The Shadow of Vesuvius Read online

  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.

  When a fire broke out in Rome in AD 64, the emperor was among those suspected of starting it. Nero is in fact thought to have been outside the city when the fire started, but this did not stop some historians from speculating as to why he might have been so eager to destroy it. ‘As if offended by the ugliness of the old buildings and by the narrow winding streets,’ wrote Suetonius, ‘he set fire to the city so openly, that several men of consular rank caught his attendants with tow and torches on his own estate but did not arrest them.’37 The city burned for six days and seven nights. To deflect blame, Nero selected a scapegoat. He became the first Roman emperor to persecute Christians, whom he was said to have punished less for the conflagration than for their ‘hatred of the human race’.38 ‘Believers’ were wrapped up in animal pelts and bitten by dogs, fixed to crosses, and used as human torches to light up the night sky over the imperial gardens. Amongst the Christians to die in Nero’s reign were the apostles Peter and Paul.

  It was not only the early Christians but the Roman senators who feared for their lives as their role became increasingly redundant in the face of Nero’s autocracy. Political delatio or ‘informing’ became a profitable business in Pliny the Elder’s lifetime and would continue to plague Rome after his nephew entered the senate in the late eighties AD. A man who laid an accusation against another could achieve political advancement as well as money. If he succeeded in informing upon someone for maiestas, or treason, then he was entitled to at least a quarter of the defendant’s property (further funds went to the state treasury).39 An unscrupulous emperor was only too happy to accommodate such activity if it resulted in the downfall of a senator who threatened his power. Stability in Rome had always depended upon its citizens’ willingness to monitor each other. Informers might have stolen the people’s ‘commerce in speaking and listening’, but for some men that was a small price to pay for an emperor’s protection and the opportunity for self-­advancement.40

  Such was the climate when, in AD 65, a group of senators, equestrians, and members of the Praetorian Guard came together to hatch a plan to blot out Nero’s poison for good. Intent on killing him during the coming games, the conspirators gathered round a popular senator named Gaius Calpurnius Piso, who might have made an honourable substitute for Nero, if only the details of their plot were not leaked before it could be executed.41 No sooner had Nero learned what awaited him than he made after the conspirators. Among those to die for their alleged involvement in the plot were Nero’s former tutor, Seneca the Younger, Seneca’s poet nephew Lucan, and that ‘arbiter of elegance’ Petronius, a satirical writer who was accused of being friends with one of the conspirators.42

  Pliny the Elder played no part in the conspiracy but grew increasingly cautious about what he wrote down. In the mid to late sixties AD, when ‘every kind of study that was a little freer or more creative was rendered dangerous by the servitude of the times’, as his nephew later put it, Pliny the Elder resorted to writing only what he was certain could not offend: an eight-­book treatise on The Ambiguities of Grammar.43

  Pliny the Younger, known here onwards as ‘Pliny’, was born in about AD 62 under Nero, the last of the Julio-­Claudian emperors, matured under the Flavian dynasty – Vespasian, his elder son Titus, and younger son Domitian – and peaked under the emperors Nerva and Trajan. We know far more about him than we do his uncle because he wrote so profusely of his experiences. One of the great chroniclers of life, Pliny could be rather pompous and self-­regarding, but he was also highly sensitive to the world around him. His surviving letters, which range from a couple of lines to several pages of Latin, provide a rare insight into the habits of his uncle and an unparalleled portrait of his own life at the very centre of things in the first and early second centuries AD.

  This was a period in which an equestrian could advance very quickly through the ranks of society. One hundred and fifty years earlier, Cicero had felt marginalised as a ‘new man’ – the first in his family to enter the senate – in a world dominated by aristocrats. Pliny seems to have experienced no such prejudice as he proceeded in his career. He became a senator and went on to document what it was like to live and work under an emperor’s nose. Of the many rulers he lived under, Domitian, who reigned from AD 81 to 96, and Trajan, who reigned from AD 98 to 117, shaped his experience the most. Pliny’s letters post-­date Domitian but frequently refer back to the events of his rule. Generally despised by the historians who described him, Domitian caused Pliny considerable unease, but must have supported him for him to have risen through the senate as he did. Pliny’s letters reveal his struggle to distance himself from the detested Domitian in the wake of his death. Trajan, by contrast, was an immensely popular ruler, his rise to power hailed in his own times as the beginning of ‘a very happy age’ in Rome’s history.44 Pliny exchanged over a hundred letters with the ruler and honoured him with an extravagant speech. The Panegyricus, which Pliny delivered in the senate house in AD 100, is highly prized because it is the earliest complete speech to have survived from ancient Rome since Cicero’s Philippics against Mark Antony of 43 BC.45

