by Daisy Dunn
EIGHT: Portrait of a Man
fn1 Like the Romans of the Republic, Pliny favoured verisimilitude over abstraction in figural art. He once sought for a scholar’s library copies of a portrait of Cornelius Nepos, the historian and patron of Catullus, and one of Titus Catius, an Epicurean philosopher, and stressed that, though copies of a copy, they ought to be as accurate as possible.
TEN: The Imitation of Nature
fn1 The Romans played a variety of ball games, including one much like Eton Fives in which they would hit a ball against a wall with their hands and compete to score. However it is difficult to imagine the portly Pliny the Elder getting much use out of the ball court at his Tuscan villa.
fn2 It was Pliny’s duty as patron to arbitrate between townsmen wherever a dispute arose. The position must have provided excellent early training for the future lawyer.
Endnotes
Abbreviations used in the Notes
AE: L’Année Epigraphique
CIL: Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (De Gruyter, Berlin and New York)
PLE: Pliny the Elder, Natural History
PLY: Pliny the Younger, Letters
Note: References to Pliny the Elder’s Natural History follow the numbering in Mayhoff’s Teubner version of the Latin text, which is helpfully available in full on Bill Thayer’s website: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/home.html. For Pliny the Younger’s letters and Panegyricus I used Radice’s two-volume text of 1969
PROLOGUE: Darker than Night
1 PLY 6.16.6; PLE 22.92–5.
2 Horace Satires 2.4.33.
3 Virgil Aeneid 6.163; 6.171–2.
4 Suetonius Life of Augustus 49. On Pliny the Elder’s post, see: J. F. Healy, Pliny the Elder on Science and Technology, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, pp. 22–3.
5 PLE 2.236–8.
6 PLE 3.62; 14.22; 14.34.
7 PLE 3.41.
8 Plutarch (Crassus 9) describes Spartacus and his allies making ladders from vines; Appian (Civil Wars 1.116) explicitly names the mountain as Vesuvius.
9 Strabo Geography 5.4.8. On fires blazing on Vesuvius ‘in ancient times’, see Vitruvius De Architectura 2.6.2. See also Diodorus Siculus Library of History, 4.21.5, who writes of Vesuvius bearing signs of the fires it put forth ‘in ancient times’ like Etna in Sicily.
10 V. Arnó, C. Principe, M. Rosi, R. Santacroce, A. Sbrana, and M. F. Sheridan, ‘Eruptive History’, in Somma-Vesuvius, 114, Vol. 8, edited by R. Santacroce, Consiglio nazionale delle ricerche, Rome, 1987; H. Sigurdsson, ‘Mount Vesuvius Before the Disaster’, p. 30 in W. F. Jashemski and F. G. Meyer (eds), The Natural History of Pompeii, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002. A particularly large eruption of Vesuvius is thought to have occurred in around 1600 BC. As Sigurdsson notes: ‘a period of quiescence of 1,400 to 4,000 years’ has tended to precede each Plinian eruption historically. The longer Vesuvius is dormant, the more catastrophic its next eruption may be (see J-M. Bardintzeff and A. McBirney, Volcanology, Jones and Bartlett, Sudbury, Massachusetts, 2000, p. xv).
11 See H. Sigurdsson and S. Carey, ‘The Eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79’, in Jashemski and Meyer (eds), Natural History of Pompeii, p. 44, for the evidence of the initial explosion.
12 P. Roberts, Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum, British Museum, London, 2013, p. 284.
13 Sigurdsson and Carey, ‘Eruption of Vesuvius’, in Jashemski and Meyer (eds), Natural History of Pompeii, pp. 48, 58.
14 PLY 6.16.9.
15 PLY 6.16.10.
16 The so-called ‘Plinian’ phase, see H. Sigurdsson, S. Cashdollar, and S. R. J. Sparks, ‘The Eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79: Reconstruction from Historical and Volcanological Evidence’, American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 86, No. 1, January 1982, pp. 39, 48.
17 Sigurdsson et al., ‘The Eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79’, p. 47.
18 Pliny the Elder said that to put a statue of a man on a high column was to elevate him above other mortals (PLE 34.27).
19 PLY 6.16.12.
20 PLY 6.16.13.
21 PLY 6.16.13; 6.16.19; 3.5.7.
22 As has been discovered through excavations at Villa Ariadne and Villa di Varano in Stabiae: see Sigurdsson et al., ‘The Eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79’, p. 40; Sigurdsson and Carey, ‘Eruption of Vesuvius’, in Jashemski and Meyer (eds), Natural History of Pompeii, p. 61.
