The Shadow of Vesuvius

by Daisy Dunn

  In reality, Pliny struck more balance in his menus than he did in his daily routine. Like his uncle before him, he prioritised work over everything else, food included. The snow was his one extravagance which, in its habit of losing form and metamorphosing into valueless water, must have reminded him of how consuming but unstable life and its luxuries could be. The Romans used both snow and ice to refrigerate food during transit but also, as Pliny did, to chill their drinks. Pliny the Elder found the use of snow to chill wine in summer particularly offensive because to ‘turn the curse of mountains into a pleasure for the throat’ in this season meant that thought had been given as to how to keep the snow cold for the other months.35 This made the serving of snow not a simple act of recklessness, but a conscious and determined inversion of Nature.

  In the sixteenth century, the essayist Michel de Montaigne observed that the ancients also had ‘cellars of snow to cool their wine; and some there were who made use of snow in winter, not thinking their wine cool enough, even at that cold season of the year’.36 Among the classical quotations Montaigne had inscribed upon the roof beams of his chateau in Bordeaux was the following, adapted from the Natural History:

  solum certum nihil esse certi

  et homine nihil miserius aut superbius

  The only certainty is that nothing is certain

  And nothing more miserable or arrogant than man.

  These words hung over Montaigne’s meditative life.37 They spoke as hauntingly to him in Renaissance France as they did to their first readers, encapsulating the idea that, of all living things, man alone struggles to accept the capriciousness of fate. Man’s desire and quest for certainty is presumptuous and arrogant; his eternal failure to achieve it, a recipe for misery.

  Given his thoughts on uncertainty, we might have expected Pliny the Elder to have been the one to promote snow as a paradigm for human fortune. But it was to his nephew’s credit that he went beyond his uncle’s moralising to present snow as not merely a luxury, but as something as changeable as life itself. Pliny the Elder and Montaigne saw man’s successes in preserving snow throughout the seasons. Pliny saw rather his failures. He might strive for certainty, protecting his snow from the heat so that it retained its shape, but as someone who served snow at dinner parties, he knew only too well that even the best efforts failed. Whether it took one hour or one day, snow always melted away.

  For all his uncle’s distaste for it and the similarity it bore to the ash that had eventually killed him, snow did not develop in Pliny’s mind the negative associations that it might have done. Pliny reserved his disapproval instead for the luxuries he believed to be more damaging to morality. Snow seemed less offensive in this regard than the fruits of the sea it was sometimes served with, in what his uncle viewed as a wanton ‘mixing of mountaintops and seabed’.38 In his encyclopaedia, Pliny the Elder had expressed a particular dislike of the combining of oysters and ‘snow’ – probably in this case crushed ice – as a delicacy. Ignoring the benefits of snow as a preservative, Pliny the Elder focused on how extravagant and unnatural it was that anyone should intrude upon two ends of the earth for the sake of satisfying his stomach. An oyster at the bottom of the ocean is no more likely to encounter snow than a snow-­capped mountain is to host an oyster.39

  Pages and pages of the Natural History were dedicated to expounding the dangers and ubiquity of seafood. In the fourth century BC, a poet from Sicily named Archestratus had published a collection of exotic recipes for shellfish in his Greek poem, ‘On the Life of Luxury’. Shellfish had been spreading their poison across the Greek world and into Rome for centuries. ‘It wasn’t enough,’ Pliny the Elder despaired, ‘that the gifts of the sea were being pushed down our throats before they were worn on the hands, ears, head, and all over the body by men as much as by women.’40 The sea creatures corrupted with their treasures as much as with their taste: oysters yielded their glistening pearls to grasping fishermen, while one species of predatory murex mollusc secreted a substance, which was used by the wealthy to dye their garments ‘Tyrian’ purple.

  Pliny the Elder related that Alexander the Great and his men had encountered oysters a foot long in the seas off India. Although the Romans had not yet been so fortunate, they knew of oysters large enough to merit the name ‘Three Bites’.41 The encyclopaedist had studied oysters closely and concluded that their growth depended not only upon the moon, which controlled the tides, but also upon the progress of the seasons. The oyster as he describes it in his encyclopaedia opens its shell at the beginning of summer, as the heat of the first sun penetrates the water. As it does so, it is as though it is ‘yawning’, an image that is all the more striking for the fact that the oyster’s head is ‘indistinguishable’ and lacks eyes.42 In the heat, the oyster begins to swell with a milk-­like juice – a sort of dew that it absorbs and incubates to produce pearls. (In actual fact, oysters can be hermaphroditic and switch between the two genders, developing pearls when layers of nacre build up around foreign bodies trapped in their shells.)

