In the Shadow of Vesuvius

by Daisy Dunn

  PART THREE

  SPRING

  SIX

  Pliniana

  Harsh winter makes way for the welcome return of spring

  And its breezes, and machines lug dry hulls to sea

  And cows cease caring for their stables, farmers for their fires,

  The meadows are no longer white with alabaster frost.

  From Horace, Odes, 1.4

  Spring came in February, turning the ground from white to green and, in Laurentum, to purple, as Pliny’s terrace became ‘fragrant with violets’ and his kitchen garden burst into life. There is an old saying, still cherished in Italy, that ‘out of bad, comes good’ – ‘Dal male nasce il bene’, or, ex malo bonum.1 Nature will make amends for the losses it inflicts. The sun will thaw the frost. The bald soil will recover its tendrils. The elements may always be in battle, but in spring one begins to realise that what they really seek is balance.

  Pliny the Elder knew that nothing ever stayed still. ‘Rain falls,’ he wrote, ‘clouds draw in, rivers dry up, hail plummets down … steam rises from the heights and sinks to the depths again … so Nature goes to and fro of its own accord.’2 Spring exemplified better than any other season the changeability of Nature. ‘Don’t be deceived,’ advised Ovid on the first day of spring, ‘cold days lie ahead of you yet;/ Winter leaves prominent signs of itself behind as it departs.’3 The unpredictability of the seasons may have been a source of frustration to the landowner but it was also what made him feel alive. As Pliny the Elder explained, we experience life best through vicissitudes, ‘for what real joys does Fortune bestow except those which follow disaster, or what true disasters except those which follow great joy?’4

  About twenty years after Pliny the Elder died in the ash that blanketed Campania like snow, spring returned foliage to the fields and blossom to the cherry trees, the most glorious of which was known locally as the ‘Pliniana’.5 The elder Pliny had observed in his Natural History that flowers wither as quickly as they bloom for the sake of warning men of the evanescence of life.6 Nature may not ‘exist for the pleasure of man’, but it does well to remind him of his limitations. No flower could have prompted Pliny the Elder to muse more deeply on his ephemerality than the cherry blossom. One pictures him almost as a young A. E. Housman, pondering his mortality beneath the ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry’.7

  The cherry tree originated in the East and displayed its otherworldliness in its blossom, the clusters so light that they blew open in the wind, so taken with their own gravity that they bowed from their branches, as though snow was still weighing them down. The first cherry to grow in Italy had been carried all the way from Pontus in Asia Minor by the Roman general Lucullus in the mid first century BC.8 Many different genera had since been cultivated across the countryside, but Pliny the Elder had deemed the Pliniana to be the best of the hardy varieties to grow in Italy. He might well have assumed that one of his ancestors had introduced it from overseas.9 Traditionally planted at the same time as lettuce, upon the winter solstice, it was each spring ‘among the first of the fruit to pay back its annual thanks to the farmer’.10

  After the cherry blossom came the beginnings of the figs. Pliny grew his own in the grounds of his villa at Laurentum. The gestatio or driveway to his house was circular with a central island edged with box and, in the gaps, with rosemary, which was more tolerant than the hedge of the sea’s spray. In the middle of the island was an ornamental vine and around that was a melee of mulberry and fig trees, ‘of which the soil there is particularly supportive, though it is rather harsher to other trees’.11 Pliny would have to wait until late summer before his figs were ready to harvest (they might even fruit twice in a warm year), but to see the green fruit begin to set against the new leaves was nonetheless an important moment in spring.12

  The appearance of the first fig leaves had been long taken as a sign that the new season was afoot and the sea ready to navigate after the storms of winter. Although he recommended waiting until summer to embark, the Greek poet Hesiod, a near contemporary of Homer and important source for Pliny the Elder, described spring as the first sailing season in his Works and Days, a seventh-century BC poem on the farmer’s year:

  When first man sees at the crown of the fig-tree

  A leaf as big as the footprint a crow makes

  As it goes, the sea may then be navigated.

