by Daisy Dunn
As admiral of the fleet, Pliny the Elder was alert to the dangers of quails. The quail (Latin: coturnix), he wrote, prefers the ground to the sky – one is shown in the claws of a cat in this mosaic from Pompeii – but can also settle on sail cloth at night, causing ships to sink.
It was a pleasure to dash those proud, proud faces to the ground, to strike them with swords, to savage them with axes, as if blood and pain would follow from each and every blow. No one was so measured in his joy and late-found happiness as not to appear to see the lacerated limbs and truncated bodies as a kind of revenge. Those fearsome, horrid portraits were thrown down and cooked in the flames so that they might be transformed from a source of terror and threat for the pleasure and use of men.13
Pliny the Elder had mourned the loss of faces from history. The melting of Domitian’s busts into liquid bronze satisfied his nephew’s desire that something good should come from evil. If any sculptures of Augustus with offensively edited faces remained in his own house, Pliny would have been careful to remove them before transferring the rest of the collection to the local town for public display. Pliny was planning to construct a new temple for the statues when he fell sick.
In about AD 97, when he was in his mid-thirties, Pliny had the misfortune to contract ‘a very serious’ illness that put him ‘in danger of [his] life’.14 The worst of his symptoms was a raging fever which not even a rigorous rub down with oil could quell. His household called a doctor. Pliny had often told his slaves that if ever he was to become very unwell and lose his senses, they were not to give him anything other than what the doctor prescribed – ‘And know that if you did give me something … I would punish you in the same way other people would for being denied something.’15 When the doctor arrived Pliny was no less resolute. Arpocras, an Egyptian whose particular expertise lay in massage, exercise, and nutrition, made him up a preparation. Pliny refused to swallow it.
Many Romans were innately distrustful of doctors, who were notorious for their exorbitant fees and questionable remedies. Tombstones bore outrageous epitaphs which testified to their right to kill with impunity: ‘A team of doctors caused his death’, they proclaimed with a healthy dose of black humour.16 Pliny the Elder had taken it upon himself to speak out against the entire profession ‘on behalf of the senate and Roman people and 600 years of Rome’.17 He had railed against the quackery and the thievery, the arrogance and stupidity, the greed and incompetence: only a doctor could charge a fortune for his services, confuse cinnabar with red lead and get away with poisoning his patients.18 Bring a team of them together and all they would do was argue.
Like Pliny’s specialist Arpocras, doctors commonly came to Italy from overseas, a fact that had done little to endear them to Pliny the Elder, who scorned the enervating influence their prescriptions seemed to have upon the population at large: ‘there is no greater cause for the loosening of morals than medicine’.19 Even the healthy had taken to languishing in boiling hot baths, vomiting their food in order to consume more potions, smothering themselves in resins to remove hair from their bodies to expose their pudenda to view.20 One of the most famous doctors of the past few centuries had recommended baths and music as a means of rebalancing the atoms in the body, and wine as an efficacious medicine for sundry complaints. Asclepiades was said to have left his native Bithynia in the late second century BC and established his surgery in Rome only after failing to make enough money as an orator.21 Nonetheless, Pliny the Elder was so anxious to promote natural remedies over foreign potions that he was prepared to share some of Asclepiades’ more appealing ideas. In his Natural History he noted that ‘the school of Asclepiades’ prescribed onions to improve colour and strength, soften the bowels and relieve haemorrhoids after bathing; and that suspended beds or hammocks, which Asclepiades allegedly invented, could be used to rock the sick gently to sleep.22
