The Shadow of Vesuvius

by Daisy Dunn

  In honouring Pliny so extravagantly on their cathedral, the people of Como had made a choice. After all the time that had passed since his death, they preferred to remember him for the good he had done for his people rather than the pain he had inflicted upon their Christian forefathers. To gloss over his final years in Bithynia was to show him forgiveness. For all his advantages in life, Pliny had proven himself capable of ‘Christian’ qualities, empathising with the unfortunate and maligned philosophers, if not with the Christians themselves. The Como people’s rivalry and one-­upmanship with the Veronese had steadily been supplanted by an appreciation of the role Pliny had played in transforming their city. He had left Como far more illustrious than he had found it. His library, his baths, the provisions he made for the education of children – his own name – had made Comum a respectable town, and these buildings and the extensive letters that described them became the very seeds of humanist learning in the Renaissance city. They fuelled the Giovio brothers’ quest to re-­establish the role that both Plinys had played in their history.5

  Pliny survived a potential backlash from the Christians. His uncle survived the attempts of humanists to discredit him. In 1492, a short time after the people of Como commissioned the Pliny statues, a physician named Niccolò Leoniceno tore into the dubious science of the Natural History in a tract entitled De Plinii et aliorum medicorum in medicina erroribus. Not only had Pliny the Elder confused Greek plant names, Leoniceno complained, he had even described the moon as larger than the earth on the basis that: ‘If the earth were bigger than the moon, it would not be possible for the entire sun to be eclipsed when the moon passed between it and the earth.’6 As if it was not serious enough that the Natural History had been disseminated by a modern press, its errors had crept into other scholars’ books. The passage on the relative size of the earth and moon had found its way into the works of the Venerable Bede, who drew heavily on the Natural History in his own De Natura Rerum (On the Nature of Things) and De Temporibus (On Times).7

  Pliny the Elder’s more fanciful passages may have irritated some readers but they enchanted far more. Even scholars were eager to leap to his defence. At the same time as Leoniceno was fulminating against his methods, a Venetian humanist named Ermolao Barbaro was preparing his Castigationes Plinianae, in which he claimed to correct thousands of errors made, not by Pliny the Elder, but by the copyists of his manuscripts: ‘I have cured almost five thousand wounds inflicted on that work by the scribes, or at the very least shown how they might be cured.’8 The same year, 1493, saw the publication of Pandolfo Collenuccio’s Pliniana defensio adversus Nicolai Leoniceni accusationem, a riposte to Leoniceno’s assault on the Natural History. Leoniceno might have prompted some readers to think more carefully before relying on what was handed down to them in ancient textbooks, but his publication did little to diminish Pliny the Elder’s appeal to Renaissance men: Francis Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci, Giorgio Vasari, the great patrons of the Italian courts.

  Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger were Renaissance men in their own time. Beneath their statues on Como Cathedral their rich lives are precised in four small panels. Pliny the Elder is in his study surrounded by books, reading, oblivious to the citizens who are massing outside his doorway. In the next frame he turns away from the volcano, aloof and untroubled as Vesuvius erupts and envelops panicking Campanians in flame. His nephew is absorbed in his reading in a study of his own. When Pliny has finished with his research he makes his way to the senate house, mounts a podium, and prepares to deliver his speech to Trajan. He takes a deep breath and begins . . .

  Timeline

  BC

  264 First Punic War (to 241)

  218 Second Punic War (to 201)

  189 Triumph of Lucius Cornelius Scipio Asiaticus and ‘birth of luxury’ in Rome

  149 Third Punic War (to 146)

  106 Births of Cicero and Pompey the Great

  100 Birth of Julius Caesar

  74 King Nicomedes IV bequeaths Bithynia to Rome

  63 Cicero becomes consul

  59 Julius Caesar founds Novum Comum

  42 Octavian is named son of deified Caesar

  38 Octavian marries Livia and becomes stepfather to her sons Drusus and Tiberius

  30 Deaths of Antony and Cleopatra

  27 Octavian becomes ‘Augustus’ and first emperor of Rome

  13 Tiberius becomes consul

  9 Death of Drusus

  AD

  4 Augustus adopts Tiberius

  6 Judaea becomes a Roman province

  9 Defeat of Varus and loss of Roman legions in Germania

  14 Death of Augustus and accession of Tiberius

  19 Jews expelled from Rome

  23/24 Birth of Gaius Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder) in Comum

