by Daisy Dunn
Corellius Rufus’ death had a profound effect upon the way Pliny thought about his own life. As he struggled to take comfort from stock phrases about Corellius having being old and sick and fortunate to have lived as good a life as he had, he sought an alternative cure for his grief. Soon after Corellius died, Pliny confessed, ‘I fear I shall live more neglectfully.’51 This was very different from the optimism he displayed for living more mindfully after his own brush with death. His quest to live ‘less carefully’ came from the realisation that the end could come so suddenly that there was little point in trying to avoid it.
If there was a part of him that felt that Corellius’ life was more of a loss to the world than his own could ever be, it was because he could see how much Corellius had left behind. His old mentor would have died sooner had he not had the needs of his family to consider. But what about him? Had Calpurnia died and his own illness been terminal, who would have dissuaded him from death? For all Pliny protested otherwise, there was little sense in living a reckless life until he had established a family to protect him or to mourn his loss. When news came that Calpurnia was out of danger, in good spirits, and well enough to return, he had new reason to hope that, after such an unpropitious start, he might yet have a family of his own.
THIRTEEN
After the Solstice
Threshed corn lay piled like grit of ivory
Or solid as cement in two-lugged sacks
The musty dark hoarded an armoury
Of farmyard implements, harness, plough-socks.
From ‘The Barn’ by Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist, 1966
According to the Natural History, you could tell the summer solstice was near when you first heard the ‘rattle’ of the cicada. It was, in fact, less a rattle than an accelerando of little creaks, their pitch heightening with every vibration of the insect’s tiny abdomen. It sounded from the tree tops after dusk, when the grape vines glowed white with the flowers of midsummer.1 The cicada would still be strumming when the blackbird’s voice gave out, a phenomenon Pliny the Elder deemed peculiar to the solstice itself.2 The cicada’s strum and the blackbird’s silence, the flowering of thyme and the bees’ discovery of its pollen were signs that the days would now grow shorter, cooler and, for the landowner, fuller, as the race against ‘savage, wild winter’ began.3
The solstice was an important moment in the year at the Tuscan estate, its coming and going Nature’s siren for the labourers to take up the tasks of late summer. The soil was to be turned and the tree roots tidied, the seedbeds hoed and prepared for next planting, the produce of summer gathered and stored.4 Pliny the Elder cautioned against commencing these tasks too soon. ‘Beware of believing the summer solstice has passed,’ he said, ‘until you’ve seen the pigeon sitting on her eggs.’5 The first sighting of an expectant pigeon would in theory set the labourers in motion after the enervating days of May and early June. To be sure of completing their work in time they ought to have been as methodical as hedgehogs, when they ‘ready food for winter and attach fallen apples to their spines by rolling over them and, holding another one in their mouth, carry them to the hollows of trees’.6
Pliny grew a rich variety of crops in the fields surrounding his villa: grapes and beans and ‘other legumes’, wheat and spelt, and barley – ‘the very oldest food’, with which Greeks traditionally made their bread.7 Before they harvested the cereals his farmhands had to prepare the threshing floor. In the summer, they would sprinkle it with olive dregs and level it with a layer of animal dung to provide a base for treading the grain ears.8 The Etrurians of central Italy used serrated hand mills to crush their spelt, while the Gauls had beasts of burden drag long, tooth-edged poles on wheels through their fields to tear and gather the ears in preparation for threshing later.9 With poles or horses or a mixture of both, Pliny’s labourers threshed his grain and stored it in the agricultural quarters of the estate, which were based some distance from the main house. Next to his granary Pliny constructed a shelter to protect his towering piles of produce. He also formed a new square in which his men could complete their tasks. It was framed by a pair of new outbuildings, probably a stables or further grain store.10 When the grain was ready it was poured into the vast ceramic jars which still survive, half-submerged, in the storage room floor of the estate.
