Pax: War and Peace in Rome's Golden Age by Holland Tom

Author:Holland, Tom [Holland, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Politics, Classics
ISBN: 9781408706985
Amazon: 1408706989
Goodreads: 62712920
Publisher: Abacus
Published: 2023-09-14T07:00:00+00:00

The Giants Awaken

For several days the Bay of Naples had been troubled by earthquakes. Pliny’s nephew, who was staying with his mother at Pliny’s villa in Misenum, made sure to keep track of them. Although he was only eighteen, the younger Pliny had already imbibed from his uncle both a fascination with the wonders of the natural world and a commitment to taking notes. An earnest and dutiful young man, he had once been told off by Pliny for walking rather than taking a litter: for by taking a litter he would have had the opportunity to read a book. ‘All time is wasted which is not devoted to study.’49 Such was Pliny’s maxim.

His encyclopaedia served as a monument to a stirring principle: that there was no occurrence so remarkable, no wonder so unsettling, that it might not become for a Roman a legitimate object of enquiry. Earthquakes, for all the terror they might generate, were as susceptible to methodical enquiry as all the other objects of his prodigious research. Pliny, detailing the many times they had convulsed the world, did not blame them on buried giants, or – as some other scholars had done – on air trapped underground, but on winds. ‘For the earth never shakes except when the sea is deathly calm,’ he wrote, ‘and the sky so still that there is not a breeze on which a bird can take wing, and all the breath of wind is exhausted; and this only ever happens after it has been particularly gusty, doubtless because all the winds end up enclosed in the veins and hidden caverns of the sky.’50 So much for the theory. But Pliny had been attentive as well to the practicalities. Many were the observations he had listed: that earthquakes were most frequent in the spring and autumn; that they were often accompanied by tidal waves, and by noises that sounded like shouting or the clash of weapons; that the safest place to stand in a tottering building was directly below an arch. To Pliny, the earthquakes that shook Campania day after day were something more than an inconvenience: they were phenomena that promised a better understanding of the world.

Elsewhere, not surprisingly, perspectives tended to be rather different. In Pompeii, seventeen years after the great earthquake that had brought so many of its buildings crashing to the ground, the recovery was still incomplete. To arrive at the city by sea, and pass into it through the gate that led from the harbour, was immediately to be struck by this. The temple of Venus, raised on a vast artificial platform just across the main road from Scaurus’ mansion, and visible from far out at sea, was the largest in the city. Originally built to mark its inauguration as a colony, and dedicated to the goddess who presided as its patron, it served as a monument to almost two centuries of Pompeian history. Yet although parts of the complex had been restored, most of it was still one enormous building site.

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