FIFTEEN

Depraved Belief

Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you.

Leviticus 11:12

The most important journey Pliny ever made was to Bithynia, the sprawling Roman province on the north coast of what is now Turkey. Dispatched there one autumn between AD 109 and 111 as an ‘imperial legate’, Pliny was to serve as a personal representative of Trajan himself.¹ He boarded a galley, crossed the seas towards Greece, rounded Cape Malea in the Peloponnese, and finally put in at Ephesus.² Despite the chill and perils of traversing what his uncle had considered ‘the most savage section of Nature’, the sea, Pliny managed to stay well enough during the long voyage from Italy to Asia Minor. It was only when he reached terra firma that he became unwell.³ He had planned to proceed from Ephesus to Bithynia by both coastal boat and land, but after developing a fever in the sudden heat, was forced to pause at Pergamum.⁴

He was fortunate not to be travelling alone. There were his crew and attendants. There was also Calpurnia. Senators used to object to women accompanying their husbands to postings overseas, believing them to be weak, susceptible to befriending the worst kind of people, and a liability to the smooth running of things.⁵ The provinces, however, were by and large less hostile than they used to be, and over time most senators had come to the conclusion that they should not suffer for the sake of their predecessors’ failures to keep their women ‘in line’. Some took their wives abroad with a mind to protecting them from the temptations of adultery at home. Pliny presumably took Calpurnia because he could not bear to be parted from her.

Shortly before Pliny and Calpurnia set out, Trajan bestowed upon them the rights ordinarily reserved for parents of three or more children. There was little Pliny could do with the ius trium liberorum, which entitled fathers of three to stand for political office before the usual age requirements and their wives to inherit property with greater ease than their childless counterparts, but he accepted the honour.⁶ His friend Martial had received the same rights after composing a series of epigrams on the Colosseum.⁷ And after thanking the gods for not having granted him children in the ‘most lamentable age’ of Domitian, and praying that Calpurnia might now be more fortunate and conceive again, Pliny asked Trajan whether he might consider extending the honour to some of his other friends as well.⁸ Suetonius had experienced Pliny’s kindness in the past when he was a young man embarking upon his career. Now around forty years old, he had found himself suffering a childless marriage of his own.⁹ Trajan wrote back to Pliny to say that, though he only rarely conferred such honours upon anyone, he would do so upon Suetonius at his request.

The crew waited until Pliny had recovered from his fever before resuming their journey by coastal boat. They finally reached the province on 17 September. Bithynia (or ‘Bithynia-­Pontus’) dominated the southern coast of the Black Sea. The province had been founded in the first century BC after the King of Bithynia bequeathed his land to Rome and Pompey the Great merged it with territory he had conquered to its east. Deeply forested with oak, beech, pine, and plane, it was desolate by comparison with the landscapes Pliny was used to. From its westernmost towns, Pliny could at least look out across the gulf towards Byzantium, which, he observed, had ‘crowds of travellers flowing into it from all sides’.¹⁰ He would examine the finances here as well. It would be almost two centuries before the emperor Diocletian chose Nicomedia (modern Izmit) as the site for his chief residence, and still decades later that Emperor Constantine relocated the Roman capital to Byzantium, but Pliny had come to a part of the world that was becoming steadily more influential.¹¹

Pliny’s first impressions of the place were not altogether encouraging. He found it a chaotic province, full of unfinished building projects, riddled with debt. His previous involvement in extortion cases arising from the region had convinced him that the Bithynian people were litigious but unpredictable.¹² They spoke mainly Greek and suffered from an unfortunate habit of unleashing torrents of words when two would do. Initial meetings with Bithynians on their home soil did little to challenge his views. His uncle had praised the region’s cheese but Pliny struggled to do so much as that.¹³ Catullus had travelled to these ‘udder-­rich’ plains a century and a half earlier and complained of making no profit while he set to work on the Bithynians’ account books. By the time Pliny arrived, the accounts were once again in considerable disarray. Taxes were owed to Rome, excruciating sums had been wasted on projects which had been undertaken without the completion of adequate plans and subsequently abandoned. Only the contractors had reason to smile as they filled their pockets with the proceeds of the projects which had been left behind.¹⁴ Pliny had his experience in the Roman treasuries to draw on as he inspected the finances, but his responsibilities exceeded the correction of logbooks, covering the administration of the province and its laws more widely.

