In the Shadow of Vesuvius

by Daisy Dunn

  When Domitian heard that people were now speaking of his iniquity he ‘was blazing’.38 For all the rumours of his misdemeanours, he was said to have been a man of justice. He was even known to overturn decisions made in the Court of One Hundred – Pliny’s court – if he believed them to have been influenced by the ambition of the jurors.39 Anxious that his reputation should not be blemished, Domitian diverted blame for the Virgin’s death on to a senator named Valerius Licinianus, whom he had arrested on accusation of having concealed one of the Virgin’s freedwomen on his estate.40 According to Pliny, the senator confessed, ‘but it was unclear whether he confessed because it was true or because he feared worse if he denied it’.41 The defendant did not attend his own trial. In his absence, his lawyer, a man named Herennius Senecio, came before the court and gave him what Pliny called the ‘Patroclus is dead’ treatment.42 With a direct and serviceable ‘Licinianus recessit’ (‘Licinianus has withdrawn his defence’), Senecio saw his client free to gather up his belongings and leave Rome in a lenient exile. Licinianus eventually became a rhetoric teacher in Sicily – a not altogether unpleasant ending, though in Pliny’s eyes a sorry one: ‘Such is his demise: from a senator to an exile, from an orator to a rhetoric teacher.’

  As for the lawyer, Senecio, it soon transpired that he had diverted his attentions elsewhere. While Pliny proceeded in AD 93 to the prestigious magistracy of praetor, Senecio steadily withdrew from public life.43 He and a fellow senator named Arulenus Rusticus had undertaken to write biographies of two ‘most sacred men’: Thrasea Paetus and his son-in-law Helvidius Priscus.44 Pliny knew who they were. They were famous Stoics.

  Stoicism was the most prominent philosophy in Rome, far outshining Epicureanism and Pythagoreanism as a school of thought. Cicero, Virgil, Seneca the Younger, Pliny the Elder and, later, the emperor Marcus Aurelius, did much to elevate and perpetuate its teachings through their work. Introduced to Rome from Greece in the second century BC by a philosopher from Rhodes named Panaetius and his pupil Poseidonius, Stoicism encouraged reverence towards Nature. ‘Nature, which is to say, Life,’ wrote Pliny the Elder, ‘is my subject.’ She was the only divinity he believed in as such.45 The traditional pantheon of Roman gods was indeed for many Stoics little more than a collection of allegories for aspects of the universe such as the sun and moon.

  Pliny the Elder followed the oldest Stoics in believing that the universe existed in a cycle without beginning or end, subject only to ekpyrosis – the sudden destruction by conflagration – after which it would recover its force and proceed on a fresh cycle. Although the word ‘encyclopaedia’ only gained currency in the fifteenth century, Pliny the Elder presented his Natural History as the Latin equivalent to what the Greeks had called enkyklios paideia, ‘all-round education’ – education that surrounds the pupil in a circle.46 He was concerned neither with what lay above the earth’s sphere nor with what might be lurking in ‘Hades’. What point is there in seeking what exists outside our world, he wondered, when we are yet to discover everything within it?47 The Natural History, a work that the younger Pliny described as ‘wide-ranging and erudite and no less varied than Nature herself’, was an attempt to lay down all that had been found on earth to date so that it would forever encircle us in its beauty.48

  The Stoics rarely went as far as the Cynic philosophers of Greece in their rejection of wealth and comfort, but they shared with them their ability to maintain perspective in moments of perceived crisis. Zeno, the man credited with founding the Stoic school of thought, was said to have learned the art of keeping his cool after scalding himself with soup. Arriving in Athens from his native Cyprus in around 312 BC, he encountered the Cynic philosopher Crates, who playfully challenged him to carry a steaming bowl of lentil soup through the potters’ quarters of the Kerameikos. Zeno accepted and, to maintain a semblance of propriety, did his best to conceal it as he started. Crates smashed the bowl with his walking stick. When the soup began to dribble down his legs, Zeno turned red and scurried off to hide his shame. As he hastened away, Crates calmly told him, ‘You have suffered nothing terrible.’49

