In the Shadow of Vesuvius

Pliny later reasoned that his uncle died because the thick fumes and air had obstructed his fragile airways. He was probably right. The surge cloud from a nuée ardente is low in oxygen and would have filled his lungs with ash, asphyxiating him.37 When his body was discovered a few days later, it was said by whoever found and reported it to be intact and unharmed, with the look more of sleep than of death. The body of a victim of thermal shock does not look peaceful. It is rigid, the hands typically clenched like a boxer’s, the result of tendons contracting in the heat. Many of the bodies later uncovered at Pompeii would show signs of thermal shock.

Pliny and his mother were further away from the volcano and better placed to escape. By daybreak, the earthquakes at Misenum had become so severe that they threatened to bring the villa down on top of them, and they quickly decided to leave the town. As mother and son made their way through the streets they found themselves followed by a crowd, ‘favouring someone else’s plan to their own, which in moments of fear is akin to prudence’.38 Crowd mentality steered the refugees clear of the falling buildings and into the possibility of safety.

Pliny and his mother proceeded by carriage. They were joined by one of Pliny the Elder’s friends who had recently come to visit from Spain. As the earth tremored, they darted one way then another, their vehicles twisting and turning. Over the course of their journey, they witnessed scenes which defied explanation. The sea seemed to ‘be absorbed back into itself and sort of be pushed back by the earthquake’, leaving a trail of marine life stranded in its wake.39 This was either the beginning of a tsunami or simply a further effect of the force of the earthquakes. Inland, meanwhile, ‘a terrifying black cloud, burst by twisting, quaking flickers of flame, began to gape to show long fiery tongues, like lightning, only bigger’. The cloud descended upon the earth and covered the sea until neither the island of Capri, nor even the promontory of Misenum itself, was visible on the horizon. Ash began to fall, only lightly, and hardly noticeable at all against the thick gloom that pressed them from behind, spreading over the earth like a torrent. Pliny did not know it, but the cloud was very probably the edge of the nuée ardente that had already killed his uncle at Stabiae.40 Pliny the Elder’s friend urged Pliny and his mother on before fleeing the danger himself: ‘If your brother, if your uncle, is alive, he would want you to be safe; if he has died, he would have wanted you to survive him. So why do you hesitate in your escape?’

There was now little time. Pliny’s mother begged – ordered – her son to leave her behind, knowing she would slow him. She told him that she was ‘heavy in years and body and could die happy, if only she was not the cause of [his] death’.41 Reflecting on this moment, Pliny thought of Virgil and his description of the fall of Troy. In the poem, Aeneas’ wife, Creusa, follows behind him as they make their escape. By the time Aeneas reaches safety, she has gone.

Pliny’s mother stayed close by him as the ash fell. He took her firmly by the hand so as not to repeat Aeneas’ mistake. Leaving the carriages behind, they hurried on by foot while there was still enough light to see. At Pliny’s suggestion they left the main path so as not to be trampled by the crowd in the darkness. At one point they paused to rest and the cloud made night of day.

This day, which had struck the people at Stabiae as blacker than any night they had ever experienced, seemed to Pliny ‘not so much a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp had gone out in a locked room’. He might still have been in his study had it not been for the screaming:

You could hear the wailing of women, the cries of babies, the shouting of men. Some were calling for their parents, others for their children, others for their partners, trying to make out their voices. Some wept for their own fate, others for those of their relations. There were some who prayed for death through fear of death. Many raised their hands to the gods; more reasoned that there were now no gods anywhere and that the night would last forever and ever across the universe.42

Was this the end of the world? Was this the ekpyrosis the Stoic philosophers feared, the fire that closed one life cycle and opened another? Was this the moment ‘Titan Sun casts out day’ and ‘a kind of death and chaos overcomes/ all the gods together and/ death sets itself upon itself …?’43

Pliny’s uncle had feared the coming of the conflagration. He had noticed that sons were now shorter than their fathers and taken this as a sign that the human seed had begun to dry in the approaching flame.44 If anyone needed proof of how dramatic the shrivelling of man had been, then he provided it in his description in his encyclopaedia of an ancient corpse measuring twenty metres tall that had been uncovered in a mountain on Crete. Split open during an earthquake, the mountain appeared to have yielded the body of a giant. Some believed it was Orion, whom Jupiter, king of the gods, placed in the sky as a constellation. Others said it was the remains of Otus, son of Neptune. But could it not have been human? The body of mortal Orestes, son of Agamemnon, had already been exhumed and measured at over three metres tall.fn3

