Di Vita Pubblica Nella Como Dei Plini, Società Archeologica Comense, Como, 1986, p. 6 n.5; Storia di Como, Vol. 1, p. 31; ‘La villa romana di Via Zezio in Como’, Rivista Como, No. 3, 1976, pp. 24ff.

  17 I. N. De Agostini, La sezione romana del museo archeologico di Como, Musei Civici, Como, 2006, pp. 49–52.

  18 PLE 36.189, Museo Civico, Como.

  19 De Agostini, La sezione romana del museo archeologico di Como, pp. 50–1.

  20 Giovio, Historiae Patriae, Vol. 2, p. 232. See T. C. Price Zimmerman, Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of Sixteenth-Century Italy, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1995, pp. 161, 338 n.125.

  21 P. L. Rubin, Giorgio Vasari: Life and History, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1995, pp. 109–10 on Paolo Giovio’s advice to Giorgio Vasari about the publication without portraits. The second edition of the Lives, published in 1568, did include portraits.

  22 Price Zimmerman, Paolo Giovio, p. 188. On the portraits see also M. W. Gahtan (ed.), Giorgio Vasari and the Birth of the Museum, Routledge, London and New York, 2016, pp. 81, 94 n.4.

  23 PLY 2.15.

  24 On the lack of evidence for regular large-scale productions of drama in Rome in this period see G. Manuwald, Roman Republican Theatre, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011, p. 119.

  25 PLY 9.7.4.

  26 See Price Zimmerman, Paolo Giovio p. 161 on Giovio’s rather opportunistic description of his museum’s site as having bee
n that of a ‘Plinian’ villa.

  27 Not the famous hotel but the Rockefeller Foundation located behind it.

  28 Giovio, Historiae Patriae, Vol. 2, p. 249.

  29 This must be the fragment now in the Museo Civico at Como – CIL V 5221. See Sartori, Le Iscrizioni Romane, p. 56.

  30 There have been several attempts to identify the Plinius of the inscription as a correspondent of Pliny. While residents of sixteenth-century Bellagio conjectured that Pliny wrote to him about the studies of his uncle, R. Syme (‘Consular Friends of the Elder Pliny’, Roman Papers Vol. 7, edited by A. R. Birley, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991, p. 510 n.104) suggests that this Plinius may have been the Sabinianus (a ‘Sa’ is visible in the fragment) addressed in PLY 9.21 and 9.24.

  31 In iugo huis prom fuit villa Plinii quam Tragediam appellare solebat at Bellagio. And hic olim Villa Plinii quam Comediam appellare solebat at Lenno – Ortelius, Map of Lake Como, Theatrum orbis terrarum (cited also by P. R. du Prey, The Villas of Pliny, pp. 4–6) – and also Gibson and Morello, Reading the Letters of Pliny the Younger, p. 200, who discuss further the appeal of Bellagio and Lenno as locations of Pliny’s villas with views of one another.

  32 Many tourists have glimpsed what they believe to be Roman remains beneath the bay at Lenno. See for example T. W. M. Lund, The Lake of Como, Kegan Paul, London; Trübner & Co. Ltd, Trench, 1910, p. 66.

  EIGHT: Portrait of a Man

  1 PLY 5.7.3.

  2 PLY 3.6.2–3.

  3 PLE 34.6.

  4 Martial Epigrams 9.59.

  5 Petronius Cena Trimalchionis 50.

  6 PLE 34.34; 33.148.

  7 PLE 35.151–2.

  8 PLE 35.5. Cf. PLY 2.7.7.

  9 In 2017 an Italian newspaper helped to launch a crowd-funding project to conclude once and for all whether this was indeed the skull of Pliny the Elder. Some of the scientists who carried out investigations on Ötzi the Iceman, the mummified corpse discovered in the Alps in 1991, have been approached to examine the isotopes in the tooth enamel. See A. Cionci, ‘Il cranio di Plinio il Vecchio perso nei meandri della burocrazia’, La Stampa: newspaper article, published online on 25 August 2017.

  10 F. Russo and F. Russo, 79 d.C Rotta su Pompei (Indagione sulla Scomparse di un Ammiraglio), Edizioni Scientifiche e Artistiche, Naples, 2007, p. 21.