In the Shadow of Vesuvius

A Life of Pliny

Daisy Dunn

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780008211103
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

‘Never less than compelling … She consistently succeeds in bringing what might otherwise seem dusty and remote to vivid life’ Tom Holland, Literary Review

‘Starts with an erupting volcano – and then gets more exciting … Wonderfully rich, witty, insightful and wide-ranging’ Sarah Bakewell

PART ONE

AUT-

PROLOGUE

Darker than Night

Lucky, I think, are those men with a god-given gift for doing what deserves to be written about or writing what deserves to be read – and very lucky are those who can do both. Through his own books and yours, my uncle will be one of these.

Pliny the Younger to Tacitus, Letter 6.16

The crisis began early one afternoon when Pliny the Younger was seventeen and staying with his mother and uncle in a villa overlooking the Bay of Naples. His mother noticed it first, ‘a cloud, both strange and enormous in appearance’, forming in the sky in the distance. Pliny said that it looked like an umbrella pine tree, ‘for it was raised high on a kind of very tall trunk and spread out into branches’. But it was also like a mushroom: as light as sea foam – white, but gradually turning dirty, elevated on a stem, potentially deadly.¹ They were too far away to be certain which mountain the mushroom cloud was coming from, but Pliny later discovered it was Vesuvius, some thirty kilometres from Misenum, where he and his mother Plinia were watching.

The cape of Misenum was famous for its sea urchins and even more so for its harbour, which was home to one of Rome’s two imperial fleets.² Its name preserved the memory of Misenus, trumpeter of Aeneas, who fought alongside Hector in the Trojan War and escaped the burning citadel only to perish ‘in a death he did not deserve’. ‘In his foolishness,’ said Virgil, ‘he happened to fill the waves with sound by blowing into a seashell, and summon the gods to a song contest.’³ Triton, son of the sea god Neptune, drowned him in his envy. It was in the course of gathering wood for Misenus’ funeral pyre, in the volcanic region of Cumae, that Aeneas discovered the golden bough that secured his entry to the Underworld.

Pliny the Elder, Pliny’s maternal uncle, was admiral of the fleet, in charge of maintaining and fitting out the boats which served predominantly ‘as protectors’ of the seas off Italy.⁴ On the morning the cloud appeared, he had risen early as usual, bathed, lunched, and was working when, at around midday, his sister came to tell him what she had seen. Abandoning his reading and calling for his shoes, he made his way to a higher vantage point for a better view.

Pliny the Elder was a historian and a naturalist as well as an admiral. He had recently finished writing his thirty-seven-volume encyclopaedia on natural history, a few passages of which were concerned with the world’s volcanoes. He had described Mount Etna in Sicily glowing through the night and ‘covering in frost the ash it ejects’ when snow lay over its surface.⁵ He had described, too, the volcano Cophantus in Bactria, north of the Hindu Kush, and Mount Chimaera in Lycia (in southern Turkey), where the fires allegedly grew when it rained but could be extinguished by earth or manure. He had written of a crater in Babylon that threw up flames like fish, and of volcanoes in Persia, Ethiopia, and the Aeolian islands. But not of Vesuvius. In the Natural History, Vesuvius is simply a vineyard-covered mountain watered by the River Sarno and visible from Pompeii.⁶ If Pliny the Elder knew it was a volcano at all, he thought it was extinct.

He gave the impression that the region of Campania was too green and well-watered to burn, with ‘plains so fertile, hills so sunny, glades so safe, woods so rich in shade, so many bountiful kinds of forest, so many mountain breezes, such fertility of crops and vines and olives, fleeces of sheep so handsome, bulls with such excellent necks, so many lakes, and rivers and springs which are so abundant in their flow, so many seas and ports, the bosom of its lands open to commerce on all sides and running out into the sea with such eagerness to help mankind!’.⁷ ‘Lucky Campania’, mused Pliny the Elder, was where Nature had gathered all her gifts.

