Pliny the Elder

Based on Wikipedia: Pliny the Elder

On August 25th in the year 79, a Roman admiral watched a strange cloud rise from across the Bay of Naples. It looked like an umbrella pine tree—a tall trunk of smoke with branches spreading at the top. Most people would have fled. This man ordered his ships to sail toward it.

He died that day, suffocated by volcanic gases while trying to rescue people from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. But the remarkable thing about Pliny the Elder isn't how he died. It's how he lived.

The Man Who Tried to Know Everything

Pliny produced seven complete works spanning 102 volumes during his lifetime. Only one survives: the Naturalis Historia, or Natural History—a thirty-seven-volume encyclopedia that attempted to catalog all human knowledge about the natural world. It covered astronomy, geography, anthropology, zoology, botany, medicine, art history, and dozens of other subjects. For centuries after his death, it served as the model for what an encyclopedia should be.

The rest of his works are gone. Twenty volumes on the wars in Germania, used as source material by Tacitus, Plutarch, and Suetonius. Thirty-one volumes of contemporary history. A cavalry manual. A biography of his old military commander. Grammar textbooks written during Nero's reign, when anything remotely political could get you killed.

All lost. But we know they existed because other ancient writers quoted them, and because Pliny's nephew—Pliny the Younger—left behind letters describing his uncle's extraordinary work habits.

A Day in the Life of a Workaholic

Before dawn, Pliny would visit the Emperor Vespasian, who also kept nocturnal hours. Then he would attend to his official duties as a provincial governor. After lunch—which he kept light and simple, in the manner of Roman ancestors—he would lie in the sun while a slave read aloud to him. He took notes constantly. Then came a cold bath, a snack, and more reading. Dinner was accompanied by more reading and note-taking.

Even travel time wasn't wasted. When Pliny went anywhere by sedan chair, a secretary walked alongside, ready to take dictation. In winter, the secretary wore gloves to keep his hands warm enough to write.

His nephew once remarked that Pliny considered any time not spent studying to be time lost. The elder Pliny apparently agreed, once gently scolding his nephew for walking somewhere instead of being carried—walking, after all, meant you couldn't read.

From Como to the Legions

Pliny was born around 23 or 24 in Como, a city at the foot of the Alps that Julius Caesar had founded as a colony less than a century earlier. The region was multicultural—Caesar had settled it with immigrants from other provinces, including five hundred aristocratic Greeks. The Plinii family was prosperous but not ancient; no earlier records of the family name exist.

His father sent him to Rome to study law. At twenty-three, following the expected path for young men of the equestrian class—the Roman upper-middle class, below senators but above common citizens—he joined the army as a junior officer.

The military shaped him. Pliny served in Germania for over a decade, participating in campaigns against tribes the Romans had never fully conquered. He built canals, commanded infantry cohorts, and eventually rose to lead a cavalry wing of nearly five hundred men. He served under Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, who was himself a writer, and formed lasting friendships with other literary-minded officers.

One night in Germania, he dreamed that the ghost of Drusus Nero—a famous Roman general who had died campaigning in the region decades earlier—begged him to preserve his memory from oblivion. Pliny took dreams seriously. He began working on his history of Rome's German wars.

Surviving Nero

When Pliny left the army, Nero was emperor. This was a problem.

Nero began his reign reasonably enough but grew increasingly erratic and dangerous. By the end, he was executing senators on whims, forcing aristocrats to commit suicide, and terrorizing anyone who attracted his attention. Pliny, who had made influential friends during his military service, chose to become invisible.

For over a decade, he stayed in Rome, practiced law quietly, and wrote about the safest possible subjects: grammar and rhetoric. His textbook Studiosus ("The Student") trained orators from childhood. His eight-volume work on questionable Latin phrases kept him busy without giving anyone reason to denounce him.

His nephew later wrote that Pliny composed these works "in the last years of Nero's reign, when every kind of literary pursuit which was in the least independent or elevated had been rendered dangerous by servitude."

Nero committed suicide in 68. The terror was over.

The Trusted Administrator

After a year of civil war, Vespasian—a general from the same equestrian class as Pliny—emerged as emperor. He needed capable administrators he could trust, and Pliny's name apparently came recommended, possibly by Vespasian's son Titus.

Pliny was put to work immediately and kept continuously employed in "the most distinguished procuratorships," according to the historian Suetonius. A procurator was typically a governor of an imperial province—a position of enormous responsibility. Pliny served in southern France, Africa, Spain, and Belgium, one posting after another.

Yet he never stopped researching and writing. Somehow, while governing provinces and maintaining a pre-dawn schedule of imperial audiences, he completed the Natural History.

What the Natural History Contains

The Natural History is less a book than an attempt to contain the universe in words. It opens with cosmology—the nature of the world, the sun, moon, and stars. Then geography: every known country, city, mountain, river, and sea. Then anthropology: the varieties of human beings and their customs.

Zoology fills several volumes: land animals, sea creatures, birds, insects. Botany takes up even more space: cultivated plants, wild plants, their uses in medicine and agriculture and industry. There are sections on precious metals and gemstones, on painting and sculpture, on the history of art.

Pliny claims to have consulted two thousand books by one hundred authors. Modern scholars have identified passages drawn from nearly five hundred sources. He copied extensively, sometimes accurately, sometimes garbling his sources. The work contains myths alongside facts, travelers' tall tales mixed with careful observation.

