The Shadow of Vesuvius

by Daisy Dunn

  When, finally, it did, Pliny was granted twelve large water clocks against which to lay out his prosecution (Tacitus would speak on the following day in response to the defence). Every eighteen minutes or so, the final drops of one water clock would swirl away and another begin. Pliny kept on talking even after the twelve clocks were spent. During his preparation for the case he had discovered that the defendant had not only committed extortion, but also accepted bribes to put innocent north Africans to death. The law stipulated that people guilty of extortion should in most cases leave for exile, which in effect entailed relinquishing their Roman citizenship, rights, and possessions, but those who accepted money for killing someone should receive capital punishment or indefinite exile.2 Twelve clocks did not reflect the severity of this case. It was only when four more clocks had run dry that Pliny finally stopped talking. By then, he had spoken for almost five hours.

  This was not the longest speech Pliny had ever given. He once spoke in court for seven hours straight. ‘Rejoice! Rejoice!’ he exclaimed upon reaching the end and realising that he still had an audience. In front of him stood a lone man in ripped clothes; the throng that had gathered at the beginning of the reading had torn them in their eagerness to escape.3 While Pliny admired the vigour of a short speech he was convinced that nothing equalled a long and weighty delivery. Few sights delighted him more than that of a speech transformed into volumes of text. He did not believe that slim books looked as authoritative as thick ones, which was one reason he liked to declaim at such length. Brevitas, while popular with the crowds, also carried the risk of a miscarriage of justice.4

  Pliny braced himself for the worst, in spite of his extraordinarily long speech. The possibility that Marius Priscus might get away with merely paying back what he had taken was still weighing heavily upon him as his fellow senators began to make their way across the floor of the house to vote. To Pliny’s relief, the members voted that the defendant and surviving witness should both go into exile. Although the satirist Juvenal proceeded to write mockingly of Marius Priscus enjoying a sojourn in which he ‘drinks from the eighth hour on and revels in the anger of gods while you, triumphant province, you weep’, Pliny had scored a relative triumph with his long speech.5 The defendant’s junior, another senator, was put on trial on a separate occasion and merely exempted from promotion.6 His crimes included receipt of 10,000 sesterces from one of the crooked witnesses, which was logged ‘under the most shameful heading of “perfumes”’.7

  Perfume was not the most offensive of the luxuries to feature in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History but it was the most evanescent. Roses, oil, saffron, cinnabar, reeds, rushes, honey, salt and ox-­tongue herb with wine together produced a simple fragrance.8 Particularly welcome in winter, when flowers were in short supply, perfume was said to benefit everyone except the person wearing it, who could not smell it at all. While Pliny the Elder admired its purity, the very inability of the wearer to enjoy the perfume on their own body convinced him of its wastefulness.

  Observing how fervently even Roman soldiers had taken to dousing themselves in it, Pliny the Elder had been quick to characterise it as a foreign import. The earliest he came across in his research was a case Alexander the Great had carried away from Persia following his defeat of King Darius III in the fourth century BC, and by the time perfume became ubiquitous at Rome, its associations with imperial expansion and eastern decadence had been fixed. Rome spread its influence over the globe but it always brought something back. Pliny the Elder dated the birth of luxury in Italy precisely to 189 BC, when a Roman general returned in triumph from Asia carrying gold crowns, ivory tusks, and 137,420 pounds of silver with him.9 Pliny the Elder could not deny that ‘communication, established throughout the world through the greatness of the Roman empire’ had led to advances in people’s lives by facilitating commerce.10 He drew consistently and proudly in his encyclopaedia on knowledge that had come to Rome from overseas. The arrival of chests of foreign treasures, however, seemed destined only to precipitate a moral decline and loss of identity in Rome. Of all the luxuries the Romans could carry home, perfume offered the best metaphor for globalisation, its steady diffusion from the east revealing the Romans for what Pliny the Elder had long suspected them to be: conquerors conquered. ‘The Roman people in its greatness,’ he explained, ‘lost its traditions, and through defeating others we were defeated ourselves.’11 The metaphor ran the other way, too, for while Rome lay at the centre of the empire, for a Roman, success meant spreading one’s scent as far away from it as possible.