Pliny the Elder had resorted to myth to explain the inexplicable and now the younger Pliny imagined himself inhabiting epic. The desperate women and infants of Campania were like the souls of the Virgilian Underworld. Pliny was Aeneas, who in Virgil’s poem is surrounded by the ‘overwhelming sound of wailing/ and weeping spirits of infants, whom the black day/ stole away, ripping them from the breast at the very threshold/ of sweet life, and plunged into bitter death’.45 He was in a living hell. He was not even particularly close to the volcano. He could only have imagined the depths of hell others had now entered. Pliny was as much a visitor to Misenum as Aeneas was to the Underworld. If only his escape could be as easy.

The people of southern Italy were not alone in their fear. The effects of the eruption were felt thousands of kilometres away, ‘the amount of dust so great, all in all, that some reached Africa and Syria and Egypt, and some reached Rome, and filled the air above and cast the sun in shade’.46 This dust would later spread ‘sickness and terrible pestilence’ among the survivors. Its sudden appearance overhead was bewildering, even to the people of Rome, who ‘did not know and could not imagine what had happened, but considered that everything had been turned upside down, and that the sun was vanishing into the earth, and the earth being raised to the heavens’.47 Some spoke of giants in the darkness, or spread false stories of the extent of the destruction. Others merely panicked. Pliny and his mother carried on, shaking themselves free of the ash that settled on their shoulders to avoid being ‘smothered and overcome by its weight’.48 Unlike so many of the people around him, Pliny did not cry, because even in these dire moments he could reason, and in reasoning, he found something close to belief. His belief became his consolation when he told himself, ‘Everything is dying with me, and I am dying with it.’

It was a few days before the darkness lifted. As it did, there was a glimmer of sunlight and Pliny’s vision was restored. His first impression, upon turning back to Misenum with his mother to await news of his uncle, was that ‘Everything had changed, buried deep in ash as if in snow.’49

ONE

Roots and Trees

Paper is made from papyrus that is cut into strips with a needle so as to be as wide as possible but very fine … Every sheet is woven on a board dampened with water from the Nile. The muddiness of the liquid serves as a glue.

Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book 13

There was a time when it was thought there was only one Pliny, a curious conflation of the Elder, who died in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, and the Younger, who survived it. The most important contribution the elder Pliny had made to history was his multi-volume encyclopaedia. The Natural History was astonishing for its breadth. Believing that ‘no book is so bad that there is nothing to be taken from it’, Pliny the Elder had crammed facts from as many as 2,000 different volumes into its pages, citing the research of Greek and Roman geographers, botanists, doctors, obstetricians, artists, and philosophers.1 Offering observations on everything, from the moon, to elephants, to the efficacy of ground millipedes in healing ulcers, Pliny the Elder had left behind an indispensable compendium of knowledge.

His nephew was no less versatile. Though commonly confused with his namesake through Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Pliny the Younger was an important figure in his own time.2 He survived the Vesuvius disaster to become a lawyer, senator, poet, collector of villas, curator of drains, and personal representative of the emperor overseas. He was also a prolific writer of letters, a couple of which contain his account of the eruption. It took a priest at the cathedral of Verona in the early fourteenth century to disentangle the orator who wrote these letters from the historian and admiral of the fleet who produced the encyclopaedia and perished beneath the volcano.3 Giovanni de Matociis, the author of a book on empire from Rome to Charlemagne, produced a critical essay which, though laden with errors, made the essential point. There was not one Pliny but two.

In around 1500, a complete manuscript containing over three hundred of Pliny the Younger’s letters – far more than de Matociis had known of – was miraculously uncovered in an abbey in Paris. The papyrus dated to the fifth century, making it one of the oldest classical manuscripts ever found (six leaves of it still survive in a library in New York). Aldus Manutius, one of the great publishers of Renaissance Venice, acquired it to produce a book of Pliny the Younger’s correspondence, for which there was now a considerable appetite.4 The discovery in 1419 of an incomplete manuscript in Verona (or possibly Venice) had prompted the first printed edition of the younger Pliny’s letters in 1471, two years after his uncle’s encyclopaedia was first published in print.5 The release of books by two Plinys in as many years was met with considerable emotion across Italy.

