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Pliny
Daisy Dunn
A new biography of Pliny the YoungerAD 79. Above the Bay of Naples, Mount Vesuvius is spewing thick ash into the sky. The inhabitants of nearby villages stand in their doorways, eyes cast on the unknown. Pliny the Elder, a historian, admiral of the fleet, and author of an extraordinary encyclopaedia of Natural History, dares to draw closer to the phenomenon. He perishes beneath the volcano. His seventeen-year-old nephew, Pliny the Younger, survives.The elder Pliny left behind an enormous compendium of knowledge, his Natural History offering observations on everything, from the moon, to elephants, to the efficacy of ground millipedes in healing ulcers. Adopted as his late uncle’s son, Pliny the Younger inherited his notebooks – his pearls of wisdom – and endeavoured to keep his memory alive. But what became of the young man after the disaster? Pliny resurrects the ‘father and son’ to explore their beliefs about life, death and the natural world in the first century AD. At its heart is a literary biography of the younger Pliny, who grew up to become a lawyer, senator, poet, collector of villas, curator of drains, and personal representative of the emperor overseas. Counting the historian Tacitus, biographer Suetonius, and poet Martial among his close friends, Pliny the Younger chronicled his experiences from the catastrophic eruption through the dark days of terror under Emperor Domitian to the gentler times of Emperor Trajan. Interweaving the younger Pliny’s Letters with ideas and extracts from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, Daisy Dunn brings their world back to life. Working from the original sources, she celebrates two of the greatest minds from antiquity and their influence on the world that came after them.
Copyright (#ulink_9dd1c693-d6dc-5730-98b2-3aca7c6a6e3b)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com)
This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © Daisy Dunn 2019
Cover image: Vesuvius, 1985 (screenprint in colours),
Warhol, Andy (1928–87) / Private Collection Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images.
Daisy Dunn asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Maps by Martin Brown
Lines from ‘The Barn’ from Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney reproduced courtesy of Faber and Faber Ltd.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008211097
Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780008211103
Version: 2019-04-24
Dedication (#u15ede2ca-8b68-5f7a-82ff-9f3916c0e03b)
For my grandparents, Don and Wendy Short
Contents
Cover (#uf5705f1a-b041-5e19-9b38-4e07a89e40f8)
Title Page (#ue7dc5f1a-1ddd-5674-96d0-6c23e4a76cd4)
Dedication
Copyright (#u2fbc0a81-315b-5385-8342-3aa39e6b4647)
Maps (#u3416a048-e986-5eb1-931f-2dac1bccb514)
Nota (#u5c6d2fd7-61af-54de-912b-d5c8181f381e)
PART ONE: Aut- (#uaecf8874-1826-541a-874d-ea7ab942358b)
Prologue: Darker than Night (#u72a8bbf9-ca7f-5d6a-8d03-0f432591547a)
1. Roots and Trees (#u4d648a5a-538d-524e-b932-c8145e96d435)
PART TWO: Winter (#u256a5fd2-e80b-5bc7-9aca-6cc4ad69c6f3)
2. Illusions of Immortality (#uadd31795-a79f-5567-862d-a4f9c3be4df8)
3. To Be Alive is to Be Awake (#uccfacfdb-cf81-50a9-b421-91b148e42638)
4. Solitary as an Oyster (#ud9463906-d50d-5c91-8bfb-59e6121b7580)
5. The Gift of Poison (#litres_trial_promo)
PART THREE: Spring (#litres_trial_promo)
6. Pliniana (#litres_trial_promo)
7. The Shadow of Verona (#litres_trial_promo)
8. Portrait of a Man (#litres_trial_promo)
9. The Death of Principle (#litres_trial_promo)
PART FOUR: Summer (#litres_trial_promo)
10. The Imitation of Nature (#litres_trial_promo)
11. A Difficult, Arduous, Fastidious Thing (#litres_trial_promo)
12. Head, Heart, Womb (#litres_trial_promo)
13. After the Solstice (#litres_trial_promo)
PART FIVE: -umn (#litres_trial_promo)
14. Life in Concrete (#litres_trial_promo)
15. Depraved Belief (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue: Resurrection (#litres_trial_promo)
Picture Section (#litres_trial_promo)
Timeline (#litres_trial_promo)
List of Illustrations (#litres_trial_promo)
Footnotes (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Select Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Maps (#u15ede2ca-8b68-5f7a-82ff-9f3916c0e03b)
Nota (#ulink_cd3dad23-d0ea-5c66-aaaf-73cac59c7bd3)
This book explores the ways in which the Plinys – Younger and Elder – thought about life, death and the natural world. At its heart is a biography of the younger, better-documented Pliny, whom I have pursued through his Letters together with his uncle Pliny the Elder’s extraordinary encyclopaedia, the Natural History. It is also a celebration of the enduring appeal of both men, their work and the treatment of their ideas through the passage of time.