  This is the spring sailing season. I for my part

  Could not enjoy it, for to my mind it gives no pleasure;

  It is snatched. You would struggle to avoid danger, but

  Even so men proceed with it in their idiocy

  For trade in goods means life for wretched mortals

  Though it is terrible to die beneath the waves.13

  For Pliny, too, spring was snatched: a season ‘where nothing is lost from the day and very little taken from the night’.14 While he fretted over the night-time writing hours he lost as the days grew steadily longer, sailors recommenced the voyages which had provoked his uncle’s no less than Hesiod’s ambivalence towards the season.15 The ‘wretched mortals’ who sailed for ‘trade in goods’ in Hesiod’s age were still risking their lives at sea. As Pliny’s uncle complained, the expansion of empire had led men to become only more degenerate since Hesiod’s time, as thirst for knowledge ceded to avarice.

  The fig itself had represented to Pliny the Elder the folly of expansion and slight grounds upon which Romans were prepared to initiate war. By the time he was writing his encyclopaedia it had become folklore that Rome had sacked Carthage for the sake of a single fruit. The First and Second Punic Wars were waged between Rome and Carthage in the third century BC and resulted in Rome fortifying its control over the western Mediterranean. Hannibal had been defeated at Zama, and Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia and the Iberian Peninsula were now theirs. The Romans resolved to destroy Carthage once and for all by declaring war again in 149 BC. In his determination to see Carthage fall, the senator and historian Cato the Elder was said to have brought a fresh north African fig with him to the senate house and asked his fellow senators to guess when it had been picked. When he told them that it had still been on its tree two days previously they were alarmed at Carthage being so close – and, ‘at once’, said Pliny the Elder, the Third Punic War began.16

  Although native to the Near East, figs had been cultivated by the Romans for hundreds of years and looked upon with such pride that, after the Gauls migrated into Italy in the second and first centuries BC, it was supposed that they had done so out of greed for dried figs (as well as Italian wine, olives, and grapes).17 Pliny the Elder provided 111 observations on figs in one section of his Natural History alone.18 Pliny may have struggled to remember them all, but whether he needed a laxative or a throat lozenge, a balm to soothe a wasp sting or a feed to fatten goose and sow livers to make foie gras, he could never have been short of uses for his figs.19

  Despite owning thousands of acres across Italy, Pliny was convinced that an intelligent man needed little more than a few fruit trees and a modest path to make himself happy. ‘Getting to know one’s vines and counting one’s fruit trees,’ he said, is the surest way of ‘freeing the mind and refreshing the eyes.’20 It also roused the ardent gardener in him. His first response upon receiving some dates from a friend one year was that they would ‘have to compete with’ his own figs and mushrooms.21 Pliny followed his uncle’s advice in growing his own mushrooms (if anyone was capable of identifying the safe ones it was going to be the farmer and picker). He grew not fungi but boleti, the variety a Roman served with oysters or turbot, or two-pound mullet if he wanted to impress his guests.22

  The first fruits of spring appealed to Pliny’s mind as they did to his stomach. The chief pleasure lay in their variety. When Pliny advised alternating business and leisure like ‘savoury and spicy foods with sweet’, he was thinking of how ‘our creative mind is replenished by switching from one study to the next’ like soil ‘refreshed by various changes of seed’.23 Unlike the vicissitudes
his uncle discerned in Nature, the changes of seed and study Pliny envisaged were perfectly controllable. We sow the seeds of our own creativity, he suggested, by favouring variety over uniformity. Just as man stimulates Nature by varying the seeds he sows, so the fruits those seeds grow into stimulate man when applied variously to his palate. Man and Nature benefit from each other, as Pliny the Elder well knew. The promise of inspiration provided Pliny with an incentive to deviate from his winter routine of work, work, and more work, to vary the vegetables he grew as well as the foods he ate. It was in spring, a season of long waits and short rewards, that he finally took the chance to refresh his mind and palate through welcoming a change in course.

  The first fruits of spring made Pliny ravenous for poetry. As soon as it was warm enough to sit outside he made his way to Rome, where ‘there was barely a day in the whole month of April when someone was not giving a recital’.24 Pliny sometimes found himself alone in his enthusiasm for the latest compositions. He would arrive at a reading and look around and notice how fidgety the other listeners were. Some arrived late and others slipped out early. Some sat down to gossip and others demanded to know how long each poem would be. The generous Emperor Titus was said to have sighed ‘I have wasted a day’ when he realised it was evening and he had not yet bestowed a gift upon his people.25 Pliny felt the same about days which passed without poetry. ‘Today,’ he observed, ‘he who has all the time in the world is invited [to a recital] with good notice and reminded repeatedly, but still either fails to turn up or turns up but complains that he has wasted a day – because he has not wasted it!’26