  Oysters in deeper waters are small, wrote Pliny the Elder, because it is dark and ‘in their sadness they look less for food’.43 Their depression was presumably only deepened by the fact that they were also the first to be searched for fine pearls (the finest were often found far beneath the surface). Quite the best thing about pearls is that no two are the same: in Latin, a pearl is sometimes called simply unio, ‘uniqueness’, whence ‘onion’, a vegetable of iridescent layers. A pearl, said Pliny the Elder, may take on the cloudiness of morning sky or be aborted or ‘miscarried’ by a storm; the oyster is so alarmed by thunder that it will slam its shell shut before the pearl is fully formed. If the weather is sunny, the pearl may develop a reddish hue, losing its whiteness ‘like the human body’ suffering sunburn.44 (He similarly believed that Ethiopians had been scorched by their proximity to the sun, while inhabitants of icy climates had white skin and fair hair.45) On this logic, Pliny the Elder attributed reddish pearls to sunny Spain, tawny pearls to Illyricum, in the Balkans, and black pearls and oyster shells to stormy Circeo in Italy.46

  Pliny the Elder could not take credit for being the first man to speak of the oyster and pearl’s susceptibility. Over a century before him, Sergius Orata, the first Italian to cultivate oyster farms at decadent Baiae in the Bay of Naples, had taken to transporting oysters from Brundisium (Brindisi) in Italy’s heel and depositing them in the Lucrine Lake in Campania.47 Once the oysters, ordinarily farmed on ropes, had absorbed the lake’s delicious waters, it did not matter where they started life. Their high price depended on people’s belief in their ability to absorb the richness of their surroundings.

  Pliny the Elder had not liked the idea of Romans risking their lives to retrieve oysters from the depths when they might have grown all they needed in simple kitchen gardens. If he quaffed the occasional one it was not because he aspired to eat ‘the palm of our tables’.48 Provided an oyster was good – sealed, not too slimy, not too meaty, more striking for its thickness than diameter, caught neither in mud nor on sand but on a hard surface like a rock – he believed that the odd one might benefit his health. Oysters, he said, can settle the stomach and soften the bowels, restore the appetite and plump the skin, purge ulcers from the bladder, chase chilblains from the toes, and reduce the size of swollen glands.49 The oyster was therefore a paradox. Luxurious on the one hand and healing on the other, it defied the kind of clear moral classification that Pliny the Elder liked to apply to the things around him. While the oyster was multifarious enough to earn his interest, Pliny the Elder was on balance reproachful: ‘There is no greater cause for the destruction of morals and rise of luxury than shellfish.’50 Given his friends’ manners, his nephew Pliny was inclined to agree.

  In his abstemiousness and censoriousness towards shellfish, Pliny proved himself to be very much his uncle’s son. When his friend and fellow equestrian Septicius Clarus failed to show at his snow-­and-­spelt dinner, he assumed it had been because he had gone after
the oysters and sea urchins on offer elsewhere. It was not like him to be tempted away by oysters: Pliny counted no one in his acquaintance ‘truer or more straightforward, accomplished or trustworthy’.51 On close enough terms with Pliny to have him assist in promoting his nephew to the senate, Septicius must have taken his teasing letter in good grace. Sue him for every morsel of food he had missed? He must be joking. The few surviving details of Septicius’ life shed light on his respectability. He was named as the dedicatee of Pliny’s collected letters as well as the most important biographical work of the age, Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars.