  Emperor Augustus had advised his successors to maintain the empire inside the limits that had been established at the time of his death in AD 14.12 Although the Romans of this era were in general less expansionist than they had been during the Republic, as they focused on maintaining stability in their existing provinces, they failed to honour Augustus’ will.13 Vespasian had overseen the annexation of Lycia to Pamphylia in the south of what is now Turkey and, with his son Titus, demonstrated how emperors could continue to leave their mark upon the world by converting foreign treasures into a display of Roman might. Spoils from their Jewish War helped to finance the construction of the magnificent Flavian amphitheatre in Rome. The ‘Colosseum’ stood not only as a symbol of victory and strength but also as a memorial to the prowess of the first Flavian emperors. It was more or less complete when, in AD 81, Titus died suddenly at the age of forty-­one having ruled for just over two years.

  Reports of the cause of Titus’ death varied wildly. Suetonius said that Titus was seen weeping at the end of a session of public games and contracted a fever later in the day. Taken up in a litter, he gazed at the sky and complained that his life was being taken away from him undeservedly. His younger brother, Domitian, had long plotted against him, said Suetonius. On learning that he had been taken seriously ill, the envious Domitian ‘ordered him to be left for dead’.14 Later writers went further and accused Domitian of hastening Titus’ end by plunging him into a chest of snow or poisoning him with a sea hare (a type of gastropod mollusc).15 On the first theory, offered by the historian Dio Cassius in the early third century AD, Titus falls ill and takes his brother’s advice to have a cold bath. Domitian’s intentions are villainous but he has the benefit of popular medicine on his side. A doctor from ancient Marseilles had recently introduced the Romans to iced baths, which they proceeded to take even in winter, ‘becoming stiff with cold just for show’.16 Domitian has a tub prepared accordingly with fresh snow until it is full to the brim, lifts his brother into it, and leaves him there to soak. Meanwhile he makes his way to the barracks, bestows upon the soldiers ‘as much as his brother had given them’, and takes up the name and authority of emperor. Titus dies, leaving behind a daughter, Julia, but no son. On the second theory, proposed by an Athens-­born writer named Philostratus in the early third century, Titus is killed after Domitian takes objection to his kindness and feeds him a sea hare, whose ink is considered so noxious (it is in fact harmless to humans) that an oyster, cooked crab, or seahorse must be ingested to neutralise it.17

  The stories which spread of Titus’ death – by immersion in snow, poisoning with rancid shellfish, or, more likely, from natural causes – were such as to inspire outlandish rumours of fratricide hundreds of years later.

  The death of Titus and accession of Domitian marked the beginning of a difficult period in Pliny’s life. Though conscious that he was succeeding a man who had been immensely popular with the people – who had now taken to mourning ‘in public no differently from how they would for a loss in their own household’ – Domitian was by nature highly reclusive.18 Suetonius described how he would spend much of his time in seclusion, stabbing flies with his stylus. Pliny pictured him rather as a monster of Hades, hiding in his lair, licking his lips with the blood of relatives, and plotting bloodshed for the noblest men in the city.19 What Pliny described of Domitian’s rule in his letters amounted to nothing less than a reign of terror. Domitian was ‘that most sa
vage beast’. He was a ‘destroyer and executioner’ of upstanding citizens.20 Writing some years after his death, Pliny diagnosed him with ‘a hatred of mankind’.21 No one wanted to get too close to him; but no one wanted to be shut out of his affairs either: there was no healthy distance.

  Domitian, who had been born in AD 51 on Pomegranate Street, on the northernmost of Rome’s seven hills, seemed to spend his life striving, Persephone-­like, to escape from the shadows.22 His biographers explained that while his brother Titus had been raised at the imperial court, Domitian had grown up in relative poverty. Although Pliny did not describe Domitian’s background, he did profess to see a look of disgruntlement in his face: anger in his eyes, arrogance about his brow, a feminine pallor to his skin and a ruddiness to his cheeks.23 Pliny had nothing but criticism for fellow writers who praised Domitian. The poet Silius Italicus may have been ‘the glory of the Castalian sisterhood [the Muses]’, but Pliny could not abide his flattery.24 His poem on the Second Punic War extended to a tremendous seventeen books and over 12,000 lines, but Pliny said it lacked inspiration. The work contained references to Domitian the ‘Conqueror of Germany’, who would outdo the achievements of his father and brother – which struck some readers as unedifying and dishonest when, of Domitian’s few, unremarkable foreign expeditions, his campaign against the Germanic tribe of the Chatti was ‘unnecessary’ and his triumph ‘a sham’.25

