Pliny and the Eruption of Vesuvius

Pedar W. Foss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000557183
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Pliny and the Eruption of Vesuvius is a forensic examination of two of the most famous letters from the ancient Mediterranean world: Pliny the Younger's Epistulae 6.16 and 6.20, which offer a contemporary account of the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79.

These letters, sent to the historian Tacitus, provide accounts by Pliny the Younger about what happened when Mt Vesuvius exploded, destroying the surrounding towns and countryside, including Pompeii and Herculaneum, and killing his uncle, Pliny the Elder. This volume provides the first comprehensive full-length treatment of these documents, contextualized by evidence-rich biographies for both Plinys, and a synthesis of the latest archaeological and volcanological research which answers questions about the eruption date. A new collation of sources results in a detailed manuscript tradition and an authoritative Latin text, while commentaries on each letter offer copiously referenced insights on their structure, style, and meaning.

Pliny and the Eruption of Vesuvius offers a thorough companion to these letters, and to the eruption, which will be of interest not only to those working on Vesuvius, Pompeii, and Herculaneum, and the works of Pliny but also to general readers, Latin students, and scholars of the Roman world more broadly.

1 Two Plinys

DOI: 10.4324/9781003273028-2

Vespasian has seized imperial power after a bloody year of civil war. On the shore of a deep Alpine lake, a boy gazes at his hometown. His father has just passed away. He has entered the legal supervision of a tutor, though he continues to live with his mother. The town is Novum Comum (hereafter, Comum); it is a prosperous, midsized Roman settlement on the southern end of the glacial-blue dagger of Lacus Larius. Soon he’ll have to leave.

Titus now governs the empire. Above a terraced seaside villa, a young man squints at a single, hazy mountain challenging the heavens. He and his mother are staying with her brother, a polymath who has completed a multivolume compendium of world knowledge. The villa commands the bustling imperial naval base at Misenum, in the welcoming Bay of Naples. His uncle commands the fleet. The young man scrambles back down to his studies.

Trajan is emperor of Rome. A middle-aged man looks over the muddy, green ribbon of the Tiber River as it slides through the largest city in the world, air thick with smoke from cooking fires and baths. He has tried to tame that river; over the last 25 years, he has developed a healthy respect for the power of nature. He has also supervised men, holding nearly every office on the cursus honorum, the “political career ladder.” A colleague has just asked him to write about a day from his youth when his uncle perished in a terrible catastrophe. It looks like he will never have children; his family name will die. But his story might endure.

This chapter treats the lives of the Younger and Elder Pliny across these three temporal frames, through the main literary and epigraphic sources. It also introduces the other named or speaking individuals who figure in the story of the two Vesuvian letters. Their knowledge, experiences, and relationships form a personal, social, political, and literary framework for Pliny’s letters. That framework began to take shape at the northern rim of the Italian peninsula, where Gauls and Romans had been blending their communities for over two hundred years (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Map of the Italian peninsula and its administrative regions, ca. AD 106. Geographic information: Talbert, ed., Barrington Atlas; ESRI, ArcGIS, P. Foss.

Historical Context

Below the southern wall of the Alps, a local Gallic tribe, the Comenses, had long lived, settling along a high ridge extending southwest of Lacus Larius (Lake Como). However, in 196 BC, a Roman army led by Marcus Claudius Marcellus defeated them.¹ Then came a century of resistance, accommodation, Roman settlement, local resettlement, road-building, and eventual integration in this part of Cisalpine Gaul, north of the Po River, known as Transpadana.² In 89 BC, recognizing the loyalty (or trying to secure it) of local Romano-Gallic communities during the Social Wars—when an Italic confederation attempted secession from Roman control unless they were given citizenship—the Roman consul, Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo, reorganized Transpadana and gave the inhabitants ius Latii, “Latin status.”³ While the rights included in this particular package are not perfectly understood, they usually included such privileges as intermarriage and commercial relationships with Roman citizens. Local communities tended to run their own affairs. By the late 120s BC, a pathway to Roman citizenship had become a reward for army service, and holding local office was increasingly open to local elites in Latin-status communities.⁴ In Transpadana, it has long been thought that Latin status was more titular than practical, but new evidence of land division and registration suggests that the physical imprint of Roman administration was in fact more dramatic, as local landowners with Celtic names had their property rights mapped out on bronze plates using Roman conventions and measurements.⁵ Possibly by 89 BC (but definitely by 49), the residents of the area roughly from Mediolanum (Milan) to Comum were enrolled in the Roman voting district for the tribus Oufentina, the “Oufentina tribe.”⁶

In 59 BC, according to the ancient geographer Strabo (5.1.6), Julius Caesar placed 5,000 settlers in a rectangular fortified town, probably on the footprint of an extant army camp, at the southern tip of the western branch of the lake, perhaps declaring it a Roman colony as well (Figure 1.2).⁷ Its outline still peeks out of the modern street plan of Como, though the present shoreline has now migrated more than 200 m forward from the Republican-era quay.⁸ In 49 BC, Caesar confirmed citizenship for all communities in Transpadana, and Comum became a municipium.⁹ Gauls and Romans mingled and married; by the time of Augustus, the free population of Comum and its territory is estimated to have been about 16,000.¹⁰ Just under a decade after Augustus’ death, the Elder Pliny came crying into the world.

Figure 1.2 Map of Novum Comum and Lacus Larius, ca. AD 100. Sources: Ferrario, et al., “Historical Shoreline”; Luraschi, “Como romana”; Gibson, High Empire; Jorio, Le terme. Geographic information: ESRI, ArcGIS, P. Foss.

