by Daisy Dunn
Once Pliny had started he found it very difficult to stop: ‘My long and deeply pondered love of liberality loosens the bonds that bind me to greed.’29 He had a library built at Comum and put aside a generous sum for its decoration and maintenance. There survives a set of exquisitely carved marbles which are thought to have adorned the column bases of an important building in the town – possibly the library itself. They feature a master or a muse teaching a pupil, a boxing contest, and mythological scenes including Perseus rescuing Andromeda, Leda and the swan, and Apollo with the Delphic tripod.30
To mark the opening of the new library, Pliny delivered a speech to the councillors of Comum. ‘A little too vainglorious and lofty’ was his verdict upon re-reading it some time later.31 He knew that good Stoics ought to be generous but not draw attention to their acts of generosity. Torn, however, between his altruism on the one hand and desire for praise on the other, Pliny had also found himself obliged to enlarge upon the kindnesses his own parents had showered upon the town before him. Such obligations rather hindered his ability to present himself as the modest philanthropist.
Despite this difficulty, he knew that Comum was where he stood the best chance of securing his legacy through the next generation. The truest portrait of Pliny ever to have existed was not a bust or a bronze but the vast panorama of people who gathered here to revere and thank him for the buildings he had financed.
NINE
The Death of Principle
The Country Mouse had never seen anything like it, and sat down to enjoy the luxuries his friend provided: but before they had well begun, the door of the larder opened and someone came in.
From Aesop’s ‘The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse’1
Pliny shared in common with his uncle an enquiring mind, an eye for minutiae, obsessive diligence, and an eagerness to extend the bounds of mortal existence. He also shared his love of stories, not only of the natural world, but of extremes of human behaviour. It is when Pliny digresses on some tale or other that he sounds most like the elder Pliny. He was probably conscious of this: the more he sounded like his uncle, the more he would prove himself worthy of being his adopted son. While Pliny was not inclined to record observations in the manner of a naturalist, he did like to share stories which revealed the gulf between man and Nature to be less yawning than one might have anticipated it to be. The line between man and animal, bird and man, creeping insect and bodily affliction grew hazier with almost every discovery he made.
Nature was never so interesting to Pliny as when it mirrored what he perceived to be a human characteristic. Perhaps he thought of his uncle’s description of birds with the ‘tongues of men’ when Regulus piled his son’s funeral pyre high with parrots and nightingales. In the Natural History, nightingales are said to possess ‘a perfect understanding of music’, breaking the silence of winter by settling in the trees and ‘singing for fifteen days and nights without cease while the buds spring into life’.2 They display what Pliny the Elder had seen as a kind of expertise in the modulation of their song, drawing out a long note in a single exhalation one moment, quavering and trilling the next. Pliny the Elder had shuddered to recall how an actor once served an exorbitant dish consisting purely of birds whose song emulated human speech, ‘seduced to such folly for no other reason than that he might eat an imitation of man’.3
Pliny was as aggrieved as his uncle had been by the idea that humans might punish creatures with near-human traits, and developed it further in his letters. In the Natural History, the sea-dwelling equivalent to the nightingale is the dolphin, ‘the very fastest of all animals, not only of sea creatures, faster than a bird’ which has a short, wide tongue – ‘not unlike a pig’s’ – which allows it to sigh in what Pliny the Elder supposed could be mistaken for a human voice.4 In a letter to his Comum friend Caninius Rufus, Pliny decided to retell a story that had also featured in his uncle’s encyclopaedia. In his version of the tale he went beyond comparing the dolphin’s sigh to a man’s to show that it possessed more humanity and intelligence than humans themselves.