  Stoicism was at heart a philosophy for achieving equilibrium in a frantic world, through which you learned to become master of yourself and your emotions, and it was in the spring of his youth, a few years after he escaped the confounding disaster of Vesuvius, that Pliny had the opportunity to learn it first-hand. Dispatched to Syria on military service, he spent his days going over the account books of the Roman cavalry and cohorts stationed in the province, and his leisure hours becoming acquainted with at least three Stoic philosophers.50

  Of the Stoics he met in Syria, there were some who preached their way of life and others who knew better. Musonius Rufus was firmly in the first camp. A philosopher of Etruscan extraction, he was something of a ‘Roman Socrates’.51 In the civil war that followed the death of Nero, he was dispatched as an envoy to negotiate a peace settlement, but ended up philosophising so intensely with the opposing army on the ugliness of conflict that he incurred only ridicule for his ‘untimely wisdom’.52 On another occasion, he told the Athenians that they should cease hosting gladiatorial shows under the walls of the Acropolis lest they spatter with blood the seats occupied by the priests of Dionysus.53 The Greeks would have struggled, at the best of times, to take lessons from a man who believed as fervently as Musonius Rufus did (on moral rather than specifically Stoic grounds) that one should abstain from homosexual practices, and from sex altogether except in cases of determined procreation.

  In the second camp was Musonius Rufus’ pupil, Euphrates, a philosopher who developed more convincing methods of bringing people round to the Stoic way of life. If Musonius Rufus was Socrates, then Euphrates was Plato.54 He was clever and subtle, but had a way of speaking that captivated even the most reluctant learners: ‘you would not shudder upon meeting him’. He ‘pursued crimes, not individuals’ because he understood that it was more effective to correct the way a man lived than punish him for it. Pliny came to know him particularly well during his service. He visited him at his home and found him to be open and approachable and ‘full of the humanity which he teaches’, which was very different from the portrait of him that emerged over a century later. According to an author of the early third century AD, Euphrates came into bitter conflict with a Pythagorean philosopher and professed miracle man named Apollonius. Originally from Tyana (modern Kemerhisar), a city in a Roman province in what is now Turkey, Apollonius travelled the world – India, Ethiopia, Egypt, Rome – issuing advice and predictions, and performing such improbable feats as releasing the city of Ephesus from plague. He met several Roman emperors, including Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian, the last of whom had him locked up after hearing Euphrates’ complaints. Allegedly, Euphrates devised ‘false letters’ about the wondrous Apollonius and spoke out against his philosophy.55 Apollonius was said to have vanished magically during his ensuing trial after describing Euphrates as lingering in the doorways of powerful men in the manner of ‘greedy dogs’ and clinging to his ‘fountains of wealth’.56 These may have been empty rumours but they hinted at the hypocrisy of Euphrates’ philosophy. The Stoics were often wealthy men endowed with the kind of extravagant possessions their philosophy taught them to eschew. The line between necessity and luxury was a highly subjective one.

  Pliny did not acknowledge these stories in his letters. In his eyes, Euphrates was entirely admirable. Although he could not have looked more like a philosopher when Pliny first met him – he was ‘tall and becoming, with long hair and a huge white beard’ – when he later moved to Rome he did his utmost to be seen as a philosopher for the way he ate and drank, slept and helped others, rather than for how he looked.57 Euphrates was afraid that the philosopher’s traditional cloak and beard might give the impression that everything he did was for show.58 Stoics were discouraged from vaunting their philosophy, for it was intended as an improvement of the self. As Seneca the Younger used to say, ‘one can be wise without ceremony, and without
inviting ill-will’.59 This was where Euphrates’ teacher Musonius Rufus had failed. He broadcast his views too widely. His fame as a philosopher and as a philosophy teacher had brought him to the attention of Nero, who exiled him in the belief that he had been involved in the conspiracy against his life in AD 65.