  37 Death of Tiberius and accession of Caligula

  c.38 Birth of the poet Martial

  41 Death of Caligula and accession of Claudius, who grants power over Judaea to Herod Agrippa

  43 Claudius invades Britain

  47 Pliny the Elder confronts the Chauci

  50 Claudius adopts Nero

  c.50 Pliny the Elder confronts the Chatti

  54 Death of Claudius and accession of Nero

  55 Death of Britannicus

  c.56 Birth of Cornelius Tacitus

  59 Death of Agrippina the Younger

  60/61 Rebellion of Boudicca

  c.62 Birth of Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus (Pliny the Younger) in Comum

  64 Fire at Rome. Persecution of Christians

  65 Pisonian Conspiracy; Suicides of Seneca the Younger and Lucan; Death of Poppaea

  66 Thrasea Paetus condemned to death; Suicide of Petronius; Start of the Jewish War

  67 Vespasian leaves for Judaea

  68 Death of Nero and accession of Galba

  69 ‘Year of the Four Emperors’: Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian

  70 The Temple of Jerusalem burns

  c.70 Birth of Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus

  73–4 Siege of Masada and conclusion of the Jewish War

  79 Death of Vespasian and accession of Titus Eruption of Vesuvius

  Death of Pliny the Elder

  80 Fire in Rome. Pliny the Younger enters the Court of One Hundred

  81 Death of Titus and accession of Domitian

  83 Domitian celebrates a triumph for war against the Chatti

  85 Agricola recalled to Rome from Britain after Battle of Mons Graupius. Domitian’s conflict with Dacia

  93 Expulsion of philosophers. Stoic trials

  96 Death of Domitian and accession of Nerva

  c.97 Death of Pliny the Younger’s first wife; Pliny the Younger falls ill

  98 Death of Nerva and accession of Trajan

  Pliny the Younger, now married to Calpurnia, becomes prefect of the Treasury of Saturn

  100 Pliny the Younger becomes consul and delivers his Panegyricus

  101 Beginning of Trajan’s Dacian Wars

  c.103 Pliny the Younger becomes augur

  c.109–13 Pliny the Younger in Bithynia and condemnation of Christians.

  Death of Pliny the Younger (c.113)

  115 Trajan’s Parthian campaign

  117 Death of Trajan and accession of Hadrian

  324 Constantine founds new capital at Byzantium

  List of Illustrations

  Part 1: AUT-

  Pliny the Elder sets out from Misenum with his fleet. (© Amanda Short)

  Part 2: WINTER

  Pine and laurel woods near Pliny’s villa at Laurentum. (© Amanda Short)

  Part 3: SPRING

  Mulberry and cherry trees with nightingale at Pliny’s Laurentine villa by the sea. (© Amanda Short)

  Part 4: SUMMER

  The hippodrome garden and vineyards at Pliny’s Tuscan villa. (© Amanda Short)

  Part 5: -UMN

  Dreaming of home on Lake Larius. (© Amanda Short)

  Endnotes

  Abbreviations used in the Notes

&n
bsp; AE:L’Année Epigraphique

  CIL:Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (De Gruyter, Berlin and New York)

  PLE:Pliny the Elder, Natural History

  PLY:Pliny the Younger, Letters

  Note: References to Pliny the Elder’s Natural History follow the numbering in Mayhoff’s Teubner version of the Latin text, which is helpfully available in full on Bill Thayer’s website: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/home.html. For Pliny the Younger’s letters and Panegyricus I used Radice’s two-­volume text of 1969

  PROLOGUE: Darker than Night

  1 PLY 6.16.6; PLE 22.92–5.

  2 Horace Satires 2.4.33.

  3 Virgil Aeneid 6.163; 6.171–2.

  4 Suetonius Life of Augustus 49. On Pliny the Elder’s post, see: J. F. Healy, Pliny the Elder on Science and Technology, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, pp. 22–3.

  5 PLE 2.236–8.

  6 PLE 3.62; 14.22; 14.34.

  7 PLE 3.41.

  8 Plutarch (Crassus 9) describes Spartacus and his allies making ladders from vines; Appian (Civil Wars 1.116) explicitly names the mountain as Vesuvius.

  9 Strabo Geography 5.4.8. On fires blazing on Vesuvius ‘in ancient times’, see Vitruvius De Architectura 2.6.2. See also Diodorus Siculus Library of History, 4.21.5, who writes of Vesuvius bearing signs of the fires it put forth ‘in ancient times’ like Etna in Sicily.