While Pliny refused to take Arpocras’ medicine, he allowed him to be on hand when, on the twentieth day of his illness, he decided that he would finally take a bath. A magnificent suite had been constructed at his Tuscan estate when it passed into imperial hands earlier in the century, with black and white geometric mosaic floors, an undressing room, a frigidarium (cold bath) and hot room.23 Two of the three baths were positioned in direct sunlight. The ailing Pliny was on the verge of being plunged into one of them when he overheard Arpocras talking with his team of doctors. The whole, delicate operation ground to a halt as Pliny insisted on knowing what they were saying. Arpocras had no choice but to admit that, while they supposed a bath would be safe, they could not be absolutely certain. Abandoning his bath without so much as a hesitation, Pliny returned to his bedchamber and ‘composed [his] mind and face’.24
Pliny later looked back on this moment with enormous pride. In a time of uncertainty, he had proven his capacity for temperance. Like a good Stoic, he had compensated for the weakness of his body with the strength of his mind – and eventually recovered. The fact that Arpocras had done very little to save his patient was what made him so admirable. He had not forced Pliny to take his medicine. He had not expressed a strong opinion either way as to whether Pliny ought to bathe. He had allowed him to remain master of his own body and mind. Later, when he was better, Pliny lobbied the emperor to bestow the citizenship of Alexandria and Rome upon his doctor as a reward for his services, and gave one of his nurses a farm.25
Pliny’s experience of sickness, both his own and that of his friends, taught him two lessons. The first was that ‘we are at our best when we are ill’.26 When we are suffering, we dream not of extravagant dinner parties or sex or other forms of pleasure, but of water, baths, fresh springs – perhaps, at most, a little wine to dull the pain.27 Our thoughts vacillate between simple and higher things. Just as the Christians would speak of trials which ‘test your faith to see whether or not it is strong and pure’, Pliny saw illness as an opportunity for reckoning.28 He understood that when mortality is weighing upon us, our thoughts turn naturally to the gods and to the end. If there is anything we can do in our final moments to be looked upon more kindly by those on earth and those above, we do it.
Out of his first observations Pliny forged a second adage: ‘When we are well, we should strive to be the sort of men we vowed to be in future when we were unwell.’29 With this, Pliny believed that he had captured in a single line what philosophers had dedicated hundreds of volumes of text in trying to teach. It was presumptuous of him, for although his phrase captured the frustrations and regrets and promises of the sick, it did not explain how we might hold on to them. We may ‘strive’ to be better, but what is to stop our ambitions from fading when we are returned to full health? Pliny ought to have explained that the hardest part comes in remembering the depth of fear that drives us to bargain with god in the first place. It is only when fear and self-knowledge remain, after all, that we can use them as forces for self-improvement.
There was little chance of Pliny’s thoughts of illness fading when Calpurnia came ‘in very great danger’ of her life as well. She did not realise she was pregnant. She missed the early signs, the ‘headaches, dizziness and impaired vision, loss of appetite and vomiting’ that Pliny the Elder’s Natural History taught women to expect on the tenth day after conception.30 She missed, too, the symptoms of exhaustion which occur ‘when the embryo is growing hair and at full moon, a time that is particularly disturbing to unborn babies’. Calpurnia might have been forgiven for her initial oversight had she been expecting a boy, for male foetuses were said to cause their mothers less trouble than girl foetuses, which make their mothers’ legs and groin swell and their weight soar to ‘unbearable’ heights. Even if she was pregnant with a girl, however, Pliny’s uncle would have expected her to have realised by the ninetieth day, for this was when female babies began to move in the womb.31
Pliny the Elder had consulted the work of female obstetricians, midwives, and what we might call ‘sex workers’ when he was preparing his passages on gynaecological health. Salpe and Sotira we
