ELEVEN

A Difficult, Arduous, Fastidious Thing

But when the blissful summer is summoned by the West Wind

To send each flock out to pasture in the glades,

Let us lose ourselves in the chill fields at first light

While the morning is fresh, while the grass is white

And the dew on the delicate blades most delicious to graze.

Virgil, Georgics, 3.322–6

Even in the relaxed setting of his Tuscan villa, Pliny endeavoured to keep a strict routine. He had set hours for seeing Calpurnia – in the middle of the day, over dinner and at recitals – and set hours for exercising, bathing, writing and dictating.¹ Anyone who did not know him would have said he got off to a slow start in the summer months, waking around sunrise only to lie in bed like a laggard. But Pliny rested, his shutters closed, to make the most of the darkness. He liked the way his thoughts flowed unimpeded when there was nothing for his eyes to fix upon except the pictures in his head.

My mind does not follow my eyes, but my eyes my mind. They see what my mind sees, since they cannot see anything else. If I have something current to work on, I’ll think it through in much the same way I would if I were writing and editing it. Sometimes I’ll do more, sometimes less, depending on how easily it can be composed or retained in my head.²

This was Pliny lengthening the day from the moment he awoke. Ignoring any instinct to spring from his bed to his desk, he indulged in a protracted levee in order to settle his ideas. In these quiet moments, he might write an entire letter or edit a flight of speech before he had so much as picked up his stylus. It was only when he had something worth remembering that he would summon his secretary, throw open his windows, and dictate what he had formed in his head. The process must have taken time to perfect. Was it born in necessity, when his eyes became inflamed and red and sensitive to light? Did he learn to ‘see’ more clearly with his mind once his vision had begun to fail? Whatever the circumstances surrounding his routine, nothing seemed to diminish the pleasure Pliny took in thinking in the dark.

Sometimes he was just relieved to be able to complete something. Writing did not always come as easily to him at his Tuscan villa as it did in Rome or at his ‘seat of the Muses’, Laurentum. ‘I have revised the odd little speech,’ he confessed to Tacitus one summer, ‘though it’s the kind of work that’s toilsome and devoid of pleasure, resembling more the burdens of the countryside than its pleasures.’³ He was always anxious to update Tacitus on his progress. He was overcome by excitement whenever Tacitus told him that their names were being uttered in the same conversations about literature. Pliny seldom believed common hearsay, but he gathered hard evidence that proved that he was really catching up with Tacitus – or even level-­pegging him: ‘You ought to have noticed it even as far as wills are concerned: unless someone happens to be a very close friend of one of us, we receive the same legacies which are equal in worth.’⁴ Tacitus, who appears to have been more flattered than offended by Pliny’s tireless efforts to tie his own name up with his, advised him to take a break, and mix a little ‘Diana with his Minerva’ by picking up his hunting nets as well as his books. ‘I wish I could obey your orders,’ Pliny replied, ‘but there is such a shortage of boars that . . . I cannot. It simply isn’t possible.’⁵

After a morning’s work Pliny usually went for a walk or ride across his grounds. Assuaging his guilt at being away from his desk by reminding himself ‘how the mind is roused by exercise and the movement of the body’, he would be outside again in the afternoon for further exertion before his bath and dinner.⁶ But if Tacitus wanted him to hunt, then he would go. With his hunting nets trailing behind him, he padded up and down his plains with all the enthusiasm of a field mouse on a hot day. It is estimated that his land extended to some 5,000 hectares (twenty square miles).⁷ It could be hours before he heard the rustling of a boar in the undergrowth. The landscapes surrounding his villa formed an amphitheatre, but it was an amphitheatre such as ‘only Nature can create’. The Colosseum at Rome was enviably enclosed and confined, its eighty entrances and vomitoria (passages designed to ‘spew forth’ spectators on their way in and out of the auditorium) servicing the humans, not the beasts, which had nowhere to hide during the emperor’s staged hunts.⁸ Pliny’s estate felt limitless by comparison. Hunting here was a real sport, where man stalked beast over grasslands which stretched on forever.

Nor was it merely animals Pliny was attempting to hunt. In Tacitus’ plea for him to worship Diana scholars have detected a hidden request for poetry.⁹ Aper, the Latin for ‘boar’, was the name of the protagonist of an imaginary debate Tacitus composed between a group of men on the status of modern oratory. Tacitus and Pliny were playing a literary game. Tacitus’ Aper argued that rhetoric was more important than poetry but praised the ‘woods and groves’ as a setting for writing verse.¹⁰ In his own woods and groves Pliny set his hunting nets and lance to one side, his books to the other, and did his very best to entwine the arts of Diana with the arts of Minerva. In the end, he found that the poems Tacitus assumed ‘could be finished off so easily among the woods and groves came to a standstill’.¹¹ Aper the Boar’s swift dismissal of poetry as almost a folly one could roll out in the peace of the countryside, unencumbered by other concerns, could not have been more irritating. Literature, said Pliny, is ‘a difficult, arduous, fastidious thing’ that ‘has contempt for those who have contempt for it’.¹²

Pliny was more eloquent in his letters from the countryside than he realised. While he struggled to complete a poem, his prose swam with observations which might readily have inspired a dozen lines of verse. He described the flowering of trefoil; the way bristly acanthus looks so peculiarly soft from a distance that ‘I would almost say it looked like water’; the blurring of time that the city-­dweller does not notice. In the letters, City Pliny has no trouble in recollecting what he has done with his day. Country Pliny cannot account for how he has spent the last few weeks: all the weddings and engagement parties and errands which usually filled his time between work seeped away into nothing.¹³ Being away from Rome made Pliny alert to many of the things which ordinarily passed him by. Above all, it showed him how similar one day in the city was to another. Upon leaving Rome behind it became a joy rather than a frustration for him to exclaim, ‘How many days I have wasted on trivial things!’

The difficulty came when mixing his two worlds. The Court of One Hundred was his arena, the Tuscan estate his amphi­theatre. They were the same shape as one another – and also the same size. To have fitted them together would have required the genius of the engineers who designed Curio’s theatre in Rome – the famous double theatre constructed in the late Republic out of two half-­circles which could be arranged back-­to-­back to provide two separate performances, then pushed together to create a single amphitheatre.¹⁴ The mechanics of the building eluded scholars and architects for centuries until finally Leonardo da Vinci discovered a solution. Using the description he found in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, he imagined the theatres propped up on wheels and connected via two chain-­like devices which could be pulled to bring the two halves together almost seamlessly.¹⁵ It was not for want of trying that Pliny found himself unable to position his arena alongside his amphitheatre in quite the same way. He might scatter the seeds of his barley, beans and other legumes in the courtroom and reap whichever happened to take, but he seemed incapable of making his speeches take root in his fields.

Attempts to bring the legal arena into the Tuscan amphitheatre only seemed to illuminate the shortcomings of both. The glories of the trefoil and acanthus would pale as Pliny’s labourers set about filling his ears with their worries. Querelae rusticorum mounted upon agrestes querelae – complaints of a kind only a peasant could contrive. Pliny’s farm manager and probably also some of his labourers lived in a villa in the agricultural quarters of his estate, some distance from the main house. Although Pliny gave them time to discuss their work with him before bed, it was never enough. He would dread coming back to Tifernum when they thought it was ‘their right to exhaust my ears after a lengthy absence’.¹⁶ And it was stressful when their grievances piled on top of his urgent legal work. The situation was even worse when ‘city business’ followed him to the countryside as well.

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 official 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.