‘Ensure it is clear to [the Bithynian people],’ Trajan instructed him, ‘that you were selected to be sent to them in my place.’¹⁵ Roman governors had been posted to the provinces during the Republic and early Empire and would continue to be dispatched for years to come. A year or two after Pliny arrived in Bithynia, Tacitus was appointed governor of Asia, the Roman province to its south-­west. Pliny, however, presented himself as being as authoritative as the emperor himself. For as long as he was in this post he was to cut as stately a figure as he could imagine. If the need arose for a faster horse or stronger chariot he had only to requisition those he liked best from the local people.¹⁶ It was his duty to command the respect and obedience of everyone he came into contact with. Behind his imperious facade, however, Pliny was still obliged to seek Trajan’s approval when it came to making key decisions. He would exchange more than a hundred letters with the emperor over the two or so years he spent in the province. The letters would become less frequent as Pliny grew more familiar with the territory and parameters of his post, but they continued to arrive – concise, business-­like, and quickly dashed off though they often were.

In Rome it had been easy for Pliny to establish which messengers were the most efficient and reliable.¹⁷ Sending letters between Rome and Bithynia was far more complicated. It would take at least two months for a letter to arrive, usually much longer, especially as Pliny was frequently on the move.¹⁸ He had to endure the endless frustration of waiting for a response to arrive from Trajan even when the solution to a problem was perfectly obvious. On reaching Prusa (Bursa), a city in the west of the province, for example, Pliny found the public buildings to be in an even worse state than the finances. The baths were ‘dirty and old’ and in dire need of replacing. A perusal of the account books was all he needed to conceive a plan for constructing new baths by calling in money from those who owed it, and redirecting funds normally reserved for the public distribution of olive oil.¹⁹ Pliny waited and waited until finally a letter from Trajan arrived giving him the go-­ahead – on the proviso that his plan did not burden the ordinary functioning of the city or involve additional taxation.

Trajan did not have to reply personally to every letter Pliny sent his way. His private secretary could compose a response following a brief conversation. But several of the letters in Pliny’s collection resound with the voice of authority. It is easiest to detect Trajan’s tone in the most sharply phrased of his letters. Time and again, Pliny wrote to ask Trajan whether architects and land surveyors might be sent from Rome to assist him in his work. Time and again, Trajan wrote back to remind him that the best men did not always come from Rome: ‘no province lacks in skilled and trained men’.²⁰ There were hardly enough architects in the city as it was, Trajan curtly told him, which was not surprising, given his grand visions for the harbour at Centum Cellae: ‘You shouldn’t think it would be quicker to have them sent from the city when in fact they usually come to us from Greece!’²¹

Whether more through reluctance to trust the skills of the locals or determination to develop his own, Pliny decided to take on some of the technical work himself. North-­east of Prusa lay Nicomedia, the former home of the kings of Bithynia, and its splendid lake. Realising that the people of Nicomedia might export their produce more efficiently if their lake could be connected to the Sea of Marmara, Pliny called in the local people to assess whether doing so would risk draining the lake, as Trajan feared. While the Bithynians attempted to measure its depths, Pliny composed another letter to Trajan requesting an engineer or architect to travel from Rome to assess whether or not it lay above sea level. While he waited for a reply, he carried out an investigation of his own. On noticing an unfinished canal he conceived the idea of connecting the lake to the sea by means of a similar structure.²² He went no further in his plans until the experts arrived. This time Trajan agreed to send a specialist from Rome.