  Pliny the Elder had described his encounters with the Chatti in the time of Claudius. Endowed with ‘robust bodies, straight limbs, threatening faces, and a marked vigour of spirit’, the Chatti were logical and skilful ‘for Germans’ and excelled as infantrymen, but had in that period occupied one of the Roman bases and taken to heavy plundering.26 Pliny the Elder’s commander, Pomponius Secundus, had split his men into two columns, one of which worked to entrap the tribesmen, while the other attacked.27 The Romans had had good reason to hope that they might engage the tribe in a war. ‘You see others go to battle,’ wrote Tacitus, ‘but the Chatti, to war.’ The Germans, however, had feared being surrounded by the Romans and a hostile neighbouring tribe, and sent legates and hostages to Rome to sue for peace. They were seemingly still unsettled when Domitian declared war upon them more than thirty years later, in the eighties AD. Though little is known of the campaign, the Romans are thought to have made their first attack in the winter months, when the tribesmen were most pressed for supplies.28 Domitian was among the invading troops, but returned to Rome to celebrate a triumph for his own achievements long before the war had been concluded. His jubilation may have been premature but it was not entirely vain. As a result of the campaign, the Romans managed to lay a new fortified boundary line and formally establish two Roman provinces west of the Rhine.

  The problem for Domitian was that he gave the impression of begrudging his men their successes in favour of his own renown. Tacitus accused him of acting out of jealousy when he recalled a highly successful governor of Britain named Agricola.29 Agricola was Tacitus’ father-­in-­law. He had conquered the island of Mona (Anglesey) and pushed north into Caledonia (Scotland) to score an impressive defeat over the local tribesmen at the so-­called Battle of Mons Graupius, only to find himself under orders to return to Rome in AD 85. The same year, as if to trump Agricola’s achievements, Domitian launched an expedition of his own. Decebalus, the ruler of Dacia (modern Romania), had led an army south across the Danube into a Roman province called Moesia. Domitian’s forces succeeded in ousting the Dacians from their territory, but suffered significant setbacks as they proceeded westwards.30 The Romans were left to pay tribute in exchange for peace. They would live to regret Domitian’s failure to remove Decebalus there and then.

  Pliny, for his part, was less concerned with documenting Domitian’s military record than acts of cruelty committed against his own people. He was discernibly shaken by the emperor’s decision to bury a Vestal Virgin alive.31

  The Vestals were priestesses who honoured the Roman goddess of the hearth. There were six of them, plucked predominantly from wealthy families, and charged with keeping the goddess Vesta’s flame burning eternally, day and night, for the protection and well-­being of Rome itself. The loss of a Vestal’s virginity had long been regarded as an ill omen, but Domitian decreed that any Vestal who failed to keep her body pure for the thirty years required of her should not merely be flogged, but confined as in ancient times to a suffocating chamber underground.32 No one in Domitian’s Rome had seen a Vestal Virgin buried alive until now.

  When the chief Vestal, Cornelia, was accused of having broken her vows of chastity, Domitian acted ‘through his powers as Pontifex Maximus [chief priest] – or rather through the heinousness of a tyrant and immunity of a despot’ to condemn her to execution.33 In spite of his disgust, Pliny felt compelled to go and watch. The woman was strapped to a sedan chair and borne in a canopied litter as far as the Colline Gate, at the northernmost reach of Rome. A large crowd was waiting there, but Pliny managed to obtain a good view. The chair was put down, its fastenings unloosed, and the veiled woman raised to her feet. As Pliny watched her being led towards an underground vault he heard her cry out, over and over again: ‘Caesar thinks I’m unchaste, but it’s because of my sacred acts that he is victorious and triumphant!’

  To Pliny she certainly ‘seemed innocent’. As she lowered herself into the dark chamber by way of a ladder, her very reflexes appeared to testify to her chastity. She had just begun the miserable descent when her robe got caught, causing her to pause and turn to gather it. As she did so, a man offered her his hand to help. She looked up and saw her ‘executioner’, Domitian. Without a moment’s thought, Cornelia sprang back and ‘pushed his filthy touch away from her pure and innocent body as if in a final act of chastity’. Cornelia descended. As Pliny watched her disappearing to her death he was reminded of the virginal Trojan princess Polyxena, the youngest of King Priam’s daughters, who in Euripides’ Hecuba submits courageously to the sword of Achilles’ son Neoptolemus. In the play, Polyxena does not merely give in. She boldly and defiantly yields her breast and neck. She falls, her modesty intact. And then she is gone.

