The Shadow of Vesuvius

by Daisy Dunn

  The questioning was in all cases fierce and relentless. As Mettius Carus proceeded with his case, Regulus, Pliny’s fiend from the Centumviral Court, stepped in and began to savage one of the defendants. Assisting in the prosecution, Regulus went so far as to brand Arulenus Rusticus ‘Stoicorum simiam’ (‘the Stoics’ Ape’) for his authorship of the biography. He was particularly proud of that line. Domitian was said to have dreamed that Rusticus had come upon him with a sword.25 With his clever turn of phrase, Regulus saw him reduced to an animal.

  Pliny did not confess in his letters to having any involvement in these proceedings. From the way he described his horror at watching one senator savage another and his grief at witnessing each Stoic suffer, anyone would think he had been a mere bystander. But the trial was taking place before the senate and at the direction of the senators. Pliny was a senator. At the end of the speeches the senators were required to cast votes on the case. When Tacitus described this moment some decades later he did so with far greater transparency than Pliny, documenting the role that he and his fellow senators played in words which were almost as tearful as they were confessional. Both he and Pliny had risen through the ranks of the senate under Domitian’s rule and through his favour (‘I would not deny it,’ said Tacitus of his own progress under Domitian; Pliny was somewhat quieter on that front26). Both he and Pliny were reluctant participants in the philosophers’ fall. ‘Our hands led Helvidius into prison; the sight of Mauricus and Rusticus shattered us; Senecio drenched us in his innocent blood,’ wrote Tacitus.27

  At the denouement of the trials, the biographers Senecio and Rusticus were condemned to death. Rusticus’ brother Mauricus, a recent consul, was exiled. His wife, exiled. Fannia and her mother, also exiled. Though at pains not to make it explicit in his letters, Pliny was complicit in the conviction of the men and women he called friends.28 Did he feel that an admission of guilt would detract from the difficulty of the predicament he had found himself in? He alone could not have saved the Stoic biographers any more than Tacitus could have done. They were serving an emperor who took sadistic pleasure in watching his senators squirm. ‘While Nero averted his eyes and did not watch the crimes he ordered,’ Tacitus claimed, ‘under Domitian it was the chief part of our miseries to see and be seen; our gasps were recorded and, the pallor of so many men duly noted, that savage face of his was tinged with the redness with which he guarded himself from shame.’29 The flush Pliny had observed in Domitian’s face had deepened.

  The senate also passed a decree ordering the destruction of the two Stoic biographies. The books in which Fannia had invested so much hope, ‘records of distinguished characters’, Tacitus called them, were seized for burning in the forum. ‘Certainly,’ Tacitus said, ‘it was thought that the voice of the Roman people and freedom of the senate and conscience of mankind would be obliterated in that fire.’30 Somehow, Fannia managed to save the diaries, for Pliny said that she separated them from the other possessions of hers which were confiscated.31 But still worse was to come.

  Fannia had a stepson who was also put on trial. The young man had written a farce in which he was alleged to have mocked Domitian’s marriage.32 To the emperor’s shame, his wife had once fallen for a young Egyptian actor named Paris. Her affections for the renowned ‘wit of the Nile’ of Egypt and ‘delight of the city’ of Rome had not gone unnoticed, but after a brief separation Domitian had decided to forgive her and take her back.33 Paris was not seen after that, sparking a rumour that Domitian had had him killed in the street.34 For embedding a reference to these embarrassing events in his farce, Fannia’s stepson was put to death.

  ‘Upon the occasion of the crime’ of the biographers, Domitian ‘banished all the philosophers from Italy and Rome,’ wrote Suetonius.35 No record was made of how many ‘all’ constituted, but Senecio and Rusticus were far from the only people to die ‘on this same charge against philosophy’.36 Their Stoicism in fact had very little to do with it.37 In a bid to assert his influence and maintain a status quo, Domitian was prepared to silence anyone who was too vocal in their opinions or support for men his predecessors had deemed threats to imperial stability. One quip about the influence of the Egyptian actor Paris was sufficient to land the satirist Juvenal into exile in the Egyptian desert.38 The Christians would later view Domitian as the second emperor to persecute them after Nero.39 John the Apostle was relegated to Patmos. Domitian’s own cousin Flavius Clemens was put to death ‘on a very slight suspicion’ of atheism, a charge frequently applied to those who had adopted the Jewish or Christian faith (monotheists, who believed in God, were seen as atheists for their failure to worship the Roman gods).40 Flavius Clemens’ wife and Domitian’s niece, Flavia Domitilla, left for exile.41 She would later be canonised.

