The Shadow of Vesuvius

by Daisy Dunn

  Pliny’s urban responsibilities increased significantly after AD 98 when he found himself appointed prefect of the Treasury of Saturn at Rome. Based in the god’s temple at the foot of the Capitoline Hill, the treasury was the store for money and civil documents, which the prefect was responsible for preserving. Important payments were weighed out in a large pair of scales inside the temple.17 Pliny already had some experience of handling finances; although he never mentioned it in his letters, he had previously worked in the aerarium militare (military treasury) that existed to organise the pensions of army veterans.18 This work, and the fact that he was stepping into a role previously occupied by the stepfather of his first wife, meant that he was far from ignorant of what the treasury prefecture would entail. Neither of which stopped him from complaining about the book-­balancing and ‘very many very unliterary letters’ he was required to write.19 But while his position in the treasury made it even harder for him to escape to the countryside in peace, Pliny had little choice but to embrace it: the promotion had come about as a direct consequence of the death of the emperor he most despised.

  Domitian was assassinated in AD 96 after ruling for fifteen years. He had grown increasingly paranoid in the three years since the trials of the philosophers and eventually fell victim to his own superstition. In his youth, said Suetonius, Domitian had received a prediction of the day, year and time at which his death would occur – and even an explanation of how it would happen.20 He had become so fixated by this prediction that his father, Vespasian, teased him for forgetting his coming fate when he refused mushrooms at dinner (he had sooner fear death by iron, he was told, than by poison). Domitian was on his guard as the fatal moment approached. He watched for a blood-­red moon in Aquarius. The following day, he asked the time and was tricked into believing that the hour he most feared had passed. As he began to celebrate cheating death, his chamberlain announced that someone had arrived to see him and would not go away. The visitor turned out to be Stephanus, the private secretary of Flavia Domitilla, the niece Domitian had exiled after executing her husband Flavius Clemens for adopting the Jewish or Christian faith. Stephanus claimed to have evidence of a plot.

  Making the fateful mistake of dismissing his slaves, Domitian entered his bedchamber to meet with Stephanus. To avert suspicion over the previous days, the scribe had feigned injury and worn his arm in a bandage.21 With his available hand he now passed the emperor a document. While Domitian was absorbed in his reading, Stephanus retrieved from his bandages a dagger and inflicted a blow to the emperor’s groin. Stephanus had recently been accused of embezzling money. With nothing to lose, he had agreed to lend his support to a plot to murder Domitian who was now ‘feared and hated by all’.22 The conspiracy was said to have been hatched by Domitian’s ‘friends and closest freedmen in conjunction with his wife [Domitia]’.23

  Reeling from the attack, Domitian ordered a boy who was attending the household gods to fetch the dagger he kept under his pillow and summon his slaves. The boy did as he was told but found that the blade had been removed and all exits closed. Domitian had no choice but to wrestle Stephanus. As he tried desperately to gouge the scribe’s eyes, the emperor was set upon by a throng of men from the imperial household, including his chief chamberlain and a gladiator. Domitian was stabbed seven more times. Injured but still breathing, he struggled on but to no avail. He died from his injuries, aged forty-­four.24

  Pliny looked back on Domitian’s rule as a period of intense secrecy and political chicanery. It was clear to him that the age of political informing had not died with Nero. Believing that it could be more calamitous to hound men from the senate on suspicion of being informers than to let sleeping rogues lie, the Flavian emperors had required senators merely to swear on oath that they had not backed any activity that could endanger an­-other’s safety, or benefited at the expense of others.25 Meanwhile, Pliny saw informers everywhere – in temples, at the treasury, across the forum – despite their determined efforts to conceal themselves from view.26 He was convinced that Regulus was as active a spy under Domitian as he had been in his youth.27 And he had good reason. Discovered on the late emperor’s desk was a petition that the lawyer-­turned-­informer Mettius Carus had lodged against Pliny following the trial of the Stoics.