Reading the Letters and Natural History in Latin is very involving and requires much to-ing and fro-ing between sources – from Roman histories to satires; from ancient Greek poetry and medical tracts to the writings of the Church fathers. Among Pliny the Younger’s regular correspondents were the historian Tacitus and biographer Suetonius, whose celebrated accounts of the emperors post-date his letters by a number of years and supplement several of his descriptions of events in Rome. There are also a good many surviving but largely forgotten inscriptions and archaeological remains which are relevant to the lives of the two Plinys. I have brought these together with the literary sources in order to provide a three-dimensional view of the world from which they came. All translations from the Greek and Latin are my own, unless indicated otherwise.
In the spirit of both Plinys, I have eschewed a strictly chronological narrative and followed rather the seasons of the Younger’s life, while drawing on the Natural History throughout. The shape of the book gives a flavour of Pliny the Younger’s year, which was structured slightly differently from ours. Julius Caesar had reformed the calendar in the first century BC because it had fallen out of step with the seasons – the discrepancy caused by the fact that it was based on the cycle of the moon. Caesar had it replaced with a solar calendar. There were now twelve months divided into thirty or thirty-one days each, with the exception of February which, as today, had twenty-eight, or twenty-nine every leap year. Although Pliny the Elder confessed that there was still little exactitude in ascertaining the proper time for a star to appear, or in marking the beginning of a new season when change is so gradual and weather so unpredictable, the Julian Calendar offered a stable framework. Pliny the Elder had winter begin on 11 November, spring on 8 February, summer on 10 May and autumn on 8 or 11 August.
PART ONE (#ulink_b28a6f0f-84dc-5d46-885e-971f59660723)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_6da9f4c3-1107-5e22-bce0-36868bb560e7)
Darker than Night (#ulink_6da9f4c3-1107-5e22-bce0-36868bb560e7)
Lucky, I think, are those men with a god-given gift for doing what deserves to be written about or writing what deserves to be read – and very lucky are those who can do both. Through his own books and yours, my uncle will be one of these.
Pliny the Younger to Tacitus, Letter 6.16
The crisis began early one afternoon when Pliny the Younger was seventeen and staying with his mother and uncle in a villa overlooking the Bay of Naples. His mother noticed it first, ‘a cloud, both strange and enormous in appearance’, forming in the sky in the distance. Pliny said that it looked like an umbrella pine tree, ‘for it was raised high on a kind of very tall trunk and spread out into branches’. But it was also like a mushroom: as light as sea foam – white, but gradually turning dirty, elevated on a stem, potentially deadly.
They were too far away to be certain which mountain the mushroom cloud was coming from, but Pliny later discovered it was Vesuvius, some thirty kilometres from Misenum, where he and his mother Plinia were watching.
The cape of Misenum was famous for its sea urchins and even more so for its harbour, which was home to one of Rome’s two imperial fleets.
Its name preserved the memory of Misenus, trumpeter of Aeneas, who fought alongside Hector in the Trojan War and escaped the burning citadel only to perish ‘in a death he did not deserve’. ‘In his foolishness,’ said Virgil, ‘he happened to fill the waves with sound by blowing into a seashell, and summon the gods to a song contest.’
Triton, son of the sea god Neptune, drowned him in his envy. It was in the course of gathering wood for Misenus’ funeral pyre, in the volcanic region of Cumae, that Aeneas discovered the golden bough that secured his entry to the Underworld.
Pliny the Elder, Pliny’s maternal uncle, was admiral of the fleet, in charge of maintaining and fitting out the boats which served predominantly ‘as protectors’ of the seas off Italy.
On the morning the cloud appeared, he had risen early as usual, bathed, lunched, and was working when, at around midday, his sister came to tell him what she had seen. Abandoning his reading and calling for his shoes, he made his way to a higher vantage point for a better view.
Pliny the Elder was a historian and a naturalist as well as an admiral. He had recently finished writing his thirty-seven-volume encyclopaedia on natural history, a few passages of which were concerned with the world’s volcanoes. He had described Mount Etna in Sicily glowing through the night and ‘covering in frost the ash it ejects’ when snow lay over its surface.
He had described, too, the volcano Cophantus in Bactria, north of the Hindu Kush, and Mount Chimaera in Lycia (in southern Turkey), where the fires allegedly grew when it rained but could be extinguished by earth or manure. He had written of a crater in Babylon that threw up flames like fish, and of volcanoes in Persia, Ethiopia, and the Aeolian islands. But not of Vesuvius. In the Natural History, Vesuvius is simply a vineyard-covered mountain watered by the River Sarno and visible from Pompeii.