  Domitian’s paranoia served the Christians better than it did the philosophers. According to a near-­contemporary Christian, Domitian became so fearful of the Second Coming that he sought a meeting with the surviving grandchildren of Jude, who was said to have been a brother or cousin of Christ, to enquire about the kingdom of Christ.42 Whether it was his new knowledge of the coming Judgement that did it, or what another Christian called his ‘humanity’, Domitian ceased to pursue the Christians and recalled any he had exiled.43 The Stoics who were fortunate enough to have survived the death sentence, meanwhile, were left to languish in exile.

  Back in Rome, Regulus gloated over what he saw as his victory over the philosophers.44 He gave a public reading of the speech he had made branding Arulenus Rusticus ‘the Stoics’ Ape’, wisely omitting Pliny from the guest list. The Stoic deaths became something for the vultures to pick over. Not content with broadcasting and then publishing his transcript, Regulus proceeded to mock the other biographer, Senecio, despite having played no part in his downfall. He was not only mocking but ‘lacerating’ him, said Pliny, who had not forgotten the rumour that Regulus had once bitten the head of a corpse. If anyone was an animal it was Regulus, but to have called him simia (‘ape’) would have been a disservice to an animal of ‘extraordinary ingenuity’.45 Reclaiming his spoils, Mettius Carus, the senator who had secured Senecio’s conviction, tore into Regulus: ‘What are my dead men to do with you?’46

  Pliny had his colleagues in the senate on one side and his surviving ‘friends’ on the other. He later claimed to have been ‘a comfort’ to Fannia and her mother in their exile and to have lent them his services ‘in good times and bad’.47 Whatever he did to help them, he understood the danger that could come from associating with the condemned. He felt the risk, the heat, the flame of ‘so many thunderbolts’ falling around him like showers of molten rock, and was certain ‘that the same fate was hanging over me too’.48 He could not have suspected it at this stage, but Mettius Carus, one of the prosecution lawyers, would soon hand over to Domitian a list of accusations against him. The document would be found on the emperor’s desk three years later, but already Pliny feared the impending fire of a thunderbolt.

  Throughout his life Pliny felt the pull of leisure and the countryside – of Comum and its lake, of Laurentum, of his meadows in central Italy – against the drama and necessity of work in the city. The fates of the philosophers who had withdrawn from public life could only have heightened his anxiety over staying away from Rome for too long. While Domitian fell ‘violently upon many like a thunderbolt’, it would have been natural for Pliny to seek the spiciness of political life in Domitian’s service with all the more zeal. Instead, he made his way out of Rome.49

  And where did he go but to the house of a Stoic outside the city. Among the philosophers Domitian banished from Rome were two Pliny had first met in Syria: Euphrates and Artemidorus. A son-­in-­law of the frugal-­eating, sex-­despising Musonius Rufus, Artemidorus had impressed Pliny with his bodily endurance ‘in winter and summer alike’ while they were young men. No less resilient now, the exiled Artemidorus opened his door to Pliny. How long Pliny stayed here he did not say, but on returning to Rome later he admitted that the move had been
‘rather dangerous’. This was, nonetheless, the last place anyone would have expected Pliny to take cover from falling thunderbolts. He would soon plan a reprisal for the Stoics who had survived.

  PART FOUR

  SUMMER

  TEN

  The Imitation of Nature

  God, that is Nature superior, interrupted this dispute;

  For she separated the land from the sky and the waves from the land

  And split the blue sky from the misty air.

  And having rolled them out and extracted them from their grim pile,

  Bound them in their separate zones in blissful peace.

  Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1.21–5

  Pliny did not need a shower of thunderbolts to chase him to the countryside or a storm to confine him to a study. He liked to hide himself away. If it was easier to be tucked up in winter, when there was little to see in the woods of Laurentum, in summer he found a means of appreciating the natural world – from indoors. The ‘Tuscan’ estate he inherited from his uncle lay amid the plains of the upper Tiber valley in the region of modern Perugia. The main villa had been built in Augustan times and boasted a set of baths, a ball court,* and a remarkable colonnade which culminated in a dining room – ‘the folding doors of which open out onto the end of a terrace and meadow beyond and much countryside besides’.1 It sat on the lower incline of a hill that rose so gently that one never noticed the climb. Vineyards, fields and agricultural buildings lay around it, and all were girt by the Apennines, the surrounding landscapes together forming a natural bowl.