Pliny liked to say that at Laurentum he could show off a desk, but at his Tuscan estate, a full granary.11 That was when everything went according to plan. Although the harvest traditionally began with the rising of the Pleiades in May, there was no guarantee the barn would be even half full by the end of the summer solstice. Pliny found it ‘troublesome’ but necessary to rent out some of his farmland: necessary because he depended on his crops for income, troublesome because it was rare his tenants could be trusted not to gobble them up.12 In hard times they found it more economical to consume the produce than conserve it for sale. The few crops which reached maturity before autumn had a habit of landing on their plates. Pliny could follow his uncle’s advice and employ a farm manager who was ‘as close to his master in intelligence as possible without appearing to regard himself as such’.13 But the manager who seemed bright on first acquaintance was not always so adept at disciplining his juniors. There was no room for the work-shy on a commercial estate. Pecunia, the Latin for money, came from pecus, the word for ‘flock’ or ‘herd’.14 Money-making was and always had been closely tied to agriculture. As the poet Hesiod explained in his poem on the farmer’s year:
Both gods and men are rightly indignant at those who live
Work-shy lives, like the stingless drones in temperament,
Eating up the products of the honeybees’ toil: work-shy.
You should make a priority of arranging your jobs
So your barns may brim with life season-round.
It is from work that men grow wealthy and flock-rich;
By working that a man becomes much dearer to the gods.15
In a good year, Pliny’s Tuscan estate could bring in more than 400,000 sesterces – the sum required to qualify as an equestrian.16 ‘Depending as it does on the condition of my farms,’ Pliny said, ‘my income can be rather small or unpredictable.’17 Given that almost all his capital was in land, he had little choice but to persevere with his more dependable tenants.18 Like Hesiod before him he appreciated the moral as well as the financial rewards which could come from investing one’s energies in the land. If it was ‘from work that men grow wealthy and flock-rich’, then it was by attending to the land that he grew much nearer to Nature.
It was only unfortunate that the soil of his estate was so difficult to work. The higher slopes of the Apennines, which Pliny the Elder called ‘the most extensive’ of the mountains in Italy, were wooded and covered with rich hillocks of fertile soil, the lower were covered in vineyards; but beneath these lay meadows and plains which proved stubborn to go over. The soil of the plains was so unyielding that, on receiving its first plough, it would throw up enormous clods which only the largest oxen and strongest harrows could break up. Even then, it could take many attempts. Pliny the Elder remembered well how the soil in this part of Italy demanded ‘nine ploughings’.19
Keeping land as difficult and plentiful as this struck some Romans as akin to self-punishment. In the first century BC, a modest plot with garden, spring and some woodland had satisfied the poet Horace’s prayers: ‘I ask for nothing more, except, Mercury, that you might make these gifts of mine last.’20 Horace had known what it felt like to be torn between town and country. He had known what it was like to be snatched away to Rome, where not even snow dispersed the crowds from the busy Esquiline Hill. Horace’s modest farm spoke of an earlier, happier time, when, as Pliny the Elder put it, ‘the most generous gift one could bestow upon generals and brave citizens was the largest piece of land one could finish ploughing in a single day’.21 The size of this ideal plot was one iugerum (the word was subsequently used to define a Roman ‘acre’, the equivalent of roughly two-thirds of a mod
ern acre), and it was precisely this that Pliny the Elder remained wistful for. With thousands of iugera to plough at the Tuscan estate each year, there was little chance that either he or his nephew could have fulfilled the age-old dream of doing enough work ‘in a single day to last him a year without any more work’.22
Pliny relinquished that dream the moment he decided to buy up the estate adjoining his own. Thoughts of the money he could save and income he could raise by having his gardeners and workers and even hunting equipment in one place overcame any other reservations. His farm manager would oversee both estates and spread his workforce over the fields and vineyards and woods of each. Pliny needed to maintain only one of the houses on his freshly enlarged estate. Although he was conscious that ‘it might be imprudent to subject so large a plot to the same weather and uncertainties’, the benefits seemed to outweigh the risks, and after a brief deliberation, he resolved to go ahead with the purchase. Reduced by 2 million sesterces ‘through lack of tenants and in generally bad times’, the estate was a steal at 3 million sesterces. Pliny looked forward to a steady if moderate return on his investment.23 If the venture was unsuccessful, then he could at least fall back upon the funds of his late wife’s mother, Pompeia Celerina, which he boasted of being able to use ‘no differently than if they were my own’.24 Even after his marriage to Calpurnia he continued to call upon the four or more properties Pompeia Celerina owned near his Tuscan villa and to refer to her as his ‘mother-in-law’ and part of his ‘household’.25 He was wise to maintain such connections in the region when the income from his property was so precarious.
