Human brutes, like other beasts, find snares and poison in the provisions of life, and are allured by their appetites to their destruction.
Jonathan Swift, ‘Thoughts on Various Subjects’, 1727
Pliny returned to Rome from Laurentum one January and joined Tacitus in speaking for the prosecution of Marius Priscus, a Roman senator accused of extortion during his governorship in north Africa.1 Pliny would prosecute a number of crooked governors for extortion in his lifetime, and while the letters in which he described those trials are not always the most scintillating, they attest to the difficulties which confronted the Romans as their empire approached its largest extent. The emperor could not be everywhere at once. He needed governors he could trust to keep order in the provinces, but the wider and more complex Rome’s power base became, the more opportunity there would be for abuses to go undetected. Towards the end of his life, Pliny would experience the challenges of governing a province for himself. In his younger years, he took seriously his duty to represent those provincials who carried reports of mismanagement by Roman officials.
Since the defendant in this case was a senator and it was his professional conduct that was being called into question, the trial was scheduled for the senate house rather than the Court of One Hundred. Senatorial trials, in which senators voted to determine the fate of their colleagues, often roused Pliny’s anxieties, for he knew how willing senators could be to protect their own. If the general nature of the trial did not fluster him, there was the fact that it was taking place at the beginning of the new political year, when Rome was at its busiest, and in the presence of the emperor.
The trial got off to an unpredictable start. First, Marius Priscus pleaded guilty and even appeared willing to pay back the 700,000 sesterces he had embezzled. Then there was a problem with one of the witnesses. Of the two called in connection with the case, one was alleged to have issued a bribe to secure the exile of a fellow Roman and the death of seven of his friends, while the other was said to have paid for a Roman equestrian to be struck with a club, condemned to the mines, and then strangled to death in prison. The first witness died before the case even commenced.
When, finally, it did, Pliny was granted twelve large water clocks against which to lay out his prosecution (Tacitus would speak on the following day in response to the defence). Every eighteen minutes or so, the final drops of one water clock would swirl away and another begin. Pliny kept on talking even after the twelve clocks were spent. During his preparation for the case he had discovered that the defendant had not only committed extortion, but also accepted bribes to put innocent north Africans to death. The law stipulated that people guilty of extortion should in most cases leave for exile, which in effect entailed relinquishing their Roman citizenship, rights, and possessions, but those who accepted money for killing someone should receive capital punishment or indefinite exile.2 Twelve clocks did not reflect the severity of this case. It was only when four more clocks had run dry that Pliny finally stopped talking. By then, he had spoken for almost five hours.
This was not the longest speech Pliny had ever given. He once spoke in court for seven hours straight. ‘Rejoice! Rejoice!’ he exclaimed upon reaching the end and realising that he still had an audience. In front of him stood a lone man in ripped clothes; the throng that had gathered at the beginning of the reading had torn them in their eagerness to escape.3 While Pliny admired the vigour of a short speech he was convinced that nothing equalled a long and weighty delivery. Few sights delighted him more than that of a speech transformed into volumes of text. He did not believe that slim books looked as authoritative as thick ones, which was one reason he liked to declaim at such length. Brevitas, while popular with the crowds, also carried the risk of a miscarriage of justice.4
Pliny braced himself for the worst, in spite of his extraordinarily long speech. The possibility that Marius Priscus might get away with merely paying back what he had taken was still weighing heavily upon him as his fellow senators began to make their way across the floor of the house to vote. To Pliny’s relief, the members voted that the defendant and surviving witness should both go into exile. Although the satirist Juvenal proceeded to write mockingly of Marius Priscus enjoying a sojourn in which he ‘drinks from the eighth hour on and revels in the anger of gods while you, triumphant province, you weep’, Pliny had scored a relative triumph with his long speech.5 The defendant’s junior, another senator, was put on trial on a separate occasion and merely exempted from promotion.6 His crimes included receipt of 10,000 sesterces from one of the crooked witnesses, which was logged ‘under the most shameful heading of “perfumes”’.7
Perfume was not the most offensive of the luxuries to feature in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History but it was the most evanescent. Roses, oil, saffron, cinnabar, reeds, rushes, honey, salt and ox-tongue herb with wine together produced a simple fragrance.8 Particularly welcome in winter, when flowers were in short supply, perfume was said to benefit everyone except the person wearing it, who could not smell it at all. While Pliny the Elder admired its purity, the very inability of the wearer to enjoy the perfume on their own body convinced him of its wastefulness.
