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Chapter Three

The Consolations of Cicero, Seneca and Pliny the Younger

Perhaps we should begin with the oldest letter that we have, fictional as it is. Homer’s Iliad, probably written in the eighth century BC, contains a stirring passage in the sixth book in which a letter almost kills its bearer. King Proteus has been entertaining a new visitor, the handsome and virile warrior Bellerophon, and it is the fatal nature of these things that the king’s wife Anteia falls in love with him. Bellerophon, however, is less than keen, and his virtue leads almost to his downfall. Anteia, livid at his rejection, informs her husband Proteus that he has tried to rape her, and Proteus leaps into action immediately by deciding that rather than killing Bellerophon himself, he should get Anteia’s father to do it. So he writes bad things about Bellephron in a letter written on sealed tablets (‘things that would destroy a man’s soul’, according to Homer), and commands Bellerophon to deliver the tablets to Anteia’s father himself, the original turkey voting for Christmas.

Mythological madness follows, in which Anteia’s father Iobates, king of Lycia, decides not to kill Bellerophon, but to send him on a seemingly impossible mission to kill the fire-snorting Chimera, which he does with the aid of winged Pegasus, after which he must defeat two armies singlehandedly. He lives to tell the tale to Poseidon, who sends a flood. The story goes on.

In the real world, Greek letters were generally of less consequence. Often, we find a simple thing: that many letters adopt a formality and mode of expression that we find instantly recognisable. Papyrus fragments and scrolls from 350 BC unearthed at a Herculaneum villa in 1752, at Arsinoe from 1877 and from rubbish mounds at Oxyrhynchus from 1897 (and at least 20 other locations close to the Nile) point to the sort of uniformity of style that we have come to expect from PowerPoint presentations. There is the regular opening – ‘From A to B, greetings’ – that we have seen employed by the Romans at Vindolanda, frequently extended according to circumstance. When writing to a person of seniority, perhaps a king, a writer would respectfully reverse the order to ‘Demetrius the Fair, King of Cyrene, from Hippopapos, greetings.’ There may be further information to aid identification and location: ‘Antogonus, brother of Capedonus, horse breeder in Olympia, to Leodonus, teacher at Delphi, greetings.’ The sign-off would usually be simple: ‘Farewell’ (usually abbreviated from ‘I trust/pray that you fare well) or, too modern though it sounds, ‘Best wishes’. (Although it is now used only informally, ‘Best wishes’ was primarily reserved for business letters.) Only those in the highest positions tended to ignore these pleasantries, a public declaration that they had more important things on their mind. Alexander the Great, for example, purposely only used them for his most trusted generals and statesmen, including Antipater and Phocion.

Where did the ‘greetings’ element come from? One explanation suggests it became popular in Athens after 425 BC, when the statesman Cleon used the word at the start of his account of an unexpected victory against the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War. The report was an official council document, but its celebratory tone was soon deemed suitable for the common letter, initially perhaps as a reminder of the victory. Before this – and this is the case of the earliest Greek letter that survives, an indistinct fifth-century inscription on lead from the Black Sea – there was no greeting at all, as if a piece of papyrus that had been delivered by fleet-footed messenger after a journey of many days was somehow part of an ongoing and open conversation, like an email.* But once it was established, the hello-goodbye template would barely alter in style through the centuries (though it wouldn’t be until the sixteenth century that the spacious layout of a modern letter took shape; certainly papyrus was far too precious to experiment with attractive blank space).

The contents of the letters, composed in black carbon ink with reed pen, are also familiar. There are enquiries about the recipient’s health, usually optimistic, followed with news of the sender’s health, which is almost always buoyant. The ancient history scholar John Muir observes that when this practice was later adopted by letter-writers in Latin it was so commonplace that it was sometimes abbreviated as SVBEEQV: si vales bene est, ego quidem valeo.** The receipt of previous letters was then acknowledged, or perhaps a rebuke for the lack of them. Good wishes were sent to all members of the family, each by name, and often including pets.

The practice of letter-writing was itself the subject of study as early as the fourth century BC, or at least the subject of criticism. Theophrastus, categorising the character traits of the ‘arrogant man’, observes that ‘when sending instructions by letter, he does not write “you would oblige me” but “I want this to happen” . . . and “make sure it is exactly as I said”.’ In the third century, the philosopher Ariston found another definition: ‘When he has bought a slave, he does not bother to ask his name but just addresses him as “slave” . . . and writing a letter, he neither writes “Greetings” nor “Farewell” at the end.’