  Cornelia disappeared from view, the ladder was pulled up and earth thrown against the chamber door. Inside there would have awaited her a small bed with an oil lamp, a morsel of bread, some milk, olive oil, a vessel of water. It was as if, by providing these meagre provisions, the Romans ‘would absolve themselves of the guilt of destroying a body devoted to the holiest rituals’, as the Greek-­born biographer Plutarch put it.34 In a short time she suffocated to death.

  Pliny the Elder once wrote that, ‘for man alone, one’s first time is full of regret, which is surely an accurate augury for life’ – a description unlikely to entice many readers into accepting his broader views on the damaging effects of sexual desire.35 In the Natural History he compares humans unfavourably with animals on the basis of their sexual habits. While animals have established seasons for mating, he says, humans view every hour as having the potential for sex, and go on doing it throughout the year, never sated. Animals get satisfaction from intercourse but humans, ‘almost none’. One of the gravest impediments to their satisfaction, he conjectured, is the seasonal incompatibility of the sexes. As early as the seventh century BC it was believed that women were lustiest in the summer, just as men were at their feeblest, and women so indifferent to sex in the colder months that, like an octopus gnawing its own foot (as one poet put it), a man must resort to masturbating alone in his passionless house.36 Lack of satisfaction breeds ‘sexual deviation’, which is, according to Pliny the Elder, ‘a crime against Nature’. Sexual deviation could take many forms, but Pliny the Elder’s immediate point of reference was the promiscuity of Messalina, third wife of Emperor Claudius, who was alleged to have engaged in a contest with a prostitute to sleep with as many men as possible within a twenty-­four-­hour window, and promptly achieved a score of twenty-­five. The charge of sexual deviancy was more often applied to men, however, for women’s sexu
ality tended to be held in check by the limits placed on their freedom outside the home. As far as Pliny the Elder was concerned, the most serious sexual crime a woman could commit was to terminate a pregnancy.

  The imperial household was rumoured to be guilty on both fronts. Domitian was married to Domitia Longina, the daughter of Corbulo (under whose command Pliny the Elder had battled trees in AD 47) but was rumoured to have had an incestuous affair with his niece Julia. No stranger to the exercise he called ‘bed-­wrestling’ – his preferred term for sex – Domitian allegedly impregnated the girl and forced her into a termination that killed her. Julia’s abortion was frowned upon by men in Rome almost as severely as Domitian’s perversion. It inspired some of the foulest verse imaginable: ‘Julia freed her fertile uterus by many/ an abortion and shed clots which resembled their uncle.’37 The behaviour of Domitian, meanwhile, only lent credence to Pliny the Elder’s exclamation of ‘how much more criminal we are in this area [of sex] than wild beasts!’

  When Domitian heard that people were now speaking of his iniquity he ‘was blazing’.38 For all the rumours of his misdemeanours, he was said to have been a man of justice. He was even known to overturn decisions made in the Court of One Hundred – Pliny’s court – if he believed them to have been influenced by the ambition of the jurors.39 Anxious that his reputation should not be blemished, Domitian diverted blame for the Virgin’s death on to a senator named Valerius Licinianus, whom he had arrested on accusation of having concealed one of the Virgin’s freedwomen on his estate.40 According to Pliny, the senator confessed, ‘but it was unclear whether he confessed because it was true or because he feared worse if he denied it’.41 The defendant did not attend his own trial. In his absence, his lawyer, a man named Herennius Senecio, came before the court and gave him what Pliny called the ‘Patroclus is dead’ treatment.42 With a direct and serviceable ‘Licinianus recessit’ (‘Licinianus has withdrawn his defence’), Senecio saw his client free to gather up his belongings and leave Rome in a lenient exile. Licinianus eventually became a rhetoric teacher in Sicily – a not altogether unpleasant ending, though in Pliny’s eyes a sorry one: ‘Such is his demise: from a senator to an exile, from an orator to a rhetoric teacher.’