Observing how fervently even Roman soldiers had taken to dousing themselves in it, Pliny the Elder had been quick to characterise it as a foreign import. The earliest he came across in his research was a case Alexander the Great had carried away from Persia following his defeat of King Darius III in the fourth century BC, and by the time perfume became ubiquitous at Rome, its associations with imperial expansion and eastern decadence had been fixed. Rome spread its influence over the globe but it always brought something back. Pliny the Elder dated the birth of luxury in Italy precisely to 189 BC, when a Roman general returned in triumph from Asia carrying gold crowns, ivory tusks, and 137,420 pounds of silver with him.9 Pliny the Elder could not deny that ‘communication, established throughout the world through the greatness of the Roman empire’ had led to advances in people’s lives by facilitating commerce.10 He drew consistently and proudly in his encyclopaedia on knowledge that had come to Rome from overseas. The arrival of chests of foreign treasures, however, seemed destined only to precipitate a moral decline and loss of identity in Rome. Of all the luxuries the Romans could carry home, perfume offered the best metaphor for globalisation, its steady diffusion from the east revealing the Romans for what Pliny the Elder had long suspected them to be: conquerors conquered. ‘The Roman people in its greatness,’ he explained, ‘lost its traditions, and through defeating others we were defeated ourselves.’11 The metaphor ran the other way, too, for while Rome lay at the centre of the empire, for a Roman, success meant spreading one’s scent as far away from it as possible.
Emperor Augustus had advised his successors to maintain the empire inside the limits that had been established at the time of his death in AD 14.12 Although the Romans of this era were in general less expansionist than they had been during the Republic, as they focused on maintaining stability in their existing provinces, they failed to honour Augustus’ will.13 Vespasian had overseen the annexation of Lycia to Pamphylia in the south of what is now Turkey and, with his son Titus, demonstrated how emperors could continue to leave their mark upon the world by converting foreign treasures into a display of Roman might. Spoils from their Jewish War helped to finance the construction of the magnificent Flavian amphitheatre in Rome. The ‘Colosseum’ stood not only as a symbol of victory and strength but also as a memorial to the prowess of the first Flavian emperors. It was more or less complete when, in AD 81, Titus died suddenly at the age of forty-one having ruled for just over two years.
Reports of the cause of Titus’ death varied wildly. Suetonius said that Titus was seen weeping at the end of a session of public games and contracted a fever later in the day. Taken up in a litter, he gazed at the sky and complained that his life was being taken away from him undeservedly. His younger brother, Domitian, had long plotted against him, said Suetonius. On learning that he had been taken seriously ill, the envious Domitian ‘ordered him to be left for dead’.14 Later writers went further and accused Domitian of hastening Titus’ end by plunging him into a chest of snow or poisoning him with a sea hare (a type of gastropod mollusc).15 On the first theory, offered by the historian Dio Cassius in the early third century AD, Titus falls ill and takes his brother’s advice to have a cold bath. Domitian’s intentions are villainous but he has the benefit of popular medicine on his side. A doctor from ancient Marseilles had recently introduced the Romans to iced baths, which they proceeded to take even in winter, ‘becoming stiff with cold just for show’.16 Domitian has a tub prepared accordingly with fresh snow until it is full to the brim, lifts his brother into it, and leaves him there to soak. Meanwhile he makes his way to the barracks, bestows upon the soldiers ‘as much as his brother had given them’, and takes up the name and authority of emperor. Titus dies, leaving behind a daughter, Julia, but no son. On the second theory, proposed by an Athens-born writer named Philostratus in the early third century, Titus is killed after Domitian takes objection to his kindness and feeds him a sea hare, whose ink is considered so noxious (it is in fact harmless to humans) that an oyster, cooked crab, or seahorse must be ingested to neutralise it.17
The stories which spread of Titus’ death – by immersion in snow, poisoning with rancid shellfish, or, more likely, from natural causes – were such as to inspire outlandish rumours of fratricide hundreds of years later.