If Pliny the Elder knew it was a volcano at all, he thought it was extinct.
He gave the impression that the region of Campania was too green and well-watered to burn, with ‘plains so fertile, hills so sunny, glades so safe, woods so rich in shade, so many bountiful kinds of forest, so many mountain breezes, such fertility of crops and vines and olives, fleeces of sheep so handsome, bulls with such excellent necks, so many lakes, and rivers and springs which are so abundant in their flow, so many seas and ports, the bosom of its lands open to commerce on all sides and running out into the sea with such eagerness to help mankind!’.
‘Lucky Campania’, mused Pliny the Elder, was where Nature had gathered all her gifts.
The grapevines were especially famous. An ancient wall painting from the region shows the wine god Bacchus, dressed in a handsome bodysuit of grapes, surveying the vines on the lower slopes of a mountain – in all likelihood Vesuvius itself. An enormous snake, the ‘Good Spirit’ of vineyards, is depicted in the foreground of the painting. It was by snapping off these long, trailing vines, weaving them into ladders, and lowering themselves onto a plain beneath the slopes of Vesuvius that Spartacus and his men had managed to launch a surprise attack on the Romans, drive them back, and take over their camp during their uprising in 73 BC.
Almost a century after Spartacus was defeated, the Greek geographer Strabo noted the presence of blackened stones towards the summit of the mountain and suggested that the ash of fires ‘since quenched’ had contributed to the fertility of the soil, as it had upon Mount Etna.
If fires were responsible for the success of Vesuvius’s grapevines, however, there was no suggestion that they had not been extinguished for good. Vesuvius first erupted about 23,000 years before and had now been dormant for approximately 700 years – dormant, but as alive as the crops which enveloped it.
Like a snake, it was now sloughing its skin.
The process had begun perhaps two hours before Pliny’s mother first noticed it. A relatively small eruption had presaged the larger one that formed the cloud.
Taller and taller the pine tree grew, propelled from its chamber and sucked up into the sky through convection.
At its peak, it would reach a height of thirty-three kilometres.
Pliny the Elder decided that this ‘phenomenon’ warranted further investigation. After taking in what he could from his lookout point he made up his mind to leave Misenum to draw nearer to its source. Earlier in the day he had given his nephew something to write. When he now asked him whether he wanted to accompany him, Pliny refused, insisting that he would prefer to stay behind with his mother in order to work. Pliny the Elder would go without him. He gave orders for a boat to be fitted out and was just leaving the villa when he received a written message from his friend Rectina, who lived beneath Vesuvius. Terrified, she was begging for his help, for there was now ‘no escape except by boat’. It was then, Pliny recalled, that his uncle ‘changed his plan and what he had begun as an intellectual pursuit he completed with all he had’.
Admiral Pliny had the entire fleet at his disposal and launched the quadriremes – large, but surprisingly swift ships equipped with two banks of rowers, two men per oar – with the intention of bringing help not only to Rectina, but to as many on that populated shore as he could.
For several hours, the fleet held course across the Bay of Naples. Despite heading in the very direction whence others were now fleeing, Pliny’s uncle was said to have been so fearless that ‘he described and noted down every movement, every shape of that evil thing, as it appeared before his eyes’.
To any sailors who survived to tell the tale of their admiral’s fortitude, the chance of reaching land in safety must have seemed increasingly remote as they proceeded across the water. First ash rained down on them, then pumice, then ‘even black stones, burned and broken by fire’. This was no hail storm. The fall of grey-white pumice is thought to have lasted eighteen hours in total.
On average, it was falling at a rate of 40,000 cubic metres a second.
By the time the quadriremes had come within sight of the coast, the pumice had formed island-like masses on the sea, impeding them from advancing any further. When the helmsman advised turning back, Pliny the Elder adamantly refused. ‘Fortune favours the brave,’ he said.
Although the pumice prevented them from reaching Rectina, they determined to put in where they could. Stabiae, a port town just south of Pompeii, lay about sixteen kilometres from Vesuvius. A contemporary image reveals the town’s harbour to have had long elegant promontories, criss-cross balustrades, sand-coloured pediments and towering columns crowned with sculptures of men.
By the time the fleet arrived here, the columns would have been mere shadows, with evening falling across the bay.
As ash and pumice continued to pour down, Pliny the Elder went to find a friend, Pomponianus, who had already stowed his possessions aboard a ship, ‘set on flight if the opposing wind settled’. Pliny the Elder embraced him and requested a bath before joining him for dinner. ‘Either he was content,’ Pliny speculated later, ‘or he showed a semblance of contentment, which was just as great-hearted.’