Pliny had moved on from Nicomedia to another part of the province when he heard news that an enormous fire had broken out and destroyed dozens of the city’s buildings. Rerouting the lake could no longer be a priority when houses had been reduced to ashes, the headquarters of the city’s elders levelled, and the temple of Isis gutted by flames.²³ The fire had been spread by strong winds and ‘the inertia of the people’, who had stood by watching helplessly because they lacked the means to put it out. When Pliny heard what happened he gave orders to supply Nicomedia with fire-­fighting equipment. At Rome people fought fires with woollen blankets dipped in water and vinegar and ingenious hydraulic water pumps powered by siphons. Pliny also drew up plans to appoint a body of 150 fire marshals to guard against future disasters. He was even prepared to oversee the marshals himself, he told Trajan, assuring him that ‘it will not be difficult to keep guard over so few’. Trajan was not convinced. It would be sufficient to issue the townsmen with equipment and teach the Bithynians how to use it. They could fight fires themselves and call upon the crowds to assist if they needed to. For when people come together in common purpose, Trajan explained, they can form hetaeriae – political clubs.²⁴ Trajan did more than just quell Pliny’s plans to establish a band of fire marshals. He instructed Pliny to issue an edict on his behalf banning the formation of such groups altogether.

It was only when Pliny proceeded eastwards into the heartlands of old Pontus that he witnessed the dangers of hetaeriae for himself.²⁵ In these remote parts of the province he became used to locals approaching him with their grievances. He handled financial disputes and addressed the problems left behind by errant builders. But nothing he had experienced so far, either here or in Rome, could have prepared him for what he heard next. As if from nowhere, a number of Bithynians were now led before him under accusation of being ‘Christian’.

Pliny had heard of Jews who had been banished and taxed throughout his lifetime, but this was his first personal experience of Christians. After Tiberius expelled Jews from Rome in AD 19, Emperor Claudius had felt compelled to exile ‘the Jews who were continually causing disturbance at the instigation of Chrestus’, by whom Suetonius surely meant Christ.²⁶ In their bemusement Romans conflated Christianity and Judaism. Peter, after all, would tell the Gentiles to abide by Jewish law. Christianity was still young and remained mysterious to the Romans, even after their engagement in the Jewish War. Pliny was only a child when Titus besieged Jerusalem, but he was in his early thirties when Domitian put his own cousin to death in Rome on suspicions of ‘atheism’ – for adopting the Jewish or Christian faith.

This was not a passing phenomenon Pliny had stumbled upon. Christianity was well established in the province when he arrived. It was the Christians of Bithynia and Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, and Asia whom Peter addressed in his First Epistle. And there were people who were brought before Pliny who professed to have been Christian up to twenty years earlier and who had since renounced their faith. But what was Pliny to do with them? He knew that trials of Christians had taken place in the past by cognitio – an investigation led by a senior senator.²⁷ However there seems to have been no formal law against Christianity specifically and no protocol for dealing with religious perpetrators in such numbers. Pliny did not know how and ‘to what extent it is usual to punish or cross-­examine [Christians]’.²⁸ Should distinctions be made depending on age? Should those who repented of being Christian be pardoned?

For other matters he was uncertain about, Pliny was prepared to await a response from Trajan. This time, however, he decided to act at once, apparently too unsettled by what he had seen to risk delay. Without so much as a pause to seek the emperor’s advice, he devised his own procedure for trialling the accused. When so-­called Christians were brought before him, he would ask them in the first instance whether or not they were Christian. If they said they were, then he would ask them again, and again a third time, threatening them as he did so with punishment. He would have been too young to remember the terrible punishments Nero had inflicted upon the Christians at Rome, but he must have heard of the crucifixions and human torches and allegations of their responsibility for the great fire that burned across the city for seven nights. If these were the sorts of punishment Pliny had in mind, then he would have been wise to recall how they had been viewed in Nero’s time. The sight of Christians hanging from crosses had inspired not only fear among the Roman people but also pity and compassion for, as Tacitus said, it was as if their punishments were being received ‘not for the public good, but to feed the savagery of one man’.²⁹