His story is set in the Roman town of Hippo Diarrhytus (Bizerte) on the coast of north Africa, where some boys are holding a competition to swim as far as possible across a lake and towards an estuary leading out to sea. One boy has come into deep water when he sees a dolphin, which proceeds to carry him safely back to shore. Caninius Rufus would have been reminded of a famous Greek story about a musician named Arion, who was said to have been saved by a dolphin after he threw himself into the sea to escape some evil sailors.5 In Pliny’s story, the villain is rather Roman superstition. Having been saved once by the dolphin, the boy returns over several days to play with it, and soon others join in. ‘It is incredible,’ said Pliny, ‘but as true as what I’ve told already, that the dolphin that carried and sported with the boys would also be dragged out onto the land, dry out in the sand, and be rolled back into the sea when it grew hot.’6 Through its tameness and tricks the dolphin wins over the residents who initially feared it. But then one of the Roman governors is driven by ‘crooked belief’ to pour perfume over its back, ‘the novelty and smell of which made it retreat into deeper water’.7 Eventually the dolphin returns, but becomes such an attraction that locals mourn the loss of peace. In a bid to banish the tourists from the town, the dolphin is secretly killed.
This had to be one of the most affecting stories Pliny had heard. ‘With what pity you will weep,’ he wrote to Caninius, whom he hoped would retell it without embellishment. He had captured perfectly in his version the contrast between the dolphin’s intelligence and the humans’ lack of instinct. Pliny found stories like these worthy of inclusion in his letters because they demonstrated the ignorance of assuming man’s superiority over Nature and highlighted the risks of celebrating its more arcane elements over the things ‘under the eyes’. His uncle had displayed a far deeper fascination with wondrous species. In his Natural History he described briefly such phenomena as ‘sciapods’ – one-legged people in India who allegedly reclined on their backs with their legs in the air and shaded themselves from the sun beneath their enormous feet – and individuals in the Balkans with two pupils in each eye who could kill with a look.8 While Pliny the Elder wrote with such conviction as to almost be believable, his nephew evidently had less interest in stories of fabulous creatures than in moral tales.
Pliny’s friends appreciated his appetite for unusual ones and raced to add their own to his repertoire. Of the ‘various miraculous stories from here and there’ which found their way into Pliny’s letters, there was one that challenged more than any other his way of thinking about the tales we tell each other. Like the story of the dolphin, it was concerned with the unpredictable choices humans make in unusual situations. He heard it while he and an elderly friend were sailing over Lake Larius (Como) and passed by a villa with a bedroom overlooking the water.9 Gesturing at the house, his companion began, ‘From that bedroom there, a woman from our town once threw herself – and her husband – to her death.’ The wife, he revealed, had bound herself to her husband with a rope, and together they had toppled over the window sill, sunk deep beneath the water, and drowned. Earlier in the day, her husband had confessed something to her. For some time, he said, he had been suffering from a terrible, ulcerating rash across his genitals. She insisted on taking a look at it to decide whether there was any hope. No sooner had he raised his toga to reveal his sores than his wife had deemed it terminal and decided that they were better off dead.
Pliny offered no comment on the unfortunate condition of the husband or speculation as to what might have been wrong with him. He was fascinated only by the courage and selflessness of the wife. She had not been thinking of her own health when she resolved to throw herself from the window. She had seemingly been imagining the rumours people would spread of her husband’s disregard for his family had he committed suicide without her complicity. Her suicide gave his suicide a certain dignity. But was her decision not rather precipitate? Had the
couple even attempted to find a cure?
The longest list of remedies for sores and ulcers was to be found in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History.10 Drawing, presumably, on what he had learned from the elderly plantsman, Antonius Castor, Pliny the Elder had assembled a sprawling list of natural treatments. Greater Centaury could be applied to the skin as a powder or lotion, while the leaves of the Lesser were suitable for rubbing into unsightly swellings and sores. Then there was gentian; chelidonia; vervain; potentilla; salt and honey; butter; the ashes of a cremated dog’s head; animal dung; millipedes ground up with turpentine and ochre; and smashed snails. There was also a stringent concoction of hemlock, wheat, wine, and white sedum (aizoum), which Pliny the Elder prescribed for ‘herpetic sores’ – a possible diagnosis of the man’s rash. The herpes virus had been known to the Greeks since at least the fifth century BC, when Hippocrates, the father of medicine, likened it to a serpent. It crawled beneath the skin, undetected, then lay dormant, waiting to break out. Pliny the Elder recalled that the Greeks had also named a particular animal ‘herpes’ (‘creeper’) because they believed it could help to treat the sores.11 Neither Pliny nor the couple from Comum seemed to realise that the infection was transmitted sexually, however. The wife was perhaps right to deem it terminal in so far as it is incurable, but wrong if she assumed that the sores were fatal. Had her husband waited a few more days, he might have seen his rash disappear, at least for a while.