  10 V. Arnó, C. Principe, M. Rosi, R. Santacroce, A. Sbrana, and M. F. Sheridan, ‘Eruptive History’, in Somma-Vesuvius, 114, Vol. 8, edited by R. Santacroce, Consiglio nazionale delle ricerche, Rome, 1987; H. Sigurdsson, ‘Mount Vesuvius Before the Disaster’, p. 30 in W. F. Jashemski and F. G. Meyer (eds), The Natural History of Pompeii, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002. A particularly large eruption of Vesuvius is thought to have occurred in around 1600 BC. As Sigurdsson notes: ‘a period of quiescence of 1,400 to 4,000 years’ has tended to precede each Plinian eruption historically. The longer Vesuvius is dormant, the more catastrophic its next eruption may be (see J-­M. Bardintzeff and A. McBirney, Volcanology, Jones and Bartlett, Sudbury, Massachusetts, 2000, p. xv).

  11 See H. Sigurdsson and S. Carey, ‘The Eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79’, in Jashemski and Meyer (eds), Natural History of Pompeii, p. 44, for the evidence of the initial explosion.

  12 P. Roberts, Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum, British Museum, London, 2013, p. 284.

  13 Sigurdsson and Carey, ‘Eruption of Vesuvius’, in Jashemski and Meyer (eds), Natural History of Pompeii, pp. 48, 58.

  14 PLY 6.16.9.

  15 PLY 6.16.10.

  16 The so-­called ‘Plinian’ phase, see H. Sigurdsson, S. Cashdollar, and S. R. J. Sparks, ‘The Eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79: Reconstruction from Historical and Volcanological Evidence’, American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 86, No. 1, January 1982, pp. 39, 48.

  17 Sigurdsson et al., ‘The Eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79’, p. 47.

  18 Pliny the Elder said that to put a statue of a man on a high column was to elevate him above other mortals (PLE 34.27).

  19 PLY 6.16.12.

  20 PLY 6.16.13.

  21 PLY 6.16.13; 6.16.19; 3.5.7.

  22 As has been discovered through excavations at Villa Ariadne and Villa di Varano in Stabiae: see Sigurdsson et al., ‘The Eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79’, p. 40; Sigurdsson and Carey, ‘Eruption of Vesuvius’, in Jashemski and Meyer (eds), Natural History of Pompeii, p. 61.

  23 PLY 6.20.3.

  24 Tacitus Annals 15.22.

  25 Seneca Natural Questions 6.10.

  26 Seneca Natural Questions 6.27–9.

  27 The date of 5 February, AD 63, is provided by Seneca the Younger (Natural Questions 6.1) shortly after the earthquake. Tacitus (Annals 15.22), writing decades later, appears to favour a date in late AD 62. For a short overview of the difficulties of the date see N. Monteix, ‘Urban Production and the Pompeian Economy’, in A. Wilson and M. Flohr (eds), The Economy of Pompeii, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017, p. 210. On the destruction and rebuilding of Pompeii see W. F. Jashemski, ‘The Vesuvian Sites Before AD 79: The Archaeological, Literary, and Epigraphical Evidence’, in Jashemski and Meyer (eds), Natural History of Pompeii, pp. 8–10. For earthquakes not in winter: see Seneca Natural Questions 6.1.

  28 In the sixth century BC, Thales of Miletus believed that the earth was balanced on water. In its ebb and flow, he suggested, the water caused the earth to quake; see Seneca Natural Questions 6.6.

  29 PLE 2.192. A fuller explanation of the theory I draw on is provided by Seneca the Younger in Natural Questions 6.

  30 Seneca Natural Questions 6.12–13, adducing the arguments of Greek scholars including Aristotle, Archelaus and Theophrastus.

  31 PLY 6.16.16. On the formation of pumice see E. De Carolis and G. Patricelli, Vesuvius, AD 79: The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, J. Paul Getty Museum, LA, 2003, p.12.

  32 PLY 6.20.3–4.

  33 PLY 6.16.17.

  34 Sigurdsson and Carey, ‘Eruption of Vesuvius’, in Jashemski and Meyer (eds), Natural History of Pompeii, p. 61.

  35 On the collapse of the column and release of pyroclastic flows, see R. S. J. Sparks and L. Wilson, ‘A model for the formation of ignimbrite by gravitational column collapse’, Journal of the Geological Society, Vol. 132, July 1976, pp. 441–51.

  36 J. Berry, The Complete Pompeii, Thames and Hudson, London, 2013, p. 27.

  37 Asphyxiation by ash, as Sigurdsson and Carey observe (‘Eruption of Vesuvius’ in Jashemski and Meyer (eds), Natural History of Pompeii, p. 49), was the cause of death of many victims of the 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens in Washington State, and was likely also to have killed Pliny the Elder. Other theories for his cause of death have included a heart attack or heart disorder, or apoplexy. J. Bigelow, ‘On the Death of Pliny the Elder’, Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1859, pp. 223–7; R. M. Haywood, ‘The Strange Death of the Elder Pliny’, Classical Weekly, Vol. 46, No. 1, November 1952, pp. 1–3; and H. C. Lipscomb and R. M. Haywood, ‘The Strange Death of the Elder Pliny’, Classical Weekly, Vol. 47, No. 5, January 1954, p. 74, make for lively reading.

