_Pliny the Elder_.--The account that you give me, nephew, of your
behaviour amidst the tenors and perils that accompanied the first
eruption of Vesuvius does not please me much. There was more of vanity
in it than of true magnanimity. Nothing is great that is unnatural and
affected. When the earth was shaking beneath you, when the whole heaven
was darkened with sulphurous clouds, when all Nature seemed falling into
its final destruction, to be reading Livy and making extracts was an
absurd affectation. To meet danger with courage is manly, but to be
insensible of it is brutal stupidity; and to pretend insensibility where
it cannot be supposed is ridiculous falseness. When you afterwards
refused to leave your aged mother and save yourself without her, you
indeed acted nobly. It was also becoming a Roman to keep up her spirits
amidst all the horrors of that tremendous scene by showing yourself
undismayed; but the real merit and glory of this part of your behaviour
is sunk by the other, which gives an air of ostentation and vanity to the
whole.
_Pliny the Younger_.--That vulgar minds should consider my attention to
my studies in such a conjuncture as unnatural and affected, I should not
much wonder; but that you would blame it as such I did not apprehend--you,
whom no business could separate from the muses; you, who approached
nearer to the fiery storm, and died by the suffocating heat of the
vapour.
_Pliny the Elder_.--I died in doing my duty. Let me recall to your
remembrance all the particulars, and then you shall judge yourself on the
difference of your behaviour and mine. I was the Prefect of the Roman
fleet, which then lay at Misenum. On the first account I received of the
very unusual cloud that appeared in the air I ordered a vessel to carry
me out to some distance from the shore that I might the better observe
the phenomenon, and endeavour to discover its nature and cause. This I
did as a philosopher, and it was a curiosity proper and natural to an
inquisitive mind. I offered to take you with me, and surely you should
have gone; for Livy might have been read at any other time, and such
spectacles are not frequent. When I came out from my house, I found all
the inhabitants of Misenum flying to the sea. That I might assist them,
and all others who dwelt on the coast, I immediately commanded the whole
fleet to put out, and sailed with it all round the Bay of Naples,
steering particularly to those parts of the shore where the danger was
greatest, and from whence the affrighted people were endeavouring to
escape with the most trepidation. Thus I happily preserved some
thousands of lives, noting at the same time, with an unshaken composure
and freedom of mind, the several phenomena of the eruption. Towards
night, as we approached to the foot of Mount Vesuvius, our galleys were
covered with ashes, the showers of which grew continually hotter and
hotter; then pumice stones and burnt and broken pyrites began to fall on
our heads, and we were stopped by the obstacles which the ruins of the
volcano had suddenly formed, by falling into the sea and almost filling
it up, on that part of the coast. I then commanded my pilot to steer to
the villa of my friend Pomponianus, which, you know, was situated in the
inmost recess of the bay. The wind was very favourable to carry me
thither, but would not allow him to put off from the shore, as he was
desirous to have done. We were, therefore, constrained to pass the night
in his house. The family watched, and I slept till the heaps of pumice
stones, which incessantly fell from the clouds that had by this time been
impelled to that side of the bay, rose so high in the area of the
apartment I lay in, that if I had stayed any longer I could not have got
out; and the earthquakes were so violent as to threaten every moment the
fall of the house. We, therefore, thought it more safe to go into the
open air, guarding our heads as well as we were able with pillows tied
upon them. The wind continuing contrary, and the sea very rough, we all
remained on the shore, till the descent of a sulphurous and fiery vapour
suddenly oppressed my weak lungs and put an end to my life. In all this
I hope that I acted as the duty of my station required, and with true
magnanimity. But on this occasion, and in many other parts of your
conduct, I must say, my dear nephew, there was a mixture of vanity
blended with your virtue which impaired and disgraced it. Without that
you would have been one of the worthiest men whom Rome has over produced,
for none excelled you in sincere integrity of heart and greatness of
sentiments. Why would you lose the substance of glory by seeking the
shadow? Your eloquence had, I think, the same fault as your manners; it
was generally too affected. You professed to make Cicero your guide and
pattern; but when one reads his Panegyric upon Julius Caesar, in his
Oration for Marcellus, and yours upon Trajan, the first seems the genuine
language of truth and Nature, raised and dignified with all the majesty
of the most sublime oratory; the latter appears the harangue of a florid
rhetorician, more desirous to shine and to set off his own wit than to
extol the great man whose virtues he was praising.
_Pliny the Younger_.--I will not question your judgment either of my life
or my writings; they might both have been better if I had not been too
solicitous to render them perfect. It is, perhaps, some excuse for the
affectation of my style that it was the fashion of the age in which I
wrote. Even the eloquence of Tacitus, however nervous and sublime, was
not unaffected. Mine, indeed, was more diffuse, and the ornaments of it
were more tawdry; but his laboured conciseness, the constant glow of his
diction, and pointed brilliancy of his sentences, were no less unnatural.
One principal cause of this I suppose to have been that, as we despaired
of excelling the two great masters of oratory, Cicero and Livy, in their
own manner, we took up another, which to many appeared more shining, and
gave our compositions a more original air; but it is mortifying to me to
say much on this subject. Permit me, therefore, to resume the
contemplation of that on which our conversation turned before. What a
direful calamity was the eruption of Vesuvius, which you have been
describing? Don't you remember the beauty of that fine coast, and of the
mountain itself, before it was torn with the violence of those internal
fires, that forced their way through its surface. The foot of it was
covered with cornfields and rich meadows, interspersed with splendid
villas and magnificent towns; the sides of it were clothed with the best
vines in Italy. How quick, how unexpected, how terrible was the change!
All was at once overwhelmed with ashes, cinders, broken rocks, and fiery
torrents, presenting to the eye the most dismal scene of horror and
desolation!
_Pliny the Elder_.--You paint it very truly. But has it never occurred
to your philosophical mind that this change is a striking emblem of that
which must happen, by the natural course of things, to every rich,
luxurious state? While the inhabitants of it are sunk in
voluptuousness--while all is smiling around them, and they imagine that
no evil, no danger is nigh--the latent seeds of destruction are
fermenting within; till, breaking out on a sudden, they lay waste all
their opulence, all their boasted delights, and leave them a sad monument
of the fatal effects of internal tempests and convulsions.