Their suicides made a deep impression upon Pliny, who found himself less perturbed by the details than by the fact that he had not heard them before now. The story reinforced his suspicion that it is not what you do but who you are that matters. Some of the noblest deeds go unnoticed simply because they are performed by ordinary people. Every little thing a rich and famous man does, by contrast, is broadcast whether it is worthy or not.
This sad realisation sent Pliny on a trail of thoughts about the men and women who were remembered for their self-inflicted deaths – and those who were not. The most startling reports of suicide had reached Rome from the Jewish War in the late sixties and early seventies AD. Pliny would have passed the Arch of Titus with its cluttered scenes of war spoils whenever he walked through the Velia on his way to and from his home on the Esquiline Hill.12 But Pliny was not thinking of the Jews. The suicides he recalled in his letters were less recent than those of the Jewish War, but distinctly more local. He thought of Caecina Paetus, a former Roman senator who was involved in a rebellion in Claudius’ time, accused of treason, and forced to kill himself.13 And of Caecina Paetus’ wife Arria who, on sensing his fear, was said to have taken a dagger, stabbed herself, then handed him the weapon to do the same with the words, ‘It does not hurt, Paetus.’
A large menorah was among the objects taken from the Temple of Jerusalem and paraded through Rome when Vespasian and Titus celebrated a triumph for their Jewish War in AD 71. The occasion is commemorated in this relief from the Arch of Titus, which was erected after the emperor’s sudden death a decade later. Another panel on the arch shows the much-missed emperor being carried by an eagle in apotheosis.
It was while he reflected on these stories that Pliny began to reconsider his position on suicide itself. He had known Arria and considered her a friend, but after hearing about the suicide of the wife from Comum, he came to realise that Arria had acted when ‘glory and immortality were before her eyes’, which to his mind made her death perhaps the less honourable of the two.14 He began to see that suicide was something people could turn to in order to achieve fame. The idea repulsed him. Fame was not necessarily Arria’s motivation, but a conversation he had had with her granddaughter encouraged Pliny to believe that Arria ought to be remembered for the acts in her past which were truer testaments to her integrity. He would record these acts in his letters and in so doing rehabilitate her character in his own mind.
Pliny learned that Arria had once tended her husband and son when they were unwell and, when the boy died, concealed his death from her husband. She used to tell him that the boy was improving every day, ‘then, when the tears she held in for so long overcame her and began to fall, she would leave the room’ and only return when she had dried her eyes and composed herself.15 This, not the suicide, was surely the most courageous thing she had ever done.