  Pliny might have panicked, had he heard of the document while Domitian was still alive, and had he not been reassured by the fact that two members of his household happened to have the same ‘dream’. One of his slave boys told him that he had been sleeping when he witnessed two people in white tunics enter his room through a window, cut his hair, and leave by the way they came. The next morning the slave claimed to have discovered his hair on the floor and a bald patch on the crown of his head.28 Either Pliny’s slaves had very inventive ways for accounting for the sudden onset of age, or something else was adrift, for one of his ‘not uneducated’ freedmen reported a similar attack. This time, a lone man had entered the room where he was sleeping beside his brother, sat on the bed, and cut a circle of hair from his head. Again, daylight revealed the scatterings of hair across the floor. In Rome, men accused of crimes were accustomed to grow their hair long. The fact that these men claimed to have had their hair shorn off was a sign to Pliny that all was well. He no longer stood accused. The danger had passed before Pliny had so much as been summoned to trial. Mettius Carus’ attempt to incriminate him through his informing had come to nothing.

  Pliny had risen through the ranks of the senate during Domitian’s rule. Although one cannot help but suspect that he had been in less danger from Domitian than he claimed, at least until Mettius Carus lodged his allegations against him, he had escaped the emperor’s thunderbolts and outlived him. During his refuge outside Rome he had done his best to support the Stoic Artemidorus, paying off debts he had incurred ‘through the most glorious causes’ (causes too glorious for Pliny to have troubled recording). Now that Domitian was dead, Pliny proposed to do whatever he could to help some of the other philosophers who had suffered. Domitian’s death was never anything more to Pliny than ‘a great and glorious opportunity to pursue the guilty, avenge the maligned, and put oneself forward’.29 He ached for such a case and perhaps more so for atonement for his complicity in the condemnation of the Stoics. He might have ached also for distraction. It was in this period that he was overcome by ‘very great sadness’ at the death of his first wife.

  For all the talk of his relentless libido, Domitian had failed to produce an heir. The one son he conceived with his wife had died in childhood, leaving his conspirators free to engineer the rise of Nerva, an apparently benign sixty-­six-­year-­old former advisor to Nero. Pliny had reason to be optimistic for the new government when he saw Nerva recall the surviving philosophers from exile, among them his Stoic ‘friends’. Pliny now acted as quickly as he could. Ordinarily he would have sought the advice of Corellius Rufus, his old mentor, the man he ‘always referred everything to’.30 But Corellius was rather cautious, and besides, Pliny had learned from experience that ‘You should not consult those whose advice you ought to take on a matter you have already decided on.’ Proceeding therefore alone, he approached the returning philosophers to discuss his plans for exacting justice for their plight.

  His first thought was to punish Regulus, who was so apprehensive in this period of uncertainty that he even attempted a reconciliation. He and Pliny communicated first through intermediaries and then face to face. Pliny left their brief meeting without giving him so much as a guarantee of his future safety. He longed to prosecute him – to exact revenge for his vile treatment of the philosophers, to conquer him once and for all. But Regulus was rich and, for reasons which had long eluded Pliny, influential.31 He was too slippery a character to take on with any confidence of success. Pliny therefore turned his attention to the other lawyers who had served the prosecution. He alighted upon Publicius Certus, who had helped condemn Fannia’s stepson for his risqué farce about Domitian’s marriage. Although he was a senator and treasury o
fficial he seemed to Pliny like a safer target.

  It was never going to be easy to secure a trial of a senator. To stab a fellow senator in the back was one thing, to turn him over to the law, quite another. As a preliminary, Pliny voiced his intentions in the senate without so much as mentioning Publicius Certus’ name. As he predicted, the reaction of his fellow senators was broadly hostile. ‘What are you trying to do?’ one cried: ‘Where are you going with this? What of the dangers you’ll encounter?’ They knew perfectly well whom Pliny intended to bring down. They would not endorse it. Even the stepfather of Pliny’s late wife spoke out in Certus’ defence.