  Musonius Rufus was on his third exile when Pliny met him in Syria (it was just as well that he thought ‘Exile is Not a Bad Thing’) and soon earned his affection.60 Although Pliny grew closer to his son-in-law, Artemidorus, a man he admired for ‘the endurance of his body in winter and summer alike’, he came to love the elder man ‘as much as one can across an age gap’.61 Musonius Rufus’ sanctimonious attitudes towards luxury and concern for protecting the environment from human greed might well have made Pliny think of his uncle: ‘But for that briefest of moments when we feel pleasure,’ wrote Musonius, ‘innumerable fish courses are prepared, the sea is sailed to its furthest limits; cooks are far more sought after than farmers; some prioritise their meals over spending on their estates, though our bodies are in no way aided by extravagant food.’62

  Musonius Rufus objected to the mining of Nature on both environmental and moral grounds. Since every jewel acquired or oyster cracked open only whetted the appetite for something rarer and more refined, he advocated a diet that satisfied need not want: vegetables, raw foods, a little cheese, no meat.63 Musonius Rufus disapproved of sweeping the oceans for oysters as much as Pliny the Elder did of probing (like surgeons with their tools) the ‘bowels’ of the earth for gold and silver, amber, bronze, iron, and gems, ‘as if the ground we tread were not generous or fertile enough’.64

  Stoicism taught them that Nature was a god to be revered, not dominated, assisted, not ignored, and as proof of this, Pliny the Elder had pointed to the lowly bramble bush. It is so wild and resilient in its growth, he said, that it would overwhelm the earth if man did not prune it. From this we should accept that Nature does not exist for the pleasure of man, but rather, ‘man can seem to be born for the sake of the earth’.65 His appetite for luxury may sooner lead him to plunder than prune, but even the fattest, idlest, most ignorant individual is obliged to attend Nature from time to time. Man would do well to understand that, while the sweeping of oceans and ploughing of rich landscapes is ruinous to the earth, it is positively deadly to his own true interests. ‘We all reach into the bowels of the earth while living on top of it,’ he wrote, ‘but are amazed when occasionally it splits open or quakes, as if it were possible that this wasn’t an expression of disapproval by our sacred parent.’66

  This was not simply a question of morality after all. Rejecting oysters and amber and gold may prevent you from falling down a rabbit hole of obsession, but more importantly, it offered you some protection against earth’s fury. Pliny and his uncle had grown up in living memory of the earth splitting open as Vesuvius began to stir. Their experience could only have fortified their beliefs about the perils of disrupting the earth’s layers. Both Plinys had learned that Nature, while predominantly kind, had evils lurking deep inside it. Man had no one but himself to blame if he unleashed them by prodding at its bowels.

  It had occurred to Pliny the Elder that there had to be a reason why Nature, otherwise so generous and nurturing of life, produced the poisons she did. Was it possible that humans are simply too vulnerable to the world around them? Oysters have their shells, boars their fur, birds their feathers.67 Trees hide behind their bark, but man – man is hideously exposed. Plunged naked onto the earth with a pulsating fontanelle, he does what no other creature does at birth. He cries. This is the only thing he knows how to do instinctively. Everything else he must learn for himself. According to the Natural History it will be at least forty days before the infant manages so much as a laugh.

  The image of a baby writhing helplessly in his cot persuaded Pliny the Elder of Nature’s potential to be a tricky stepmother, but the image of an elderly man struggling in his bed made him think of her rather as a kindly mother. Nature, he decided, has given us two main gifts. One is brevity of life. The other is the means of ending life. Mortality should not be seen as a curse, for it is the one thing we have that the gods do not.68 If life becomes too much then we have a way out. Zeus had no choice but to carry on when he saw his son Sarpedon die and be carried from the battlefield in the arms of Sleep and Death. The elderly man can escape his bed of pain by ending his life there and then. The earth will cover him over, embracing his body like a mother. The simplest explanation Pliny the Elder could find for why Nature had sowed poisons in the earth was to provide us with a means of committing suicide. We need only learn which mushrooms, leaves, or berries to pick.fn1

  His was in many ways an age marked by reasoned acceptance of death. Seneca the Younger encapsulated a popular Stoic view when, around the time of Pliny’s birth, he said that it was foolish to prolong life for the sake of enduring pain, but cowardly to seek death because of pain alone.69 As Pliny the Elder recalled, the admirable Seneca, who had written richly Stoic works on clemency, mutual kindness and ‘the tranquillity of the mind’, was ‘the foremost of intellectuals whose power ultimately overcame him’.70 Forced to commit suicide by Nero following the conspiracy that landed Musonius Rufus in exile, he died a long, suffering and determinedly theatrical death. He cut into his veins, and then took poison when he failed to bleed out sufficiently. When the poison did not work he got into a hot bath and died ‘by its vapour’.71 Decades after leaving Syria for Rome, Pliny’s Stoic friend Euphrates committed suicide by hemlock to avert the pains of illness and old age.72