Pliny found Arria’s granddaughter Fannia to be equally strong-willed. She had seen her father, Thrasea Paetus, and husband, Helvidius Priscus, put to death under Nero and Vespasian respectively and was determined to honour their memories. Thrasea had been a distinguished senator with a keen interest in Stoicism, and Pliny knew of his many aphorisms, including: ‘He who hates vices, hates mankind.’16
Some vices, however, were too terrible not to hate. When Nero kicked his pregnant wife Poppaea to death in AD 65, Thrasea chose not to attend her funeral. He had then found himself facing a list of accusations carried by a disgruntled senator he had once prosecuted for extortion. The most serious of them was that he had failed to attend not only Poppaea’s funeral but also the past three years’ meetings in the senate. On one side there were claims that Thrasea had supporters, which made him a potential threat to Nero’s power. On the other, his political secession and purported focus on private legal cases posed the greater risk to national stability, for ‘if many dared to do the same, it would be war’.17 The tense relationship between Thrasea and Nero was likened to that between Cato the Younger and Julius Caesar. When it emerged that Thrasea had been spending his time writing a biography of none other than the Stoic, Cato the Younger, Nero’s fears seemed to be confirmed: Thrasea was in bitter opposition to his rule.18
Stoics were encouraged to play an active role in public life but might withdraw if they considered the man they were serving to be morally corrupt. While Stoicism was unlikely to turn a man into a demagogue, Thrasea’s interests in the philosophy had only made him more suspect.19 Nero had decreed that the Stoic Seneca commit suicide on grounds of having conspired against him. The Stoics had increasingly come to be seen as troublemakers. Thrasea’s son-in-law Helvidius, a senator raised with Stoic beliefs, had campaigned for the senate to exercise authority independently of the emperor’s desires and had shown Vespasian little respect. He was deemed a particular threat to the emperor because he behaved ‘as if it were the task of his philosophy to besmirch those in power and to stir up the crowds, to confound the established order and foment change’.20 Neither Nero nor Vespasian had been prepared to wait to see what might happen. Thrasea was condemned to death by Nero in AD 66, while his son-in-law went into exile a number of times before being executed upon Vespasian’s orders about a decade later.
Fannia waited until Domitian was emperor before attempting to do something to honour both men. She had secreted away her husband’s diaries and now sought a biographer brave enough to commemorate the lives of the men she had loved. Pliny saw two of his friends take up the task. Arulenus Rusticus, a consul who had encouraged him in his youth, agreed to write the life of Fannia’s late father.21 The biography of Fannia’s late husband, meanwhile, was to be written by Pliny’s colleague in the courts, Herennius Senecio.
If Pliny was uncertain as to why his friend Senecio had failed to climb the senatorial ladder with the same speed as he himself had, he now knew. The orator had withdrawn from political life in order to write. He was treading a perilous line considering the fate of the subject of his biography, and unfortunately seemed destined to go the same way. Compounding his withdrawal from public life with his decidedly Stoic book, Herennius Senecio found himself in hot water. In AD 93, in an uncomfortable echo of the events of Nero’s rule, he was summoned before the senate. Here began a series of trials that culminated in Domitian’s expulsion of philosophers from Italy.
Of all the crimes committed in the period around Herennius Senecio’s arrest, ‘none seemed more atrocious than the fact that a senator should have laid his hands … on a senator in the senate house’.22 Pliny was back in Rome with Tacitus in AD 93 to witness the onslaught of senator aga
inst senator, in senatu senator senatori (Pliny’s polyptoton conveyed the dreadfulness of the scene) as their colleagues laid out the case against the Stoic writers.
Senecio spoke in his own defence and confessed that Fannia had approached him to write a biography of her late husband.23 She was then summoned to stand. The senator prosecuting her was a notorious political informer named Mettius Carus. Did she ask Senecio to write this book, he asked her?
‘I did ask him.’
‘Did you give Senecio your husband’s diaries?’
‘I did.’
‘Did your mother know?’
‘She did not know.’
Truly, the spirit of Fannia’s relations was with her as she withstood the force of the prosecution. Behind her ‘pleasant and charming’ facade she was every bit as tough as her late grandmother who had plunged a dagger in her chest and told her husband it did not hurt.24
The questioning was in all cases fierce and relentless. As Mettius Carus proceeded with his case, Regulus, Pliny’s fiend from the Centumviral Court, stepped in and began to savage one of the defendants. Assisting in the prosecution, Regulus went so far as to brand Arulenus Rusticus ‘Stoicorum simiam’ (‘the Stoics’ Ape’) for his authorship of the biography. He was particularly proud of that line. Domitian was said to have dreamed that Rusticus had come upon him with a sword.25 With his clever turn of phrase, Regulus saw him reduced to an animal.