  38 PLY 6.20.7.

  39 PLY 6.20.9.

  40 As suggested by Sigurdsson and Carey in ‘Eruption of Vesuvius’, Jashemski and Meyer (eds), Natural History of Pompeii, pp. 50, 62.

  41 PLY 6.20.12.

  42 PLY 6.20.14–15.

  43 Ps-­Seneca Hercules Oetaeus 1111, 1114–1117; A. N. Sherwin-­White, The Letters of Pliny: A Historical and Social Commentary, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1966, p. 380; and F. G. Downing, ‘Cosmic Eschatology in the First Century: “Pagan”, Jewish and Christian’, L’Antiquité Classique, Vol. 64, 1995, p. 106, the latter of whom detects the influence of Epicureanism in Pliny’s interpretation of the scene.

  44 PLE 7.73.

  45 Virgil Aeneid 6.426–9.

  46 Dio Cassius Roman History 66.23.4.

  47 Dio Cassius Roman History 66.23.7–9.

  48 PLY 6.20.16.

  49 PLY 6.20.18.

  ONE: Roots and Trees

  1 PLY 3.5.10.

  2 On who was reading Pliny’s letters in later antiquity see A. Cameron, ‘The Fate of Pliny’s Letters in the Late Empire’, Classical Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 2, November 1965, pp. 289–98. As Cameron notes, some of the blame for the conflation of the two Plinys lay with Jerome, who in the late fourth century produced a translation and continuation of Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea’s Greek Chronicon, a history of time from the birth of Abraham to the present day, which featured ‘Plinius Secundus’ as an ‘orator and distinguished historian from Novum Comum [Como in northern Italy] whose many inspired works still survive: he perished while visiting Vesuvius’ (Jerome Chronicle S.a.109).

  3 Giovanni de Matociis, Brevis adnotatio de duobus Pliniis (early fourteenth century) – text reproduced in E. T. Merrill, ‘On the Eight-­Book Tradition of Pliny’s Letters in Verona’, Classical Philology, Vol. 5, No. 2, April 1910, pp. 186–8. S. B. McHam, ‘Renaissan
ce Monuments to Favourite Sons’, Renaissance Studies, Vol. 19, No. 4, September 2005, p. 468 and n.62 discusses de Matociis on the Plinys.

  4 E. A. Lowe and E. K. Rand (eds), A Sixth-­Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, 1922, inspected the ancient folios, now in New York’s Pierpoint Morgan Library, and established the arguments for viewing them as part of the Paris manuscript used in Venice by Aldus Manutius. See especially Rand, p. 41, and on the dating, Lowe, pp. 13–15. The leaves are now thought to date to the late fifth century. They contain letters from Pliny’s second and third books. The manuscript Aldus Manutius used came from the Abbey of Saint Victor in Paris. Pieces of five ancient manuscripts of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History still survive (see L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson (eds), Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2005, p. 309), the fullest of which also dates to the fifth century. The inclusion of excerpts of the work in medical books and other compendia helped to keep Pliny the Elder’s name alive.

  5 This manuscript of Pliny’s letters, arranged over eight books, had been found by Guarino Guarini in either Venice or Verona in 1419. The first printed edition of Pliny’s letters was produced by Ludovicus Carbone in Venice in 1471. On the eight-­, nine-­ and ten-­book traditions of Pliny’s letters see D. Johnson, ‘The Manuscripts of Pliny’s Letters’, Classical Philology, Vol. 7, No. 1, January 1912, pp. 66–75. And on the history of the manuscript tradition see Reynolds and Wilson (eds), Texts and Transmission, pp. 316–22.

  6 Attr.Suetonius Life of Pliny the Elder 1. See M. Reeve, ‘The Vita Plinii’, pp. 207–8, in R. K. Gibson and R. Morello (eds), Pliny the Elder: Themes and Contexts, Brill, Leiden, 2011.

  7 B. Giovio, Historiae Patriae, 1629, Como New Press, 1982, Vol. 2, pp. 237–40. Flavio Biondo was an architectural historian, Lorenzo Valla a talented Latinist and Niccolò Perotti a rhetorician. Petrarch owned a near-­complete copy of the Natural History from the thirteenth century.