The Greek letters that survive – some 2,000 examples scattered around the world’s great museums – have value beyond their immediate content. They shed some light on the prominent role played by educated women, and certainly refute the notion that all were invisible in public debate. (The literacy rate in Greek cities is believed to have been less than 50 per cent, and the figure was lower for women, but the illiterate often hired scribes to communicate for them.) The letters have also enabled scholars to track developments in Greek language and grammar.

Predictably, the letters we find most intriguing are not the commonplace (the majority) but the quirky, the ones that make us gasp at their audacity or absurdity. In the first century BC a letter from a man working away from his wife (whom he calls sister, a common convention), is both caring and nonchalantly heartless.

Hilarion to his sister Alis, very many greetings – and to my respected Berous and Appolonarion. Know that we are still at this moment in Alexandria . . . I ask you and urge you, look after the child, and as soon as I receive my pay I will send it up to you. If by any chance you give birth and it is male, let it live; if it is female, get rid of it. You said to Aphrodisias, ‘Don’t forget me’. How can I forget you? I ask you therefore not to be anxious.

A letter from older to younger sisters carries a hectoring air:

Apollonia and Eupous to their sisters Rasion and Demarion, greetings. If you are in good health, that is well. We ourselves are in good health too. You would do us a favour by lighting the lamp in the shrine and shaking out the cushions. Keep studying and do not worry about mother. For she is already enjoying good health. Expect our arrival. Farewell. And don’t play in the courtyard but behave yourselves inside. Take care of Titoas and Shairos.

A testy letter from the third century AD, from an eager son at school to an unresponsive father, smothers its frustrations as best it can:

To my respected father Arion, Thonis sends greetings. Most of all I say a prayer every day, praying to the ancestral gods of this land in which I am staying that I find you and all our family flourishing. Look, this is the fifth letter I have written and, except for one, you have not written to me, even about your being well, nor have you come to see me. Having promised me, ‘I am coming’, you didn’t come so that you could find out whether the teacher was attending me or not . . . So make the effort to come to me quickly so he can teach me – as he is keen to do . . . Come quickly to me before he leaves for the upper territories. I send many greetings to all our family by name and to my friends. Goodbye my respected father, and I pray that you may fare well for many years along with my brothers (safe from the evil eye).

Remember my pigeons.

But for all their attractions, and for all their familiar templates, most Greek letters fall short of the key attribute we expect from letters in the modern world: they do not greatly enrich the personal experience. They may be fascinating, but the personal letters are rarely of consequence. Public letters – many purposely artificial, using the letter form as a new way of performing elaborate flights of philosophy and reaching a wider audience – are often just unperformed speeches, the equivalent of the ‘open letter’ in our modern media; many New Testament epistles would clearly model themselves on this practice.

The Greeks loved the idea of the letter and its high ambitions; they loved its epistolarity. But what of its private role as a conveyance of intimacy? Almost all letters were written to be read aloud; even private letters were primarily dictated to a scribe, and read in a low voice when received. There are rare snippets of private idiosyncrasy in Socrates and Plato, but the majority of correspondences are free of private emotion, and their oratorical heritage lends them a showy formality.

So what is lacking that we might expect to find? The historian John Muir notes that of the 2,000 or so papyrus letters we have, there are very few – he counts twelve or thirteen – that concern themselves with bereavement. Of these only six have sympathy as their main purpose, and a disproportionate three were written by women. Thus one of the few reliable mainstays of letter-writing in an age of email – the condolence letter – is almost entirely absent, and there is no logical explanation. And why were there no love letters? One possibility is that almost all were destroyed by the parties involved. Another, more plausible, is that letters were not yet regarded as the proper medium for such things. Because so many Greek letters were those of effect (or carried violent or dramatic instruction, such as that brought by Bellerophon), they may not have been considered appropriate for authentic outpourings from the heart. Muir also sounds a word of caution – their world was not as much like ours as we might imagine. The greetings and farewells were one thing, but ‘there may be a salutary warning against assuming that the many undoubtedly recognisable feelings and situations in the letters imply that we are meeting people . . . who had notions of individuality very like our own. The “otherness” of the ancient world is sometimes easy to forget.’

