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Pliny the Elder incorporated the rumour of Agrippina’s machinations into his encyclopaedia as little more than an illustration of the dangers of mushrooms.
Pliny inherited not only his pearls of wisdom, but also his warnings against the destructive forces of wealth and greed.
As Umberto Eco asked in 1990: ‘One wonders whether Pliny would have preferred a Reader accepting his glorious product (monument to the Elder) or a Reader realising his glorifying production (monument to the Younger)?’
Preserved within the snow-like layers were imprints of the victims of the disaster of AD 79. The shapes of human bodies frozen in time were more palpable
It was only some decades later, in the mid-nineteenth century, that a Neapolitan numismatist and archaeologist named Giuseppe Fiorelli developed a technique for preserving what remained of the ancient dead.
He modelled himself on not only Virgil but the greatest orators of history:
When Pliny wasn’t mining the orators’ texts for inspiration, he was looking to the weather. Snow was best. ‘Driven and continuous and plentiful, divinely inspired and heavenly,’ it seemed to offer itself up as a model for the daring speech-writer.40 First came the blizzard, the storm of words. Then the let-up in the spate that allowed the finest phrases to melt into a jury’s ears. Finally, ice might be extracted from the slush and driven into them ‘like a sword at the body – for so a speech is impressed upon the mind by equal thrust and
Odysseus was a perfect model for Pliny. He showed him that, if the most innocent skies can deliver the greatest snowstorms, then the most unprepossessing men can deliver the greatest speeches.
He would imagine that he was planting ideas as he spoke like the seeds he sowed each winter: ‘barley, beans and other legumes’.44 Pliny received
stretching out his arms, plucking seeds from the air, and scattering them over an invisible trench, Pliny would give a visual demonstration of what little law and landowning held in common.
Nature had taught him to treat his oratory as he did his grain so as to prepare himself for every eventuality.
Marcus Aquilius Regulus,
A contemporary once called Regulus ‘the most obnoxious of all two-footed creatures’, which seemed about right.
Pliny could never understand how Regulus managed to attract to the courtroom the crowds he did. He had ‘weak lungs, garbled speech, a stammer, he is very slow to make connections, has no memory, indeed he has nothing except a mad creativity’.52 He was jittery and pale and so bad at memorising
Vespasian
The circumstances in which suicide might be considered permissible would continue to be debated by Jews down the centuries, as indeed they would in the Christian Church (the most sustained argument against Christian suicide would come in St Augustine’s City of God in the fifth century).
Josephus presented suicide as a crime against nature and impiety against God: since the soul is immortal and part of the divinity, and life a gift from God, then it ought to be God’s decision as to when to take it away.
Virgil’s Aeneid.
Around a year later, in AD 68, came news that Nero had died. Years of cruelty and overspending had left him isolated. Abandoned by his guard, he was recalled to Rome only to be declared an enemy of the state by the senate. He avoided brutal execution by taking a dagger to his own throat.
Nero’s death without issue left a power vacuum into which men poured like lava. AD 69 went down in history as the ‘Year of the Four Emperors’ and ‘almost the last year of the state’, as civil war broke out over the succession.
Titus
Josephus, the Jew who had predicted Vespasian’s rise, enjoyed the rare privilege of living out the rest of his life in Rome as a Roman citizen.
cupidity,
profligacy.
Titus, was only too pleased to retain his former tent-mate in the imperial administration. Pliny the Elder had little choice but to persevere with his studies in the rare hours he had to himself. As he explained to the new emperor, he dedicated his days to him, and his nights to producing his encyclopaedia.20
Humans are not wronged by the fact that their lives are brief, he wrote, but do wrong by spending the life they do have asleep. For to sleep is to lose half of one’s allotted time – more than half, given that infancy, ailing old age,
‘To be alive is to be awake.’
The Homeric epics taught that Sleep and Death were brothers. When Zeus’s mortal son Sarpedon falls at Troy in the Iliad, Sleep and Death carry his body from the battlefield.
Pliny the Elder was able to complete his encyclopaedia in time to dedicate it to Titus. ‘You are to me such as you were in camp as my tent-mate,’
Titus was given the opportunity to prove his generosity when, just a few months after he succeeded his father as emperor, Vesuvius erupted.
The property of those who had died without issue was harnessed to fund the relief effort. The imperial purse made no profit from the tragedy.26 Titus’ clemency in the wake of the disaster was the kindest tribute he could have paid the learned friend who, after a lifetime of being awake, had finally been carried off in the arms of Sleep and Death.
His encyclopaedia was an attempt to overcome the frailty of human life and human memory: a record of everything man had learned and risked losing through neglect and the passage of time.
Pliny longed to establish a comparable legacy for himself. ‘Day and night,’ he wrote, as often quoting Virgil, ‘I think “how I too might raise myself from the earth”; for that would fulfil and indeed surpass my prayer “to fly victorious over the lips of men”.’
Martial
Cato
Martial remains one of the most popular poets of ancient Rome.29
Inspired by his uncle’s choice of life over deadly sleep, Pliny had established a rigorous routine of his own.
His uncle had shielded his hands from the cold with gloves, ‘so that not even the bitterness of the weather could snatch any time away from his studies’.30 Pliny relied on his underfloor heating.
pedant
Long before William Cowper declared, in his poem of 1785, that ‘Variety’s the very spice of life,/ That gives it all its flavour’, Pliny forged a culinary metaphor for the merits of alternation.
Like his uncle before him, he prioritised work over everything else, food included. The snow was his one extravagance which, in its habit of losing form and metamorphosing into valueless water, must have reminded him of how consuming but unstable life and its luxuries could be.
The only certainty is that nothing is certain And nothing more miserable or arrogant than man.
The Romans believed that dreams merited deep consideration on the basis that they might have some bearing upon waking life. Like the Greeks before them, they realised that, while some dreams come to pass, others presage a less obvious result.
The book was an important influence on Sigmund Freud, who read it before writing his Interpretation of Dreams
There was something of Scrooge to Pliny come midwinter, ‘secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster’.
owned at least 500 slaves across his various properties by the time of his death.23 Rather than spoil them once a year he showed them his favour in other ways.
lumen meant both ‘eye’ and ‘light’, and when it meant ‘light’ it could also mean ‘life’. Both a blind man and a dead man could be said to have had ‘the light stolen from him’.
‘Mortals,’ he said, ‘are ingenious at fooling themselves and drawing deceptive conclusions.’37
Julius Caesar
Mark Antony.
