There is even a kind of dust that by nature creates awe-inspiring things. It is native to the regions of Baiae and the countryside of the towns surrounding Mount Vesuvius. It is mixed with lime and stones and not only strengthens other buildings, but even causes fortifications constructed in the sea to grow harder under the water.
Vitruvius, De Architectura, 2.6.1
Pliny the Elder called the Tiber ‘the gentlest merchant of goods in the whole world’.1 He had followed its route from the Apennines past Tifernum and Oriculum and down to Rome and watched as it rose from a mere trickle to become aspera et confragosa, wild and uneven, as it met other rivers and streams. The Tiber could rise very suddenly as it passed through Rome. Pliny the Elder had interpreted its swell as ‘always more holy than savage’ because it reminded people of the importance of revering Nature. For all the respect he felt towards his uncle, Pliny could not share in his optimism. He knew only too well how quickly this gentle merchant could transform itself into a torrent. The Tiber, said Pliny, ‘sheds its name as a great river’ in summer.2 It shed its reputation as a gentle merchant when the rain came. One year, Pliny saw it burst its lower banks, submerge the surrounding valleys and skim the land of its carapace. Whole woods were swept away as the water rushed into the adjoining River Aniene, swelled, and carried herds, trees and roof beams away with it.3
Autumn was in many ways the most testing time for Pliny. It was the season when he discovered how much he had to gain – and to lose – by entrusting his produce to the Tiber as his streams began to flow again. He might gather in a full harvest and put the farms to bed, only for the river to dry up or flood and render all his work in vain. Or he might find that he had little to entrust to the Tiber at all. When one year his vines failed, he was reduced to sending a friend some of his poems instead of his usual gift of wine. When they failed again, he jested that he would be unable even to do that for want of money to purchase papyrus.4 Although Pliny had known his crops to be struck by both hail and drought, there was one period of ‘continuous barrenness’ that brought him almost to despair.5 With a view to reducing his tenants’ rents, he sought leave from his post at the treasury to reorganise his Tuscan estate. ‘I cannot calculate [the new rents] unless I’m there,’ he explained in a letter. Thirty days were duly granted him by Trajan, who succeeded Nerva as Emperor of Rome in AD 98.
Nerva had been in power for only sixteen months when he collapsed and died after what was said to have been a heated debate with one Regulus.6 Pliny would not have kept quiet had it been his old enemy Regulus who dispatched the emperor to his grave but, whoever he was, he was irksome enough to be blamed for inducing a sweat in the aged emperor, followed by a shivering, and finally death. Pliny did not display any grief in his letters at Nerva’s passing. Nerva had feared instability too much to seek justice for the philosophers. He had failed to reverse the damage Domitian had caused. But there was still time. As Tacitus said, ‘remedies work more slowly than diseases’.7 Pliny therefore proceeded to embrace Trajan with all the warmth and fervour he had withheld from Nerva. ‘The immortal gods have hastened to bring your virtues to the helm of the state,’ he declared in his gushing letter of congratulation.8 Seizing the opportunity to ingratiate himself further, Pliny obtained the new emperor’s permission to display his portrait in the temple he was building near his villa at Tifernum. Trajan was a tall, handsome man with a wide face and fine head of hair (its premature greying, said Pliny, only made him look more majestic).9 His portrait would make a welcome addition to the collection.
Pliny would stay in the town for September, the month he knew he would be least missed at the treasury owing to the number of public holidays. The day known as the Ides fell at the middle of each month and was normally celebrated with a festival. In September, the Ides coincided with the Ludi Romani, two weeks of games held at Rome in honour of Jupiter, and was marked with a feast in honour of the god. In Tusculum, meanwhile, the local people would make their way to Pliny’s Tuscan estate to participate in a smaller regional celebration of Ceres, the goddess of the harvest. Her new temple, replacing the weather-beaten monument that had been nearing collapse, was now complete and featured porticoes ‘for the mortals’ as Pliny had requested. The worshippers had no longer to endure the elements.
