In the Shadow of Vesuvius. Daisy Dunn
trees on the banks attained such heights in their ‘determination to grow’ that they could be borne along vertically on their roots when they were torn up by the wind and waves. The description sounds fanciful but it is perfectly possible for a current to carry trees along on their roots. Many stumps were carried erect down river during the eruption of Mount St Helens in Washington State in 1980.11 It is thought that the petrified forests of Yellowstone National Park may also have developed as a result of trees being carried upright through water.12
The curiosity that drew Pliny the Elder towards Mount Vesuvius, and his death, was the product of a lifetime’s fascination with the natural world. Already as a young soldier he was making observations which he would incorporate into his Natural History. His description of trees floating across the lake was included in a section on the forests of Germania. It was a rare piece of reflection, for Pliny the Elder seldom paused to reminisce on his own experiences, and an important one, for it was in these woods, so thick that they ‘add to the cold with their shade’, that the Romans had suffered one of their most crushing defeats in recent history.
At the end of the previous century, the first Roman emperor, Augustus, had sent the Roman army into German territory in the hope of pushing their frontier north beyond the Rhine towards the River Elbe.13 Drusus, son of Augustus’ third wife Livia, enjoyed some formidable early successes in the campaign, but died in 9 BC following a fall from his horse. About fifty years later, Pliny the Elder dreamed that he had been visited by Drusus’ ghost. According to Pliny the Younger, it was as a result of this encounter, in which Drusus begged to be saved from ‘the injustice of being forgotten’, that his uncle went on to produce a twenty-volume account of the German Wars.14 The work is sadly now lost but proved useful to later historians, who referred to its passages on Agrippina the Elder, mother of the emperor Caligula, and her attainment of more power over the Roman army than the generals themselves.15
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