Pliny believed that any Roman citizen who was brought before him under suspicion of being Christian deserved to be sent to Rome for trial. The accused who were not Roman citizens and who persisted in saying they were Christian, however, were to be executed. ‘For I had no doubt that, whatever it was they were confessing to, such obstinacy and obdurate perseverance ought to be punished.’³⁰ But that was just it: what were they to be punished for? Pliny did not know. Domitian had exiled Christians but he had also exiled Stoic philosophers. Pliny had no reason to view Domitian’s treatment of Christians as anything other than part of a broader plan to crush anyone who might have challenged him. When finally Pliny wrote to Trajan to tell him what procedure he had put in place in his province, he asked him explicitly whether it was the name ‘Christian’ itself that was punishable, even if the ‘Christian’ had committed no crime, or whether it was ‘the crimes associated with the name’ which he ought to be punishing.³¹

It was only from interrogating the Christians that he learned what these ‘crimes’ were. According to Pliny, the Christians believed their own gravest crimes to be that they held meetings on an established day of the week before first light, during which they hymned to Christ as if he were a god; that they bound themselves by oath not to commit sins such as theft or adultery, not to break trust, nor to deny a deposit when it was called upon.³² Pliny discovered that, before he issued the edict banning hetaeriae, the Christians had also held meetings later in the day over food. Although they had ceased these meetings in compliance with his orders, their morning meetings were truly a cause for concern. The Christians called their meetings ekklesiai but for Pliny they were still hetaeriae and therefore potentially dangerous.³³ Emperor Claudius had initially allowed Jews to live as they wished in Rome provided they refrained from holding meetings.³⁴ Even among Romans private meetings were treated with suspicion. Throughout history various ‘sumptuary’ laws had been passed imposing limits on the size of dinner parties in a bid to prevent them from being used for political ends. The very earliest Roman laws had prohibited night-­time meetings altogether. The fact that Christians were holding meetings in the dark rendered them all the more threatening. The Romans would come to see them as ‘a secretive and light-­evading species’ and spread rumours of them being incestuous cannibals.³⁵ The Christians would describe the Romans in turn as ‘light-­evading’ for their refusal to engage with Holy Scripture.³⁶

Pliny did not want simply to dismiss or punish the Christians he met. He was curious about what they believed. The cases brought before him became increasingly varied. Some were carried by informers and others arose from an anonymous book ‘containing the names of many Christians’ which was brought to his attention. When Pliny obtained this private list of alleged Christians he determined to use it. He would test every suspected Christian regardless of the source from which the accusation came. He would place statues of Trajan and the Roman gods in front of the accused, perhaps recalling how Caligula had offended the Jews by planning to have a statue of himself erected in the Temple of Jerusalem. And he would then ask the alleged Christians to invoke the Roman gods, honour the emperor’s image with incense and wine, and blaspheme Christ. If they followed these commands, then they were allowed to leave provided they denied being or having ever been Christian. Pliny had heard it said that nothing could force a true Christian to speak ill of Christ. Indeed, when Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, was given the opportunity to save himself from death by cursing Christ half a century later, he told the Roman before him: ‘I have been His servant for eighty-­six years, and he has done nothing to dishonour me. How can I blaspheme the King who saved me?’³⁷

For perhaps the first time in his life, Pliny felt truly ruffled. Roman governors in this period usually tried to avoid stirring up tension among provincials by allowing them to continue to live by their old laws instead of imposing too much of the Roman way of life upon them.³⁸ Governors were, however, required to maintain order; the Christians seemed to threaten that order. Pliny was so alarmed by what he had learned from the Christians during his interrogations that he decided that it was now ‘even more necessary to seek the truth from two female slaves, who were called “deaconesses”, by means of torture’.³⁹ Pliny did not need to elaborate, for it was standard practice among the Romans to take evidence from slaves accused of crimes under torture.⁴⁰ But the criminality of the Christians of this province had not been established, and there was no guaranteeing that a slave under torture would reveal anything pertinent. As Pliny told Trajan, while exacting his punishments, he ‘found nothing except a depraved and unbridled superstitio’. It was at this point that Pliny sought Trajan’s guidance. He had come to the conclusion that Christianity in Bithynia was out of control. He had been able to discern no pattern in the people brought before him. The ‘Christians’ were of all ages, all classes, both genders, and from all areas of the province. The ‘contagion of superstition’ had spread not only through the towns and villages, but through the countryside as well. This part of Pliny’s letter would have given the Christians reason to rejoice. The fourth-­century Christian historian Eusebius of Caesarea took the fact that non-­Christians were writing of the persecutions and martyrdoms as a sign that Christianity was in good health.⁴¹

The destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem by Titus’ forces in AD 70 had left the Jews and early Christians with no central place of worship in Judaea, ‘the origin of the evil’ that had spread to Rome.⁴² The Romans might reasonably have supposed that the loss of the temple would presage the destruction of the faith, but the very fact that there was no centre meant that worshippers had had to adapt and spread the Word.⁴³ Pliny did not connect the rise of Christianity with Roman activity in the east of the empire. He sought not a cause for the growth of the strange cult but a plan to reverse it. His progress through Bithynia had shown him that there was support for the Roman gods. There was still every chance that the tide of Christianity could be stemmed, as he informed Trajan:

It seems that [the superstition] can be stopped and corrected. Certainly it’s clear that the [Roman] temples which were previously empty have begun to be visited, and sacrifices which had been given up for a long time are being performed again, and the meat of sacrificial victims is being sold everywhere, though it was very rare a buyer could be found before. It’s easy to conclude from this that a lot of people could be reformed, if only they had a chance to repent.⁴⁴

The performance of Roman-­style animal sacrifice would be enforced across the empire by an edict of the emperor Decius in AD 249. For the moment, Trajan was prepared to take a passive approach to the problems Pliny had identified. His response to his letter must have come as a shock to Pliny. While he had done well to examine the Christians, Trajan told him, anonymous lists of names such as he had described had no place in their world.⁴⁵ The proper way to make an accusation was face to face.⁴⁶ Alarmed by the faith Pliny had placed in anonymous accusations, Trajan determined to correct him. Pliny had been wrong to use the evidence he had. By putting his trust in potentially unscrupulous informers Pliny had acted as Regulus and so many other men had under Nero and Domitian. Trajan advised a less active course than the one Pliny had in mind. He told him that there could be no single rule for handling Christians. From now on, he said, people who were brought before him and proven guilty were to be punished. But those who honoured the Roman gods and denied being Christian now were to be pardoned. As a general rule, Christians were not to be hunted out.

Trajan may have been advocating a more moderate approach but, to some early Christians, it was frustratingly illogical. Tertullian, a Christian writer born in Carthage about half a century after Trajan issued his instructions, believed that Roman hatred of the ‘name of Christians’ was driven by little more than ignorance of the faith.⁴⁷ The emperor’s advice to Pliny not to go after Christians but to punish those who were brought before him seemed particularly duplicitous. In saying that Christians were not to be sought out implied that they were innocent, reasoned Tertullian, while ordering them to be punished implied that they were guilty. If you condemn them, why not also seek them out? If you do not seek them out, why not also acquit them?⁴⁸ Trajan might have reduced the number of persecutions Pliny planned to carry out, but he fell short of stopping the violence altogether. Eusebius later observed that local persecutions were still commonplace in certain provinces, with some finding any excuse to bring Christians to harm.⁴⁹

Pliny had not anticipated that his actions against the Christians might be met with reproach. Whether they did anything to diminish the trust Trajan had placed in him is impossible to say. There is no further word on the Christians in the letters and it is unclear where Pliny proceeded to next. He was in regular communication with Rome, but his life was now very much here, in Bithynia. Calpurnia was certainly still with him in the province when news arrived from Rome that her grandfather had died. Pliny tells Trajan in his very last letter that he has taken the liberty of giving her one of his official work permits so that she can find immediate passage home.⁵⁰ He has done so out of urgency, he tells Trajan, and in hope of his approval. Pliny received a letter back. ‘Dearest Secundus,’ Trajan began, addressing Pliny by his last name, ‘you were right to have confidence in my response and ought not to have doubted it.’⁵¹ Trajan’s words, reassuring Pliny of his authority, make for rather an abrupt ending to their correspondence.