In spite of his own poor harvests, Pliny later looked back on this period as one of plenty across the Italian countryside. In previous generations, Rome had relied upon Egypt and Sicily for grain, importing more than 130,000 tonnes a year from Egypt alone under Augustus.10 While Trajan helped to increase the grain supply from the provinces further by reducing levies on produce, Pliny expressed greater enthusiasm for Italian self-sufficiency. In the second year of Trajan’s rule, the Nile faltered, its water levels plummeting as ‘half-heartedly and languidly it raised itself from its bed’.11 The vision of haughty Egyptians receiving back what they ordinarily dispatched as the Italians made up the shortfall tickled Pliny pink.
About a year after he had reorganised his estate Pliny was back in Rome rejoicing that crops were no longer being ‘seized as if from an enemy only to perish in the granaries . . . but deliver of themselves what the earth begets, what the stars nourish, what the seasons bring forth’.12 His words formed part of a speech he gave in the senate house on 1 September, AD 100 on the occasion of his appointment to the consulship. This was the most senior executive magistracy in the senate. While Pliny was delighted to have attained it, he was elated to have done so at a ‘much younger’ age than Cicero.13 He was thirty-eight or thirty-nine when he achieved the honour; Cicero had been an elderly forty-three. Pliny’s was a less powerful consulship than Cicero’s. In the late Republic, two consuls served for most of the year but would often then make way for two ‘suffect’ consuls to complete their term. While Cicero had served as consul for 63 BC (and at the youngest possible age at that time), Pliny would be suffect consul from September to October, AD 100. That his was a less prestigious post did not trouble Pliny in the least. Pliny the Elder had lavished so much praise on Cicero as a setter of precedents – first of all men to be hailed ‘father of the country’, first man in a toga to win a triumph and laurel for his speeches, father of Latin letters – that Pliny was only too pleased to have anticipated him at something.14 A few years later, Trajan granted Pliny his wish to be elected to a priesthood. He became Augur or Interpreter of Bird Signs, an honorary office that Cicero had held at the age of fifty-three. The people of Comum celebrated Pliny’s first promotion by erecting a statue of him in the town with ‘COS’ for ‘consul’ engraved in large letters upon its base.15 Pliny meanwhile poured all his energies into delivering the best inaugural speech he possibly could in thanksgiving to the emperor on behalf of the state.16
Trajan had been emperor for only seventeen months when Pliny set about praising his wisdom, humility and moderation and the transformative effect he had had on the crops. For much of the time, Trajan had been on command outside Rome. Following his governorship in Germania in the time of Nerva, he had proceeded in the direction of the Danube to confront the continuing threat from Dacia (modern Romania). Domitian had expelled the Dacians from the neighbouring Roman province of Moesia after they invaded, but they were once again intent on disrupting Roman control over these territories. With Trajan so often away and only returning to Rome in the autumn of AD 99, Pliny could hardly have known what kind of man he was, but he did know who he wanted him to be, and saw his speech as an opportunity to commend him to virtue and establish a paradigm for his successors to live up to. He believed that if he could only encourage Trajan to rouse Rome’s future leaders from their laziness and pleasure-seeking ‘for a little while’, then it would have been a job well done.17 Tacitus later professed to write his Annals of the emperors sine ira et studio (‘without bitterness or an agenda’), and Pliny now similarly claimed to be speaking free from the constraints of fear.18 In one of the most successful moments in his speech, he described Trajan rounding up Rome’s political informers, putting them aboard ships, and entrusting them to the uncertainty of the waves: ‘It was a memorable sight, a fleet of informers released to every wind, forced to open sails to the storms and to follow the angry waves onto the rocks in their path.’19
This was Pliny in epic mode – in full flight. It was as if he was describing the evil suitors undergoing Odysseus’ journey in reverse. In the poem, the suitors are slaughtered. For the informers, execution would have been too easy a death. As he stood in front of Trajan in the senate house, Pliny relived the experience of watching them embark upon a journey into exile that he knew they might never complete.