Individuality and authenticity – a letter that was both personal and informative – begins properly with the Romans, the first true letter-writers, and the first to establish the tradition of letters both as biographical source material and a literature to be gathered and enjoyed in its own right. The classical scholar Betty Radice has compared the ancient history of letters to a trip round a marble-floored museum, ‘the Greek statue stands aloof with his stylized enigmatic smile, while the Roman portrait bust is recognisably someone like ourselves, and its regular features speak for a single individual at a point of time’. To the modern reader, Latin letters tend to have another beneficial attribute over their Greek counterparts – their straightforwardness. They are intelligent without being flashy, direct rather than imaginative, unpretentious rather than conceited. If Greek letters are rooted in the theatre, Roman ones are rooted in the tavern.

The trail begins in the second half of the first century BC with more than 900 letters from Marcus Tullius Cicero. Cicero was the consummate statesman on a world stage at a time when the Roman Republic was in significant decline. His oratory – as a lawyer in court and in the senate – was allegedly stupendous, but it is his surviving letters that confirm his talents. His lifelong correspondence with his friend Atticus is boastful, playful and varied like no other correspondence before it, and its prolific and sequential nature enables us to build an unusually intimate biographical picture of a politician. In other letters he is compelling particularly because he is spontaneous, vulnerable and prone to hyperbolic excitement, and because his political success is fuelled by ambition, vanity and weakness. Cicero does not emerge as a particularly likeable character, but his letters have made him a valuable one: there were few figures with whom he did not communicate as Rome suffered paroxysms of decline in the decades before 45 BC, and no other collection of writing so illuminates this world. But Cicero performs another trick too, a grand epistolary deflection. His is the oldest substantive collection to show how the consummate politician flatters to deceive; his apparent confidences invariably advance his own ends and enhance his reputation.

Cicero at work: pompous perhaps, but never dull.

The survival and popularity of Cicero’s correspondence is due largely to the discovery of a long-lost collection by Petrarch in the cathedral in Verona in 1345, while a second haul almost 50 years later at Vercelli boosted the supply. Together, the letters made an immeasurable literary contribution to the formative years of the Renaissance; Cicero had laid bare the values of classical antiquity with enough detail to inspire its artistic and cultural reconstruction.

We empathise with his domestic travails (two divorces, the untimely death of his daughter Tullia), almost enough to forgive his pomposity. Virginia Woolf once noted that ‘there is a bareness about an age that has neither letter-writers nor biographers’, and it is Cicero who proves the point first. There is no doubt that Cicero knew the value of his correspondence: it was carefully edited before being copied, with an aim to present a man in firm control of grand public events; Tiro, his secretary, played at least some role in this. The worth of his letters to subsequent centuries has changed over time, but as a late-Victorian translator of Cicero’s writing claims in an introduction to his letters, ‘In every one of them he will doubtless rouse different feelings in different minds. But though he will still, as he did in his lifetime, excite vehement disapproval as well as strong admiration, he will never, I think, appear to anyone dull or uninteresting.’

In 2011, the Princeton classics professor Denis Feeney noted that while Cicero has always been popular, the last decade and a half has seen an even greater scholarly interest in his letters, ‘as if our own scurrying e-communications have created a nostalgia for a time when busy people could write pages of well-turned prose as part of their regular intercourse’.*

Two examples provide vivid snapshots of his times and a glimpse of his mischievous style (Cicero claimed he was no more able to keep a witticism in his mouth than a hot coal). The first, to his friend M. Marius at Cumae, a city near Naples, was written in 55 BC from Rome. His friend had missed the opening of the new theatre named after the leader Pompey, and with it a nice display of animal-baiting and other revelry.

If some bodily pain or weakness of health has prevented your coming to the games, I put it down to fortune rather than your own wisdom: but if you have made up your mind that these things which the rest of the world admires are only worthy of contempt, and, though your health would have allowed of it, you yet were unwilling to come, then I rejoice at both facts – that you were free from bodily pain, and that you had the sound sense to disdain what others causelessly admire.