The death of Titus and accession of Domitian marked the beginning of a difficult period in Pliny’s life. Though conscious that he was succeeding a man who had been immensely popular with the people – who had now taken to mourning ‘in public no differently from how they would for a loss in their own household’ – Domitian was by nature highly reclusive.18 Suetonius described how he would spend much of his time in seclusion, stabbing flies with his stylus. Pliny pictured him rather as a monster of Hades, hiding in his lair, licking his lips with the blood of relatives, and plotting bloodshed for the noblest men in the city.19 What Pliny described of Domitian’s rule in his letters amounted to nothing less than a reign of terror. Domitian was ‘that most savage beast’. He was a ‘destroyer and executioner’ of upstanding citizens.20 Writing some years after his death, Pliny diagnosed him with ‘a hatred of mankind’.21 No one wanted to get too close to him; but no one wanted to be shut out of his affairs either: there was no healthy distance.
Domitian, who had been born in AD 51 on Pomegranate Street, on the northernmost of Rome’s seven hills, seemed to spend his life striving, Persephone-like, to escape from the shadows.22 His biographers explained that while his brother Titus had been raised at the imperial court, Domitian had grown up in relative poverty. Although Pliny did not describe Domitian’s background, he did profess to see a look of disgruntlement in his face: anger in his eyes, arrogance about his brow, a feminine pallor to his skin and a ruddiness to his cheeks.23 Pliny had nothing but criticism for fellow writers who praised Domitian. The poet Silius Italicus may have been ‘the glory of the Castalian sisterhood [the Muses]’, but Pliny could not abide his flattery.24 His poem on the Second Punic War extended to a tremendous seventeen books and over 12,000 lines, but Pliny said it lacked inspiration. The work contained references to Domitian the ‘Conqueror of Germany’, who would outdo the achievements of his father and brother – which struck some readers as unedifying and dishonest when, of Domitian’s few, unremarkable foreign expeditions, his campaign against the Germanic tribe of the Chatti was ‘unnecessary’ and his triumph ‘a sham’.25
Pliny the Elder had described his encounters with the Chatti in the time of Claudius. Endowed with ‘robust bodies, straight limbs, threatening faces, and a marked vigour of spirit’, the Chatti were logical and skilful ‘for Germans’ and excelled as infantrymen, but had in that period occupied one of the Roman bases and taken to heavy plundering.26 Pliny the Elder’s commander, Pomponius Secundus, had split his men into two columns, one of which worked to entrap the tribesmen, while the other attacked.27 The Romans had had good reason to hope that they might engage the tribe in a war. ‘You see others go to battle,’ wrote Tacitus, ‘but the Chatti, to war.’ The Germans, however, had feared being surrounded by the Romans and a hostile neighbouring tribe, and sent legates and hostages to Rome to sue for peace. They were seemingly still unsettled when Domitian declared war upon them more than thirty years later, in the eighties AD. Though little is known of the campaign, the Romans are thought to have made their first attack in the winter months, when the tribesmen were most pressed for supplies.28 Domitian was among the invading troops, but returned to Rome to celebrate a triumph for his own achievements long before the war had been concluded. His jubilation may have been premature but it was not entirely vain. As a result of the campaign, the Romans managed to lay a new fortified boundary line and formally establish two Roman provinces west of the Rhine.
The problem for Domitian was that he gave the impression of begrudging his men their successes in favour of his own renown. Tacitus accused him of acting out of jealousy when he recalled a highly successful governor of Britain named Agricola.29 Agricola was Tacitus’ father-in-law. He had conquered the island of Mona (Anglesey) and pushed north into Caledonia (Scotland) to score an impressive defeat over the local tribesmen at the so-called Battle of Mons Graupius, only to find himself under orders to return to Rome in AD 85. The same year, as if to trump Agricola’s achievements, Domitian launched an expedition of his own. Decebalus, the ruler of Dacia (modern Romania), had led an army south across the Danube into a Roman province called Moesia. Domitian’s forces succeeded in ousting the Dacians from their territory, but suffered significant setbacks as they proceeded westwards.30 The Romans were left to pay tribute in exchange for peace. They would live to regret Domitian’s failure to remove Decebalus there and then.
Pliny, for his part, was less concerned with documenting Domitian’s military record than acts of cruelty committed against his own people. He was discernibly shaken by the emperor’s decision to bury a Vestal Virgin alive.31
The Vestals were priestesses who honoured the Roman goddess of the hearth. There were six of them, plucked predominantly from wealthy families, and charged with keeping the goddess Vesta’s flame burning eternally, day and night, for the protection and well-being of Rome itself. The loss of a Vestal’s virginity had long been regarded as an ill omen, but Domitian decreed that any Vestal who failed to keep her body pure for the thirty years required of her should not merely be flogged, but confined as in ancient times to a suffocating chamber underground.32 No one in Domitian’s Rome had seen a Vestal Virgin buried alive until now.
