In the Shadow of Vesuvius. Daisy Dunn
Elder had returned to the region once more with the Roman army. In the course of his travels he came to Vetera, modern Xanten, near the Rhine, the very camp where Drusus had established his headquarters in 11 BC. Remarkably, some horse trappings bearing Pliny the Elder’s name and post were discovered at the site in the nineteenth century. Made of brass overlaid in silver, the adornments are exquisitely detailed. Several roundels, four of which feature portrait heads, are connected by chains which would have fitted to the harness of the horse. The roundel inscribed with Pliny the Elder’s name has at its centre a portrait of a wide-eyed man with a fringe. Was this a stylised portrait of Pliny the Elder? Could the roundel have hung from his horse? It is very tempting to picture the trapping flapping around Pliny the Elder’s shins as he stormed through the thick German forests. While it is possible that the portrait does indeed show Pliny the Elder, it is more likely to depict Emperor Claudius or the young Nero.12 Inscribed with the names of two further men besides, the trappings might well have belonged to Pliny the Elder before being passed down to officers stationed under his command.13 Whether the object passed through Pliny the Elder’s hands or not, it is a tantalising relic of the authority he had attained in the Roman cavalry at the time he met the young Titus.
When Pliny the Elder came to write his encyclopaedia, he reflected fondly on Titus as his former contubernalis, or ‘tent-mate’. It is a pity that he did not describe in his Natural History the kind of life they shared in Germania. The period was evidently instructive for them both, and Titus would not forget Pliny the Elder when he became emperor two decades later. In the short term, his experience in a German camp must have been valuable preparation for the military career that he pursued under his father in the Jewish War. Once Vespasian had embarked upon his duties as emperor, Titus was entrusted with leading the legions to besiege Jerusalem, where fighting had broken out between rival groups of Zealots. As a struggle ensued between the Jews and Roman forces in AD 70, the Temple of Jerusalem was set alight. Treasures salvaged from the flames were carried to Rome and paraded the following year when Titus and Vespasian celebrated a joint triumph for their efforts. By the time the Jewish War ended with the siege of Masada in AD 73–4, hundreds of thousands of Jews, maybe more, had lost their lives. 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.
Pliny the Elder did not describe the atrocities of the Jewish War in his encyclopaedia. The closest he came to acknowledging the destruction the Romans wreaked was when he referred to the former town of Engadda as ‘second to Jerusalem in fertility and palm groves, now another funeral pyre’.14 Masada was merely ‘a fortress on a rock’. Judaea was evoked to provide context for descriptions of the discovery or trade of plants such as its native balsam.15 Pliny the Elder did however experience Vespasian’s rule from close quarters. The death of Nero and return of relative stability to Rome after the catastrophic Year of the Four Emperors enabled him to emerge from his quietude and earn a place on the imperial council. Every morning in the city, clientes (‘clients’) paid a formal greeting or salutatio to their patrons in the halls of their homes. Pliny the Elder, who made a habit of rising soon after midnight in the autumn and winter months, was among those who attended the emperor. An ‘early riser’ himself, Vespasian received his greeting before he had so much as put on his shoes.16 Once the meeting was adjourned and he had dealt with any necessary business, Vespasian would return to bed, usually with one of his concubines (he was already a widower when he came to power).
Having re-established control over Judaea, Vespasian was determined to put the empire back on an even keel. Increasing – and in some cases doubling – the tribute which the provinces owed Rome, he earned a reputation for cupidity, but went some way towards recovering the financial losses Rome had suffered through Nero’s profligacy.17 Pliny the Elder played an increasingly important role in his administration. In the seventies AD, he was appointed to a series of civil posts or ‘procuratorships’ overseas. Although the details of his employments are unknown, he is said to have ‘conducted very splendid and continuous procuratorships with the utmost integrity’, one of which took him to Tarraconensis, the largest Roman province in Hispania, to oversee the imperial finances.18
Between his work for the imperial council and his promotion following his procuratorships to the admiralty of the fleet, Pliny the Elder had little time for conducting his own research. He had no more opportunity to pursue his own interests when, in AD 79, Vespasian died at the age of sixty-nine, anticipating his posthumous deification with the words: ‘I think I’m becoming a god.’19 His successor, 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
A furious night-writer, Pliny the Elder was fortunate to possess what his nephew called ‘a sharp intellect, incomparable concentration, and formidable ability to stay awake’.21 There were moments when he nodded off during the day, but these were as nothing to the time other people wasted. If his passion for night-writing was born of necessity, then it was driven by the need he felt to make the most of the time he had. 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, indeed the hours lost to insomnia, cannot truly constitute living.22 He went so far as to establish a memorable formula to express these beliefs. Vita vigilia est, he wrote: ‘To be alive is to be awake.’23
The idea was a logical solution to a theme found in Homer. If wakefulness was life, then it was because sleep was akin to death. 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. A painting of them straining beneath the weight of the warrior’s bleeding corpse became the unlikely adornment for a wine bowl in the late sixth century BC.24 The brothers are formidable figures, with richly textured wings, armoured body plates and long dark beards. One grasps Sarpedon’s legs, the other his gigantic shoulders, while blood gushes from his wounds like wine from a ruptured wine skin. Distributing his weight between them, Sleep and Death raise him from the ground as the god Hermes watches. There is life in Sarpedon’s tendons yet, but his head is slumped, the final insult to the divine father who could not save him. To preserve what is left of his dignity, Sleep and Death must carry his body to his native Lycia for burial.
Sleep and Death were united in Pliny the Elder’s mind in the same way as they were on the archaic pot. They were strange and inimitable brothers, shadows of one another, complementing each other in their work. To embrace Sleep as the brother of Death was to recognise wakefulness as the sister of life. It was by doing precisely this that 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,’ he wrote to him in the preface. ‘Not even the improvement in your fortunes has changed you, except in so far as you can now bestow as much as you want to.’25
Titus was given the opportunity to prove his generosity when, just a few months after he succeeded his father as emperor, Vesuvius erupted. Faced with the cruel task of recovering his empire from ruin, he proved himself to be a man of the utmost pragmatism. Although there was no straightforward way of rebuilding the cities when the foundations were so unstable, Titus hastened to the disaster zone and appointed a pair of senators to plan the restoration of the few salvageable buildings and oversee the construction of new ones. 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.
Pliny the Elder had pushed the boundaries of mortal achievement. His publication of over 20,000 pieces of information exceeded anything his predecessors had produced. 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