  Some years after Pliny’s death, Septicius Clarus and Suetonius travelled to Britain. Following their landings under Claudius, the Romans had suppressed the revolt of Boudicca in AD 60 or 61 and worked their way steadily northwards to conquer much of England and Wales. In AD 122, Trajan’s successor, Hadrian, launched an expedition to settle pockets of unrest and begin work on the wall that would eventually stretch from the east coast to the west and mark the northernmost frontier of the Roman empire. Septicius was praetorian prefect, Suetonius private secretary to the emperor. Both were powerful roles into which they appear to have relaxed only too easily. In the course of the British campaign they were dismissed from their posts, both allegedly on grounds of overfamiliarity with Hadrian’s wife.52 It was a late and fallible source that cited the reason for their dismissal, but it may just be that Septicius finally got his comeuppance for the shameless social climbing Pliny had scolded him for.

  As for Suetonius, Pliny would have been surprised he had it in him. Before becoming a prolific author, Suetonius had cut a shy and self-­doubting figure, at least when Pliny was around. He was less than ten years younger than Pliny but emerges almost boy-­like from the Letters.53 Reticence was his defining characteristic. Pliny once helped him to secure a small estate and, as a first step towards public office, a military tribunate, or junior post, which Suetonius passed on to a relative.54 While Septicius Clarus ‘often urged’ Pliny to publish his letters, Pliny practically implored Suetonius to publish work of his own. Prior to his Lives, Suetonius completed a biographical compendium of famous men, including Pliny the Elder, which Pliny must have been eager to see released into the world.55 Within their circle of mutual encouragement, Pliny confessed to being ‘hesitant about publishing’, but Suetonius outdid ‘even’ him in his ‘dallying and delaying’.56

  By the time Suetonius decided to try his hand at law, he was suffering from nightmares. He must have been in his late twenties when he wrote to Pliny seeking an adjournment to a trial on the basis of having had bad dreams. A more bullish lawyer might have told him to pull himself together, but Pliny was sympathetic. A perfectionist who was ‘never so prepared as to not rejoice at a delay’, Pliny had also experienced dreams in the past which appeared to augur ill for his cases.57 Around the time he embarked upon his legal career Pliny married for the first time. Nothing is known of his first wife, but he recalled in a letter how he was about to proclaim against ‘very powerful citizens and even friends of the emperor’ when he dreamed that his mother-­in-­law got down on her knees and begged him not to go through with the trial. The Romans believed that dreams merited deep consideration on the basis that they might have some bearing upon waking life. Like the Greeks before them, they realised that, while some dreams come to pass, others presage a less obvious result.

  Any dream involving a mother figure was always ripe for discussion. On the Interpretation of Dreams, a definitive guide in five volumes, was published a generation after Pliny died and laid out what could come of nightly visits by matriarchs. The book was an important influence on Sigmund Freud, who read it before writing his Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, and described a number of possible scenarios. A senator like Pliny who might dream of having sex with his mother had reason to rejoice, provided he had adopted the missionary position; the mother symbolised the state, and one who governed his partner sexually could be sure to govern well politically.58 But a man of fragile health who dreamed of having sex with his mother on top, might predict his own death – for earth, Mother Earth, does not lie above the living. Such earthy thoughts could not have been further from Pliny’s conscious, but at their root lay the old idea that, for all the many things a dream can symbolise, Sleep is little more than a shadow of Death.

  Since adjournments were not permitted in the Court of One Hundred, Pliny had had no choice but to ignore the warning of his dream and go through with his trial. The words he had used to reassure himself then were the words he used now to reassure Suetonius: ‘The best thing is to fight for one’s country.’59 With this hearty expression of patriotism, a quote from Homer’s IIiad, the young Pliny had stormed into the basilica, confronted the opposition, and promptly won his case. He recommended that Suetonius did the same. If his dream rendered the prospect of doing so too frightening, then Suetonius was well advised to interpret it to a better outcome. As Homer had illustrated, dreams were meaningful or meaningless depending on which of two gates they issued from. There was a gate made of horn and another of ivory. Dreams which poured through the ivory gate, according to Odysseus’ wife Penelope, were empty. But those which passed through the horn gate ‘bring the truth to pass whenever a mortal sees them’.60 It was to the gate of ivory, through which ‘the spirits of the dead send false dreams towards the sky’, that Aeneas and the Sibyl were led as they prepared to leave Hades in Virgil’s Aeneid.61 By departing through the gate of false dreams it was as if their journey to the land of the dead had never happened.