. . . On the whole, if you care to know, the games were most splendid, but not to your taste. I judge from my own . . . For what is the pleasure of a train of six hundred mules in the ‘Clytemnestra’, or three thousand bowls in the ‘Trojan Horse’, or gaycoloured armour of infantry and cavalry in some battle? These things roused the admiration of the vulgar; to you they would have brought no delight . . . Why, again, should I suppose you to care about missing the athletes, since you disdained the gladiators? in which even Pompey himself confesses that he lost his trouble and his pains. There remain the two wild-beast hunts, lasting five days, magnificent – nobody denies it – and yet, what pleasure can it be to a man of refinement, when either a weak man is torn by an extremely powerful animal, or a splendid animal is transfixed by a hunting spear? . . . The last day was that of the elephants, on which there was a great deal of astonishment on the part of the vulgar crowd, but no pleasure whatever. Nay, there was even a certain feeling of compassion aroused by it, and a kind of belief created that that animal has something in common with mankind.

At the same theatre, just over a decade later, in 44 BC, the murder of Julius Caesar would take place by its entrance. But shortly before that, Caesar came to dinner at Cicero’s house in the Bay of Naples, and Cicero wrote of the experience to Atticus in Rome in much the same way we might refer to overpowering visitors today.

Well, I have no reason after all to repent my formidable guest! For he made himself exceedingly pleasant . . . He stayed with Philippus on the third day of the Saturnalia till one o’clock, without admitting anyone. He was engaged on his accounts, I think, with Balbus. Then he took a walk on the beach. After two he went to the bath . . . He was anointed: took his place at the table. He was under a course of emetics, and so ate and drank without scruple and as suited his taste. It was a very good dinner, and well served, and not only so, but ‘Well-cooked, well-seasoned food, with rare discourse: A banquet in a word to cheer the heart.’

Besides this, the staff were entertained in three rooms in a very liberal style. The freedmen of lower rank and the slaves had everything they could want. But the upper sort had a really recherché dinner. In fact, I showed that I was somebody. However, he is not a guest to whom one would say, ‘Pray look me up again on your way back.’ Once is enough.

A century later the Stoic philosopher, poet and dramatist Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Seneca the Younger) offered a different take on the Latin letter. Where Cicero was personal and scheming, Seneca was instructional and disarming, composing 124 letters telling us how to conduct our lives.* All written towards the end of his life to his writer friend Lucilius, they are a combination of philosophical treatise and spiritual guide, with the letter judged a suitable vehicle for the provision of robust and serious advice delivered in a digestible way.

The letters may be seen as the world’s first correspondence course in self-improvement, or indeed – considered as a collection – the first self-help book. As would be expected, the complexity of his arguments increases as the course progresses. But the letters are also conversational, and it is largely assumed that the dialogue went both ways, though the contribution from Lucilius does not survive. They contain much modern thinking, and their range is vast: from musings on the respective merits of brawn and brains to old age and senility; from the value of travel to the despairs of drunkenness; from the futility of half-done deeds to the virtues of self-control; from specific ethical issues to broad matters of physics. They are never less than absorbing. Scholars have argued that Seneca is often playing the role of the philosopher, as concerned with the structure of his argument as he is with the treatise itself. But there is no doubt that he adores the challenges of the letter form, and his accessible, bite-sized approach has contributed to the continued popularity and influence of his work.

On travel, for example, Seneca advises against the hope of returning from a journey in a better frame of mind than the one we had on departure. He is evidently replying directly to a complaint of Lucilius:

Do you suppose that you alone have had this experience? Are you surprised, as if it were a novelty, that after such long travel and so many changes of scene you have not been able to shake off the gloom and heaviness of your mind? You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate . . .

What pleasure is there in seeing new lands? Or in surveying cities and spots of interest? All your bustle is useless. Do you ask why such flight does not help you? It is because you flee along with yourself. You must lay aside the burdens of the mind; until you do this, no place will satisfy you.

It was one of the cornerstones of the Stoic tradition that an individual’s well-being could be improved by clarity of being as well as clarity of thought, a distant forerunner of the unclutter movement. In ‘Some Arguments in Favour of the Simple Life’, Seneca considers ‘how much we possess that is superfluous; and how easily we can make up our minds to do away with things whose loss, whenever it is necessary to part with them, we do not feel.’

There are a great many musings on aging and death, and several on suicide. In ‘On the Proper Time to Slip the Cable’ there can be no doubting Seneca’s view of aging as a natural process to be welcomed, nor his careful advocacy of euthanasia when the process is no longer bearable.

We have sailed past life, Lucilius, as if we were on a voyage . . . On this journey where time flies with the greatest speed, we put below the horizon first our boyhood and then our youth, and then the space which lies between young manhood and middle age and borders on both, and next, the best years of old age itself. Last of all, we begin to sight the general bourne of the race of man. Fools that we are, we believe this bourne to be a dangerous reef; but it is the harbour, where we must some day put in . . .