re Greek obstetrices. Elephantis was the author of an illustrated manual of sexual positions, Olympias was a female doctor from Thebes, and Lais, who shared her name with a famous Greek courtesan, something between the two. Pliny the Elder spoke of obstetricians and prostitutes in the same breath, convinced there was little to separate them when their work required an equal familiarity with genitalia.32 Despite using their work as sources, Pliny the Elder remained largely ignorant of female anatomy. The gynaecological sections of his encyclopaedia are peculiarly steeped in superstition. In the fourth century BC, Aristotle had considered menstruating women capable of turning mirrors cloudy just by looking at them. Pliny the Elder developed the idea further, explaining that, when a woman is bleeding: ‘Must grows sour at her approach, at her touch, the crops become sterile, grafts die, shoots in the garden are frazzled, fruit falls from trees beneath which she sits; the shine of mirrors is dulled by her reflection, steel becomes less sharp, ivory less gleaming, bees die in the hive, bronze and even iron immediately grow rusty and develop a foul smell, and dogs develop rabies by tasting the blood, and their bite is utterly poisonous.’33
These sections of the encyclopaedia could not have been of much use to Calpurnia who, ‘like a girl’, discovered she was pregnant only when it was too late. Her miscarriage was a devastating shock. Although Pliny did not blame her for losing the child, he did blame her inexperience. Owing to her youth and failure to notice that she was pregnant she ‘omitted to do the things one ought to protect one’s pregnancy, and did the things she ought not to have done’. The things she ought not to have done might have filled an encyclopaedia of their own, so precarious was the condition of pregnancy. Sneezing, even opening one’s mouth too strenuously were deemed sufficient to induce miscarriage. ‘The gait and everything that could possibly be spoken about is so significant to pregnant women,’ wrote Pliny the Elder, ‘that if they eat salty foods, they will give birth to a child without fingernails.’
When Pliny learned what had happened, he wrote to Calpurnia’s aunt to ask her whether she might explain the situation to her father, for such understanding ‘came more easily to women’.34 But he also felt he ought to write to Calpurnia’s grandfather himself. Calpurnius Fabatus was a powerful equestrian from Comum who had once narrowly escaped Nero’s wrath when he was falsely accused of being privy to acts of incest and dark arts.35 Perhaps hardened by the experience, he was rather an intimidating figure, but as Pliny knew only too well, yearned for great-grandchildren.36 After torturing himself with thoughts of the easy route to power a potential son would have through both his great-grandfather’s connections and his own, Pliny tried to be pragmatic. The one hope to take from this tragedy was that there would be healthy children born soon. ‘For her mistake,’ Calpurnia had paid a heavy price and endangered her own life. She would be more careful next time. Her miscarriage was proof of her fertility. It could only be so long before she conceived again.
Weak and thin, Calpurnia travelled to Campania ‘for the sake of [her] health’.37 She could have gone to the west coast, or to Comum, or to the Alps, but instead headed for the very region where Vesuvius had spread its virulence not two decades earlier. The return of life and relative normality to Campania had apparently helped to restore its reputation as a place of fertile abundance. On returning to his native Neapolis after the eruption, a poet named Statius had asked whether future generations would believe what was buried beneath the regions near Vesuvius, ‘when the crops and these abandoned soils grow green again’.38 By the time Calpurnia arrived, vegetation had even returned to the worst-affected areas, emerging through the rubble of Pompeii.39 Already new buildings had begun to encroach upon the zone where no one in AD 79 could have imagined they would ever rise again.
Calpurnia might have stayed at the villa owned by her grandfather.40 His Villa Camilliana in Campania was old and dilapidated, but on visiting it one day Pliny found that its ‘more valuable aspects are either still intact or only very mildly damaged’ and proposed to have it restored. Although business prevented Pliny from accompanying his wife this time, he suffered no apparent anxiety about returning to the region where his uncle had died when he did go to stay there on other occasions.41 As for Calpurnia, he was overcome by anxiety for her general well-being the moment she left.