  Pliny’s letters contain another important first: the earliest pagan sources on the tension between Romans and Christians.46 Pliny encountered what he called the ‘depraved and unbridled superstitio’ – a subversion of what he understood by ‘religion’ – after Trajan dispatched him to Bithynia, on the south coast of the Black Sea, one of the many provinces now ruled from Rome, in the last years of his life.47 Although Pliny could never have predicted that by the fourth century Christianity would be the central religion of the Roman empire, his understanding of its resilience as a faith must have influenced the way he engaged with the Christians he met.

  After his uncle’s death in AD 79, Pliny became his beneficiary and worked hard to sustain his memory. He inherited his agricultural estate in the upper Tiber valley (in modern Perugia), and personal effects including 160 of his notebooks, double-­sided and written in ‘the very smallest handwriting’.† Pliny the Elder had once rejected an extraordinary offer of 400,000 sesterces for his notebooks in favour of leaving them to his nephew. And, as Pliny later reflected, ‘there were rather fewer’ notebooks at that time than there would be by AD 79. He also bequeathed his nephew his name.48 Pliny the Elder had no children by the time he died and Pliny had lost his father as a boy. Pliny the Elder therefore adopted him posthumously by bequest of his will. It was in recognition of his adoption that Pliny the Younger tended to use the name ‘Plinius’, after his maternal uncle, rather than ‘Caecilius’, after his natural father.

  Pliny might have struggled to remember all the facts the Natural History contained, but through his uncle’s words he gained a certain perspective on the world and impetus to establish his place within it. Despite professing to be ‘very lazy’ by comparison with the elder Pliny, he was deeply influenced by his methods for dedicating as many hours of each day as possible to scholarship. Pliny was in a sense haunted by his uncle and the scale of his achievements, which seemed to exceed what was possible in a single lifetime. The Natural History, Pliny the Elder’s sole surviving work, was a seminal achievement. Although the Greeks had produced compendia, and at least two Roman writers anticipated him in creating encyclopaedic collections of their own, the Natural History was of another order entirely.49 The oldest extant encyclopaedia from the Graeco-­Roman world, it is indigestible in its enormity. Pliny the Elder claimed that it featured 20,000 pieces of information – though it is now known to contain far more. He included a list of contents in an attempt to make it navigable. The labourer might turn to the pages on ‘Viticulture’, the artist to the sections on pigments. The Natural History was a book for everyman.

  Pliny the Elder was in the midst of a discussion of insects when he paused to confess, ‘I am forever watching Nature and persuaded to think that nothing about her should be deemed impossibl
e.’50 In many ways a testament to that thought, his encyclopaedia was a celebration of the peculiarities of Nature over the corrupting influences of materiality. Wealth in this period was concentrated in the hands of the varied few (senators, equestrians, fortunate freedmen – former slaves), but Pliny the Elder still feared for the damage it might cause the wider world.

  Perhaps the most vivid symbol of temptation and human corruptibility in the encyclopaedia was the oyster. Pliny the Elder returned to it often, revealing its qualities and health benefits as well as its dangers. He had seen men plunder the earth for gold and gems as well as oysters and feared for the earth’s future stability. If fire, war and general collapse did not lead to the destruction of the world, then he believed that man’s greed would.51 He witnessed emperors construct monumental edifices, Nero’s Golden House with its revolving dining room epitomising the needless opulence to which the affluent might aspire. Meanwhile, treasures were being carried home from overseas and whetting – or so he imagined – Roman appetites for even more. Pliny the Elder recognised that ‘globalisation’ could bring improvements, particularly in knowledge, but also challenges. Just as we have come to realise that technologies and antibiotics can be destructive when we rely too heavily upon them, he believed that the easy availability of resources and foreign medicines would weaken Rome.