When the chief Vestal, Cornelia, was accused of having broken her vows of chastity, Domitian acted ‘through his powers as Pontifex Maximus [chief priest] – or rather through the heinousness of a tyrant and immunity of a despot’ to condemn her to execution.33 In spite of his disgust, Pliny felt compelled to go and watch. The woman was strapped to a sedan chair and borne in a canopied litter as far as the Colline Gate, at the northernmost reach of Rome. A large crowd was waiting there, but Pliny managed to obtain a good view. The chair was put down, its fastenings unloosed, and the veiled woman raised to her feet. As Pliny watched her being led towards an underground vault he heard her cry out, over and over again: ‘Caesar thinks I’m unchaste, but it’s because of my sacred acts that he is victorious and triumphant!’
To Pliny she certainly ‘seemed innocent’. As she lowered herself into the dark chamber by way of a ladder, her very reflexes appeared to testify to her chastity. She had just begun the miserable descent when her robe got caught, causing her to pause and turn to gather it. As she did so, a man offered her his hand to help. She looked up and saw her ‘executioner’, Domitian. Without a moment’s thought, Cornelia sprang back and ‘pushed his filthy touch away from her pure and innocent body as if in a final act of chastity’. Cornelia descended. As Pliny watched her disappearing to her death he was reminded of the virginal Trojan princess Polyxena, the youngest of King Priam’s daughters, who in Euripides’ Hecuba submits courageously to the sword of Achilles’ son Neoptolemus. In the play, Polyxena does not merely give in. She boldly and defiantly yields her breast and neck. She falls, her modesty intact. And then she is gone.
Cornelia disappeared from view, the ladder was pulled up and earth thrown against the chamber door. Inside there would have awaited her a small bed with an oil lamp, a morsel of bread, some milk, olive oil, a vessel of water. It was as if, by providing these meagre provisions, the Romans ‘would absolve themselves of the guilt of destroying a body devoted to the holiest rituals’, as the Greek-born biographer Plutarch put it.34 In a short time she suffocated to death.
Pliny the Elder once wrote that, ‘for man alone, one’s first time is full of regret, which is surely an accurate augury for life’ – a description unlikely to entice many readers into accepting his broader views on the damaging effects of sexual desire.35 In the Natural History he compares humans unfavourably with animals on the basis of their sexual habits. While animals have established seasons for mating, he says, humans view every hour as having the potential for sex, and go on doing it throughout the year, never sated. Animals get satisfaction from intercourse but humans, ‘almost none’. One of the gravest impediments to their satisfaction, he conjectured, is the seasonal incompatibility of the sexes. As early as the seventh century BC it was believed that women were lustiest in the summer, just as men were at their feeblest, and women so indifferent to sex in the colder months that, like an octopus gnawing its own foot (as one poet put it), a man must resort to masturbating alone in his passionless house.36 Lack of satisfaction breeds ‘sexual deviation’, which is, according to Pliny the Elder, ‘a crime against Nature’. Sexual deviation could take many forms, but Pliny the Elder’s immediate point of reference was the promiscuity of Messalina, third wife of Emperor Claudius, who was alleged to have engaged in a contest with a prostitute to sleep with as many men as possible within a twenty-four-hour window, and promptly achieved a score of twenty-five. The charge of sexual deviancy was more often applied to men, however, for women’s sexuality tended to be held in check by the limits placed on their freedom outside the home. As far as Pliny the Elder was concerned, the most serious sexual crime a woman could commit was to terminate a pregnancy.
The imperial household was rumoured to be guilty on both fronts. Domitian was married to Domitia Longina, the daughter of Corbulo (under whose command Pliny the Elder had battled trees in AD 47) but was rumoured to have had an incestuous affair with his niece Julia. No stranger to the exercise he called ‘bed-wrestling’ – his preferred term for sex – Domitian allegedly impregnated the girl and forced her into a termination that killed her. Julia’s abortion was frowned upon by men in Rome almost as severely as Domitian’s perversion. It inspired some of the foulest verse imaginable: ‘Julia freed her fertile uterus by many/ an abortion and shed clots which resembled their uncle.’37 The behaviour of Domitian, meanwhile, only lent credence to Pliny the Elder’s exclamation of ‘how much more criminal we are in this area [of sex] than wild beasts!’