The Elder Pliny

He was born Caius Plinius Secundus at Comum in AD 23 or 24.¹¹ There is no surviving ancient portrait, so all images are conjectural (e.g., Figures 1.3, 4.4).¹² He was the uncle (avunculus) to his sister’s son, the Younger Pliny.¹³ Nearly all that we know of him comes from three sources: his nephew’s Epistulae (particularly letters 3.5, 5.8, 6.16); a short biography (the Vita Plinii), probably written by the historian Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus; and the Elder’s one surviving work, the Historia Naturalis, notably its preface (praefatio).¹⁴ Key portions of those sources are critical for understanding the Elder’s life, so they are reprinted below, in chronological order of composition. These sources provide a (filtered) sense of the Elder’s character, personality, interests, and motivation. Brief discussion follows, as well as in the relevant portions of Chs 4–5 (Ep. 6.16 and 6.20).

Figure 1.3 Portrait of Pliny the Elder from de Laet, Historiae Naturalis, vol. 1 (1635). Vellum-backed book, no. 458.14 (01/03), spine number 11. Tabley House Collection, The University of Manchester.

* * *

The Natural History, confusingly in its modern printed form, has three different numbering systems for references within books (the typographic conventions for which, more confusingly, vary across editions).¹⁵ In 1587, the French medical botanist, Jacobus Dalecampius (Jacques Dalechamps), released a text and commentary on all 37 books, each book internally numbered by chapter, based flexibly on subheadings in the table of contents the Elder himself listed in HN, Book 1.¹⁶ A century later, in 1685, Joannes Harduinus (Jean Hardouin) released a more extensive text and commentary, with a chapter system also based on Pliny’s table of contents (diverging in places from Dalecampius), but now adding line numbers on each page of text.¹⁷ The third system was developed by the German tradition during the late 19th century. Its versions comprise what is known as the “Teubner” edition and include both the Dalecampius and Harduinus chapter numbers—plus yet another system of shorter sections (often called paragraphs) of text, which may be denoted by a section mark (§).¹⁸ This book, in line with most recent translations, uses the Teubner paragraphs.

Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis praef. 1, 12–21, 33.¹⁹

Plinius Secundus Vespasiano Suo S. (1) Libros Naturalis Historiae, novicium Camenis Quiritium tuorum opus, natos apud me proxima fetura licentiore epistula narrare constitui tibi, iucundissime imperator ...

Pliny the Elder greets his friend Vespasian [Emperor-designate Titus]. (1) I have decided to tell you about these books of a Natural History, a brand-new work for the native Muses of your Roman subjects, born as my most recent offspring, in this rather bold letter, most delightful commander…

After this jaunty opening, the Elder rejiggers a poetic line from his fellow northern Italian, Catullus, an exercise in disingenuous self-effacement (among other things).²⁰ He then speaks in familiar terms to Titus, leaning heavily on their joint military service in the late 50s on the Rhine (in 1: hoc castrense verbum, “this army slang”; petulantia, “brash talk”; procaci epistula, “pushy letter”; in 3: castrensi contubernio, “tent-mate in camp”), and continues at bootlicking length to heap praises on the imperial son, whom he envisions as an arbiter of the book. Later, he gets to his project:

(12) Meae quidem temeritati accessit hoc quoque, quod levioris operae hos tibi dedicavi libellos: nam nec ingenii sunt capaces, quod alioqui in nobis perquam mediocre erat, neque admittunt excessus aut orationes sermonesve aut casus mirabiles vel eventus varios, iucunda dictu aut legentibus blanda. (13) Sterilis materia, rerum natura, hoc est vita, narratur, et haec sordidissima sui parte, ac plurimarum rerum aut rusticis vocabulis aut externis, immo barbaris, etiam cum honoris praefatione ponendis. (14) Praeterea iter est non trita auctoribus via nec qua peregrinari animus expetat: nemo apud nos qui idem temptaverit invenitur, nemo apud Graecos qui unus omnia ea tractaverit. Magna pars studiorum amoenitates quaerimus, quae vero tractata ab aliis dicuntur inmensae subtilitatis obscuris rerum in tenebris premuntur. An omnia attingenda quae Graeci τῆς ἐγκυκλίου παιδείας vocant, et tamen ignota aut incerta ingeniis facta? Alia vero ita multis prodita ut in fastidium sint adducta.

(12) Indeed, to my boldness has been added this, that I have dedicated to you these book-rolls of trifling effort: for they are not full of talent, which anyway in my case is utterly average, nor do they contain digressions, speeches, disputations, marvelous occurrences or colorful outcomes—enjoyable to relate, and alluring to readers. (13) Sterile stuff, the “nature of things”—that is, life—is described [here], pretty paltry as far as it goes, and for most items in backwoods or foreign, even “barbarian” terms, which require advance apology. (14) Besides, my path is not a road trod by authors nor one by which the mind seeks to go exploring: none among us (Romans) can be found who has made the same attempt, none among the Greeks who has investigated all these things by himself. Most of us seek out the delights of scholarship, while topics investigated by others that are considered in unfathomable detail get overwhelmed by the dark uncertain corners of their subjects. Must all those things be dealt with that the Greeks call “an encompassing education,” despite being unconfirmed or disputed by clever arguments? Surely the rest has been published in so many words that it has to be regarded as tiresome.

(15) Res ardua vetustis novitatem dare, novis auctoritatem, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Prologue: Lightning, Water, and Fire
• 1 Two Plinys
• 2 Two Letters
• 3 Two Days
• 4 Epistulae 6.16, The Elder’s Story
• 5 Epistulae 6.20, The Younger’s Story
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index