  For all the beauty of the estate, Pliny’s friends used to grow anxious when he travelled there in summer. Letters arrived, fraught with warnings of the malarial conditions of the coast. While Pliny insisted that his villa was a good distance from the sea, the marshes of the Tiber posed a latent threat. Not one to be deterred, Pliny hastened here for the new season to cherish the meadows, mountain breeze and sense of freedom afforded by being near a town where wearing a toga, the formal wear of Rome, was only optional. The residents of laid-­back Tifernum Tiberinum (Città di Castello) had made him their patron when he was still just a boy – an act, Pliny said, that displayed ‘as much enthusiasm as lack of judgement’.2 They were mostly very elderly, grandfathers, great-­grandfathers of grown men, full of stories of their distant ancestors.† If you felt as though you had stepped back in time when you arrived, after a few days here, wrote Pliny, ‘you should think you were born in another century’.3 For all his disavowals, Pliny came to appreciate the honour of his position. Whenever he arrived and whenever he left, the people of the local town would gather to greet or see him off.

  Such was Pliny’s ardour for his uncle’s former estate that his eighteenth-­century biographer, the 5th Earl of Orrery, went so far as to describe it as his mistress: ‘The lover dwells upon the charms of his mistress; he views in rapture every feature, and seems uneasy, lest she should not appear equally amiable to others, as to himself. That state of love must certainly be happy, where jealousy can find no intrusion.’4 Pliny was certainly keen to show his estate off. Being the good patron that he was, he wrote to reassure one anxious friend that it was quite safe to visit; even his slaves were at their healthiest when they came to Tifernum: ‘Certainly up to now I haven’t lost any of those I brought with me here (forgive me).’5

  If Pliny was half as relaxed as he said he was about the risk of disease in summer, it was because his estate conformed almost perfectly to the best advice available at the time. According to Cato the Elder, whose ideas Pliny the Elder often reproduced in his encyclopaedia, a farm ought to be south-­facing and situated at the foot of a mountain.6 Pliny’s main villa faced mostly south. The Apennines, ‘healthiest of mountains’, rose at its rear, but at some distance, so there was always good movement of air. Cato’s dream estate is well watered and near the sea or a river that can be traversed by boat. Tributaries of the Tiber flowed through Pliny’s land but dried up in summer, reducing the risk of malarial infection. Perhaps the greatest danger Pliny the Elder had perceived when he was living at the estate came from shrews, whose bites he knew to be venomous.7 It was easy enough for Pliny to avoid those.

  A series of roads connected the estate to Rome. Passing over the Apennines, the Via Flaminia had recently been relaid with black basalt from the volcanic provinces just north of the region, each luscious slab swollen and organic, like a loaf that had burned and spilled over its tin.8 Approach the mountains from Perugia, and you may still visit the site of Pliny’s estate. From the town of Città di Castello, head towards Pitigliano in the comune of San Giustino. Beside the Campo di Santa Fiora lies a plain named Colle Plinio. The area was inhabited as early as the Bronze Age, but rightly belongs to Pliny.9 In the nineteenth century, a clutch of roof tiles bearing Pliny’s full set of initials was discovered beneath the plain. While one man watched the tiles, then pieces of marble, then black-­and-­white tesserae of mosaic being lifted from the soil, the resident of a neighbouring estate ‘lovingly’ gathered up whatever fragments he could find.10

  Pliny had left nothing to chance. He was not the first or the last man to have his name inscribed on his building materials, but he did so with particular pride. His tiles were made of local clay from the surrounding plains and stamped with fat, rounded letters, ‘CPCS’: Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus.11 It would have been easier to have had his initials printed in relief, but these were raised from the surface, like a scratch freshly applied to the skin. They were designed to be read, but not by anyone visiting in Pliny’s lifetime. Hidden away in the roof of an agricultural outbuilding, they were largely obscured from sight.

