Robert Harris - Pompeii

The Minerva pushed on steadily as the heat of the morning settled over the bay. For two hours the oarsmen kept up the same remorseless pace. Clouds of steam curled from the terraces of the open-air baths in Baiae. In the hills above Puteoli, the fires of the sulfur mines burned pale green.

The engineer sat apart, his hands clasped around his knees, his hat pulled low to shield his eyes, watching the coast slide by, searching the landscape for some clue as to what had happened on the Augusta.

Everything about this part of Italy was strange, he thought. Even the rust-red soil around Puteoli possessed some quality of magic, so that when it was mixed with lime and flung into the sea it turned to rock. This puteolanum, as they called it, in honor of its birthplace, was the discovery that had transformed Rome. And it had also given his family their profession, for what had once needed laborious construction in stone and brick could now be thrown up overnight. With shuttering and cement Agrippa had sunk the great wharves of Misenum, and had irrigated the empire with aqueducts—the Augusta here in Campania, the Julia and the Virgo in Rome, the Nemausus in southern Gaul. The world had been remade.

But nowhere had this hydraulic cement been used to greater effect than in the land where it was discovered. Piers and jetties, terraces and embankments, breakwaters and fish farms had transformed the Bay of Neapolis. Whole villas seemed to thrust themselves up from the waves and to float offshore. What had once been the realm of the super-rich—Caesar, Crassus, Pompey—had been flooded by a new class of millionaires, men like Ampliatus. Attilius wondered how many of the owners, relaxed and torpid as this sweltering August stretched and yawned and settled itself into its fourth week, would be aware by now of the failure of the aqueduct. Not many, he would guess. Water was something that was carried in by slaves, or which appeared miraculously from the nozzle of one of Sergius Orata’s shower-baths. But they would know soon enough. They would know once they had to start drinking their swimming pools.

The farther east they rowed, the more Vesuvius dominated the bay. Her lower slopes were a mosaic of cultivated fields and villas, but from her halfway point rose dark green, virgin forest. A few wisps of cloud hung motionless around her tapering peak. Torquatus declared that the hunting up there was excellent—boar, deer, hare. He had been out many times with his dogs and net, and also with his bow. But one had to look out for the wolves. In winter, the top was snowcapped.

Squatting next to Attilius he took off his helmet and wiped his forehead. “Hard to imagine,” he said, “snow in this heat.”

“And is she easy to climb?”

“Not too hard. Easier than she looks. The top’s fairly flat when you get up there. Spartacus made it the camp for his rebel army. Some natural fortress that must have been. No wonder the scum were able to hold off the legions for so long. When the skies are clear you can see for fifty miles.”

They had passed the city of Neapolis and were parallel with a smaller town that Torquatus said was Herculaneum, although the coast was such a continuous ribbon of development—ocher walls and red roofs, occasionally pierced by the dark green spear-thrusts of cypresses—that it was not always possible to tell where one town ended and another began. Herculaneum looked stately and well pleased with herself at the foot of the luxuriant mountain, her windows facing out to sea. Brightly colored pleasure craft, some shaped like sea creatures, bobbed in the shallows. There were parasols on the beaches, people casting fishing lines from the jetties. Music, and the shouts of children playing ball, wafted across the placid water.

“Now, that’s the greatest villa on the bay,” said Torquatus. He nodded toward an immense colonnaded property that sprawled along the shoreline and rose in terraces above the sea. “That’s the Villa Calpurnia. I had the honor to take the new emperor there last month, on a visit to the former consul, Pedius Cascus.”

“Cascus?” Attilius pictured the lizard-like senator from the previous evening, swaddled in his purple-striped toga. “I had no idea he was so rich.”

“Inherited through his wife, Rectina. She had some connection with the Piso clan. The admiral comes here often, to use the library. Do you see that group of figures, reading in the shade beside the pool? They are philosophers.” Torquatus found this very funny. “Some men breed birds as a pastime, others have dogs. The senator keeps philosophers!”

“And what species are these philosophers?”

“Followers of Epicurus. According to Cascus, they hold that man is mortal, the gods are indifferent to his fate, and therefore the only thing to do in life is enjoy oneself.”

“I could have told him that for nothing.”

Torquatus laughed again, then put on his helmet and tightened the chin strap. “Not long to Pompeii now, engineer. Another half hour should do it.”

He walked back toward the stern.

Attilius shielded his eyes and contemplated the villa. He had never had much use for philosophy. Why one human being should inherit such a palace, and another be torn apart by eels, and a third break his back in the stifling darkness rowing a liburnian—a man could go mad trying to reason why the world was so arranged. Why had he had to watch his wife die in front of him when she was barely older than a girl? Show him the philosophers who could answer that and he would start to see the point of them.

She had always wanted to come on holiday to the Bay of Neapolis, and he had always put her off, saying he was too busy. And now it was too late. Grief at what he had lost and regret at what he had failed to do, his twin assailants, caught him unawares again, and hollowed him, as they always did. He felt a physical emptiness in the pit of his stomach. Looking at the coast he remembered the letter a friend had shown him on the day of Sabina’s funeral. The jurist Servius Sulpicus, more than a century earlier, had been sailing back from Asia to Rome, lost in grief, when he found himself contemplating the Mediterranean shore. Afterward he described his feelings to Cicero, who had also just lost his daughter: “There behind me was Aegina, in front of me Megara, to the right Piraeus, to the left Corinth; once flourishing towns, now lying low in ruins before one’s eyes, and I began to think to myself: ‘How can we complain if one of us dies or is killed, ephemeral creatures as we are, when the corpses of so many towns lie abandoned in a single spot? Check yourself, Servius, and remember that you were born a mortal man. Can you be so greatly moved by the loss of one poor little woman’s frail spirit?’ ”

To which, for Attilius, the answer still remained, more than two years later: yes.

He let the warmth soak his body and face for a while, and despite himself he must have floated off to sleep, for when he next opened his eyes the town had gone, and there was yet another huge villa slumbering beneath the shade of its giant umbrella pines, with slaves watering the lawn and scooping leaves from the surface of the swimming pool. He shook his head to clear his mind, and reached for the leather sack in which he carried what he needed—Pliny’s letter to the aediles of Pompeii, a small bag of gold coins, and the map of the Augusta.

Work was always his consolation. He unrolled the plan, resting it against his knees, and felt an immediate stir of anxiety. The proportions of the sketch, he realized, were not at all accurate. It failed to convey the immensity of Vesuvius, which still they had not passed, and which must surely, now he looked at it, be seven or eight miles across. What had seemed a mere thumb’s-width on the map was in reality half a morning’s dusty trek in the boiling heat of the sun. He reproached himself for his naÏveté—boasting to a client, in the comfort of his library, of what could be done, without first checking the actual lie of the land. The rookie’s classic error.