23 PLY 6.20.3.
24 Tacitus Annals 15.22.
25 Seneca Natural Questions 6.10.
26 Seneca Natural Questions 6.27–9.
27 The date of 5 February, AD 63, is provided by Seneca the Younger (Natural Questions 6.1) shortly after the earthquake. Tacitus (Annals 15.22), writing decades later, appears to favour a date in late AD 62. For a short overview of the difficulties of the date see N. Monteix, ‘Urban Production and the Pompeian Economy’, in A. Wilson and M. Flohr (eds), The Economy of Pompeii, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017, p. 210. On the destruction and rebuilding of Pompeii see W. F. Jashemski, ‘The Vesuvian Sites Before AD 79: The Archaeological, Literary, and Epigraphical Evidence’, in Jashemski and Meyer (eds), Natural History of Pompeii, pp. 8–10. For earthquakes not in winter: see Seneca Natural Questions 6.1.
28 In the sixth century BC, Thales of Miletus believed that the earth was balanced on water. In its ebb and flow, he suggested, the water caused the earth to quake; see Seneca Natural Questions 6.6.
29 PLE 2.192. A fuller explanation of the theory I draw on is provided by Seneca the Younger in Natural Questions 6.
30 Seneca Natural Questions 6.12–13, adducing the arguments of Greek scholars including Aristotle, Archelaus and Theophrastus.
31 PLY 6.16.16. On the formation of pumice see E. De Carolis and G. Patricelli, Vesuvius, AD 79: The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, J. Paul Getty Museum, LA, 2003, p.12.
32 PLY 6.20.3–4.
33 PLY 6.16.17.
34 Sigurdsson and Carey, ‘Eruption of Vesuvius’, in Jashemski and Meyer (eds), Natural History of Pompeii, p. 61.
35 On the collapse of the column and release of pyroclastic flows, see R. S. J. Sparks and L. Wilson, ‘A model for the formation of ignimbrite by gravitational column collapse’, Journal of the Geological Society, Vol. 132, July 1976, pp. 441–51.
36 J. Berry, The Complete Pompeii, Thames and Hudson, London, 2013, p. 27.
37 Asphyxiation by ash, as Sigurdsson and Carey observe (‘Eruption of Vesuvius’ in Jashemski and Meyer (eds), Natural History of Pompeii, p. 49), was the cause of death of many victims of the 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens in Washington State, and was likely also to have killed Pliny the Elder. Other theories for his cause of death have included a heart attack or heart disorder, or apoplexy. J. Bigelow, ‘On the Death of Pliny the Elder’, Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1859, pp. 223–7; R. M. Haywood, ‘The Strange Death of the Elder Pliny’, Classical Weekly, Vol. 46, No. 1, November 1952, pp. 1–3; and H. C. Lipscomb and R. M. Haywood, ‘The Strange Death of the Elder Pliny’, Classical Weekly, Vol. 47, No. 5, January 1954, p. 74, make for lively reading.
38 PLY 6.20.7.
39 PLY 6.20.9.
40 As suggested by Sigurdsson and Carey in ‘Eruption of Vesuvius’, Jashemski and Meyer (eds), Natural History of Pompeii, pp. 50, 62.
41 PLY 6.20.12.
42 PLY 6.20.14–15.
43 Ps-Seneca Hercules Oetaeus 1111, 1114–1117; A. N. Sherwin-White, The Letters of Pliny: A Historical and Social Commentary, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1966, p. 380; and F. G. Downing, ‘Cosmic Eschatology in the First Century: “Pagan”, Jewish and Christian’, L’Antiquité Classique, Vol. 64, 1995, p. 106, the latter of whom detects the influence of Epicureanism in Pliny’s interpretation of the scene.
44 PLE 7.73.
45 Virgil Aeneid 6.426–9.
46 Dio Cassius Roman History 66.23.4.
47 Dio Cassius Roman History 66.23.7–9.
48 PLY 6.20.16.
49 PLY 6.20.18.
ONE: Roots and Trees
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1 PLY 3.5.10.
2 On who was reading Pliny’s letters in later antiquity see A. Cameron, ‘The Fate of Pliny’s Letters in the Late Empire’, Classical Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 2, November 1965, pp. 289–98. As Cameron notes, some of the blame for the conflation of the two Plinys lay with Jerome, who in the late fourth century produced a translation and continuation of Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea’s Greek Chronicon, a history of time from the birth of Abraham to the present day, which featured ‘Plinius Secundus’ as an ‘orator and distinguished historian from Novum Comum [Como in northern Italy] whose many inspired works still survive: he perished while visiting Vesuvius’ (Jerome Chronicle S.a.109).
3 Giovanni de Matociis, Brevis adnotatio de duobus Pliniis (early fourteenth century) – text reproduced in E. T. Merrill, ‘On the Eight-Book Tradition of Pliny’s Letters in Verona’, Classical Philology, Vol. 5, No. 2, April 1910, pp. 186–8. S. B. McHam, ‘Renaissance Monuments to Favourite Sons’, Renaissance Studies, Vol. 19, No. 4, September 2005, p. 468 and n.62 discusses de Matociis on the Plinys.
