Pliny. Daisy Dunn
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after the laurel tree, sacred to the poetry god Apollo, that grew in the courtyard of Lavinia’s father’s palace.16 Laurentum was for Pliny, too, a place of beginnings. He was descended from the Oufentina, a former tribe established in 318 BC and named after the river Oufens which flowed through it.17 If he could not write in a villa built upon the laurel-rich landscapes of the Romans’ ancestors (not to mention his own), then he might as well have given up.
The library of his Moυσεîoν was located in the winter quarters of his villa near some bedrooms and a dining room that was angled in such a way as to retain the sun’s heat, but keep out the sound of all winds ‘except those which bring in the clouds’.18 During the Saturnalia, however, not even these rooms were quiet enough. Leaving his slaves to send their ‘festive cheer’ echoing through the halls, Pliny retired instead to the living room, snug, bedroom with folding doors, and darkened cell which together comprised a sort of Saturnalian suite. It was this wing of his villa – not the D-shaped portico, nor the covered courtyard, nor the dining room with a view through bay windows ‘as if over three seas’, nor the ball court, nor the larger bedrooms, nor the walkway that ‘stretched almost to the size of a public monument’, nor the baths, nor the two towers with the dining rooms, bedroom and granary they contained – that he liked best.19 He had commissioned the suite himself and it was his ‘true love’.
Scrooge had his dark set (sitting room, bedroom, lumber room) and Pliny his private suite. The fact that the Saturnalia fell upon the solstice, when the day is that much shorter than the night, did nothing to dissuade Pliny from shutting himself away.20 Like a diligent schoolboy concealing his prep, he would pretend to friends that he was having a high old time revelling in the celebrations.21 Not to be fooled, Tacitus sent him a book to critique, knowing full well that it would reach him while he was still at his desk. Tacitus assumed, if not the role of guardian to Pliny, then that of idol and teacher, and Pliny was only too happy to play along. He wrote back to Tacitus at once, feigning outrage at being called ‘back to school’ in the middle of the holiday. For all Pliny fantasised about posterity reflecting in wonderment that ‘two men more or less equal in age and repute … should have nurtured each other’s work’, for much of the time he felt that he was indeed little more than Tacitus’ pupil.22 And so he sat at his desk, fretful that he had not produced enough work to send and thereby punish him for so knowingly summoning him back to the classroom in midwinter.
It was tradition during the Saturnalia for slaves to be dismissed from their chores and waited on by their masters. But not in Pliny’s house. The satisfaction of working when no one else was seems to have outweighed any pressure Pliny felt to engage with his staff over the holiday. His decision was perhaps more practical than selfish. He owned at least 500 slaves across his various properties by the time of his death.23 Rather than spoil them once a year he showed them his favour in other ways. Whenever he was looking to employ one, he would make a point of relying on his ‘ears rather than eyes’, believing that reputation was a more accurate measure of a man than the state of his hair and clothes. Every slave who entered his service was then allowed to leave a list of instructions for his belongings to be shared among other slaves in the household after he died.24 Pliny was not always kind, but he never chained his slaves, and throughout his life freed a great many of them. He even paid for one of his freedmen to travel to Egypt and Gaul in order to recuperate when he became ill and started coughing up blood. Such acts of generosity more than compensated for his reluctance to partake in their ‘idle gossip’ over the Saturnalia. The slaves were free to keep their holiday in their way, provided they let Pliny keep it in his: ensconced in rooms so secret, self-contained and solitary, that he felt like he had ‘left the house entirely’.25
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