He wrote her many letters while she was away. They were often shorter than those he sent his colleagues and friends, but what they lacked in length they made up for in feeling. The letters left her in no doubt of how difficult he found it to be separated from her when she was at her weakest:
Never have I complained more about the responsibilities of my work, which have not allowed me to accompany or even follow you on to Campania … I was particularly anxious to be with you now, so that I might judge with my own eyes the strength and weight you gain, and whether you are borne safely through the pleasures of your sojourn and the abundance of the region.42
In her absence, he admitted, ‘I fear everything, imagine everything.’43 He begged her to write to him once, even twice, a day, ‘to delight and to torture me’.44 Calpurnia agreed and told him that her one consolation while they were apart was to hold his books and gather them beside her where he usually lay. In place of his blood and bones was his scholarship. A valid substitute for the tireless scholar. Pliny in turn wandered to her rooms as he usually did in the middle hours of the day and despaired upon finding them empty. He took her letters in his hands, read them, re-read them as he did his legal speeches, and left as sullen as he came.
Seldom did Pliny lay himself so bare. He wrote with such affection, such concern for the happiness and health of his wife, that it is perhaps not surprising that he was upheld as a model husband still hundreds of years after his death. In the early eighteenth century, the editor of The Tatler, Sir Richard Steele, a bachelor with ‘no other notions of conjugal tenderness but what I learn from books’, was so taken with Pliny’s letters to Calpurnia that he felt inspired to reproduce three of them in translation in an essay for the journal.45 Despite being written by a ‘heathen’, the missives seemed to promote the kind of concordance and affection that he imagined was still desirable between husband and wife. In particular, Pliny’s tender words to the ailing Calpurnia reminded Steele of the saying of one of his married friends: ‘Sickness itself is pleasant to a man that is attended in it by one whom he dearly loves.’ Pliny gave the impression of suffering as acutely as his wife. His letters revealed to Steele not only the agonies of separation and anxiety, but the solution to tempering their effects. If struck down with lovesickness, Pliny showed that a man could do worse than attempt to lose himself in scholarship: ‘You can imagine what my life is like when I find relief in work, and comfort in anxiety and worries.’46 While his mind was occupied by his legal cases it was unable to torment him. Nights, however, were more difficult. Nights he spent alone with his old companion, insomnia. He could lightproof his rooms to achieve perfect darkness, but still he lay awake, thinking of Calpurnia.
If Pliny assumed life would be easier after Domitian, he was ill-prepared for the spate of personal tragedies that followed the emperor’s assassination. From the death of his first wife to his own close encounter with the spirits of Hades, he seemed to be on a downward trajectory from which he could only escape. The possibility of happiness was rendered only more remote by news that his friend and former mentor, Corellius Rufus, the man he ‘always referred everything to’, had resolved to starve himself to death to relieve himself of the agony of gout. Corellius had developed the ailment in his feet when he was in his early thirties. It had now spread through his limbs. Pliny assumed gout was a hereditary disease (Corellius’ father had also suffered from it) but might also have viewed it as a modern complaint. Pliny the Elder, who observed that gout was becoming increasingly common, believed that it must be ‘a foreign illness’ because the word the Romans used to for it, podagra, was Greek.47 While the Hellenes recommended treating it by limiting the intake of meat and wine, Pliny the Elder, as often
, prescribed a plant-based treatment: pickled wild cucumber root, cabbage, barley, and vervain.48
None of these treatments was likely to appeal to a man on hunger strike. Pliny hurried to his old friend’s bedside on the pleas of Corellius’ wife to find that he had weighed up his reasons for living (his conscience and reputation, his family and friends) against his reasons for dying (the persistence and severity of his affliction, which he had tried but failed to control through his mind and temperance) and already come out firmly in favour of death.49 Pliny was devastated but understood why Corellius had chosen the path he had. ‘Why do you think I endure so much pain for so long?’ Corellius had once asked him. ‘So that I might outlive that brigand, if only by a day.’50 He had outlived Domitian by many, many days, but still there was a possibility that his self-inflicted death might be viewed as an act of political defiance. Cato the Younger’s gruesome suicide by self-disembowelment in the late Republic was still remembered as the ultimate act of rebellion against Julius Caesar’s tyranny.