  But then they were reminded of what Fannia and her mother had suffered at his hands. Any empathy these reminiscences stirred among the senators was Pliny’s to exploit as he rose to make his speech. This was his moment, his chance to vent whatever feelings of fear and anger he had had upon witnessing Domitian’s treatment of the philosophers of Rome. It was also his opportunity to make his name, to do something more than use his riches to pay off the debts of impoverished Stoics. And he triumphed. By Pliny’s own account, his speech garnered such admiration, such applause, that by the time he had finished delivering it, he had won the approval of almost the entire house for speaking out: ‘There was barely anyone in the senate who did not embrace me, kiss me, and verily lavish me with praise.’32

  It was to no avail, however. Nerva decided not to take Pliny’s motion any further. He could remember the chaos into which the senate had descended when senator turned against senator in the direst age of political informing. If Pliny condemned Publicius Certus, he would give fresh wind to the informers, initiate a frenzied witch hunt, perhaps trigger the downfall of the senate itself. If at first Pliny shared Tacitus’ belief that the accession of Nerva marked ‘the dawn of a most blissful age’, he soon realised that the new emperor was weak.33 In one of his letters, he records part of a conversation one of the returning Stoics had with Nerva over dinner. What would happen to the cruellest of Domitian’s political informers, Nerva asks, if he were still alive? ‘He would be dining with us,’ the Stoic replies.34

  Disenchanted and increasingly angered by Nerva’s passivity and reluctance to hand over the men responsible for Domitian’s assassination, the Praetorian Guard responded more aggressively still, seizing two of the suspected killers and putting them to death; according to one late source, they removed his chamberlain’s genitals and stuffed them in his mouth.35 Humiliated and weakened by the Guard’s display of power, Nerva had little choice but to succumb to the pressure they now placed on him to adopt a son and successor. The emperor had put off making a decision until now, and given his advancing years, it was only natural that his people should have become anxious. If there was no plan for the succession, then who knew who might attempt to seize power?36

  There were many men who might have made a worthy successor, but some of the most powerful senators favoured one candidate in particular. The man they wanted was hundreds of miles away, commanding one of the provinces of Germania; a soldier from Italica in Baetica (modern Andalusia), and son of a senator who had commanded formidably in the Jewish War: Marcus Ulpius Traianus – Trajan.

  Pliny described Nerva taking the advice ‘of men and gods’ in his decision to adopt the young governor. It is uncertain what role Trajan played in these plans, but he was surely aware of the manoeuvring of both the senate and the Praetorian Guard at Rome.37 News of his adoption was proclaimed at Rome in October, AD 97. Pliny celebrated the fact that ‘the adoption was enacted not in the bedroom but in a temple, not before the marriage bed but before the couch of Jupiter Best and Greatest’.38 Rome had just received news of a victory in the region of the Danube. As Nerva laid the victory laurels before Jupiter, he used the occasion to rejoice in his new ‘son’. Nerva and Trajan would share power by serving as joint consuls or heads of the senate. It would not be long before Trajan was sole emperor of Rome.

  Nerva’s adoption of Trajan settled the Guard but did little for Pliny in his immediate plans. Masking his disappointment over the emperor’s prevarication and his reluctance to bring Publicius Certus to trial, Pliny satisfied himself with believing that he had won on principle. He had ‘revived the long-­lapsed tradition’ of raising matters which concerned the public in the senate house while risking the hostility of his fellow senators, and had an excellent speech to show for it.39 If this was insufficient to assuage his guilt, Pliny also did what he could privately to support the relatives of the philosophers who had died. He found a tutor for the children of one of the Stoic biographers. He continued to be a source of comfort to Fannia until she fell gravely ill while nursing a Vestal Virgin. As her fever and cough worsened, Pliny said that she maintained a spirit worthy of her late husband and father. ‘I grieve that so great-­hearted a woman is being seized from our very eyes,’ he wrote, ‘and doubt whether the likes of her will ever be seen again.’40

