Pliny the Elder

• 1. Introduction

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  Pliny the Elder died on the 25th of August, AD 79, on a beach near Stabiae, surrounded by the ash and toxic gases of Mount Vesuvius, having gone there not to flee the disaster but to sail toward it. He was a corpulent man with a chronic respiratory condition, and he had crossed the Gulf of Naples in a military galley to rescue a stranded friend. His last recorded words, shouted to a helmsman urging retreat, were: "Fortune favours the bold; steer to where Pomponianus is."

  That same man had spent the previous decade writing the Naturalis Historia, a thirty-seven-volume encyclopedia that would become the model for every encyclopedia that followed. He had also served as a naval commander, a cavalry officer, a procurator in four provinces, a lawyer, and a biographer. He produced seven works spanning 102 volumes.

  How did a single Roman find time to do all of it? And what drove a man of such administrative distinction to wade into a volcanic eruption in the name of scholarship and friendship?

• 2. Como to the Rhine

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  Gaius Plinius Secundus was born at Como, in the region Julius Caesar had colonized only about 82 years before Pliny's birth, importing 4,500 settlers from other provinces and 500 aristocratic Greeks to found the community. The town was multi-ethnic from its inception, and the Plinies could have come from anywhere within that mosaic.

  His father, Gaius Plinius Celer, was of equestrian rank, the class just below the senatorial elite. Pliny the Elder never married and had no children. He adopted his nephew, the future Pliny the Younger, probably by a testamentary arrangement after his death, leaving the young man a considerable inheritance. The wealth was real: Pliny the Younger's combined estates allowed him to found a school and a library, endow a fund for the women and children of Como, and own numerous estates around Rome and Lake Como.

  In AD 46, at about age 23, Pliny entered the army as a junior officer, following the custom for men of his class. The classical scholar Ronald Syme reconstructed three periods at three ranks across Pliny's military career. He began under the commander Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo in Germania Inferior, taking part in AD 47 in the Roman conquest of the Chauci and the construction of a canal between the rivers Maas and Rhine. His description of Roman ships anchored overnight having to fend off floating trees carries the tone of someone who was there.

  A promotion to military tribune moved him to Germania Superior under Publius Pomponius Secundus, a man of letters and a half-brother of Corbulo. Pliny fought in the campaign against the Chatti in AD 50, aged 27, in his fourth year of service. A further promotion to praefectus alae made him commander of a cavalry battalion of about 480 men back in Germania Inferior. A decorative piece of harness bearing his name was later found at Castra Vetera, modern Xanten, a large Roman base on the lower Rhine.

• 3. Writing Under Terror

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  Nero, the last of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, became emperor while Pliny was still serving in Germania. When Pliny left the military, he found himself practicing law in Rome under a ruler who grew, in Pliny the Younger's words, gradually more insane as his reign progressed.

  During those years, Pliny wrote. He completed Bella Germaniae, a twenty-volume history of the wars between Rome and the Germani, prompted in part by a dream in which the spirit of Drusus Nero begged him to preserve his memory from oblivion. He wrote a two-volume biography of his old commander Pomponius Secundus. He published a three-book, six-volume educational manual on rhetoric, titled Studiosus, or "The Student." Pliny the Younger quoted its ambition plainly: "The orator is trained from his very cradle and perfected." That was followed by eight books entitled Dubii sermonis, on doubtful phraseology.

  Neither of those last two works survived. Pliny the Younger explained why they were written the way they were: his uncle had composed them under Nero, in the last years of the reign, when every kind of literary pursuit that was the least independent or elevated had been rendered dangerous by servitude. Pliny focused on grammar and rhetoric, subjects too formal to provoke imperial suspicion, rather than the history and natural investigation he preferred.

  Nero committed suicide in 68, and the calculated silence ended. The next year brought the civil war of the Year of the Four Emperors. At its close, Vespasian, a general who had also risen from the equestrian class, became emperor and immediately put Pliny to work as a procurator.

