Robert Harris: Pompeii

Once, a boy passed them, dragging an emaciated goat by a rope halter toward the town. He was the only person they saw. Misenum itself lay hidden from view just beyond the cliff edge. Occasionally its sounds floated up to them—shouts of command from the military school, hammering and sawing from the shipyards.

Attilius, an old straw hat pulled low over his face, worked hardest of all. Even when the others crept off occasionally to sprawl in whatever patches of shade they could find, he continued to swing his ax. The shaft was slippery with his sweat and hard to grip. His palms blistered. His tunic stuck to him like a second skin. But he would not show weakness in front of the men. Even Corax shut up after a while.

The crater they eventually excavated was twice as deep as a man’s height, and broad enough for two of them to work in. And there was a spring there, right enough, but it retreated whenever they came close. They would dig. The rusty soil at the bottom of the hole would turn damp. And then it would bake dry again in the sunlight. They would excavate another layer and the same process would recur.

Only at the tenth hour, when the sun had passed its zenith, did Attilius at last acknowledge defeat. He watched a final stain of water dwindle and evaporate, then flung his ax over the lip of the pit and hauled himself after it. He pulled off his hat and fanned his burning cheeks. Corax sat on a rock and watched him. For the first time Attilius noticed he was bareheaded.

He said, “You’ll boil your brains in this heat.” He uncorked his waterskin and tipped a little into his hand, splashed it onto his face and the back of his neck, then drank. It was hot—as unrefreshing as swallowing blood.

“I was born here. Heat doesn’t bother me. In Campania we call this cool.” Corax hawked and spat. He tilted his broad chin toward the hole. “What do we do with this?”

Attilius glanced at it—an ugly gash in the hillside, great mounds of earth heaped all around it. His monument. His folly. “We’ll leave it as it is,” he said. “Have it covered with planks. When it rains, the spring will rise. You’ll see.”

“When it rains, we won’t need a spring.”

A fair point, Attilius had to concede.

“We could run a pipe from it,” he said thoughtfully. He was a romantic when it came to water. In his imagination, a whole pastoral idyll suddenly began to take shape. “We could irrigate this entire hillside. There could be lemon groves up here. Olives. It could be terraced. Vines—”

“Vines!” Corax shook his head. “So now we’re farmers! Listen to me, young expert from Rome. Let me tell you something. The Aqua Augusta hasn’t failed in more than a century. And she isn’t going to fail now. Not even with you in charge.”

“We hope.” The engineer finished the last of his water. He could feel himself blushing scarlet with humiliation, but the heat hid his shame. He planted his straw hat firmly on his head and pulled down the brim to protect his face. “All right, Corax, get the men together. We’ve done here for the day.”

He collected his tools and set off without waiting for the others. They could find their own way back.

He had to watch where he put his feet. Each step sent a scattering of lizards rustling away into the dry undergrowth. It’s more Africa than Italy, he thought, and when he reached the coastal path, Misenum appeared beneath him, shimmering in the haze of heat like an oasis town, pulsing—or so it seemed to him—in time with the cicadas.

The headquarters of the western imperial fleet was a triumph of man over nature, for by rights no town should exist here. There was no river to support her, few wells or springs. Yet the Divine Augustus had decreed that the empire needed a port from which to control the Mediterranean, and here she was, the embodiment of Roman power: the glittering silver disks of her inner and outer harbors, the golden beaks and fantail sterns of fifty warships glinting in the late-afternoon sun, the dusty brown parade ground of the military school, the red-tiled roofs and the whitewashed walls of the civilian town rising above the spiky forest of masts in the shipyard.

Ten thousand sailors and another ten thousand citizens were crammed into a narrow strip of land with no fresh water to speak of. Only the aqueduct had made Misenum possible.

He thought again of the curious motion of the vapor, and the way the spring had seemed to run back into the rock. A strange country, this. He looked ruefully at his blistered hands.

“A fool’s errand.”

He shook his head, blinking his eyes to clear them of sweat, and resumed his weary trudge down to the town.

HORA UNDECIMA

[17:42 hours]

A question of practical importance to forecasting is how much time elapses between an injection of new magma and an ensuing eruption. In many volcanoes, this time interval may be measured in weeks or months,

but in others it seems to be much shorter, possibly days or hours.

— VOLCANOLOGY (SECOND EDITION)

At the Villa Hortensia, the great coastal residence on the northern outskirts of Misenum, they were preparing to put a slave to death. They were going to feed him to the eels. It was not an unknown practice in that part of Italy, where so many of the huge houses around the Bay of Neapolis had their own elaborate fish farms. The new owner of the Villa Hortensia, the millionaire Numerius Popidius Ampliatus, had first heard the story as a boy—of how the Augustan aristocrat Vedius Pollio would hurl clumsy servants into his eel pond as a punishment for breaking dishes—and he would often refer to it admiringly as the perfect illustration of what it was to have power. Power, and imagination, and wit, and a certain style .

So when, many years later, Ampliatus, too, came to possess a fishery—just a few miles down the coast from Vedius Pollio’s old place at Pausilypon—and when one of his slaves also destroyed something of rare value, the precedent naturally came back into his mind. Ampliatus had been born a slave himself; this was how he thought an aristocrat ought to behave.

The poor fellow was duly stripped to his loincloth, had his hands tied behind his back, and was marched down to the edge of the sea. A knife was run down both of his calves, to draw an attractive amount of blood, and he was also doused with vinegar, which was said to drive the eels mad.

It was late afternoon, very hot.

The eels had their own large pen, built well away from the other fishponds to keep them segregated, reached by a narrow concrete gangway extending out into the bay. These eels were morays, notorious for their aggression, their bodies as long as a man’s and as wide as a human trunk, with flat heads, wide snouts, and razor teeth. The villa’s fishery was a hundred fifty years old and nobody knew how many lurked in the labyrinth of tunnels and in the shady areas built into the bottom of the pond. Scores, certainly; probably hundreds. The more ancient eels were monsters and several wore jewelry. One, which had a gold earring fitted to its pectoral fin, was said to have been a favorite of the Emperor Nero.

The morays were a particular terror to this slave because—Ampliatus savored the irony—it had long been his responsibility to feed them, and he was shouting and struggling even before he was forced onto the gangway. He had seen the eels in action every morning when he threw in their meal of fish heads and chicken entrails—the way the surface of the water flickered, then roiled as they sensed the arrival of the blood, and the way they came darting out of their hiding places to fight over their food, tearing it to pieces.

At the eleventh hour, despite the sweltering heat, Ampliatus himself promenaded down from the villa to watch, attended by his teenaged son, Celsinus, together with his household steward, Scutarius, a few of his business clients (who had followed him from Pompeii and had been hanging around since dawn in the hope of dinner), and a crowd of about a hundred of his other male slaves who he had decided would profit by witnessing the spectacle. His wife and daughter he had ordered to remain indoors: this was not a sight for women. A large chair was set up for him, with smaller ones for his guests. He did not even know the errant slave’s name. He had come as part of a job lot with the fishponds when Ampliatus had bought the villa, for a cool ten million, earlier in the year.