Trajan had shown that it was possible for an emperor to rule from outside Rome while he continued in his military cam­-paigns.⁵² Through his letters to Pliny, he had also demonstrated how a ruler could make his authority felt in the furthest reaches of the empire by means of trusted representatives. Pliny was in many respects the ideal example of an emperor’s deputy. Over the following centuries the emperors would seek new ways to control their vast territories. Before Emperor Constantine founded his new capital at Byzantium in AD 324, and before the First Council of Nicaea convened in Bithynia to establish the Nicene Creed of the Church, the emperor Diocletian helped to establish a tetrarchy, whereby he ruled over one part of the empire and three colleagues ruled over other parts, so as to better govern Rome’s diverse provinces. Pliny had come to know the nature of these faraway landscapes and remoteness of their people long before these emperors did. His encounter with the Christians presaged the change that was to come at the heart of Rome’s empire. What would Pliny have made of Emperor Constantine declaring himself a believer in the ‘depraved and unbridled superstitio’ he had worked so hard to subdue? Perhaps a part of him would have felt that he had failed in his duty to maintain order in the province.

In AD 113 one of Pliny’s former colleagues in the treasury replaced him in his post. Did Pliny die in the province? Or did he follow Calpurnia back to Rome? It is certain that he had died by the time Hadrian succeeded Trajan as emperor in AD 117. Pliny would have been in his early to mid-­fifties at the time of his death – no older than his uncle had been when he lost his life in the shadow of Vesuvius. He had at least outlived Regulus, his old enemy, whose absence he felt more strongly than he had anticipated.

Pliny left behind the makings of his own biography. Through his letters and speeches he had presented his life as falling in two distinct phases. After the uncertain times of Domitian came the glorious years under Trajan; it was not in Pliny’s interest to dwell on the fact that he had climbed the senatorial ladder in the service of a despised emperor. Pliny’s writings, as well as the sometimes exaggerated accounts of his historian friends, were what shaped the reputation of Domitian after his death. Through both his friendship with Tacitus and Suetonius and his own experience of watching the Roman people desecrate monuments across the city, Pliny anticipated how Domitian would be thought of forever after.

Given that Pliny left far more of himself behind in his letters than his uncle had done in his encyclopaedia, it is surprising that Pliny the Elder remains the more celebrated of the two men today. We document our lives so attentively that we tend to assume that something of us will remain after we die. The example of Pliny the Elder suggests otherwise. He is remembered not because he wrote about himself, but because he was written about by others, especially his nephew, who might have shared his fate had he not been so concerned with completing his studies in the midst of the eruption of Vesuvius. As Pliny himself had said of his uncle, he was one of those men who had done what deserved to be written about and written what deserved to be read. Pliny the Elder’s death only cemented his fame: ‘look to the end’, as the Greeks said. His encyclopaedia preserved the findings of many who had come before him and would concern all who came after him. The Natural History survived because it was not personal.

The fact that Pliny was so mindful of his own place in the world and anxious to secure a legacy for the future did not make him the antithesis of his uncle. For all he fretted about his position in Rome, what really made Pliny happy was what lay outside the city, in the fields and meadows of his estates. He was a man who saw the world through its details – of wills and inheritance, of water levels, of seasonal change. If only subconsciously, he perpetuated his uncle’s celebration of Nature by embracing it in its purest forms and favouring the modest over the elaborate, his silent study over his grand porticoes, his bronze sculpture of a wrinkly old man over more distinguished masterpieces; his beetroot and snails over oysters and snow. He was a career man who escaped by discovering the world beyond.