Pliny was conscious that expressions of thanksgiving had proven soporific in the past and strove for a more exalted ‘optimistic’ tone than he normally used.20 To modern ears his chosen style is somewhat grating and turgid. In places his speech even sounds fulsome.21 Its sheer joyfulness, spread over ninety-five chapters, can be difficult to stomach: ‘If another man had excelled in just one of these areas, he would long since have worn a halo around his head, had a seat of gold or ivory among the gods, and been invoked with the meatiest sacrifices on high altars,’ Pliny flattered.22
There are a few moments of unintended comic relief as Pliny compares the courteous Trajan with the uncouth Domitian: Trajan is to be praised for eating his dinner in the company of other men without having already gorged himself earlier in the day; he is to be praised for not throwing – or throwing up – his food in the presence of his hungry guests.23 And then more obsequy. It was unfortunate for Pliny that a ban imposed upon performances by actors of mime shows known as ‘pantomimes’ (‘an effeminate art-form and pursuit unworthy of our age’) lapsed in Trajan’s rule.24 In his desperation to portray Trajan as an eschewer of all luxuries, Pliny was reduced to making the desperate suggestion that his morality was so contagious, that the Roman people had begged for pantomimes to be outlawed all over again.25
Pliny was on safer ground when he enlarged on Trajan’s military feats. In his final years Trajan would declare war on the Parthian empire (in ancient Iran) that had always eluded Roman conquest. His campaign would lead to the capture of the Parthian capital and annexation of Armenia, and by the time of his death in the East in AD 117, the Roman empire would have reached its largest extent to date. In the early second century, Trajan was still establishing his credentials. He celebrated his most glorious victory over Dacia after a series of difficult campaigns which culminated in the establishment of a new Roman province and the suicide of the Dacian king Decabalus. ‘I see tables . . . weighed down under the huge barbarian spoils,’ Pliny exclaimed in his speech, ‘and the enemy himself, enchained at the wrist, following in parade behind his own accomplishments.’26
Pliny’s words were later echoed in the carvings applied to Trajan’s Column in Rome. Completed thirteen years after Pliny delivered his speech in the senate, the thirty-metre monument was placed at the centre of Trajan’s new forum complex, which was funded from spoils from the Dacian Wars. It features the emperor fifty-nine times across its spiralling surface and in as many guises as Pliny described him. He is a military counsellor and a soldier; a pious performer of sacrifice and a stern-faced assessor of men. He stands among his soldiers, his sweat mingling with theirs; elsewhere he floats above them like a god.27 While the Dacians are depicted preparing to commit mass suicide in defeat, the Roman soldiers lay waste to their villages, administer first aid to injured legionaries, and process towards the Danube.
The construction of Trajan’s column and forum was overseen by Apollodorus of Damascus, an architect who had accomplished the unprecedented feat of bridging the lower Danube in the course of the Dacian Wars. Trajan had been anxious to span the river because he feared what would happen if it froze over and war broke out against the Romans on the far bank.28 Pliny could only marvel at Apollodorus’ expertise. His finished bridge was said to have had as many as twenty stone piers. When Pliny heard that his friend Caninius Rufus was planning to write about the wars, he thrilled with excitement at the descriptions he might give of ‘new rivers established on land, new bridges thrown up over rivers, mountain edges broken by camps’.29
Reports of Apollodorus’ success in bridging the Danube led Pliny to ponder man’s potential to overcome the challenges of Nature. Whether the Danube froze over in midwinter or dried up in late spring, the man-made structure enabled the Romans to cross it as if it were midsummer. As he wrote in his speech, ‘it was just as if the seasons had been changed’.30
Pliny’s continuing fascination with the rise and fall of water – of the Danube, of the Nile, of the spring at Comum – did not go unnoticed by Trajan who, three years after hearing his long inaugural speech, appointed him curator alvei Tiberis et riparum et cloacarum urbis – Curator of the Bed and Banks of the River Tiber and of the City’s Sewers.31 Tasked with monitoring the river levels and making provisions to protect against flooding and drought, Pliny stepped into a role that was reserved for senators, but decidedly better suited to engineers.