Every man ought to make his life acceptable to others besides himself, but his death to himself alone.

Seneca, radical self-improver.

Dramatically, Seneca took his own advice. Implicated in the assassination plot against Nero, he was ordered to kill himself (which he did, although his bloodletting took slightly longer than expected, and his friends were encouraged to carry him into a warm bath to complete the ordeal).

His passing cleared the way for one more great letter-writer of the age. Pliny the Younger, born four years after Seneca’s death, did more than anyone to establish the letter in its modern form, and to rescue it from the byways of inconsequence, pomposity, rhetoric and philosophical instruction. His letters from the turn of the first century, arguably the most buoyant period in the life of the Roman Empire, continue to entertain and inform the reader more than 2,000 years later.

Before the form is put back in the box by an early Christian world more interested in religious stricture and instruction, Pliny’s letters serve as a beacon for what secular letters will become as they emerge in the twelfth century and beyond into the early Renaissance: commonplace, personal and indispensible.

We have 247 personal and professional letters from Pliny collected in nine books that were published in his lifetime, and 121 further official letters to and from the Emperor Trajan published posthumously. The letters were written when Pliny held some of the highest offices in the Treasury and legal profession, and many of his correspondents are also influential lawyers, philosophers and literary men, the majority of them in Rome, some also in his home town of Como (known then as Comum; Pliny owned several houses overlooking the lake). He writes generously and maintains consistent friendships, and his letters reflect wide cultural interests. His main value for us is historical, as a documenter of the times; that this is conveyed not through rhetoric, but through a natural, easy and expressive style renders it not only more accessible but also more authentic. The fact that he is often a vividly descriptive and aesthetic writer is a rare attribute for any Roman man of letters, and may explain why his correspondence has weathered so well.

Here are four letters. Written several decades apart, all are descriptive; the first (to a friend at Lake Como) is nostalgic and instructive, the second (about a failed dinner party) is woeful and comic, and the last two (about the eruption of Vesuvius) are famous and vital. All of them – in these translations from 1909 and the 1960s – could have been written yesterday, were it not for the fact that Lake Como is now a European fixture for the Hollywood A-list, and Pompeii a magnet for the international flip-flop brigade.

To Caninius Rufus (a former school friend and neighbour):

I wonder how our darling Comum is looking, and your lovely house outside the town, with its colonnade where it is always springtime, and the shady plane trees, the stream with its sparkling greenish water flowing into the lake below, and the drive over the smooth firm turf. Your baths which are full of sunshine all day, the dining rooms large and small, the bedrooms for night or the day’s siesta – are you there and enjoying them all in turn, or are you as usual for ever being called away to look after your affairs? If you are there, you are a lucky man to be so happy; if not, you do no better than the rest of us.

But isn’t it really time you handed over those tiresome petty duties to someone else and shut yourself up with your books in the peace and comfort of your retreat? This is what should be both business and pleasure, work and recreation, and should occupy your thoughts awake and asleep! Create something, perfect it to be yours for all time; for everything else you possess will fall to one or another master after you are dead, but this will never cease to be yours once it has come into being. I know the spirit and ability I am addressing, but you must try now to have the high opinion of yourself which the world will come to share if you do.

The following, to his friend Septicius Clarus (a leader of the Praetorian Guard at the beginning of the second century), carries a rebuke as delicious as the food it describes.

Oh you are a pretty fellow! You make an engagement to come to supper and then never appear. Justice shall be exacted: you shall reimburse me to the very last penny the expense I went to on your account; no small sum, let me tell you. I had prepared, you must know, a lettuce apiece, three snails, two eggs, and a barley cake, with some sweet wine [chilled with] snow (the snow most certainly I shall charge to your account, as a rarity that will not keep). Olives, beetroot, gourds, onions, and a thousand other dainties equally sumptuous. You should likewise have been entertained either with an interlude, the rehearsal of a poem, or a piece of music, whichever you preferred; or (such was my liberality) with all three. But the oysters, sows’-bellies, sea-urchins, and dancers from Cadiz of a certain _______ I know not who, were, it seems, more to your taste. You shall give satisfaction; how, shall at present be a secret.