The grapevines were especially famous. An ancient wall painting from the region shows the wine god Bacchus, dressed in a handsome bodysuit of grapes, surveying the vines on the lower slopes of a mountain – in all likelihood Vesuvius itself. An enormous snake, the ‘Good Spirit’ of vineyards, is depicted in the foreground of the painting. It was by snapping off these long, trailing vines, weaving them into ladders, and lowering themselves onto a plain beneath the slopes of Vesuvius that Spartacus and his men had managed to launch a surprise attack on the Romans, drive them back, and take over their camp during their uprising in 73 BC.⁸ Almost a century after Spartacus was defeated, the Greek geographer Strabo noted the presence of blackened stones towards the summit of the mountain and suggested that the ash of fires ‘since quenched’ had contributed to the fertility of the soil, as it had upon Mount Etna.⁹ If fires were responsible for the success of Vesuvius’s grapevines, however, there was no suggestion that they had not been extinguished for good. Vesuvius first erupted about 23,000 years before and had now been dormant for approximately 700 years – dormant, but as alive as the crops which enveloped it.¹⁰ Like a snake, it was now sloughing its skin.^fn1

The process had begun perhaps two hours before Pliny’s mother first noticed it. A relatively small eruption had presaged the larger one that formed the cloud.¹¹ Taller and taller the pine tree grew, propelled from its chamber and sucked up into the sky through convection.¹² At its peak, it would reach a height of thirty-three kilometres.¹³ Pliny the Elder decided that this ‘phenomenon’ warranted further investigation. After taking in what he could from his lookout point he made up his mind to leave Misenum to draw nearer to its source. Earlier in the day he had given his nephew something to write. When he now asked him whether he wanted to accompany him, Pliny refused, insisting that he would prefer to stay behind with his mother in order to work. Pliny the Elder would go without him. He gave orders for a boat to be fitted out and was just leaving the villa when he received a written message from his friend Rectina, who lived beneath Vesuvius. Terrified, she was begging for his help, for there was now ‘no escape except by boat’. It was then, Pliny recalled, that his uncle ‘changed his plan and what he had begun as an intellectual pursuit he completed with all he had’.¹⁴ Admiral Pliny had the entire fleet at his disposal and launched the quadriremes – large, but surprisingly swift ships equipped with two banks of rowers, two men per oar – with the intention of bringing help not only to Rectina, but to as many on that populated shore as he could.

For several hours, the fleet held course across the Bay of Naples. Despite heading in the very direction whence others were now fleeing, Pliny’s uncle was said to have been so fearless that ‘he described and noted down every movement, every shape of that evil thing, as it appeared before his eyes’.¹⁵ To any sailors who survived to tell the tale of their admiral’s fortitude, the chance of reaching land in safety must have seemed increasingly remote as they proceeded across the water. First ash rained down on them, then pumice, then ‘even black stones, burned and broken by fire’. This was no hail storm. The fall of grey-white pumice is thought to have lasted eighteen hours in total.¹⁶ On average, it was falling at a rate of 40,000 cubic metres a second.¹⁷ By the time the quadriremes had come within sight of the coast, the pumice had formed island-like masses on the sea, impeding them from advancing any further. When the helmsman advised turning back, Pliny the Elder adamantly refused. ‘Fortune favours the brave,’ he said.

Although the pumice prevented them from reaching Rectina, they determined to put in where they could. Stabiae, a port town just south of Pompeii, lay about sixteen kilometres from Vesuvius. A contemporary image reveals the town’s harbour to have had long elegant promontories, criss-cross balustrades, sand-coloured pediments and towering columns crowned with sculptures of men.¹⁸ By the time the fleet arrived here, the columns would have been mere shadows, with evening falling across the bay.

As ash and pumice continued to pour down, Pliny the Elder went to find a friend, Pomponianus, who had already stowed his possessions aboard a ship, ‘set on flight if the opposing wind settled’. Pliny the Elder embraced him and requested a bath before joining him for dinner. ‘Either he was content,’ Pliny speculated later, ‘or he showed a semblance of contentment, which was just as great-hearted.’¹⁹ As his host and his household watched flames leaping from the mountain and lighting up the night sky, Pliny the Elder told them that they were witnessing merely ‘the bonfires of peasants, abandoned through terror, and empty houses on fire’.²⁰ As if soothed by his own deception, he soon fell asleep. He was fifty-five years old, corpulent and had a weak windpipe.²¹ As the hot ash and pumice began to mount up on the pavement outside the doorway, his raw and narrow airways – call it asthma – for once proved to be a blessing. He might have been trapped inside had his noisy breathing not alerted Pomponianus’ household to his continued presence inside the house. Rousing him from his bedchamber, they gathered to make a final decision as to whether to stay put or leave while they still could. The weight of the pumice and repeated earth tremors had now begun to cause buildings to collapse. If they remained in the villa they might be crushed. If they ventured outside, then the pumice could still throw other structures down on top of them. About two metres of it would fall on the town of Stabiae alone.²²

