90 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY 17 &24, 2020
two months to get back. Reading them,
you sense that Trajan often wished Pliny
would just go ahead and make whatever
decision seemed reasonable.
We do hear about some celebrated
crimes: Agrippina, the Emperor Clau-
dius’ wife, poisoning him in order to se-
cure the succession for her son, Nero;
Nero then killing Agrippina and also
kicking his pregnant wife, Poppaea, to
death. (That’s after he arranged for the
poisoning of his stepbrother, Brittani-
cus.) Then, there’s Domitian, going off
with, they say, whatever implement he
had at hand, to terminate his niece Ju-
lia’s pregnancy, engendered by him. This,
Dunn writes, inspired a locally popular
ditty: “Julia freed her fertile uterus by
many/an abortion and shed clots which
resembled their uncle.” ( Julia died from
the procedure.) Next to such reports, the
regular rubouts, as in the notorious Year
of the Four Emperors, in 69 A.D.—Nero,
to avoid execution, stabbed himself in
the throat and was replaced by Galba,
who was assassinated after seven months
by the Praetorian Guard and succeeded
by Otho, who ruled for three months
before, faced with a rebellion, he com-
mitted suicide, yielding his place to Vi-
tellius (soon murdered by the soldiers of
Vespasian, but let’s stop there)—look like
business as usual. Or they would seem
so if they didn’t involve those little Cosa
Nostra touches, such as a victim’s being
found with his penis cut off and stuffed
in his mouth.
Of course, many of the most appall-
ing episodes are well known from more
famous accounts, in Tacitus’ “Annals of
Imperial Rome” and Suetonius’ “Lives
of the Twelve Caesars.” Dunn has no
scoops, and she knows it. Furthermore,
she is trying to be faithful to Pliny’s ac-
count, but, as she notes, he made a point,
when he published his correspondence,
of excising all the dates and arranging
the letters, as he put it, “however they
came to hand.” She thinks that he was
trying, by this means, to show “a life of
ups and downs, uncertainties, and ques-
tions rather than certain progress.”
If so, he achieved his goal. The let-
ters have a weirdly drifting quality, as if
these people woke up, went to the law
courts, sentenced some people to death,
burned a few Christians, and then went
home to dinner. With such a source, it
is no surprise that Dunn’s book contains
a number of challenges to our under-
standing. One is the treatment of the
widely hated Emperor Domitian. Dunn
quotes Suetonius to the effect that Domi-
tian amused himself at night by stabbing
the flies over his desk with a stylus, and
she repeats the stories of his alleged deal-
ings with his niece. Pliny, she says, pic-
tured him as “a monster from Hades,
hiding in his lair and licking his lips with
the blood of relatives.” But later she writes
that the emperor was said to have been
“a man of justice.” Really? What do we
do, then, with the jokes about the aborted
fetuses that supposedly looked like their
uncle Domitian? No matter how distant
you feel from the morals of imperial
Rome, you can’t quite figure this out, and
Dunn doesn’t help us much.A
t the risk, in such a context, of
seeming sentimental, it must be
said that the most striking thing about
Pliny’s letters is the lack of tender feel-
ing. Dunn makes much of Pliny’s affec-
tion for his third wife, Calpurnia, and
of his sorrow when she had a miscar-
riage. (In the end, she died childless.)
Dunn points out, too, that Pliny took
Calpurnia to Bithynia with him. Some-
how, though, these seem small tributes.
When the two were apart, he wrote
begging her to send him a letter once
or even twice a day—“to delight and
to torture me.” She wrote back that her
consolation, when they were separated,
was to take his books to bed with her
and hold them in the place where he
usually lay. Why does her tribute sound
so much more serious than his?
Pliny knew the art of fine words. In
100 A.D., he gave a speech—the Pane-
gyricus, famous in its day—in praise of
Rome’s recently installed emperor, Tra-
jan, who had to sit in front of him, in
the Senate house, the whole time. He
then revised and expanded it for publi-
cation. Scholars disagree about how long
the speech would have lasted, but no one
seems to think that the running time
was less than three hours. Elsewhere,
Pliny proudly mentions giving a speech
that lasted seven. Describing the Pane-
gyricus, Dunn comes close to mocking
Pliny. “To modern ears his chosen style
is somewhat grating and turgid,” she says.
With such statements, however, she does
succeed in making Pliny, whom she
clearly considers a sort of dry stick, a poi-gnant character, the kind of person who
has to do the dirty jobs of an empire and,
having done them, gets no compliments.
Pliny’s deepest feeling seems to have
been his love of nature. By my count, he
had at least five villas, and many of the
most ardent passages in his letters are
devoted to agricultural matters. Dunn
writes that at his Tuscan estate he grew
so many grapevines that they threatened
to invade the villa:
One of the bedrooms was constructed al-
most entirely from marble and contained a cab-
inet-like alcove for a bed. There were windows
on every facet, but in summer the vines shrouded
them in shade. Being in bed then, as flickers
of light fought through the foliage, was “like
lying in a wood, but without feeling the rain.”Here one feels the Romans’ love of
the world, and of that especially beauti-
ful piece of it that is the Italian penin-
sula. In this sentiment, at least, Pliny was
truly his uncle’s nephew, which may go
some way toward explaining the curious
fact that, after the fall of Rome, anyone
who still knew the name Pliny assumed
that he was just one person. It was not
until the early fourteenth century that a
cleric at the cathedral of Verona figured
out that there were two Plinys. And it
was only in the fifteenth century that
their books made it back into circulation.
The Elder’s “Natural History” had its
first printed edition in 1469; his neph-
ew’s letters returned to publication in- “The release of books by two Pli-
nys,” Dunn writes, “was met with con-
siderable emotion across Italy.”
Neither Pliny knew that his home-
land’s great mountain, Vesuvius, was nour-
ishing in her bosom the extermination
of so many of her people. This somehow
makes the two men’s kinship closer. In
my mind’s eye, I see Pliny, on the terrace
of his mother’s villa, watching the Roman
quadriremes, under the Elder’s direction,
make for the opposite shore. Should he
have gone with them? Perhaps, but it is
typical of this cautious young person that
he stayed back. In any case, his decision
joined the two men permanently, at least
in Roman history. Not only did Pliny live
to tell the tale but the next day, when his
childless uncle died on the beach of Sta-
biae, he became, by the directives of the
will, the Elder’s adoptive son and the in-
heritor of his property. And so he spent
his later life gathering grapes on the hill-
sides that had been the old man’s joy.