72 Culture TheEconomistJanuary29th 2022
RomanlifehacksAncient and
modern
T
heplinyswerewellaheadofyou.You
may think it is terribly contemporary
and efficient to go for a walk with your Air
Pods in and an audiobook on. It is also very
Roman. For as Pliny the Younger records,
people were doing this (mutatis mutandis)
in those days too. While “going about any
where”, the author’s uncle, Pliny the Elder,
instructed someone to follow him, clutch
ing a book and reading out loud. This
happened as the elder Pliny ate, as he sun
bathed, even at the baths; he was an
antique audiobook enthusiast.
The reasons for this habit were much
the same as those modern metropolitans
might cite if you tapped them on the shoul
der and asked them to explain the head
phones. Namely: saving time. Pliny’s uncle
knew the world was wide and that life was
short. How better, then, to make the most
of both than to multitask? The elder Pliny
even travelled by chair, rather than walk
ing, so his secretary could sit alongside
him, book in hand (gloved hands in win
ter). “You need not”, he told his nephew,
“lose these hours.”
People don’t read Pliny the Younger
much any more. Some still pick up Marcus
Aurelius (for the philosophy) and Catullus(forthesmut).Horaceremainspopularfor
thosefridgemagnetphrases:carpediemis
his,sotooarenildesperandumanddulceet
decorumest. Evenamongtheclassicallyin
clined, though, Pliny is out of fashion. His
back story is so uninspiring, for one thing.
The elder Pliny was a sometime military
commander, at least, but the younger one
was neither emperor nor soldier nor famed
lover, but merely a lawyer. In other words,
he resembled the numberless boring
bureaucrats of today. And what could be
interesting about that?
Everything, is the answer. If you really
want to understand an empire—to feel its
muscle and its might, sense its power
beneath your fingers on the page—then
forget the poets and poseurs. What you
need are its laws and its lawyers. Their
prose may not be fine or fancy. Their topics
aren’t elevated. They talk about beggars
and beatings and the price of bread. They
rule on who could wear purple (imperial
household only) or jewellery (not actress
es), or, later, who could dress as nuns (not
prostitutes). And as Pliny the Younger
shows, their observations can be riveting.
Flip through his correspondence and
there, in Letter 10.96, you find the first
mention of Christians in the work of any
Roman author. They are irksome, Pliny
thinks, and they pray too much. Pick up
Letter 6.16, and there is the only eyewitness
account of the eruption of Vesuvius in
79 ad(“flames blazed”). Occasionally there
are dull parts—he was a lawyer after all. But
the good bits are breathtaking.
There is one more reason to read Pliny
the Younger in 2022. Flick to Letter 1.6 and
you find an early championing of working
from home (wfh). Or rather Working
While On A Boar Hunt, the equivalent for
welloff Romans. Like most people who
wfh, Pliny found he got a lot more done.
“The mere fact of being alone in the depths
of the woods in the silence”, he wrote,“isa
positive stimulus for thought.” Thesame
might be said of being alone with him.nRead Pliny the Younger, advises our
revived feature on classic books and arthome
entertainmentSofi Thanhauser opens “Worn” by evok
ing her love of clothing, particularly the
bargains she picked up secondhand as a
girl in Martha’s Vineyard. “A loden coat. A
Barbour jacket. A pink silk cocktail dress
from the 1950s with a creamcoloured
taffeta lining...” Her passion and magpie
like eye for clothes and the stories they
contain led her to write this book. It makes
no claims to be definitive; rather it follows
the thread of her interests, travelling from
bygone centuries to the present, and from
Phoenix, Arizona, to the Yangzi Delta in
China. Throughout, she explores the com
plex systems woven between the produc
ers of cloth and its consumers.
Each of the five sections of “Worn”
tackles a different raw material—linen,
cotton, silk, synthetics and wool—and is
divided into chapters in which Ms Than
hauser visits a related site or explains an
aspect of the textile’s manufacture. The re
sult is a book that bulges at the seams with
finely spun descriptions of the places and
people she encounters.
In Lubbock, Texas, the author meets a
wealthy farming family in a blue, white
and brown landscape denuded of all green
ery by the liberal use of paraquat, a defoli
ant similar to Agent Orange, which makes
cotton easier to harvest. Edwin and Linda,
her hosts, live in a mansion as “waxed and
echoless as a funeral parlour”. A girl in red
leggings and pearl earrings in Choloma,
Honduras, walks along a road “thwacking
the back of her wrist against her palm
rhythmically”: a tic to ease the pain of a 12
hour shift operating a sewing machine. In
Yangzi the author sees silk cocoons being
sorted by grade and then unspooled by
keeneyed young women. (The silk fila
ments are so fine that they are all but
invisible to the naked eye.)
As she points out, stories and myths
about cloth and clothing—from the Greek
Fates to Rumpelstiltskin via those lumi
nous, bluewhite Parisian linens—are of
ten really about other things: avarice, sta
tus, pride, the difficulty of finding true
love, or the helplessness of humanity in
the face of forces beyond its control.
“Worn” is no different. Ms Thanhauser
emphasises the experience of workers,
usually women, who are enmeshed in
lucrative global industries linked to tex
tiles and clothing.
They include medieval linenweavers
who were reviled for their efforts to form
guilds, and rayon workers exposed to
lethal carbon disulphide, which caused
“devastating neurological symptoms akin
to endstage syphilis”. Some Uyghur Mus
lims in the Xinjiang region of China have
reportedly been forced to make goods for
wellknown Western companies. A knowl
edgeable and fascinating book, “Worn”
makes for uncomfortable reading,no mat
ter how spotless your linens.n