  Guests at Pliny’s Tuscan villa would have noticed rather the signature he had created in its grounds. Seven letters, snipped from box hedge, revealed the identity of the estate owner: PLINIUS. If the tiles bearing his initials secured Pliny’s place in the history of Perugia (how rare it is to find a house from a description in a Latin letter), then the topiary secured his place in daily conversation. Pliny was so proud of his gardener’s skilful manipulation of Nature that he allowed him to cut his own name from another hedge nearby. Their topiary names grew together in the middle of a large garden fashioned out of a former hippodrome.

  Visitors to Pliny’s hippodrome garden were treated to a display of obelisks and roses, fruit trees and acanthus, and many more topiary names and figures cut out of box. At the head of the garden lay Pliny’s marble bench which spurted water whenever someone sat down on it, and the basin he filled with floating hors d’oeuvres. The whole hippodrome was planted round with plane trees, like Plato’s Academy in Athens, ivy weaving its way among the branches and box hedging filling in the spaces between each trunk. Around the box grew laurel, and two rows of shorter plane trees defined the sun-­drenched space at the centre of the garden. Pliny was so proud of his plane tree and topiary hippodrome that he believed that it ‘far, far outstripped the design and pleasantness of the buildings’. Millennia after the topiary withered and died, an outline of the hippodrome appears to have been preserved and become part of the landscape. An aerial view of the Colle Plinio reveals a long field with a semi-­circular end, like an elongated horseshoe. Looking at it from above it is easy to imagine how majestic it once was, when its centre ‘lay open and offered itself up to full view as soon as one entered it’.

  That Pliny should have admired a garden fashioned out of a former hippodrome is surprising because he dismissed horse-­racing as ‘inane’.12 The sport was as popular as it had ever been at Rome, where Domitian introduced Capitoline Games in honour of Jupiter, with lyre contests, Latin and Greek declamation competitions, foot races for girls, and equestrian events.13 The sight of men behaving like boys as the horses went round and round irritated Pliny, not least because he suspected it was really the racing colours they came to see and that they were engaging in illicit gambling. A few years later, the Circus Maximus in Rome was restored and enlarged to accommodate an unprecedented quarter of a million spectators
.14 Although Pliny insisted that the circus did not interest him either, the driveway at his Tuscan estate was shaped like one. Pliny despised horse-­racing and yet he kept a hippodrome garden, a circus drive – and wore a seal ring engraved with a picture of horses and chariot, as if to bring something of his Tuscan estate to the documents which were passed across his desk.15 Equestrianism as such formed part of his signature. It was a lively vignette of fleeting time.

  Like most equestrians and senators, Pliny owned in addition to his seal ring a gold ring which distinguished him from plebeians. He may not have given much thought to what it symbolised when he twiddled it on his finger or used it as a gauge to measure the water level at Comum, but he could hardly have forgotten his uncle’s trenchant views on finger rings in general.16 Pliny the Elder had not minded the early Romans wearing iron rings as symbols of courage in war. It was gold and gemstone-­encrusted rings he despised: gold, mined from the bowels of the earth and pressed over a man’s knuckles only to broadcast his status and wealth. Slaves wore merely iron rings (though some now covered the iron in gold). In Germania, too, the Chatti tribesmen whom he had encountered as a young soldier wore iron rings as signs of bravery.17 Pliny the Elder deemed even seal rings to be superfluous to human needs on the basis that the otherwise flamboyant Egyptians were content to sign their letters by hand.18 ‘The man who first adorned his fingers,’ he concluded, ‘committed the worst crime against life.’19

  Gold rings, like oysters and pearls, earned a prominent place in the Natural History because they represented to Pliny the Elder the kind of luxury that was most damaging to the earth and human morality. When his encyclopaedia was read in the Renaissance it was the passages on extravagances such as these which often attracted the most interest. Pliny the Elder’s discussion of rings was particularly influential, inspiring the central ceiling panel in one of the most important cabinets of curiosity of the sixteenth century. Francesco I de’Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany from 1574, commissioned the cabinet as a private study – accessible by secret passage – in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. His passion was alchemy, and his secret study-­gallery housed the products of his experiments.20 Thirty-­four compartments were concealed behind paintings inspired by antiquity and Nature. Designed by Giorgio Vasari, author of the Lives, and Vincenzo Borghini, a humanist and Benedictine prelate, Francesco’s Studiolo was less a room than an oversized jewellery box. It is perhaps the closest anyone has ever come to rendering Pliny the Elder’s Natural History in three dimensions.21