This wasn't intellectual carelessness. Pliny was attempting something unprecedented: to gather all human knowledge about nature into a single work. He knew some of his sources were unreliable. But he included them anyway, often noting his skepticism, because his goal was completeness. Better to record a dubious claim than to lose it entirely.

The Bachelor Scholar

Pliny never married and had no children. This was unusual for a Roman man of his class, who would typically be expected to produce heirs. Instead, he adopted his nephew—Pliny the Younger, son of his sister Plinia—making him his heir after death.

For at least some time, the elder Pliny lived with his sister and nephew in a villa at Misenum, near Naples. It was a household organized around his work. Slaves read to him constantly. Secretaries stood ready to take notes. His nephew described him as "a very ready sleeper, sometimes dropping off in the middle of his studies and then waking up again."

In 79, Pliny held the position of commander of the Roman fleet at Misenum—the western Mediterranean squadron. He was fifty-five or fifty-six years old. His encyclopedic work was complete. He had survived Nero, served Vespasian loyally, and achieved a kind of intellectual immortality.

Then Vesuvius erupted.

The Last Day

The account comes from Pliny the Younger, who was seventeen at the time and stayed behind in Misenum while his uncle sailed toward the volcano. Years later, the historian Tacitus asked him what happened. The nephew's two letters describing the disaster are the most detailed eyewitness account of a volcanic eruption from the ancient world.

When Pliny first saw the cloud—that distinctive umbrella pine shape—his reaction was curiosity. He ordered a light vessel prepared so he could go investigate. But before he could leave, a message arrived from a friend named Rectina, whose villa lay at the foot of Vesuvius. She was trapped. The only escape was by sea.

Pliny immediately changed plans. Instead of a small boat for scientific observation, he ordered the full warships launched. He sailed directly into danger, dictating observations as he went, while ash fell on the deck and pumice stones rained down. When the helmsman suggested turning back, Pliny reportedly said: "Fortune favors the brave. Head for Pomponianus."

Pomponianus was another friend, trapped at Stabiae on the southern end of the bay. Pliny found him loading a ship, waiting for the wind to change so he could escape. The wind that had carried Pliny to Stabiae was blowing directly toward Vesuvius—no one could sail away from shore.

To calm his terrified friends, Pliny bathed, dined, and went to sleep. He slept soundly—loudly, even, his snoring audible to servants waiting outside his door. But during the night, the courtyard began filling with ash and pumice. They woke him. The building was shaking. They debated whether to stay indoors or flee outside.

They chose outside, tying pillows over their heads with cloth strips to protect against falling stones. By now it was technically morning, but the ash cloud had blotted out the sun. They made their way to the shore by torchlight, hoping the wind had shifted.

It hadn't. The sea was still too rough and the wind still wrong. Pliny asked for water, drank it, then lay down on a sailcloth spread on the ground. Twice, flames and sulfurous gases drove the party to flee. Twice, Pliny got up with help from two slaves. The third time, he didn't get up.

When daylight finally returned two days later, his body was found intact, looking more asleep than dead. The gases had killed him. His nephew speculated that his uncle's weak lungs—he had always been prone to respiratory problems—made him especially vulnerable.

The Legacy of Comprehensive Curiosity

Pliny's death became famous partly because of how he died—a naturalist killed while investigating the greatest natural phenomenon of his age—and partly because his nephew made it famous. The two letters to Tacitus ensured that Vesuvius would forever be associated with the Plinii.

Volcanologists still call large explosive eruptions "Plinian eruptions" in his honor.

But the deeper legacy is the Natural History. For over a thousand years, it remained the standard reference work on the natural world. Medieval scholars copied it, quoted it, argued with it. Renaissance artists consulted its descriptions of ancient paintings and sculptures. Early modern scientists used it as a starting point, even when they disagreed with its conclusions.

The work reflects a particular kind of ambition: the belief that one person could know, or at least survey, everything worth knowing about the physical world. Pliny didn't think he'd achieved this. He wrote in his preface that the Natural History was a "path"—a road others could follow and improve upon. He dedicated it to the Emperor Titus with characteristic self-deprecation, calling it a work of "moderate talent."

Twenty thousand facts. Thirty-seven volumes. One man's attempt to preserve everything humanity knew about nature before it could be forgotten.

The Immigrant's Grandson

There's something fitting about Pliny's connection to the Substack article on Pompeii's genetic diversity. Como, where Pliny was born, was itself a city of immigrants—founded by Caesar, populated by settlers from across the Mediterranean, including those five hundred aristocratic Greeks.

The Roman Empire was built on movement: soldiers transferred between provinces, administrators rotating through postings, merchants and slaves and scholars flowing along roads and shipping lanes. Pliny himself spent years in Germania, governed provinces in France and Spain and Africa, and died in the shadow of Vesuvius while commanding a fleet far from his birthplace.

The people he tried to save that day in Stabiae—we don't know where they came from originally. The genetic evidence from Pompeii suggests they could have been from anywhere in the Mediterranean world. In that sense, Pliny died as he lived: surrounded by the empire's extraordinary diversity, trying to understand and catalog and preserve it all.

He ran out of time. But the encyclopedia survived.