  Pliny anticipated that Suetonius might still struggle and told him that he would attempt to delay his case. ‘It’s difficult, but I’ll try,’ he promised, for as Homer said, ‘a dream is from Zeus.’62 The line was a wry comment on the difficulty of interpreting one’s own dreams, for as he knew only too well, even dreams from Zeus could be deceptive. In the Iliad, Agamemnon, commander of the Greek army, was famously deceived into thinking that he could take Troy at once after the King of Pylos appeared to speak to him in a dream.63 On waking he decided first to test his men’s resolve by encouraging them to abandon the war and return home, since they had no hope of sacking Troy. Far from rejecting his plan and rallying to fight all the more defiantly, his soldiers shamefully got up to leave. It was up to Odysseus to talk them into staying. There was no chance of concluding the war after nine years in a single day. The dream was false. Vita vigilia est.

  FOUR

  SOLITARY AS AN OYSTER

  ‘You are fettered,’ said Scrooge, trembling. ‘Tell me why?’

  ‘I wear the chain I forged in life,’ replied the Ghost. ‘I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?’

  Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 1843, Stave I

  The festival of the Saturnalia was for most Romans, though not for Pliny, ‘the very best of days’.1 A week of wine and banquets, presents and practical jokes, it took place around the solstice each December and honoured Saturn, the Roman god of time and the seasons. Work ceased, togas were hung up, festive robes and caps put on, bottles opened, meat sliced, dice thrown, and roles reversed.2 Pliny had a couple of choices as to where to spend the holiday. He could stay in Rome and look at flamingos from the Nile, pheasants from Georgia, guinea fowl from Numidia (all the birds his uncle had discouraged Romans from travelling the world to see), while feasting – in the presence of dwarves and female gladiators – on nuts from Pontus, dates from Palestine, plums from Damascus, figs from Ibiza, and jars upon jars of wine.3 Or he could travel thirty kilometres south-­west to the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea and recline alone in a room that ‘not the voices of the younger slaves, nor the murmur of the sea, nor thunder nor lightning, nor light of day could reach, provided the windows were not open’.4 Pliny chose the latter.

  There was something of Scrooge to Pliny come midwinter, ‘secret, and self-­contained, and solitary as an oyster’.5 The arrival of t
he Saturnalia each year was his prompt to retreat to his ‘Laurentine’ villa and its most isolated rooms. Lying just south of Ostia, on Italy’s west coast, Laurentum was close enough to Rome that he could retire there for the season ‘when the day was done’.6 Built in the early first century on layers of oyster shells – sand, mortar, oyster shells, mortar again, pottery sherds, more crushed oyster shells – the village was delightful in its rusticity.7 Since the roads were liable to become too sandy to drive a carriage over, Pliny thought it best to complete the final leg of the journey from Rome by horse. On horseback one would gain sufficient height to see the crowns of the trees which grew in the woods inland. Emperor Tiberius had kept an elephant menagerie and guild of gamekeepers in woods around here, while an orator named Hortensius had created his own game preserve, to which he would invite friends for dinner and watch as his musician, Orpheus, summoned forth a parade of deer and wild boar to provide ‘no less distinguished a spectacle . . . than when the hunts of the aediles [junior politicians] take place in the Circus Maximus without African beasts’.8

  Elephants had always struck Pliny’s uncle as closest to men in sensibility. Though less faithful than dogs and horses, they were intelligent, obedient and fired by ‘a desire for love and glory’.9 It was Pliny the Elder who first recorded their fear of mice.* He had drawn on the research of Aristotle, who had undertaken an investigation into ‘the nature of animals’ for his pupil Alexander the Great, in the fourth century BC.10 Using information gathered from thousands of animal keepers and hunters across Greece and Asia, Aristotle had produced a comprehensive study of animals in almost fifty volumes, which Pliny the Elder commended to his readers. Aristotle described the elephant as the most well tempered and easily tamed of species, a view borne out in Pliny the Elder’s description of Romans teaching the beasts to walk tightropes, memorise the Greek alphabet, and engage in gladiatorial contests in the circus.11 Pliny, for his part, rarely found these entertainments anything other than disappointing. There was an occasion when one of his friends put on a show of exotic beasts in the amphitheatre at Verona. But owing to bad weather, the African panthers he was promised never arrived.