And finally this, to the historian Tacitus, written some 20 years after the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum in AD 79. Pliny was 17 at the time, and his eye-witness account (described in two letters, here slightly edited) carries its loaded portent and scorching intensity to the present day. Tacitus had requested a description of the death of Pliny’s uncle, the writer, philosopher and naval commander who had been Pliny’s mentor.

My uncle was stationed at Misenum, in active command of the fleet. On 24 August, in the early afternoon, my mother drew his attention to a cloud of unusual size and appearance. He had been out in the sun, had taken a cold bath, and lunched while lying down, and was then working at his books. He called for his shoes and climbed up to a place which would give him the best view of the phenomenon. It was not clear at that distance from which mountain the cloud was rising (it was afterwards known to be Vesuvius); its general appearance can be best expressed as being like an umbrella pine, for it rose to a great height on a sort of trunk and then split off into branches, I imagine because it was thrust upwards by the first blast and then left unsupported as the pressure subsided, or else it was borne down by its own weight so that it spread out and gradually dispersed. Sometimes it looked white, sometimes blotched and dirty, according to the amount of soil and ashes it carried with it. My uncle’s scholarly acumen saw at once that it was important enough for a closer inspection, and he ordered a boat to be made ready, telling me I could come with him if I wished. I replied that I preferred to go on with my studies, and as it happened he had himself given me some writing to do.

As he was leaving the house, he was handed a message from Rectina, wife of Tascius whose house was at the foot of the mountain, so that escape was impossible except by boat. She was terrified by the danger threatening her and implored him to rescue her from her fate. He changed his plans, and what he had begun in a spirit of inquiry he completed as a hero. He gave orders for the warships (5) to be launched and went on board himself with the intention of bringing help to many more people besides Rectina, for this lovely stretch of coast was thickly populated. He hurried to the place which everyone else was hastily leaving, steering his course straight for the danger zone. He was entirely fearless, describing each new movement and phase of the portent to be noted down exactly as he observed them. Ashes were already falling, hotter and thicker as the ships drew near, followed by bits of pumice and blackened stones, charred and cracked by the flames: then suddenly they were in shallow water, and the shore was blocked by the debris from the mountain. For a moment my uncle wondered whether to turn back, but when the helmsman advised this he refused, telling him that Fortune favoured the brave. [The] wind was of course full in my uncle’s favour, and he was able to bring his ship in.

Meanwhile on Mount Vesuvius broad sheets of fire and leaping flames blazed at several points, their bright glare emphasized by the darkness of night. My uncle tried to allay the fears of his companions by repeatedly declaring that these were nothing but bonfires left by the peasants in their terror, or else empty houses on fire in the districts they had abandoned. Then he went to rest and certainly slept, for as he was a stout man his breathing was rather loud and heavy and could be heard by people coming and going outside his door. By this time the courtyard giving access to his room was full of ashes mixed with pumice-stones, so that its level had risen, and if he had stayed in the room any longer he would never have got out. He was wakened, came out and joined Pomponianus and the rest of the household who had sat up all night. They debated whether to stay indoors or take their chance in the open, for the buildings were now shaking with violent shocks, and seemed to be swaying to and fro, as if they were torn from their foundations. Outside on the other hand, there was the danger of falling pumice-stones, even though these were light and porous; however, after comparing the risks they chose the latter . . . As a protection against falling objects they put pillows on their heads tied down with cloths.

Elsewhere there was daylight by this time, but they were still in darkness, blacker and denser than any ordinary night, which they relieved by lighting torches and various kinds of lamp. My uncle decided to go down to the shore and investigate on the spot the possibility of any escape by sea, but he found the waves still wild and dangerous. A sheet was spread on the ground for him to lie down, and he repeatedly asked for cold water to drink. Then the flames and smell of sulphur which gave warning of the approaching fire drove the others to take flight and roused him to stand up. He stood leaning on two slaves and then suddenly collapsed, I imagine because the dense fumes choked his breathing by blocking his windpipe which was constitutionally weak and narrow and often inflamed. When daylight returned on the 26th – two days after the last day he had seen – his body was found intact and uninjured, still fully clothed and looking more like sleep than death.

A few days later, Pliny wrote to Tacitus again, amplifying his account. He expected the historian ‘to select what best suits your purpose, for there is a great difference between a letter to a friend and history written for all to read.’ But it is only the letter to a friend that survives.