When Domitian heard that people were now speaking of his iniquity he ‘was blazing’.38 For all the rumours of his misdemeanours, he was said to have been a man of justice. He was even known to overturn decisions made in the Court of One Hundred – Pliny’s court – if he believed them to have been influenced by the ambition of the jurors.39 Anxious that his reputation should not be blemished, Domitian diverted blame for the Virgin’s death on to a senator named Valerius Licinianus, whom he had arrested on accusation of having concealed one of the Virgin’s freedwomen on his estate.40 According to Pliny, the senator confessed, ‘but it was unclear whether he confessed because it was true or because he feared worse if he denied it’.41 The defendant did not attend his own trial. In his absence, his lawyer, a man named Herennius Senecio, came before the court and gave him what Pliny called the ‘Patroclus is dead’ treatment.42 With a direct and serviceable ‘Licinianus recessit’ (‘Licinianus has withdrawn his defence’), Senecio saw his client free to gather up his belongings and leave Rome in a lenient exile. Licinianus eventually became a rhetoric teacher in Sicily – a not altogether unpleasant ending, though in Pliny’s eyes a sorry one: ‘Such is his demise: from a senator to an exile, from an orator to a rhetoric teacher.’
As for the lawyer, Senecio, it soon transpired that he had diverted his attentions elsewhere. While Pliny proceeded in AD 93 to the prestigious magistracy of praetor, Senecio steadily withdrew from public life.43 He and a fellow senator named Arulenus Rusticus had undertaken to write biographies of two ‘most sacred men’: Thrasea Paetus and his son-in-law Helvidius Priscus.44 Pliny knew who they were. They were famous Stoics.
Stoicism was the most prominent philosophy in Rome, far outshining Epicureanism and Pythagoreanism as a school of thought. Cicero, Virgil, Seneca the Younger, Pliny the Elder and, later, the emperor Marcus Aurelius, did much to elevate and perpetuate its teachings through their work. Introduced to Rome from Greece in the second century BC by a philosopher from Rhodes named Panaetius and his pupil Poseidonius, Stoicism encouraged reverence towards Nature. ‘Nature, which is to say, Life,’ wrote Pliny the Elder, ‘is my subject.’ She was the only divinity he believed in as such.45 The traditional pantheon of Roman gods was indeed for many Stoics little more than a collection of allegories for aspects of the universe such as the sun and moon.
Pliny the Elder followed the oldest Stoics in believing that the universe existed in a cycle without beginning or end, subject only to ekpyrosis – the sudden destruction by conflagration – after which it would recover its force and proceed on a fresh cycle. Although the word ‘encyclopaedia’ only gained currency in the fifteenth century, Pliny the Elder presented his Natural History as the Latin equivalent to what the Greeks had called enkyklios paideia, ‘all-round education’ – education that surrounds the pupil in a circle.46 He was concerned neither with what lay above the earth’s sphere nor with what might be lurking in ‘Hades’. What point is there in seeking what exists outside our world, he wondered, when we are yet to discover everything within it?47 The Natural History, a work that the younger Pliny described as ‘wide-ranging and erudite and no less varied than Nature herself’, was an attempt to lay down all that had been found on earth to date so that it would forever encircle us in its beauty.48
The Stoics rarely went as far as the Cynic philosophers of Greece in their rejection of wealth and comfort, but they shared with them their ability to maintain perspective in moments of perceived crisis. Zeno, the man credited with founding the Stoic school of thought, was said to have learned the art of keeping his cool after scalding himself with soup. Arriving in Athens from his native Cyprus in around 312 BC, he encountered the Cynic philosopher Crates, who playfully challenged him to carry a steaming bowl of lentil soup through the potters’ quarters of the Kerameikos. Zeno accepted and, to maintain a semblance of propriety, did his best to conceal it as he started. Crates smashed the bowl with his walking stick. When the soup began to dribble down his legs, Zeno turned red and scurried off to hide his shame. As he hastened away, Crates calmly told him, ‘You have suffered nothing terrible.’49
Stoicism was at heart a philosophy for achieving equilibrium in a frantic world, through which you learned to become master of yourself and your emotions, and it was in the spring of his youth, a few years after he escaped the confounding disaster of Vesuvius, that Pliny had the opportunity to learn it first-hand. Dispatched to Syria on military service, he spent his days going over the account books of the Roman cavalry and cohorts stationed in the province, and his leisure hours becoming acquainted with at least three Stoic philosophers.50
Of the Stoics he met in Syria, there were some who preached their way of life and others who knew better. Musonius Rufus was firmly in the first camp. A philosopher of Etruscan extraction, he was something of a ‘Roman Socrates’.51 In the civil war that followed the death of Nero, he was dispatched as an envoy to negotiate a peace settlement, but ended up philosophising so intensely with the opposing army on the ugliness of conflict that he incurred only ridicule for his ‘untimely wisdom’.52 On another occasion, he told the Athenians that they should cease hosting gladiatorial shows under the walls of the Acropolis lest they spatter with blood the seats occupied by the priests of Dionysus.53 The Greeks would have struggled, at the best of times, to take lessons from a man who believed as fervently as Musonius Rufus did (on moral rather than specifically Stoic grounds) that one should abstain from homosexual practices, and from sex altogether except in cases of determined procreation.
