In the Shadow of Vesuvius. Daisy Dunn
‘Legacy-hunting’ – known to the Romans as captatio – was a common enough crime for Pliny’s words to have had the ring of truth. Members of the Court of One Hundred had a responsibility to protect the sanctity of wills, not corrupt them. Pliny’s gossip about Regulus showed just how deeply he cared about some of the less sensational work of their court.
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 his speeches that he relied upon writing them down.53 Pliny disapproved of reading speeches aloud because he believed that an orator needed his hands and eyes to be free in order engage the crowd.54
Regulus cut not only a dull figure but a ridiculous one; he insisted on wearing an eye patch – over his right eye if he was speaking for the prosecution and over his left if for the defence. A sign of gross superstition, his patch also had the useful effect of reminding him which side he was speaking for.55 He used to consult soothsayers on the outcome of his cases and examine livers for signs of future prosperity. Pliny once caught him in the process of divining his own fortune. Having discovered a double set of entrails inside a sacrificial animal, Regulus boasted that he would not be worth 60 million sesterces, as he had originally predicted, but twice that. Pliny did not doubt him.56 He was considerably richer than Pliny. Among his many properties Regulus kept gardens with exquisite statues and enormous colonnades on the banks of the Tiber.57 One day he was very nearly killed by a collapsing colonnade on the ‘road to the chill heights of Herculean Tibur, where white Albula is vaporous with sulphurous waters’.fn1
But for all Pliny cared, Regulus might have been crushed and ‘dispersed’ like the columns ‘in a cloud of dust’.58
If you have a garden in your library, you’ll lack nothing
Cicero, Ad Familiares, 9.4
Pliny the Elder had lived as breathlessly as he died. An exception to his own rule that ‘there is nothing in Nature that does not like the change provided by holidays, after the example of day and night’, he had worked through darkness and daylight.1
He was not like the beasts of burden who ‘enjoy rolling around when they’re freed from the yoke’, or the dogs who do the same after the chase, or the tree that ‘rejoices to be relieved of its continuous weight, like a man recovering his breath’. Believing that a moment away from his books was a moment wasted, Pliny the Elder had developed an extraordinary ability to study in any situation: not only while he ate and while he sunbathed, but even while he was rubbed down after his bath (he used to pause only for the bath itself). On one occasion when he was taking notes over dinner, a guest deigned to correct the pronunciation of the slave who was reading to them from a book: ‘But you must have understood him?’ Pliny the Elder asked. ‘Then why did you make him repeat the word? We have lost at least ten verses because of your interruption!’2 Pliny remembered how he used to chastise him for walking everywhere when he might have travelled by sedan chair, as he did, ‘You could avoid losing those hours!’
After his spell of writing inoffensive grammar books during the latter years of Nero’s reign, Pliny the Elder had found a new direction in his studies, completing a history of modern Rome begun by a historian named Aufidius Bassus and finally getting down to work on the Natural History. The change in his routine had come about with the rise of a new dynasty of emperors under Vespasian in AD 69. The scion of an ‘obscure’ family of tax collectors, Vespasian was a senator and exemplary military man and one of the most capable of Nero’s generals. He had already commanded a legion in Germania and conducted a tour of Britain – where ‘he brought under [Roman] control two very powerful tribes and over twenty towns and the Isle of Wight, which is next to Britain’ – when Nero sent him east to quell a Jewish uprising.3
Tensions had been escalating ever since Emperor Augustus established Judaea as a Roman province in AD 6. Claudius had attempted to relieve hostilities between Jews and Gentiles across Alexandria and Caesarea, and granted power over Judaea to King Herod Agrippa, grandson of Herod the Great. But the death of the king in AD 44 and reversion of Judaea to a Roman province had deepened the troubles both there and in Rome, and in AD 66 the Jews, long frustrated at being subject to Roman control and taxation, finally revolted.4 The trigger to what would be known as the Jewish War came when Nero’s governor seized funds from the Temple of Jerusalem. In a bid to restore stability amid the ensuing riots, the Roman governor of Syria led his forces towards the city but ultimately withdrew in defeat. The Romans could delay no longer.
Pliny the Elder was probably in Rome when Vespasian left for Galilee with intentions of proceeding south and eventually capturing Jerusalem.5 He was about a year into the war when his forces laid siege to Jotapata (Yodfat). The commander of the Jews, Josephus, later recounted the events in his Jewish War.6 He described how he avoided being killed by his men for his desire to surrender to the Romans rather than die. If the Romans were willing to show mercy and spare them, he said, then they ought to show mercy to themselves. 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).7
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. His description of Jewish suicides entering the darkness might well have reminded Romans of the souls of suicides wandering Hades in Virgil’s Aeneid. Josephus failed to shake the Jews of their resolve. He therefore suggested that they take lots to kill one another so as to avoid dying by their own hands. Lots were duly taken, but when Josephus emerged as one of the last two to have to die, he ensured he did not have to by surrendering to the Romans. As if in possession of a divine prophecy, he addressed Vespasian as though he were already emperor, allegedly thereby sowing the seed of his ambition.
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.8 First to succeed Nero was Galba, governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, the easternmost of Rome’s provinces in Spain. The Praetorian Guard assassinated him after seven months and installed his deputy, Otho, in his place. Otho ruled for three months. The Roman legions replaced him with their commander Vitellius. Finally, Vespasian was hailed emperor by his troops. He was fortunate enough to have the support of the governors of Egypt and Syria and the benefit of a strong army, who defeated Vitellius’ men at Cremona in northern Italy. As Vespasian assumed power with the blessing of the senate at Rome, his son Titus set about completing the conquest of Judaea.
Pliny the Elder had come to know Titus well as a young man. Born in about AD 39 to Vespasian and his wife in a ‘pokey dark bedroom’ in a ‘squalid’ seven-storeyed building in Rome, he had grown up at the imperial court with Claudius’ son Britannicus in a rare conferral of honour.9 Although the young Titus was said to have been rather too keen on eunuchs and parties, he soon redeemed himself through his military prowess.10 Having impressed everyone around him with his ‘receptiveness to learning almost all the arts of war and peace’ and skill in arms and horsemanship, he left for Germania, which was where he met Pliny the Elder.11
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