  Pliny did not go to poetry readings because he thought he ought to or because he believed they were good for him. He appreciated the skill and wit and indeed the courage that were required to compose poetry for popular consumption. An amateur poet himself, he was known to give readings at small gatherings, fending off the critics who accused him of pride in order to use the opportunity to gain distance from his work. He was often amending speeches after reading them aloud to friends, and hoped that the process of reciting his poems would help similarly with their editing – for an audience would indicate how they felt about one line or another through ‘their facial expressions, their eyes, the nodding of their heads, their hands, the murmurs or the silence’.27 A writer can always distinguish between what is genuine appreciation, and what feigned ‘out of humanity’.

  There was a large part of him that yearned to be a famous poet – a Callimachus, perhaps, or someone like Calvus, who had distinguished himself as both a lawyer and a poet in the circle of Catullus in the previous century. His only worry was that if he moonlighted as a poet, he might no longer be taken seriously as a senator and lawyer. Ever the pragmatist, Pliny therefore resolved to justify his poetic ambitions by drawing up a list of the most respectable men in history who had expressed themselves in the kind of literature that proclaimed ‘I’m human’: Cicero and Calvus, Asinius Pollio, Messala, Hortensius, Brutus, Sulla, the politician Catulus, Scaevola, Sulpicius, Varro, Torquatus (in fact, several Torquati), Memmius, Lentulus Gaetulicus, Seneca the Younger, Verginius Rufus, Julius Caesar – and that was not to mention the emperors.28

  The reputations of these men had suffered less for what they wrote than for what others had written about them. Julius Caesar had been furious when, in the fifties BC, Catullus had branded him ‘a shameless, grasping gambler’, an ‘adulterer’, and lover of ‘little girls’ in his poems, but forgave him.29 Pliny would never have gone so far. He heroised Catullus but struggled to write as uninhibitedly, ‘not because I am more serious, but because I am more timid’.30 As the Veronese always remembered, Pliny’s uncle had invoked Catullus as his ‘fellow countryman’; his native Comum and Catullus’ Verona both having formed part of Cisalpine Gaul. Pliny the Elder had even given his encyclopaedia an unexpectedly playful preface by addressing Titus as iucundissime (‘most pleasant chap’), a thoroughly Catullan term of endearment. Catullus was the romantic and expressive poet that the younger Pliny most dreamed of emulating.

  Pliny’s friends knew where his aspirations lay. Good ones were willing to humour him. He might have seen through their flattery (he suspected even booksellers of exaggerating when they told him his work was popular), but he could only smile when one compared him to his idols Catullus and Calvus in a fawning poem:31

  I sing songs in verse concise

  As once my dear Catullus, Calvus too.

  All the poets of old. But what are these to me?

  Pliny is the only precedent, I say,

  Preferring his poems short on departing the forum,

  Seeking something to love and supposing he’s loved back.

  Come now, ye who love, love no more.

  What a man, that Pliny, how many Catos he is worth!32

  In reality Pliny was more Cato than Catullus. He could not write of affairs with other men’s wives or of ‘nine consecutive fucks’ at midday. Nor, as a lawyer, was he about to threaten fellow citizens with rape – pedicabo … et irrumabo – or to jest about having pockets full of cobwebs. The sight of a joke or rude graffito scrawled across a voting tablet would have delighted Catullus; it incensed Pliny.33

  If poetry is a ‘secretion’, as the cherry-loving A. E. Housman famously said, then it was for Pliny ‘a morbid secretion, like the pearl in the oyster’, not ‘a natural secretion, like turpentine in the fir’.34 (Housman had read Pliny’s letters closely and offered suggestions on an edition of the text prepared by a classics don in 1906.35 He seems to have found little inspiration in Pliny’s literary style, however.) But while poetry did not come to Pliny as naturally as seven-hour declamations or competitive vegetable growing, he persevered. He wrote his first major work, a Greek tragedy, when he was just fourteen.36 Five years later, his journey home from Syria inspired an elegy on the sea and the Aegean island of Icaria after he was detained there by bad weather. Sporadically throughout his adulthood – whether over dinner, in the bath or on sleepless nights or in the carriage – Pliny turned his hand to writing poetry. He even completed a volume of hendecasyllables, energetic, eleven-syllable lines of verse first made famous in Rome by Catullus.37 In his efforts to emulate the style of the earlier poet, Pliny steadily began to find the confidence to display something of his candour in his own lines, as he explained in a letter to a friend:

  In these poems I jest and play and love and grieve and moan and rage. I go from describing something simply to elaborately and aim at variety so as to please some people with some things and everyone with a few. If some bits seem a bit too ripe to you, then it will be a sign of your learning that you can appreciate how men of utmost standing and severity who wrote such verses in the past did not only not abstain from lasciviousness – they went as far as to express it in the plainest vocabulary.38

  This was Pliny at his most defensive. Would people laugh to read a lawyer’s woes and erotic dreams? Did a serious man debase himself by sharing his private thoughts? How ‘ripe’ was too ripe? You cannot help but wonder what – or whom – he could possibly have been writing about to be so nervous.

  Pliny married at least twice, and while he never mentions so much as his first wife’s name in his surviving letters, he proved himself quite the romantic in his letters to his second.39 He married Calpurnia within perhaps a year of the death of his first wife in about AD 97.40 Orphaned as a child, Calpurnia had been raised by her aunt, whom Pliny had known since he was a boy because she was an old friend of his mother. ‘We thank you,’ he wrote to her after she arranged the match: ‘I because you gave her to me, she because you gave me to her, as if we were chosen for each other.’41 Pliny was in his mid to late thirties at the time of the wedding and more understanding than many of his contemporaries of a young woman’s desires. He was always being asked to find husbands for his friends’ daughters and would consider a man eligible only if he were rich, accomplished, handsome – specifically ‘rosy-cheeked’ – ‘for some sort of reward ought to be given in exchange for a
girl’s virginity’.42 Under no illusion as to what he could offer his own bride, he confessed to her aunt that ‘it is not my age or body that she loves, which gradually declines and decays, but my renown’.43

  Once, when work kept him from seeing her, Pliny presented himself to Calpurnia as an exclusus amator. In the love poetry of Ovid and others, the ‘locked-out lover’ weeps on the doorstep of his beloved in the hope that she will let him in. He is young and idealistic while Pliny was level-headed and nearing middle age, but the passionate trope appealed to him in his loneliness as no doubt it did to Calpurnia in hers.44 For all his expressions of love and longing, the letter was not, however, in the least sense ‘ripe’. None of the surviving letters to Calpurnia are. The lascivious poems over which Pliny felt such unease were apparently not intended for her.

  Only once in his letters did Pliny quote from one of his fruitier poems. He was suffering from insomnia when he wrote it, restless and fuddled from having heard a poem, supposedly by Cicero, in which the orator bemoaned his male secretary Tiro’s refusal to kiss him. The poem was probably spurious, but this did not seem to trouble or even to occur to Pliny, who welcomed it as proof that ‘the minds of great men rejoice/ in natural wit and charm of variety rich’.45 Hearing Cicero’s sorry complaints roused something deep inside him. In his wakefulness, Pliny found himself able to express what he had bottled up for some time. Through the example of ‘Cicero’, he discovered an inner confidence to ‘plough out in verse that very thing that had triggered me to write’:

  ‘Why after this,’ I ask, ‘Should I conceal my affairs

  And be afraid to bring some light to my Tiro’s wiles and confess

  That I have known the alluring refusals of a Tiro

  Which furtively heap flame on new flame?’46

  They were not the lightest or freest or most elegant of words (he admitted that he was out of practice), but Pliny had at last found a voice in which to express his private feelings – ‘to love and grieve and moan and rage’. In his rather overladen hexameters he gave up the fight to conceal his experience of sexual frustration. This frustration was brought on not by his wife, the mild-mannered Calpurnia, but by a fickle and teasing youth. Was he a boy? Or was he, like Tiro, a former slave of similar age to his master? Pliny was playing a poetic game in likening himself to Cicero, but he was also revealing something of his own struggle as an ordinarily buttoned-up, self-regarding man of responsibilities in thrall to a frivolous male ‘tease’.47 Pliny would never write with the confidence and elegance of Catullus or Calvus, but he had taken a leap, and in doing so satisfied his literary if not his sexual appetite.