I was expecting another poet as Daisy Dunn's follow up to Catullus. While Pliny the Younger fancied himself as such, it is not what he is primarily remembered for. Even if one had expected a Pliny, one would have thought the Elder was the more likely but he left writing about the world and not about himself whereas the Younger left letters. Thus, in the same way as we see Socrates through Plato, or Dr. Johnson through Boswell, we see Pliny the Elder through the writing of his nephew. While Daisy's book is 'A Life of Pliny', by which she means the Younger, it is not what one usually gets from a chronological biography. It gradually shifts attention from the Elder to the Younger but, more than being about them (which it is), it provides a wide-ranging survey of Roman life, culture, politics and - most captivatingly- thought.It begins with a bang, the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, and the Elder's assiduous devotion to his studies bringing about his demise. Daisy doesn't specify what we were told at school that his fanaticism about time spent reading meant that he had a slave read to him while he was in the bath but his dedication to reading, investigation and the writing of his Natural History was both the making of him and his undoing. His nephew both sustained and benefitted from his legacy.
Sleep was a waste of time, and was equated with death,
Vita vigilia est ('to be alive is to be awake').
While one can have a great deal of sympathy for the Stoicism of the Younger that included environmental concerns, vegetarianism and the avoidance of Christmas (the festival of Saturnalia), we don't have to take all our bearings from the Pliny's and the Elder's work ethic and the Younger's objections to horse racing is taking their worthiness too far. They can't be the only ones who have ever taken themselves a little bit too seriously.
While Daisy's Catullus book made a case that I'm sure we all wanted to believe for having found the likeness of her subject in a fresco, she is more circumspect in evaluating the chances of a skull reputed to be that of Pliny the Elder being really him. Character is better assessed in such vignettes as the Younger's admiration for a lifelike, unidealized bronze sculpture of an old man in all its realism rather than the tendency of collectors to feign knowledge of art but not understand it.
The Younger's career is established in the bleak, tyrannical reign of Domitian. He attends the Court of One Hundred but does well to escape the murderous attentions of the Emperor who, most chilling among all his crimes, oversaw the burying alive of a Vestal Virgin accused of infidelity.
Having inherited his uncle's villa at Comum, the Younger establishes an idyllic country estate, trading in wine and crops and conveniently identifying his property for posterity by having the bricks embossed with his initials which seems slightly at odds with his generally pre-Puritan values. Having begun with such vivid drama, the book seems to have moved into a gentle coda of luxury and enjoyment for its own sake.
He is promoted, though, by the more enlightened Trajan who trusts him with the governorship of Bithynia on the Black Sea. He regularly writes home to the empoeror for advice until becoming more confident in making his own decisions. However, he needs guidance on dealing with Christians and is surprised by Trajan's (relatively) liberal line.
Insights into Roman science might make it seem imaginatively quaint - the Moon must be bigger than the Earth or else there wouldn't be total eclipses; if pregnant women eat salt, their children will be born without fingernails- but at least they didn't invent plastic, the internal combustion engine or golf.
It is not only classicists who write good prose but it can't do any harm to be disciplined enough to translate Latin's rigorous grammar and thus habitually write fine English. Good writing is most often that which one doesn't notice and bad writing draws attention to itself by its flaws. But one can also notice exceptionally good prose and, time and again, one appreciates Daisy Dunn's tremendous grasp of her subject and the way she expresses it, not only in the compendium of quotes, references and stories she assembles from the ancient world but in the way the words are put together.
The book ends sooner than you might be thinking because roughly a quarter of it is the Endnotes and Index. I didn't refer to them very often but when I looked for Endnote 35 on page 299 it wasn't there, and neither was 32. Never trust a proofreader or a first edition. But if that miniscule point is the only fault I can find, this is a wonderful book with potentially much wider appeal than to those of us who like to play at being scholarly. If one wasn't so stoic that one doubted the validity of prizes, one would nominate it for all those it qualifies for.