  Although there was no trial, Publicius Certus was robbed of the consulship he had hoped for and dismissed from his post as prefect of the Treasury of Saturn. Then Pliny heard that, ‘by coincidence, though it was as if it was no coincidence’, he had become very ill and died. ‘I have heard people say that he had seen a sort of vision of me in his mind’s eye, threatening him with a sword. Whether this is true, I would not dare to say, but it would set an example if it did appear to be so.’41 For all Pliny complained of the writing of ‘very many very unliterary letters’ and infringement of the treasury responsibilities upon his time, the promotion was a symbolic victory after his efforts to bring Publicius Certus to trial were scuppered. As his Stoic friend Euphrates told him when he complained about the duties of his new post, a man who performs a public service and administers the justice that philosophers can only talk about, has the most beautiful share in the philosophic life.42 It was a line to repeat like a creed whenever the city impinged upon his contemplation amidst the meadows and watery acanthus.

  TWELVE

  Head, Heart, Womb

  [6 June] Then I was shown that after the sacred Ides of June

  Is a good time for brides and their husbands,

  And the first part of the month found to be unfavourable

  To their marriage bed. For the holy wife of the high priest said:

  ‘Until the gentle Tiber has swept the cut hair

  From Vesta’s shrine on its yellow waters out to sea,

  I may not brush my hair with a wooden comb

  Or cut my nails with iron, or touch my husband,

  Even though he is Jupiter’s priest

  Even though he was given to me to be with forever.’

  Ovid, Fasti, 6.223–32

  Every year the people of Tifernum and the surrounding towns would make their way to Pliny’s Tuscan estate before the harvest. Within its grounds stood a temple to Ceres, the goddess credited with introducing men to corn when, in their primordial savagery, they feasted only on acorns.1 While the crowds who came to feast in her honour grew over the years, the temple only crumbled. There came a point when anyone who saw it might have supposed it had been caught up in a cyclone it was so battered. The walls were weathered. The old wooden statue of the goddess was missing limbs. It was a wonder Ceres could protect the crops at all, given the state that she was in.

  Pliny summoned the soothsayers, who told him what he already knew: the temple needed to be larger and grander.2 With no shelter to be found beyond the temple walls, it was a case of worshippers either getting wet in the autumn rain or being blinded by the sun as it dipped ever lower in the sky. Reluctant to see another harvest slip by without proper provision, Pliny resolved to build as beautiful a temple as he could imagine. He employed an architect to draw up plans for a sizeable monument with marble statue, tetrastyle porch and – so as to ‘seem to be generous as well as pious’ – porticoes. ‘The [temple] for the use of the goddess, and [the porticoes] for the mortals,’ Pliny clarified for the benefit of the builders. He was first to admit that he was unused to liaising w
ith tradesmen.3

  Pliny also planned to remove some statues from the main house. Positioned where they were, these busts stood as relics of a period he would sooner have forgotten. The original owner of his estate, Marcus Granius Marcellus, seems to have left them behind when he was forced to give up his property.4 A magistrate from Hispellum (Spello in Umbria), Granius Marcellus had been brought to trial by a political informer in AD 15.5 The accusations against him included the spreading of wicked rumours about Tiberius’ personal habits, which carried particular weight, noted Tacitus, because the rumours happened to be true.6 Although he was cleared of every accusation the informers had made against him, Granius survived only to see his son charged with treason and forced to commit suicide, and his estate seized and pressed into imperial hands.7

  How Pliny came to live at the Tuscan estate at all after it was requisitioned is a mystery. It has been proposed that his uncle received the estate back in Vespasian’s gift on the basis that he was a relation of this Granius Marcellus.8 In the seventeenth century, a French scholar adduced two fragmentary inscriptions which he believed revealed that Pliny the Elder’s mother was called Grania Marcella, daughter of Granius, which would make Pliny Granius’ great-­grandson.9 However it was that Pliny the Elder came to own the estate to pass down to Pliny, its tumultuous history could have made them more sensitive to the threat posed by political informers. The fate of the Granii might have been Pliny’s own had Domitian not died before he could act on the charges lodged against him.