He was fortunate to receive a lesson in water-based engineering from Apollodorus of Damascus himself. Between his work bridging the Danube and planning the new forum with its column at Rome, Apollodorus oversaw the construction of a magnificent new harbour at Centum Cellae (Civitavecchia), to the north-west of the city. It would be less famous than the great hexagonal harbour Trajan established at Portus, near Ostia, but for Pliny it was a work of art. He had the opportunity to watch it being built when he went to stay with Trajan at his ‘stunning’ villa near the shore. He had developed, if not a friendship, then a closeness and familiarity with Trajan, which would deepen over the years. He was invited to Centum Cellae in the first instance to help the emperor assess some civil cases – one involving a charge of adultery against the wife of a military tribune, another, allegations of forgery in a man’s will – but his visit would also be a sociable one. ‘You will recognise how serious our days were,’ Pliny wrote to a friend, ‘but the breaks which followed them were very pleasant.’ In the evenings he dined with Trajan – not on anything too lavish ‘if you consider he is an emperor’ – and enjoyed whatever entertainments he laid on.32
In breaks during the day, Pliny made his way through ‘the greenest fields’ to the coast to examine the foundations of his harbour. He gazed in wonder at the ‘artistry with which it rises’ as he watched enormous stones being hauled into place to form the harbour arms. With his eye cast firmly on the reinforcements laid to tame the sea, Pliny described each new layer as it was applied: ‘There is already a towering stone ridge, which breaks the waves as they hit it and throws them up into the air.’ You can almost hear in his description the proud voice of Trajan pointing things out, telling him what will go where: ‘Then piers will be built on the rocks and soon enough it will resemble an island that has always been there’ (the island would serve as an additional breakwater); ‘it will be a great source of safety, for it will provide a refuge on this very long, harbourless coastline.’33 These were the barriers of a river curator’s dreams.
Parts of the harbour still survive – a testament to the strength of Roman concrete. An ingenious recipe had been devised for a material that the architectural historian Vitruvius (quoted also by Pliny the Elder) claimed grew only stronger and more impregnable when placed in seawater.34 The secret was to mix volcanic rock and ash – specifically the ‘dust’ of Puteoli in the Bay of Naples – with lime and water, which together formed ‘a single stone when submerged’ in the sea. Vitruvius accounted for the phenomenon by the existence of sulphur, alum, bitumen and flames beneath the ground in these regions: so dry are the natural products of the Bay of Naples that they will swiftly absorb any water they come into contact with and use it to cohere and become hard. In 2017, an international team of scientists put the theory to the test and discovered that, when volcanic ash is combined with water, a series of ‘water–rock interactions’ takes place which indeed lead to the strengthening of the concrete over time.35 Volcanic matter, so quick to destroy buildings, was also the ingredient needed to protect them against Nature’s battering.
The dichotomy between the destructive and preservative properties of stone fascinated Pliny because he saw it at play in his own life. The experience of delivering his speech to Trajan led him to ponder how quickly words turned to dust. A marble column might stand forever provided it was not felled by an earthquake or an enemy, but a senator’s speech tended to be ‘contained by the walls of the senate house’.36 One had the permanence of stone; the other, stone rendered impermanent. Although important speeches were now preserved in bronze alongside proclamations of the emperor, Pliny was sorry that so many had already perished within the house itself.
In the early years of Trajan’s rule, Pliny was thinking particularly deeply about his legacy. For all he boasted of being ‘much younger’ than Cicero at the same stage in his career, Pliny the Younger was beginning to feel decidedly old. The depressing thought that he had lived the best part of his life came to him suddenly when he heard that the last of Nero’s consuls had died. Silius Italicus, poet of the Punic War, had starved himself to death at the age of seventy-five after developing an incurable tumour. Pliny had never much cared for his poetry (‘more diligent than inspired’), or for his habit of buying up properties, lavishing them with treasures, and leaving his old ones to moulder.37 But his death prompted him to think about the fleetingness of his own life. To Pliny it felt like only yesterday that Nero was on the throne. Now the last surviving consul of Nero’s senate had perished. ‘Grief for the frailty of human life comes over me as I remember this,’ Pliny wrote. He had been a child in Nero’s time. Now he was in middle age, a consul himself, with no child of his own.