In the nineteenth century, the Prussian designer Karl Friedrich Schinkel drew up plans of Pliny’s Tuscan villa from the description in his letter. The architectural historian Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey criticised Schinkel’s reconstruction as ‘more like a sanatorium in the high Alps than a villa in the Apennine foothills’, but the ground plan is not entirely fanciful. Schinkel also recreated Pliny’s hippodrome garden at Charlottenhof Castle in modern Potsdam for Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm.
The soil of his landscapes proved to be fertile but irritatingly disobedient to his commands. Pliny planted myrtle. It would not grow. He longed to farm olives, but any trees which chanced to take were scorched by the winter frost.26 This was particularly frustrating because, elsewhere in Italy, considerable advances had been made in their cultivation. While, centuries earlier, in Greece, Hesiod had lamented the fact that no one who planted an olive tree ever lived to savour its fruit, the invention of nurseries had since encouraged the production of a harvest after only one year’s growth.27 The saplings would be pruned with the vines and their fruit gathered after the grapes each autumn. For all his many iugera, Pliny was resigned to purchasing his olive oil from more sheltered estates elsewhere. Pliny the Elder described Italy as holding ‘first place in the world’ for its olives, and was particularly complimentary of a variety that grew in the shady groves of Venafro, some way north of Naples.28 Pliny, for his part, preferred something more exotic and artisan. The olive-oil bottles he left behind at his estate came principally from north Africa and Baetica, in southern Spain.29 Baetica was less famous for its oil than it was for its fine fish products. During the Republic it had become home to the first ever fish-processing plant, from which Romans imported a range of luxury fish sauces. Pliny was rather partial to these, particularly garum, which he purchased from all over Spain but most notably from Cadiz.30 More than a few of Pliny’s comestibles came from overseas – a habit his uncle would undoubtedly have scolded him for.
Pliny at least had the means to produce his own, thoroughly Italian, vintage. He grew so many vines at his estate that they encroached upon the villa itself. The summer walkway seemed ‘not to look over the vineyards, but in fact to touch them’.31 One of the bedrooms was constructed almost entirely from marble and contained a cabinet-like alcove for a bed. There were windows on every facet, but in summer the vines shrouded them in shade. Being in the bed then, as flickers of light fought through the foliage, was ‘like lying in a wood, but without feeling the rain’. The vines could not be forgotten. They pushed up against Pliny’s windows as if to remind him that they were holding the villa up. The grapes were the most valuable crop on the entire plot. Without them, the house would collapse.
A vine could either be trained to a trellis or left to develop ‘without any prop, binding itself with its own limbs and feeding its thickness through its shortness’.32 Roman writers liked to imagine vines as lovers, twining around each other or their supports like husband and wife on their wedding night. Pliny the Elder described the vines of Campania as married to poplars. He had watched them grow and realised that it was ‘while embracing their spouses and climbing through their branches with wanton arms’ that they reached their full height.33 Pliny married his vines to props. His uncle was quite right to speak of the laboriousness of growing grapevines. When the grapes at the estate were finally ripe, they would need one labourer per seven Roman acres of vineyard to have the full crop picked before it spoiled.34
According to one tradition, the fruit changed hue in a display of honour towards Vertumnus, the Roman god of the seasons.35 In August, on the cusp of the new season, the beginning of the grape harvest was heralded by a festival called the Vinalia rustica. Pliny took a keen, if theoretical, interest in the process of harvesting his vineyards. One year, he was telling a friend how busy he was gathering in the grapes when he stopped himself short: ‘If “to gather in” is to pick the odd grape, visit the wine press, sample the must from the vat, creep up on the city slaves, who are now supervising the rustic ones, leaving me to my secretaries and readers …’36 He looked in at all the important moments. ‘Is he checking up on us?’ you imagine his slaves wondering, or was he just curious to feel the firmness of the fruit, taste the must, smell the juices forming in the calcatarium, the new treading vat that he introduced to the estate so that his grapes could be processed on site?37 If there was an art to applying pressure by stealth, Pliny had mastered it. Amused by how ‘urban’ he felt when he tiptoed into the sticky, noisy world of grape-treading, he was relieved to have his secretaries waiting for him at his desk. There were many more drinkers of his wine than there were readers of his work, but Pliny at least professed to prioritise the fruits of his intellect.