No sooner had the books been published than an intense intellectual dispute broke out between the cities of Verona and Como (ancient Comum) over the birthplace of the uncle and nephew. The Veronese priest de Matociis had been in no doubt that the pair were native to his home town. In the preface to his encyclopaedia, Pliny the Elder invoked Catullus, the love poet born in Verona in the first century BC, as his ‘fellow countryman’. Verona and Comum both formed part of former Gaul. The Veronese now seized upon these words as proof that Pliny the Elder was one of them. Rattled by their presumption and haughtiness, the people of Como, a town some 150 kilometres to Verona’s north-west, retrieved their copies of the Natural History and threw open its covers to reveal what was written in the frontispiece. Early editions of the encyclopaedia were prefaced by a biographical note which identified Pliny the Elder explicitly as a man of ancient Como.6 The Veronese refused to back down. The horror of having witnessed scholar after scholar, poet after humanist – Petrarch, Flavio Biondo, Lorenzo Valla, Niccolò Perotti – come out in support of Verona’s rivalrous claim eventually drove the people of Como to more extreme measures.7 In their determination to win this contest they commissioned a sculptor to produce larger-than-life-size statues of both Plinys, which they displayed prominently in their town centre. The Veronese responded by erecting a statue of the elder Pliny on the rooftop of their council building. If they could not have both Plinys they could at least have one. Standing among the most famous sons of ancient Verona – Catullus and Cornelius Nepos, the dedicatee of his poetry book, the architectural writer Vitruvius, and the poet Aemilius Macer – Pliny the Elder would watch over Verona’s Piazza dei Signori for ever after.8

If the people of Como were going to settle this dispute, they had no choice but to produce a definitive portrait of the lives of the Plinys in their ancient town. The task was taken up in the sixteenth century by a pair of polymaths: Paolo Giovio, a collector of art, advisor to the art historian Giorgio Vasari, and physician to Pope Clement VII, and his brother Benedetto, a notary, classical scholar, and historian.9 Gifted and imaginative, if not also highly impressionable, they were precisely what Como needed. Paolo put aside his copy of the Natural History, picked up the Letters and began to dream of constructing a novel kind of museum-villa in memory of Pliny the Younger. Meanwhile Paolo’s brother sought to deconstruct the Veronese claims to Pliny the Elder on textual grounds and to re-establish the connection of Pliny the Younger to the town through archaeology. It would take time and ingenuity but the Giovio brothers would prevail. The Plinys were men of ancient Como – and they were worth fighting over.

Pliny the Elder was born Gaius Plinius Secundus in Comum in AD 23 or 24. His family was of the second highest social order, the equestrians, which meant that he was wealthy, but not so illustrious in his birth as the Julii or Claudii or any of the other great patrician families who had filled the Roman senate for centuries.fn1 He began his career, as was customary for a man of his class, with a spell of military service, which he took to with assiduity. In AD 47, thirty years prior to his appointment as admiral of the fleet, he joined a campaign off what is now the Netherlands and found himself waging ‘a naval battle against trees’.10 He was on the lakes when he saw them. They were not rolling over the surface of the water, but floating towards him as upright as ships’ masts. It was terrifying. He recalled that the trees often took the men when they were least prepared, ‘driven by the waves as if purposely against our prows when we were moored at night’. The men had no choice but to confront the huge trunks head on.

It was typical of Pliny the Elder to seek an explanation for the peculiarities of the landscapes he encountered on his tours: it was because the trees on the banks attained such heights in their ‘determination to grow’ that they could be borne along vertically on their roots when they were torn up by the wind and waves. The description sounds fanciful but it is perfectly possible for a current to carry trees along on their roots. Many stumps were carried erect down river during the eruption of Mount St Helens in Washington State in 1980.11 It is thought that the petrified forests of Yellowstone National Park may also have developed as a result of trees being carried upright through water.12

The curiosity that drew Pliny the Elder towards Mount Vesuvius, and his death, was the product of a lifetime’s fascination with the natural world. Already as a young soldier he was making observations which he would incorporate into his Natural History. His description of trees floating across the lake was included in a section on the forests of Germania. It was a rare piece of reflection, for Pliny the Elder seldom paused to reminisce on his own experiences, and an important one, for it was in these woods, so thick that they ‘add to the cold with their shade’, that the Romans had suffered one of their most crushing defeats in recent history.