Pliny had always been conscious of time slipping by, but there was a new urgency to his thinking, a fresh desperation. He began to take a graver view of the necessity of prolonging each moment. There is a famous passage in Herodotus’ Histories that describes Xerxes, King of Persia, weeping as he surveys his great army because he knows that death will soon come to thousands of his men. As Pliny read it, not for the first time in his life, he now found himself in sympathy with the despised Persian king. ‘So narrow are the limits that contain the lives of so many people,’ he explained, ‘that it seems to me that those royal tears of his ought not merely to be forgiven, but indeed to be praised.’38 In the aftermath of Silius Italicus’ suicide, Pliny renewed his call for his contemporaries to fulfil something in the short time they had: ‘Let us leave behind something by which we can prove we have lived!’39
But if ephemerality frightened Pliny, the prospect of spending his whole life working, only to die before completing something, was more nightmarish still. ‘The deaths of those who are in the process of producing some immortal work,’ he said, ‘always seem to me to be cruel and premature. For those who live from day to day immersed in pleasures see their reasons for living completed every day; whereas those who think of posterity and prolong the period for which they will be remembered through their work, for them death is always sudden since it interrupts something before it’s finished.’40
Death, whenever it came, would come too soon for Pliny. To achieve immortality, he believed that he needed to complete a magnum opus, but in order to do that he needed to know when to stop. When he did not allow even his days to reach their natural conclusion, extending his work far into the night, what hope did he have of ever feeling that he had done all he needed to do?
Perhaps this is one reason why he resisted the pressure his friends put on him to write a work of history. Knowing how important it was to him to leave something behind, they urged him to turn his hand to past events. A chronicle of Rome would have more longevity than any speech delivered in the Court of One Hundred or senate. But it would also require more time, and Pliny had no way of knowing how much of that he had left. If he were to dedicate five years to writing a history of Rome, only to die before completing it, then he would have wasted five years. What would have happened to his uncle’s Natural History had Vesuvius erupted a few years earlier? Pliny did feel the impulse to write history – ancient rather than modern, he fancied – but he had to revise his speeches for publication first. He promised his friends that he would write something historical – but only when he was too old to write oratory. He perhaps also feared being compared unfavourably to his uncle and to Tacitus.
Pliny had a long list of reasons for putting it off: history-writing and speech-writing are incompatible. Each discipline had its own rhythm, its own vocabulary, its own tone. History was concerned with great events but oratory merely with sordida – the lowly things in life. In his view there was no viable method of writing both side by side. This was not what Pliny’s uncle had said. Pliny the Elder had described his Natural History as a record not of ‘expeditions or speeches or conversations or any manner of exotic events’, but rather ‘of the nature of things, which is life, and often within this, the very basest of matters – sordidissima’.41 Pliny the Elder dealt in sordidissima, not speeches. Pliny composed speeches on sordida. Their two worlds were far closer than Pliny was prepared to accept. His letters were in themselves a form of history.
It was only some time after Pliny had delivered his speech for Trajan that he realised that speeches were not so very different from history after all. The solution to his stalemate came when he resolved to rewrite and extend the speech. Once he had this in hand he could treat it just as he would a work of history. There was no need for his speech to die within the walls of the senate house or to be swept away on the Tiber. He would do all he could to give it the permanence of stone.
He began by giving a full-length reading of it to his friends at Rome.42 He may have regretted telling them to come only ‘if it’s convenient’ or ‘if you’re really free (though it’s never convenient and no one is really free to listen to a recital at Rome . . .)’ when he awoke to ‘the foulest storms’ over the city, but not even the inclement weather could keep them away. If the appeal of the Panegyricus is often lost on modern ears, it was not on its early audiences, who forced Pliny to continue into a third day when ‘modesty’ led him to bring his two-day reading to an end. The long speech was written down in its entirety and copied out with such enthusiasm and commitment down the centuries that it flourished far beyond the confines of human memory to become the earliest Latin speech since Cicero’s Philippics to survive antiquity.43