After my uncle’s departure I spent the rest of the day with my books, as this was my reason for staying behind. Then I took a bath, dined, and then dozed fitfully for a while. For several days past there had been earth tremors which were not particularly alarming because they are frequent in Campania: but that night the shocks were so violent that everything felt as if it were not only shaken but overturned. My mother hurried into my room and found me already getting up to wake her if she were still asleep. We sat down in the forecourt of the house, between the buildings and the sea close by. I don’t know whether I should call this courage or folly on my part (I was only seventeen at the time) but I called for a volume of Livy and went on reading as if I had nothing else to do . . .

‘Sometimes it looked white, sometimes blotched and dirty’: Abraham Pether reinterprets Pliny.

By now it was dawn, but the light was still dim and faint. The buildings round us were already tottering, and the open space we were in was too small for us not to be in real and imminent danger if the house collapsed. This finally decided us to leave the town. We were followed by a panic-stricken mob of people wanting to act on someone else’s decision in preference to their own (a point in which fear looks like prudence), who hurried us on our way by pressing hard behind in a dense crowd. Once beyond the buildings we stopped, and there we had some extraordinary experiences which thoroughly alarmed us. The carriages we had ordered to be brought out began to run in different directions though the ground was quite level, and would not remain stationary even when wedged with stones. We also saw the sea sucked away and apparently forced back by the earthquake: at any rate it receded from the shore so that quantities of sea creatures were left stranded on dry sand. On the landward side a fearful black cloud was rent by forked and quivering bursts of flame, and parted to reveal great tongues of fire, like flashes of lightning magnified in size . . .

Soon afterwards the cloud sank down to earth and covered the sea; it had already blotted out Capri and hidden the promontory of Misenum from sight. Then my mother implored, entreated and commanded me to escape the best I could – a young man might escape, whereas she was old and slow and could die in peace as long as she had not been the cause of my death too. I refused to save myself without her, and grasping her hand forced her to quicken her pace. She gave in reluctantly, blaming herself for delaying me. Ashes were already falling, not as yet very thickly. I looked round: a dense black cloud was coming up behind us, spreading over the earth like a flood. Let us leave the road while we can still see, I said, ‘or we shall be knocked down and trampled underfoot in the dark by the crowd behind.’ We had scarcely sat down to rest when darkness fell, not the dark of a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp had been put out in a closed room. You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men; some were calling their parents, others their children or their wives, trying to recognize them by their voices. People bewailed their own fate or that of their relatives, and there were some who prayed for death in their terror of dying. Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore . . . I could boast that not a groan or cry of fear escaped me in these perils, had I not derived some poor consolation in my mortal lot from the belief that the whole world was dying with me and I with it.

At last the darkness thinned and dispersed into smoke or cloud; then there was genuine daylight, and the sun actually shone out, but yellowish as it is during an eclipse. We were terrified to see everything changed, buried deep in ashes like snowdrifts. We returned to Misenum where we attended to our physical needs as best we could, and then spent an anxious night alternating between hope and fear. Fear predominated, for the earthquakes went on, and several hysterical individuals made their own and other people’s calamities seem ludicrous in comparison with their frightful predictions. But even then, in spite of the dangers we had been through, and were still expecting, my mother and I had still no intention of leaving until we had news of my uncle.

Of course these details are not important enough for history, and you will read them without any idea of recording them; if they seem scarcely worth putting in a letter, you have only yourself to blame for asking them.

‘Of course these details are not important enough for history,’ he wrote. In fact, Pliny’s accounts are the only contemporary document of the eruption, preserving in words what the volcano preserved beneath ash. Pliny thought the memorial was to his brave uncle – who snored as Vesuvius roared – but history had grander intentions. He considered the details of his letters superfluous, the way letter-writers often do at the time of writing, but we now may argue against this.

Letters from Abroad

14232134 SIGNALMAN CHRIS BARKER

H.C., BASE DEPOT, ROYAL SIGNALS,

MIDDLE EAST FORCES

Somewhere in North Africa

5th September 1943

Dear Bessie,

Since Auld Acquaintance should not be forgot, and I have had a letter to Nick and yourself on my conscience for some time, I now commence some slight account of my movements since arrival here some five months ago, and one or two other comments which will edify, amuse or annoy you according to the Britishers’ war-time diet or whatever you had for breakfast.