At the end of the previous century, the first Roman emperor, Augustus, had sent the Roman army into German territory in the hope of pushing their frontier north beyond the Rhine towards the River Elbe.13 Drusus, son of Augustus’ third wife Livia, enjoyed some formidable early successes in the campaign, but died in 9 BC following a fall from his horse. About fifty years later, Pliny the Elder dreamed that he had been visited by Drusus’ ghost. According to Pliny the Younger, it was as a result of this encounter, in which Drusus begged to be saved from ‘the injustice of being forgotten’, that his uncle went on to produce a twenty-volume account of the German Wars.14 The work is sadly now lost but proved useful to later historians, who referred to its passages on Agrippina the Elder, mother of the emperor Caligula, and her attainment of more power over the Roman army than the generals themselves.15

After Drusus died, his brother Tiberius, who would precede Caligula as emperor from AD 14 to 37, worked hard to pacify the Germanic tribes, but was recalled before the Romans could conquer all the territory they desired around the Rhine. The most catastrophic setback came in the autumn of AD 9 when a Roman legate named Varus was leading three legions through the thick Teutoburg Forest near the River Weser. Varus fatefully put his trust in a Germanic chieftain, who had formerly served with the Roman auxiliary, only to be attacked by his tribesmen.16 The Roman legions were destroyed. Although the Romans lost the land they had gained to the east of the Rhine, they managed to create a zone of provinces beneath the Danube and had made sufficient inroads to maintain troops across the Rhineland with centres at modern Mainz and Cologne. Over the following decades, insurrections, mutinies and plundering became increasingly common among the Germanic tribes, and it was in the interest of quelling the so-called Chauci that Pliny the Elder had found himself waging a war against trees in AD 47.

The Romans at home came to know the Germans by repute. They learned that they had wild blue eyes, reddish hair, large strong frames, little tolerance of thirst and heat, but natural resistance to cold and hunger owing to their climate.17 Their tribes did not live in cities but ‘scattered and far apart, wherever a fountain or plain or grove took their fancy’.18 Pliny the Elder at least had the good fortune to be confronting ‘the very noblest of the Germans, who elect to preserve their greatness through justice’.19 The Greater Chauci lived between the Elbe and Weser rivers and the Lesser between the Weser and the Ems. As the Romans’ commander, a severe but capable man named Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, led the triremes up the Rhine channel, the rest of the fleet proceeded through a network of estuaries and canals.20 Pliny the Elder took one look at the territory and concluded that the Chauci were ‘a miserable people’ to inhabit country so flood-prone.21 He likened them in their huts on higher ground to sailors aboard a ship and then, as the waters receded, to victims of a shipwreck.

As he and his fellow soldiers set about sinking the tribesmen’s ships, Corbulo succeeded in subduing the neighbouring tribe of the Frisians, and made after the leader of the Chauci.22 No sooner had he put him to death than he received orders from Rome to withdraw his troops to the near bank of the Rhine.23 Rome was now ruled by Claudius, son of Drusus who had died in Germania. His rise to power had come about almost by accident when, in AD 41, the Praetorian Guard murdered his nephew Caligula and supported him to take his place. Though sickly, stammering, and frequently taken for a fool, Claudius was highly astute. The last thing he wanted was to stir up war among the very tribes he hoped to pacify. The Roman empire now stretched from Hispania in the west to Pontus (north-east Turkey) and Judaea in the east, and he had ambitions of extending it further still. By the end of his rule, Claudius would have succeeded in annexing Thrace, Lycia (in southern Turkey), Noricum (Austria with some of Slovenia) and Mauretania in north Africa. In the period when Pliny the Elder was in Germania, Claudius’ attentions were firmly focused on Britain. Knowing that it would be a tremendous coup to succeed where Julius Caesar had twice failed – in conquering the ‘remotest island in the west’ – Claudius had launched an expedition to Britain in the summer of AD 43 and returned to Rome in triumph the following year.24 Although it would be another forty years before the Romans had truly conquered England and Wales, Claudius had set the process in motion.