In the second camp was Musonius Rufus’ pupil, Euphrates, a philosopher who developed more convincing methods of bringing people round to the Stoic way of life. If Musonius Rufus was Socrates, then Euphrates was Plato.54 He was clever and subtle, but had a way of speaking that captivated even the most reluctant learners: ‘you would not shudder upon meeting him’. He ‘pursued crimes, not individuals’ because he understood that it was more effective to correct the way a man lived than punish him for it. Pliny came to know him particularly well during his service. He visited him at his home and found him to be open and approachable and ‘full of the humanity which he teaches’, which was very different from the portrait of him that emerged over a century later. According to an author of the early third century AD, Euphrates came into bitter conflict with a Pythagorean philosopher and professed miracle man named Apollonius. Originally from Tyana (modern Kemerhisar), a city in a Roman province in what is now Turkey, Apollonius travelled the world – India, Ethiopia, Egypt, Rome – issuing advice and predictions, and performing such improbable feats as releasing the city of Ephesus from plague. He met several Roman emperors, including Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian, the last of whom had him locked up after hearing Euphrates’ complaints. Allegedly, Euphrates devised ‘false letters’ about the wondrous Apollonius and spoke out against his philosophy.55 Apollonius was said to have vanished magically during his ensuing trial after describing Euphrates as lingering in the doorways of powerful men in the manner of ‘greedy dogs’ and clinging to his ‘fountains of wealth’.56 These may have been empty rumours but they hinted at the hypocrisy of Euphrates’ philosophy. The Stoics were often wealthy men endowed with the kind of extravagant possessions their philosophy taught them to eschew. The line between necessity and luxury was a highly subjective one.
Pliny did not acknowledge these stories in his letters. In his eyes, Euphrates was entirely admirable. Although he could not have looked more like a philosopher when Pliny first met him – he was ‘tall and becoming, with long hair and a huge white beard’ – when he later moved to Rome he did his utmost to be seen as a philosopher for the way he ate and drank, slept and helped others, rather than for how he looked.57 Euphrates was afraid that the philosopher’s traditional cloak and beard might give the impression that everything he did was for show.58 Stoics were discouraged from vaunting their philosophy, for it was intended as an improvement of the self. As Seneca the Younger used to say, ‘one can be wise without ceremony, and without inviting ill-will’.59 This was where Euphrates’ teacher Musonius Rufus had failed. He broadcast his views too widely. His fame as a philosopher and as a philosophy teacher had brought him to the attention of Nero, who exiled him in the belief that he had been involved in the conspiracy against his life in AD 65.
