Pages and pages of the Natural History were dedicated to expounding the dangers and ubiquity of seafood. In the fourth century BC, a poet from Sicily named Archestratus had published a collection of exotic recipes for shellfish in his Greek poem, ‘On the Life of Luxury’. Shellfish had been spreading their poison across the Greek world and into Rome for centuries. ‘It wasn’t enough,’ Pliny the Elder despaired, ‘that the gifts of the sea were being pushed down our throats before they were worn on the hands, ears, head, and all over the body by men as much as by women.’40 The sea creatures corrupted with their treasures as much as with their taste: oysters yielded their glistening pearls to grasping fishermen, while one species of predatory murex mollusc secreted a substance, which was used by the wealthy to dye their garments ‘Tyrian’ purple.
Pliny the Elder related that Alexander the Great and his men had encountered oysters a foot long in the seas off India. Although the Romans had not yet been so fortunate, they knew of oysters large enough to merit the name ‘Three Bites’.41 The encyclopaedist had studied oysters closely and concluded that their growth depended not only upon the moon, which controlled the tides, but also upon the progress of the seasons. The oyster as he describes it in his encyclopaedia opens its shell at the beginning of summer, as the heat of the first sun penetrates the water. As it does so, it is as though it is ‘yawning’, an image that is all the more striking for the fact that the oyster’s head is ‘indistinguishable’ and lacks eyes.42 In the heat, the oyster begins to swell with a milk-like juice – a sort of dew that it absorbs and incubates to produce pearls. (In actual fact, oysters can be hermaphroditic and switch between the two genders, developing pearls when layers of nacre build up around foreign bodies trapped in their shells.)
Oysters in deeper waters are small, wrote Pliny the Elder, because it is dark and ‘in their sadness they look less for food’.43 Their depression was presumably only deepened by the fact that they were also the first to be searched for fine pearls (the finest were often found far beneath the surface). Quite the best thing about pearls is that no two are the same: in Latin, a pearl is sometimes called simply unio, ‘uniqueness’, whence ‘onion’, a vegetable of iridescent layers. A pearl, said Pliny the Elder, may take on the cloudiness of morning sky or be aborted or ‘miscarried’ by a storm; the oyster is so alarmed by thunder that it will slam its shell shut before the pearl is fully formed. If the weather is sunny, the pearl may develop a reddish hue, losing its whiteness ‘like the human body’ suffering sunburn.44 (He similarly believed that Ethiopians had been scorched by their proximity to the sun, while inhabitants of icy climates had white skin and fair hair.45) On this logic, Pliny the Elder attributed reddish pearls to sunny Spain, tawny pearls to Illyricum, in the Balkans, and black pearls and oyster shells to stormy Circeo in Italy.46
Pliny the Elder could not take credit for being the first man to speak of the oyster and pearl’s susceptibility. Over a century before him, Sergius Orata, the first Italian to cultivate oyster farms at decadent Baiae in the Bay of Naples, had taken to transporting oysters from Brundisium (Brindisi) in Italy’s heel and depositing them in the Lucrine Lake in Campania.47 Once the oysters, ordinarily farmed on ropes, had absorbed the lake’s delicious waters, it did not matter where they started life. Their high price depended on people’s belief in their ability to absorb the richness of their surroundings.
Pliny the Elder had not liked the idea of Romans risking their lives to retrieve oysters from the depths when they might have grown all they needed in simple kitchen gardens. If he quaffed the occasional one it was not because he aspired to eat ‘the palm of our tables’.48 Provided an oyster was good – sealed, not too slimy, not too meaty, more striking for its thickness than diameter, caught neither in mud nor on sand but on a hard surface like a rock – he believed that the odd one might benefit his health. Oysters, he said, can settle the stomach and soften the bowels, restore the appetite and plump the skin, purge ulcers from the bladder, chase chilblains from the toes, and reduce the size of swollen glands.49 The oyster was therefore a paradox. Luxurious on the one hand and healing on the other, it defied the kind of clear moral classification that Pliny the Elder liked to apply to the things around him. While the oyster was multifarious enough to earn his interest, Pliny the Elder was on balance reproachful: ‘There is no greater cause for the destruction of morals and rise of luxury than shellfish.’50 Given his friends’ manners, his nephew Pliny was inclined to agree.
In his abstemiousness and censoriousness towards shellfish, Pliny proved himself to be very much his uncle’s son. When his friend and fellow equestrian Septicius Clarus failed to show at his snow-and-spelt dinner, he assumed it had been because he had gone after the oysters and sea urchins on offer elsewhere. It was not like him to be tempted away by oysters: Pliny counted no one in his acquaintance ‘truer or more straightforward, accomplished or trustworthy’.51 On close enough terms with Pliny to have him assist in promoting his nephew to the senate, Septicius must have taken his teasing letter in good grace. Sue him for every morsel of food he had missed? He must be joking. The few surviving details of Septicius’ life shed light on his respectability. He was named as the dedicatee of Pliny’s collected letters as well as the most important biographical work of the age, Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars.
Some years after Pliny’s death, Septicius Clarus and Suetonius travelled to Britain. Following their landings under Claudius, the Romans had suppressed the revolt of Boudicca in AD 60 or 61 and worked their way steadily northwards to conquer much of England and Wales. In AD 122, Trajan’s successor, Hadrian, launched an expedition to settle pockets of unrest and begin work on the wall that would eventually stretch from the east coast to the west and mark the northernmost frontier of the Roman empire. Septicius was praetorian prefect, Suetonius private secretary to the emperor. Both were powerful roles into which they appear to have relaxed only too easily. In the course of the British campaign they were dismissed from their posts, both allegedly on grounds of overfamiliarity with Hadrian’s wife.52 It was a late and fallible source that cited the reason for their dismissal, but it may just be that Septicius finally got his comeuppance for the shameless social climbing Pliny had scolded him for.
As for Suetonius, Pliny would have been surprised he had it in him. Before becoming a prolific author, Suetonius had cut a shy and self-doubting figure, at least when Pliny was around. He was less than ten years younger than Pliny but emerges almost boy-like from the Letters.53 Reticence was his defining characteristic. Pliny once helped him to secure a small estate and, as a first step towards public office, a military tribunate, or junior post, which Suetonius passed on to a relative.54 While Septicius Clarus ‘often urged’ Pliny to publish his letters, Pliny practically implored Suetonius to publish work of his own. Prior to his Lives, Suetonius completed a biographical compendium of famous men, including Pliny the Elder, which Pliny must have been eager to see released into the world.55 Within their circle of mutual encouragement, Pliny confessed to being ‘hesitant about publishing’, but Suetonius outdid ‘even’ him in his ‘dallying and delaying’.56
By the time Suetonius decided to try his hand at law, he was suffering from nightmares. He must have been in his late twenties when he wrote to Pliny seeking an adjournment to a trial on the basis of having had bad dreams. A more bullish lawyer might have told him to pull himself together, but Pliny was sympathetic. A perfectionist who was ‘never so prepared as to not rejoice at a delay’, Pliny had also experienced dreams in the past which appeared to augur ill for his cases.57 Around the time he embarked upon his legal career Pliny married for the first time. Nothing is known of his first wife, but he recalled in a letter how he was about to proclaim against ‘very powerful citizens and even friends of the emperor’ when he dreamed that his mother-in-law got down on her knees and