  Pliny understood the logic of the arguments for suicide but, even after his time with the philosophers in Syria, struggled to see it put into practice. He had a friend called Titius Aristo with whom he used to spend time deliberating matters of constitutional law. If, for argument’s sake, there was a defendant who might be acquitted, left to go into exile, or put to death, Pliny might ask him whether it was right that senators who supported the death penalty should consult with those who favoured banishment. Might not such collusion ensure that acquittal was impossible? Titius Aristo would have the answer, for he was a ‘treasury [of knowledge]’ and ‘there was nothing you might want to learn that he could not teach’.73 When Pliny heard that he had fallen ill and resolved to die he hastened to his bedside.

  Pliny found his bedchamber sparse and cold and adorned solely ‘with the greatness of his mind’. Titius Aristo lay sweating beneath his covers, which he insisted remained on in spite of his raging fever. As Pliny approached, his friend leaned in to him and bade him ask the doctors whether his illness was fatal. If it was, he said, he was indeed resolved to die. But if the doctors believed it was merely a long and painful sickness then he would endure it, for he could not contemplate suicide against the wishes of his wife, daughter and friends.

  The Stoics, too, were obliged to weigh their own discomfort against the agony their relatives would feel as a result of their deaths. Pliny considered the ability to understand the arguments on both sides the mark of a great mind. He did as Titius Aristo asked him and discovered that the doctors were optimistic for his friend’s health. This was the perfect opportunity for Pliny to adopt a Stoic resolve.

  Pliny confessed that he struggled to grasp the tenets of Stoicism. On returning to Rome from Syria and reuniting with Euphrates years later, he admitted that he could not fully understand his philosophical virtues ‘even now; for just as one cannot judge painting, sculpture or modelling unless one is an artist, so only a wise man can recognise wisdom’.74 Pliny’s disavowal was not a rejection of Stoicism but rather a test. Like a Stoic who refused to wear a beard, Pliny’s modest statement was an invitation to others to look beneath his facade for signs of his wisdom. A new acquaintance who sought hints of Stoicism in Pliny might begin by watching how he conducted himself in court. The benches of the Court of One Hundred provided a good vantage point. Was he flustered, or did he look as though anxiety was clouding his thoughts? The ideal Stoic never ceded to his emotio
ns or fears. Was Pliny hesitant? The Stoic did not act on impulse. When pressure was applied, was he rational? The Stoic had a deep sense of security and inner confidence; he knew that it was in his power to make the right choice.

  And when Pliny was at a sick friend’s bedside, how was he then? Was he calm and accepting of the ill man’s desire for death? He was not. When Pliny was sitting with the ailing Titius Aristo he described himself as attonitus, ‘struck by terror’, a word he used on only one other occasion in his letters, which was when he recalled the state of the crowd which tried to flee the eruption of Vesuvius.75 This time he was too panicked to read, let alone to make notes. Over the course of his life Pliny witnessed the suicides of a large number of his friends. His efforts to save them were almost always in vain. Pliny did not record whether his friend Aristo lived or died, but the moments he spent by his bedside would have reinforced the challenges of Stoicism.

  Seeing how difficult it was to maintain calm in the face of uncertainty might have provided Pliny with some incentive to lead a Stoic life. Despite appreciating the humanitas and sanctitas of the philosophy, however, he chose not to define himself by it. In the years following his encounter with the Stoics in Syria, he came to know a network of Stoic philosophers in Rome. His associations with them would serve him well as he proceeded in his legal career, but disastrously as he came up against the tyranny of Domitian’s rule. Pliny’s decision not to immerse himself too deeply in the precepts of any particular school of thought might even have saved him.

  If the impassioned, wholehearted reverence for Nature that Pliny the Elder inspired in his readers was the least contentious aspect of his philosophy, then it was also the feature of Stoicism that Pliny observed most closely. It was in spring that he had the chance to appreciate the gifts of Nature anew after the long, studious days of winter.