• 4. The Procurator's Provinces

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  Suetonius wrote that Pliny was kept in a continuous succession of the most distinguished procuratorships under Vespasian. The classical scholar Friedrich Munzer catalogued four: Gallia Narbonensis around AD 70, Africa in AD 70-72, Hispania Tarraconensis in AD 72-74, and Gallia Belgica in AD 74-76.

  The procuratorship in Hispania Tarraconensis is the most firmly documented. Larcius Licinius, the Praetorian legate there, offered Pliny 400,000 sesterces for his personal collection of research extracts. Pliny declined. Those extracts, by the time of his death, filled about 160 volumes. He bequeathed them to his nephew.

  In Hispania, Pliny became familiar with the gold mines of the north and west. His descriptions of mining methods in Natural History read like those of a witness. He may have visited Las Medulas, the mine excavated there. In Africa, he watched the Psylli provoke poisonous toads and observed the fertile coastal oasis of Gabes, in present-day Tunisia, which is now a World Heritage Site. In Gallia Belgica, he recorded how a severe winter killed the first crops planted by the Treviri, who sowed again in March and collected an abundant harvest.

  All through this period, Pliny rose before dawn to attend Vespasian at the palace before the emperor's other business began. His nephew described it with the imperfect tense in Latin, ibat, conveying something done repeatedly, habitually. He noted that Pliny was a very ready sleeper, sometimes dropping off mid-study and waking again to continue.

• 5. Natural History

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  Natural History was dedicated to Titus, Vespasian's son, who had been consul six times by AD 77. The six consulships of Titus before that year were held in 70, 72, 74, 75, 76, and 77, all jointly with Vespasian. That convergence places the dedication in 77, the year Pliny was allowed back in Rome and when the manuscript was most likely released to the public.

  The thirty-seven books cover botany, zoology, astronomy, geology, and mineralogy, as well as the human exploitation of those resources. Pliny himself wrote that he was the only Roman ever to have attempted such a work. His sources were personal experience, his own earlier writings including the Germania volumes, and extracts from other authors read aloud by a servant while another servant transcribed them as Pliny dictated. He is said to have dictated while bathing. In winter, he had the copyist fitted with gloves and long sleeves so the writing hand would not stiffen in the cold.

  Some of what Natural History records cannot be found anywhere else. His accounts of hushing in mining technology and the use of water mills for crushing grain are the only surviving descriptions of those practices. The work is also virtually the only surviving text that describes the output of Roman artists of the period. Lorenzo Ghiberti drew on Pliny's method of discussing artists when writing his commentaries in the 15th century. Giorgio Vasari, who published the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects in 1550, did the same.

  The manuscript lacked a final revision when Pliny died. That incompleteness is the only physical evidence, beyond his nephew's letters, that his death was genuinely sudden.

• 6. The Final Crossing

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  On the 24th of August, AD 79, around one in the afternoon, Pliny's sister pointed out an unusual cloud rising in the distance above the bay. Pliny began organizing an expedition to observe it. Before his galleys could depart, a message arrived from Rectina, a friend stranded at Stabiae, asking urgently for rescue. He changed course and led the fleet across the Gulf of Naples.

  As his vessel neared Herculaneum, cinders and pumice fell on the deck. The helmsman urged turning back. Pliny refused and directed him toward the position of Senator Pomponianus at Stabiae. The same wind that carried them to shore made departure impossible. They waited, then decided that evening that the risk of collapsing buildings outweighed the risk of the open air.

  When the group fled into the toxic plume, Pliny could not keep up. He suffered from a chronic respiratory condition, possibly asthma, and was a corpulent man. He died and was left behind. Three days later, when the group returned after the plume had dispersed, they found his body with no apparent external injuries.

  Pliny the Younger wrote his account of that night in a letter to Tacitus, composed twenty-seven years after the events. He believed toxic gases killed his uncle. Suetonius recorded a separate rumor that Pliny had asked a slave to kill him to spare him the heat. In 1859, Jacob Bigelow, reviewing the evidence in Pliny the Younger's letter, concluded that apoplexy or heart disease was the more likely cause. The encyclopediste Louis de Jaucourt, writing later, called Pliny's writings "the most precious monuments of all antiquity" in the arts and sciences, and noted that his end had made him of particular interest to all of humanity as well.