The ‘security’ advice of a Signals officer that in our travels we should keep our bowels open and our mouths shut seemed not to have been heard by the populace en route for our port of disembarkation. The behaviour of the troops on board ship was bad. They shouted, shoved, swore and stole to their black hearts’ content. I lost about a dozen items of kit, and was able to replace most of it from the odds left about on the disembarkation date by chaps who had first pinched for the fine fun of it. I cannot include my razor in this lot. That was removed from the ledge I had placed it on, as I turned to get a towel to wipe it.

A letter to Signalman Barker tries to get through.

Chris Barker, 29, was born and grew up in Holloway, north London. He left school at 14 to join the Post Office, working initially as a messenger boy and then a counter clerk, becoming an active trade union member. His training as a teleprinter operator, a ‘reserved’ occupation, kept him out of the war until the end of 1942, and after army training in Yorkshire he enlisted as a keyboard operator with Middle East Command. After a long sea voyage via the Cape, he arrived in Cairo in May 1943.

Four months later, serving with the Royal Corps of Signals in Tobruk, on the Libyan coast, he was looking after communications for the RAF in the southern Mediterranean. With time on his hands, he began writing to friends he missed back home.

His letter to Bessie Moore and her boyfriend Nick was just one amongst many (Chris had worked with Bessie at the Post Office). She was now working at the Foreign Office, where her training in Morse code was employed to translate intercepted German radio messages. She was 30 when their correspondence began. She remained in London throughout the war.

Our disembarkation arrangements were perfect and after a not uncomfortable rail journey we were brought to the above address. I had expected to be parked on a pile of sand, and told it was ‘home’, but the Depot is a very pleasant place, surrounded by pine and eucalyptus trees. The water comes from a tap, and one sits down to meals. There is a Church Hut, quiet and fly-free, an Army Educational Corps hut, where are excellent books, a good NAAFI and a Cinema. A little further away is a tent, run by voluntary labour, where refreshments are served (not thrown at one) at reasonable prices, and there is a lounge, library, writing room, games-room, and Open Air Theatre, where a free film show takes place weekly, also a Concert. There is a lecture one night, bridge and whist another, and a more ‘highbrow’ musical evening another night.

Directly I arrived, my brother applied for my posting to his units, and after two months of base life I started on the wearying but interesting journey to him. I met him after a separation of 26 months, and had a fine time talking of home and all that had happened there – the rows and the rejoicing – and in the evening walked through the sandy vineyard to swim in the blue waters.

Since leaving the [Post Office] Counter School and joining the Army, a period of twelve years, I had little real rest. I was either actually on the counter or doing some Union work. If I did relax, it was not for long and I was conscious of being ‘guilty’. Since joining (or being joined to) H.M. Forces, I have had a great deal of leisure, and I have spent most of it reading and writing.

Since I have decided to make this my last sheet I had better drop a few remarks on the people here. The Egyptians, nominally neutral, are hostile, as are most people without ‘independence’. The Arabs, poor, unhealthy, ignorant, need to be seen to be believed. Metropolitan life turns them into pests, but away from town they are not bad people. They work 12 hours for the shilling; only 25% of them can read and write, 170,000 have only one eye and they die about 40.

Oh, the Pyramids; yes, I have seen them, sat on them, and thought what a gigantic case for Trade Unionism they present. How many unwilling slaves died in the colossal toil involved in erecting these edifices. And how insignificant the erection compared with Nature’s own hills and mountains?

I visited the Cairo Zoo, happily in the company of two young Egyptians who were being educated at the American mission. They made the day a success. The cruelty of having a polar bear (noble creature) in this climate, and the effort to console him with a 10 second cold water dip!

Excuse the writing, and confusion of this effort. But it’s me, alright. I hope you are O.K. Nick, it’s a long way from our Lantern Lecture on Sunny Spain at Kingsway Hall!

All the best Bessie.

Chris

* If a letter was particularly urgent, the folded and sealed papyrus would sometimes be addressed ‘To Antogonus – now’.

** ‘If you’re well, that’s good – all’s well with me.’

* ‘Caesar’s Body Shook’, London Review of Books, 22 September 2011.

* There were probably more; this is what survives. Seneca’s letters were rather longer than the norm, ranging from 149 to 4,134 words, with an average of 955, or some 10 papyrus sheets joined on a roll. Philological scholars with time on their hands have calculated that a sheet of papyrus of approximately 9 x 11 inches contained an average of 87 words, and that a letter rarely exceeded 200 words. Cicero’s letters ran from 22 to 2530 words, with an average of 295.