Herculaneum, a town on the Bay of Naples that was buried beneath volcanic ash when Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, has only been partially excavated. Some buildings stand open to the sky; others, such as the theatre, can only be accessed through cramped and winding tunnels; many lie entirely entombed within rock. A visitor's reaction to this can be an interesting gauge of character. The glass-half-full person will exult in the chance to walk the streets of an ancient city. The glass-half-empty person will wish there were more streets to walk. In Herculaneum, where furniture, bread and figs were all carbonised by the pyroclastic surge, the trace elements of life as it was lived in the heyday of the Roman Empire can serve to tantalise as well as satisfy the curious. To study the distant past is always to be greedy. It is to be like Orpheus, snatching after ghosts.
We can never know enough. This is not an exclusively modern feeling. Two thousand years ago, when Vesuvius erupted, a longing to make sense of what was happening lured antiquity's most celebrated encyclopedist to his death. Pliny the Elder's lifework, the Natural History, was a colossal monument to his insatiable inquisitiveness: thirty-seven volumes, crammed with facts strip-mined from some two thousand works, covering the entire breadth of available knowledge. Whether it was prescribing blood from a lamb's testicles as a deodorant, discoursing on the intelligence of elephants, estimating the distance of the earth from the moon or identifying the only person to have laughed on the day he was born (Zoroaster), Pliny had pretty much everything covered. Inevitably, he made sure to describe the world's volcanoes. Vesuvius, though, was not on his list. Pliny, like the inhabitants of Herculaneum, Pompeii and the various other towns planted on Vesuvius's foothills, had no idea that it was a volcano. And so, when it erupted, the great encyclopedist inevitably wished to explore this remarkable occurrence close up, a commitment to field research that resulted in his asphyxiation by ash.
The details of his death were recorded years later by his nephew Pliny the Younger (as posterity remembers him). Seventeen at the time, he was busy with the Roman equivalent of his A levels and so turned down his uncle's invitation to sail with him into the heart of the pumice storm. Lacking in heroism this decision may have been, but it was eminently sensible. Even in the naval base of Misenum, at a distance of some thirty kilometres from the volcano, Pliny the Younger was only just able to make an escape. Daisy Dunn, who opens her biography of him with a brilliantly vivid description of Vesuvius's eruption, gives her account the appropriate shading of an apocalypse: ‘The cloud descended upon the earth and covered the sea until neither the island of Capri, nor even the promontory of Misenum itself, was visible on the horizon. Ash began to fall, only lightly, and hardly noticeable at all against the thick gloom that pressed them from behind, spreading over the earth like a torrent.'
Dunn's book, then, begins with a bang. Fortunately for Pliny the Younger – if less so for Dunn herself – nothing else in his life ever rivalled the eruption of Vesuvius for sheer explosive impact. Over the course of a long and distinguished career, he practised as a lawyer, held a succession of important offices, hobnobbed with the Emperor Trajan and had a run-in with a group of Christians. His letters – of which 247 have survived – hold up an incomparable mirror to the governance of the Roman Empire at its height, and as such have always been treasured by historians of the Pax Romana. Peace, however, by its very nature, is less eventful than war. Dunn's previous book, on Catullus, had as its backdrop the implosion of the Roman Republic, an incomparably dramatic episode, rich in extraordinary characters and convulsions. The age of Pliny the Younger offers fewer such excitements. Throughout his life Pliny himself remained recognisably the same person who, as a teenager, had opted to keep his nose in his books rather than head towards an erupting volcano.
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