Pompeii
By Robert Harris
Yet another Harris book. I’m working my way through them now, like the lava of Vesuvius through the streets of the Bay of Neapolis.
This story is a little different, though. It’s not a mere historical account. Indeed, it’s a story told through the eyes of several people in the four days leading up to the destruction wrought.
The main protagonist is Attilius, the aquarius. He is new to the area, the long-time aquarius having gone missing. There is something of a drought taking place, the Aqua Augusta not providing water.
At the same time in a different area, we meet the wealthiest man of the locality, a former slave called Ampliatus. He decides to have a slave put to death, eaten by eels, because his prize fish have been poisoned. The slave protests his innocence, but Ampliatus doesn’t care. His mother begs Ampliatus’ daughter, Corelia, for help, and the latter runs to find the aquarius, to prove the slave’s innocence.
Too late. Attilius arrives after the slave’s horrific death. He angrily snaps at the tyrant: The fish were indeed poisoned, but by the water of the area, which has raised sulphur levels. Those particular fish are delicate.
And this is the beauty from the reader’s point of view. With the benefit of hindsight, we know exactly what was going on. The reason that the Augusta’s flow had been interrupted, the concrete layers somehow moved, was because of movements in the earth’s crust. The raised sulphur levels were precursors of an almighty volcanic eruption. And for those who are too slow on the uptake to register all of this, Harris helpfully starts each chapter with a quotation from scholarly articles on volcanoes.
This is a fun book. We meet the chap who would go down in history as Pliny the Elder, the admiral of the fleet who mobilised the ships (which could’ve seen him executed for treason, as this was the Emperor’s pleasure only) in order to try to save people, and who, instead of fleeing, dictated his observations to his nephew. These became the first study of volcanoes, the nephew was known to history as Pliny the Younger, and the adjective plinian was later used to describe the type of eruptions that Vesuvius emitted.
Anyway, a good book, though I would expect no less from Harris. It documents human emotion, it contains elements of mystery, and works well as a historical novel.
Tags: Robert Harris