Musonius Rufus was on his third exile when Pliny met him in Syria (it was just as well that he thought ‘Exile is Not a Bad Thing’) and soon earned his affection.60 Although Pliny grew closer to his son-in-law, Artemidorus, a man he admired for ‘the endurance of his body in winter and summer alike’, he came to love the elder man ‘as much as one can across an age gap’.61 Musonius Rufus’ sanctimonious attitudes towards luxury and concern for protecting the environment from human greed might well have made Pliny think of his uncle: ‘But for that briefest of moments when we feel pleasure,’ wrote Musonius, ‘innumerable fish courses are prepared, the sea is sailed to its furthest limits; cooks are far more sought after than farmers; some prioritise their meals over spending on their estates, though our bodies are in no way aided by extravagant food.’62
Musonius Rufus objected to the mining of Nature on both environmental and moral grounds. Since every jewel acquired or oyster cracked open only whetted the appetite for something rarer and more refined, he advocated a diet that satisfied need not want: vegetables, raw foods, a little cheese, no meat.63 Musonius Rufus disapproved of sweeping the oceans for oysters as much as Pliny the Elder did of probing (like surgeons with their tools) the ‘bowels’ of the earth for gold and silver, amber, bronze, iron, and gems, ‘as if the ground we tread were not generous or fertile enough’.64
Stoicism taught them that Nature was a god to be revered, not dominated, assisted, not ignored, and as proof of this, Pliny the Elder had pointed to the lowly bramble bush. It is so wild and resilient in its growth, he said, that it would overwhelm the earth if man did not prune it. From this we should accept that Nature does not exist for the pleasure of man, but rather, ‘man can seem to be born for the sake of the earth’.65 His appetite for luxury may sooner lead him to plunder than prune, but even the fattest, idlest, most ignorant individual is obliged to attend Nature from time to time. Man would do well to understand that, while the sweeping of oceans and ploughing of rich landscapes is ruinous to the earth, it is positively deadly to his own true interests. ‘We all reach into the bowels of the earth while living on top of it,’ he wrote, ‘but are amazed when occasionally it splits open or quakes, as if it were possible that this wasn’t an expression of disapproval by our sacred parent.’66
This was not simply a question of morality after all. Rejecting oysters and amber and gold may prevent you from falling down a rabbit hole of obsession, but more importantly, it offered you some protection against earth’s fury. Pliny and his uncle had grown up in living memory of the earth splitting open as Vesuvius began to stir. Their experience could only have fortified their beliefs about the perils of disrupting the earth’s layers. Both Plinys had learned that Nature, while predominantly kind, had evils lurking deep inside it. Man had no one but himself to blame if he unleashed them by prodding at its bowels.
It had occurred to Pliny the Elder that there had to be a reason why Nature, otherwise so generous and nurturing of life, produced the poisons she did. Was it possible that humans are simply too vulnerable to the world around them? Oysters have their shells, boars their fur, birds their feathers.67 Trees hide behind their bark, but man – man is hideously exposed. Plunged naked onto the earth with a pulsating fontanelle, he does what no other creature does at birth. He cries. This is the only thing he knows how to do instinctively. Everything else he must learn for himself. According to the Natural History it will be at least forty days before the infant manages so much as a laugh.
The image of a baby writhing helplessly in his cot persuaded Pliny the Elder of Nature’s potential to be a tricky stepmother, but the image of an elderly man struggling in his bed made him think of her rather as a kindly mother. Nature, he decided, has given us two main gifts. One is brevity of life. The other is the means of ending life. Mortality should not be seen as a curse, for it is the one thing we have that the gods do not.68 If life becomes too much then we have a way out. Zeus had no choice but to carry on when he saw his son Sarpedon die and be carried from the battlefield in the arms of Sleep and Death. The elderly man can escape his bed of pain by ending his life there and then. The earth will cover him over, embracing his body like a mother. The simplest explanation Pliny the Elder could find for why Nature had sowed poisons in the earth was to provide us with a means of committing suicide. We need only learn which mushrooms, leaves, or berries to pick.*
His was in many ways an age marked by reasoned acceptance of death. Seneca the Younger encapsulated a popular Stoic view when, around the time of Pliny’s birth, he said that it was foolish to prolong life for the sake of enduring pain, but cowardly to seek death because of pain alone.69 As Pliny the Elder recalled, the admirable Seneca, who had written richly Stoic works on clemency, mutual kindness and ‘the tranquillity of the mind’, was ‘the foremost of intellectuals whose power ultimately overcame him’.70 Forced to commit suicide by Nero following the conspiracy that landed Musonius Rufus in exile, he died a long, suffering and determinedly theatrical death. He cut into his veins, and then took poison when he failed to bleed out sufficiently. When the poison did not work he got into a hot bath and died ‘by its vapour’.71 Decades after leaving Syria for Rome, Pliny’s Stoic friend Euphrates committed suicide by hemlock to avert the pains of illness and old age.72
Pliny understood the logic of the arguments for suicide but, even after his time with the philosophers in Syria, struggled to see it put into practice. He had a friend called Titius Aristo with whom he used to spend time deliberating matters of constitutional law. If, for argument’s sake, there was a defendant who might be acquitted, left to go into exile, or put to death, Pliny might ask him whether it was right that senators who supported the death penalty should consult with those who favoured banishment. Might not such collusion ensure that acquittal was impossible? Titius Aristo would have the answer, for he was a ‘treasury [of knowledge]’ and ‘there was nothing you might want to learn that he could not teach’.73 When Pliny heard that he had fallen ill and resolved to die he hastened to his bedside.