4 E. A. Lowe and E. K. Rand (eds), A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, 1922, inspected the ancient folios, now in New York’s Pierpoint Morgan Library, and established the arguments for viewing them as part of the Paris manuscript used in Venice by Aldus Manutius. See especially Rand, p. 41, and on the dating, Lowe, pp. 13–15. The leaves are now thought to date to the late fifth century. They contain letters from Pliny’s second and third books. The manuscript Aldus Manutius used came from the Abbey of Saint Victor in Paris. Pieces of five ancient manuscripts of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History still survive (see L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson (eds), Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2005, p. 309), the fullest of which also dates to the fifth century. The inclusion of excerpts of the work in medical books and other compendia helped to keep Pliny the Elder’s name alive.
5 This manuscript of Pliny’s letters, arranged over eight books, had been found by Guarino Guarini in either Venice or Verona in 1419. The first printed edition of Pliny’s letters was produced by Ludovicus Carbone in Venice in 1471. On the eight-, nine- and ten-book traditions of Pliny’s letters see D. Johnson, ‘The Manuscripts of Pliny’s Letters’, Classical Philology, Vol. 7, No. 1, January 1912, pp. 66–75. And on the history of the manuscript tradition see Reynolds and Wilson (eds), Texts and Transmission, pp. 316–22.
6 Attr.Suetonius Life of Pliny the Elder 1. See M. Reeve, ‘The Vita Plinii’, pp. 207–8, in R. K. Gibson and R. Morello (eds), Pliny the Elder: Themes and Contexts, Brill, Leiden, 2011.
7 B. Giovio, Historiae Patriae, 1629, Como New Press, 1982, Vol. 2, pp. 237–40. Flavio Biondo was an architectural historian, Lorenzo Valla a talented Latinist and Niccolò Perotti a rhetorician. Petrarch owned a near-complete copy of the Natural History from the thirteenth century.
8 The sculptures are thought to have been erected upon the Loggia del Consiglio in Verona in 1493. See McHam’s ‘Renaissance Monuments to Favourite Sons’, pp. 482–3, and Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance, Yale University Press, New Haven; London, 2013, pp. 157–8, on the rivalry.
9 Giovio, Historiae Patriae, Vol. 2, 237–40.
10 PLE 16.5.
11 H. G. Coffin, R. H. Brown, R. J. Gibson, Origin by Design, Review and Herald Publishing Association, Hagerstown, Maryland, 2005, p. 243, citing also W. J. Fritz, ‘Reinterpretation of the Depositional Environment of the Yellowstone “Fossil Forests”’, Geology, Vol. 8, 1980, pp. 309–13.
12 Coffin et al., Origin by Design, pp. 242–6.
13 See H. H. Scullard, From the Gracchi to Nero, Routledge, London and New York, 2006, pp. 254–9 for a concise account of Augustus’ plans.
14 PLY 3.5.4.
15 Tacitus Annals 1.69; Suetonius (Life of Caligula 8) cites Pliny the Elder’s German Wars on Caligula and his birthplace.
16 See Tacitus Annals 1.55 on the death of Varus.
17 Tacitus Germania 4.
18 Tacitus Germania 16.
19 Tacitus Germania 35.
20 Tacitus Annals 11.18. It is generally agreed that Pliny the Elder joined Corbulo’s campaign. I have consulted here the entry on Pliny the Elder in Brill’s New Pauly (H. Cancik and H. Schneider (eds), ‘Pliny the Elder’, Brill’s New Pauly, Phi-Prok, Brill, Leiden, 2007) and R. Syme (‘Pliny the Procurator’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 73, 1969, pp. 205–7), who summarises Münzer, Bonner Jahrbücher, 104, 1899, who established the details of Pliny the Elder’s three Germanic campaigns, which I follow in this book.
21 PLE 16.3.
22 Tacitus Annals 11.18. The leader of the Chauci, Gannascus, had formerly served with the Roman auxiliary.
23 Tacitus Annals 11.19.
24 Catullus Carmina 29.12.
25 Cancik and Schneider (eds), ‘Pliny the Elder’.
26 PLE 31.20, cited by Syme, ‘Pliny the Procurator’, p. 206.
27 Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 10.1.98.
28 PLE 13.83; 7.80.
29 Tacitus Annals 12.28.
30 PLE 13.83.
31 Tacitus Annals 12.56.
32 PLE 33.63, cited by Syme, ‘Pliny the Procurator’, p. 206. The golden cloak is also described by Tacitus in Annals 12.56.