Germania, meanwhile, remained unsettled. In around AD 51, Pliny the Elder returned to the region to quell the agitations of another tribe, the Chatti. It was probably in this period that he began writing his book On Throwing the Javelin from Horseback. Like his histories of the German Wars, the work is unfortunately lost, but presumably set out the military techniques he had learned on the battlefield. His experiences might well have commended to him the German technique of hurling javelins at close quarters over the Roman tradition of firing them at long range.25 Later, in his Natural History, Pliny the Elder provided the merest glimpse into how he might have soothed his aching limbs after these exercises. There were hot springs at nearby Mattiacum, modern Wiesbaden, where the water, he wrote, remained warm ‘for three days’.26

Not everyone would have found military life conducive to writing, but Pliny the Elder happened to be posted under a commander who had literary ambitions of his own. Pomponius Secundus would one day be celebrated for the ‘erudition and polish’ of his plays, one of which was inspired by the story of Aeneas.27 Pliny the Elder later described him as ‘a poet and very distinguished citizen’ who was so self-restrained that he never belched.28 Although Pomponius failed to achieve war against the Chatti, he was greeted in Rome with triumphal honours, which were but ‘a fragment of his fame in the eyes of posterity, among whom the glory of his poems prevailed’.29 On visiting him at home, Pliny the Elder was impressed to find official papers in his collection dating from almost two hundred years earlier.30 These, and his experience of his command, left a lasting impression; a biography of Pomponius Secundus, written in his memory, is among Pliny the Elder’s other lost works.

Having returned from Germania, Pliny the Elder went to see Claudius put on a magnificent naval battle on a lake beside a mountain he had had bored through in central Italy. Keen to display his muscle against the backdrop of this spectacular feat of engineering, the emperor had the Roman triremes and quadriremes drawn up and boarded by an extraordinary 19,000 servicemen. Crowds from the nearest towns and from as far away as Rome arrived and filled the banks and hills ‘in their cupidity or duty to see the emperor’.31 Pliny the Elder’s eye, however, was drawn not to Claudius but to his fourth wife (and niece), the empress Agrippina the Younger, for she was dressed in a ‘cloak of woven gold without any other material’.32 Pliny the Elder never failed to notice a glint of luxury. He paused on Agrippina’s cloak as if it held a clue to her true character.

He would be among several historians to suggest that Agrippina was responsible for Claudius’ death a few years later. In the autumn of AD 54, the empress was said to have ordered Claudius’ plate of boleti (bolete, perhaps porcini) mushrooms to be poisoned because she feared he was grooming his natural son Britannicus as his successor rather than her own son Nero, whom she had had him adopt.33 Succession under the Julio-Claudian emperors was never without drama. Even the emperors who were fortunate enough to have natural sons had reason to fear the emergence of rival heirs. Pliny the Elder incorporated the rumour of Agrippina’s machinations into his encyclopaedia as little more than an illustration of the dangers of mushrooms. It was his belief that, if mushrooms were not spiked by a scheming empress or poisonous by Nature, then they could still become deadly by absorbing whatever happened to be in the soil where they sprang up. The nail from a soldier’s boot, a piece of old rag, even the breath of a snake in the soil could render a mushroom noxious as it rose ‘lighter than sea foam’ from its womb-like tunic.34 As far as Claudius’ mushrooms were concerned, the poison only spread. Agrippina’s act, Pliny the Elder quipped, gave the world a new ‘poison’ in the form of the teenage emperor Nero.

While initially Nero put on an honourable front – arranging an elaborate funeral for Claudius, abolishing some taxes and reducing others, hosting extravagant entertainments for the people – he soon lived up to Pliny the Elder’s assessment of him.35 First he had his stepbrother Britannicus poisoned. Then, after several failed attempts, he dispatched his controlling mother to her death. Then he killed his aunt. He then kicked his pregnant wife Poppaea to death when she reproached him for returning home late from the races.36 Around sixty years would pass before Suetonius recounted these murders in his Lives of Rome’s rulers, from Julius Caesar to Domitian. The Algerian-born biographer (he is thought to have come from the Romanised town of Hippo Regius) was head of the libraries at Rome and had access to the imperial archives. Even allowing for some bias in his account, it is clear that the latter part of Nero’s rule was deeply unsettled. If Pliny the Elder had hoped that he would have more freedom to pursue his literary interests after returning from his Germanic expeditions, then Nero’s impulsiveness showed him otherwise.