Pliny found his bedchamber sparse and cold and adorned solely ‘with the greatness of his mind’. Titius Aristo lay sweating beneath his covers, which he insisted remained on in spite of his raging fever. As Pliny approached, his friend leaned in to him and bade him ask the doctors whether his illness was fatal. If it was, he said, he was indeed resolved to die. But if the doctors believed it was merely a long and painful sickness then he would endure it, for he could not contemplate suicide against the wishes of his wife, daughter and friends.
The Stoics, too, were obliged to weigh their own discomfort against the agony their relatives would feel as a result of their deaths. Pliny considered the ability to understand the arguments on both sides the mark of a great mind. He did as Titius Aristo asked him and discovered that the doctors were optimistic for his friend’s health. This was the perfect opportunity for Pliny to adopt a Stoic resolve.
Pliny confessed that he struggled to grasp the tenets of Stoicism. On returning to Rome from Syria and reuniting with Euphrates years later, he admitted that he could not fully understand his philosophical virtues ‘even now; for just as one cannot judge painting, sculpture or modelling unless one is an artist, so only a wise man can recognise wisdom’.74 Pliny’s disavowal was not a rejection of Stoicism but rather a test. Like a Stoic who refused to wear a beard, Pliny’s modest statement was an invitation to others to look beneath his facade for signs of his wisdom. A new acquaintance who sought hints of Stoicism in Pliny might begin by watching how he conducted himself in court. The benches of the Court of One Hundred provided a good vantage point. Was he flustered, or did he look as though anxiety was clouding his thoughts? The ideal Stoic never ceded to his emotions or fears. Was Pliny hesitant? The Stoic did not act on impulse. When pressure was applied, was he rational? The Stoic had a deep sense of security and inner confidence; he knew that it was in his power to make the right choice.
And when Pliny was at a sick friend’s bedside, how was he then? Was he calm and accepting of the ill man’s desire for death? He was not. When Pliny was sitting with the ailing Titius Aristo he described himself as attonitus, ‘struck by terror’, a word he used on only one other occasion in his letters, which was when he recalled the state of the crowd which tried to flee the eruption of Vesuvius.75 This time he was too panicked to read, let alone to make notes. Over the course of his life Pliny witnessed the suicides of a large number of his friends. His efforts to save them were almost always in vain. Pliny did not record whether his friend Aristo lived or died, but the moments he spent by his bedside would have reinforced the challenges of Stoicism.
Seeing how difficult it was to maintain calm in the face of uncertainty might have provided Pliny with some incentive to lead a Stoic life. Despite appreciating the humanitas and sanctitas of the philosophy, however, he chose not to define himself by it. In the years following his encounter with the Stoics in Syria, he came to know a network of Stoic philosophers in Rome. His associations with them would serve him well as he proceeded in his legal career, but disastrously as he came up against the tyranny of Domitian’s rule. Pliny’s decision not to immerse himself too deeply in the precepts of any particular school of thought might even have saved him.
If the impassioned, wholehearted reverence for Nature that Pliny the Elder inspired in his readers was the least contentious aspect of his philosophy, then it was also the feature of Stoicism that Pliny observed most closely. It was in spring that he had the chance to appreciate the gifts of Nature anew after the long, studious days of winter.
* Pliny the Elder was critical of suicides by drowning and sword. He was also critical of antidotes to poison. In the first century BC, Pompey the Great had conquered the kingdom of Pontus on the south coast of the Black Sea and carried home with him new knowledge of the nature of poisons. The vanquished King of Pontus, Mithridates VI Eupator, had discovered that, by ingesting a little poison every day, you can build up an immunity to it. He allegedly became so resistant that he found himself unable to commit suicide by poison following his defeat. According to Pliny the Elder, Mithridates had also developed an antidote against poison that consisted of fifty-four ingredients. The recipe for the ‘mithridate’ was tweaked over the years at Rome and became steadily more opiate in its composition. The supposed antidote of the foreign king remained popular in medieval times, when it was optimistically employed as protection against plague. Pliny the Elder derided the ostentation of the science.