33 Suetonius Life of Claudius 43–4; Tacitus Annals 12.65–67; PLE 2.92.
34 PLE 22.92–5.
35 Suetonius Life of Nero 9–11.
36 Suetonius Life of Nero 33–5.
37 Suetonius Life of Nero 38.
38 Tacitus Annals 15.44.
39 Pliny the Younger Panegyricus 42.1.
40 Tacitus Agricola 2.
41 Tacitus Annals 15.49–74.
42 Tacitus Annals 16.18.
43 PLY 3.5.5.
44 Tacitus Agricola 44.
45 P. Roche, ‘Pliny’s Thanksgiving: An Introduction to the Panegyricus’, p. 4, in P. Roche (ed.), Pliny’s Praise: The Panegyricus in the Roman World, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2011.
46 The two letters, 10.96 and 10.97, predate Tacitus’ descriptions of Nero’s persecution of the Christians – see Sherwin-White, Letters of Pliny, p. 693.
47 PLY 10.96.8.
48 PLY 3.5.17.
49 The Roman writers were Marcus Terentius Varro and Celsus. Cato the Elder, Aristotle and Theophrastus were also important influences upon Pliny the Elder.
50 PLE 11.6.
51 PLE 2.207.
52 PLE 25.9.
53 PLE 29.85. The Natural History inspired numerous other reference books besides, including Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum Maius in the thirteenth century and Conrad Gesner’s Bibliotheca Universalis in 1545.
54 R. P. Duncan-Jones, ‘The Finances of a Senator’, in R. K. Gibson and C. Whitton (eds), The Epistles of Pliny, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016, p. 91, suggests that Pliny possessed more than twice the 8 million sesterces normally deemed a reasonable capital for a senator.
55 Plutarch Lucullus 39.4. Like Pliny, Lucullus owned an estate near Tusculum and used it as a summer residence.
56 The first nine volumes of Pliny’s letters are thought to have been released in his lifetime, but the tenth book, which contains the letters he sent Trajan and Trajan’s replies, was probably published posthumously.
57 Although the ten books of Pliny’s letters progress roughly chronologically, the letters within them are often out of sequence. Later letters often intersperse the sequences of earlier ones. J. Bodel, ‘The Publication of Pliny’s Letters’, provides in pp. 13–35 of I. Marchesi (ed.), Pliny the Book-Maker: Betting on Posterity in the Epistles, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015, a useful examination of the arrangement of the letters and a summary of the attempts of Mommsen, Syme and Sherwin-White to order and date them.
TWO: Illusions of Immortality
1 PLY 2.1.6.
2 PLY 7.20.4.
3 PLY 2.1.8.
4 Pliny always admired a well-earned, well-structured retirement – see Letters 6.10 and 3.1.
5 PLY 6.10.3.
6 PLY 7.33.1. Tacitus probably used Pliny’s account of the eruption to write a section of his Histories that is now lost.
7 PLY 6.16.1.
8 PLY 6.20.20.
9 PLY 6.16.22.
10 Sigurdsson et al., ‘The Eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79’, p. 44.
11 U. Eco, The Limits of Interpretation, Indianapolis Press, Bloomington, Indianapolis, 1994, p. 136.
12 Francis Bacon, Letter to the Earl of Arundel and Surrey, The Letters and The Life of Francis Bacon, edited by J. Spedding, Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, London, 1874, 7.550. A. Doody quotes from and discusses Bacon’s letter in her book on the reception of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History – Pliny’s Encyclopedia: The Reception of the Natural History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2010, pp. 32–3. Doody observes that Bacon was reflecting on Pliny’s description of his uncle in his second letter on the eruption. This letter of Bacon is also discussed in relation to Pliny the Elder by L. Jardine and A. Stewart, Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon, Victor Gollancz, London, 1998, pp. 502–8 (work cited in Doody, Pliny’s Encyclopedia, p. 33) and by G. Darley, Vesuvius: The Most Famous Volcano in the World, Profile, London, 2011, pp. 38–9.
13 John Aubrey, Life of Francis Bacon, ‘Brief Lives’, chiefly of Contemporaries: set down by John Aubrey, between the years 1669 & 1696, edited from the Author’s MSS, by Andrew Clark, Vol. 1, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1898, pp. 75–6.
14 Francis Bacon, Letter to the Earl of Arundel and Surrey, in J. Spedding (ed.), The Letters and The Life of Francis Bacon, 7.550.
15 Aubrey, Life of Francis Bacon, in Clark (ed.), Vol. 1, pp. 75–6. Aubrey was here recording the account of Bacon’s former secretary Thomas Hobbes.
16 Doody, Pliny’s Encyclopedia. Writing on the causes of Bacon’s death, L. Jardine and A. Stewart (Hostage to Fortune, pp. 504–8) have suggested that Bacon had been taking opiates in an attempt to extend his life when he fell ill. The fact that Bacon’s fingers were too ‘disjointed’ [numb] to hold a pen is, they argue, evidence that he died from ‘an overdose of inhaled nitre or opiates’.