While he believed that no harm could come from drinking wine in moderation, Pliny understood the repercussions of drinking too much. Drunkenness had been a cause of some concern in Rome over the past century, Seneca the Younger documenting with particular passion the ill effects that excessive alcohol had had upon otherwise able men such as Mark Antony.38 It is unlikely the Romans were drinking any more than the Greeks, or indeed the Macedonians (Alexander the Great famously died after a bout of heavy drinking), but the loss of inhibition caused by alcohol jarred with Roman ideals of decorum. For Pliny the Elder, drunkenness was the price man paid for availing himself of wine rather than ‘the liquid Nature provided’ – water.39
Worse than the ‘thousands of crimes’ its consumption inspired was the kind of life it bestowed upon those who drank it. Pliny the Elder had felt less contempt than pity for the pale-faced, trembling-handed drunks who ‘do not see the sun rising and therefore live shorter lives’.40 He stayed true to his belief that being alive meant being awake, and remained wary of becoming loose-tongued through drink: veritas … vino est. At the same time, the scholarly encyclopaedist could not help but marvel at the most celebrated wines of the world – the Maronean of Thrace and Pramnian of Smyrna, the dazzling vintages of Pucinum, Setia, and Alba, and the hangover-inducing produce of Pompeii. Pliny the Elder concluded that Italy was so blessed with her vines that ‘with these alone she could be seen to have surpassed all the treasures of the world – even the perfumes’.41
The desire to celebrate Italian wines became only more urgent in the decades after Pliny the Elder wrote his encyclopaedia. Concerned that the attention lavished on grapes was causing the dearth of oth
er crops, Domitian had banned the planting of vines in Italy and ordered the destruction of at least half of all existing vineyards in the provinces.42 Although he never officially enforced his ruling (the circulation of threatening, hands-off-my-vine notes allegedly deterred him), the ban remained in place at least nominally for another 188 years. Pliny was among those who decided to ignore it in favour of working to meet the demands of the growing population of Rome. Once a drink for wealthy men, wine was now enjoyed by women and the lower orders, too. The poor man needed his wine as much as the rich one, and in Pliny, he found his ideal supplier.
When Pliny inherited the Tuscan estate its wine seems to have been stored in large amphorae. His uncle had recommended preserving ‘weak wines’ in large jars in the ground so as to prevent them from spoiling.43 For all the excitement he felt at watching his grapes being processed, Pliny’s vintage turned out to be similarly low in alcohol content. He might have tried to prolong its shelf life by adding certain ingredients to the jars: ‘Immediately after the rising of the Dog Star,’ his uncle advised, ‘wine jars should be coated with pitch, then rinsed with sea water or water mixed with salt, and then sprinkled with ash from wood or white clay, cleaned, and fumigated with myrrh together with the storage rooms.’44 The addition of oil or seepage of resin from the amphorae could help to slow the processes of spoilage and oxidation. In practice, however, the effects were slight. Pliny decided instead to accept his produce for what it was, a table wine, to be drunk as quickly as possible.45 Revolutionising his business without so much as getting his feet dirty, he decided not to store his wines, as his predecessor had done, but to arrange instead for the purchase of small, narrow-necked jars, capable of holding no more than fifteen or twenty litres each.46 Made with flat bottoms, these vessels could be filled with the bright, watery-rimmed produce and put aboard boats to Rome. In autumn, the Tiber streams which passed through the estate would begin to flow again after the drought of summer. His wine could be on Roman tables in time for supper the following evening.