The inhabitants of Campania had felt the tremors for days, but they were used to these movements, this background noise. As Pliny observed, ‘they were not particularly frightening because they were so commonplace’.²³ Over sixteen years had passed since the last truly devastating earthquake had struck, demolishing temples, baths and municipal buildings in Pompeii and the surrounding towns.²⁴ Some citizens had fled after that earthquake and vowed never to come back.²⁵ More had stayed, only to witness their neighbours wander in a sort of madness, their livestock – over 600 sheep – dying as noxious gases permeated the atmosphere.²⁶ It would not occur to the people of Campania to connect these events with the eruption that was now taking place. It must have been inconceivable that what was unravelling so quickly had been set in train so many years earlier.

The earthquake of ad 63 had been as unexpected in its timing as it had in its force. Striking on 5 February, when Pliny the Younger was little more than a year old, it made a mockery of the ancient belief that earthquakes never happen in winter.²⁷ Theories put forward over the past 600 years for the cause of earthquakes ranged from wrathful gods to the movement of water beneath the earth and activity of fire or air.²⁸ Pliny the Elder, for his part, subscribed to a theory of ‘opposing winds’.²⁹ He believed that the earth and all things upon it were full of life-giving breath; that winds lurked deep beneath the ground in even the darkest hollows and ravines. Left alone, these winds were quite content within their burrows. They would make room for any fresh air that tried to insinuate its way into their caverns by leaving through chinks in the earth.³⁰ Strato of Lampsacus, a philosopher from the school of Aristotle, had discovered that hot and cold repel one another. The winds beneath the earth would do all they could to recede from the cool, incoming air. If they could find no chinks through which to escape, however, and air continued to filter in, then a mighty struggle would ensue. It was in the midst of this battle between winds that the earth burst open to relieve the pressure mounting inside. Neither Pliny the Elder nor anyone else yet knew of the existence of tectonic plates, but his theory showed an understanding of the role that opposing forces play in triggering earthquakes.

The winds theory even partially accounted for what happened next. It was rightly presumed that the sheep that died in AD 63 did so as a result of bowing their heads so close to the earth from which gases such as carbon dioxide and sulphur were now emanating. The death of livestock is a common occurrence in volcanic regions. In the spring of 2015, over five thousand sheep died in Iceland as a result of intoxication by volcanic sulphur. Humans hold their heads sufficiently high to inhale the poison in smaller doses. Their heady confusion tends to pass. But what no one realised in AD 63 was that this earthquake and gaseous release was evidence not of winds moving beneath the earth but of magma rising within Vesuvius. Earthquakes had continued to plague southern Italy over the next sixteen years of the younger Pliny’s life as – slowly – the volcano began to wake.

As the earthquakes started to intensify across the Bay of Naples, buildings seemed both to be swaying on their foundations and collapsing from their debris-laden roofs. Pliny the Elder remained sufficiently rational to realise that to stay inside, while the earth shook and the sky fell in, would be fatal. He, Pomponianus and the other men and women in the house at Stabiae gathered up pillows, strapped them to their heads, and ventured out into the darkness. Pumice is light and porous – formed, as it is, when gas bubbles expand and burst inside the rising magma, which then solidifies and rapidly cools – but a large piece of rock might easily have felled them.³¹

Back in Misenum, Pliny and his mother had made a similar decision. Pliny had gone to bed early only to be woken from a short sleep. Although pumice and ash were yet to fall here, the tremors had become so strong that objec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Maps
• Nota
• Part One: Aut-
• Part Two: Winter
• Part Three: Spring
• Part Four: Summer
• Part Five: -umn
• Epilogue: Resurrection
• Picture Section
• Timeline
• List of Illustrations
• Footnotes
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• By the Same Author
• About the Publisher