A Cloud Like a Pine Tree — Titus: A Cloud Like a Pine Tree

The galleys push off from the shore. Let us freeze this image, because someone is watching it. In a house at Misenum a seventeen-year-old stays behind. His uncle had invited him along. The boy preferred to stay with the work his uncle himself had set him (Pliny, Letters 6.16).

A quarter of a century later this boy, Pliny the Younger, is a senator and a former consul. A friend asks him for an exact account of those days. Pliny writes two letters. They are the only eyewitness account that survives. In them he notes that he describes what he saw himself or heard right afterward, “when reports are most truthful.” And he adds: a letter is not the same as history (Letters 6.16, our translation).

The friend is called Tacitus. On the first page of his “Histories” he announces the years in which “on the most fertile coast of Campania, cities were swallowed up or buried” (Histories 1.2, our translation). That part of his work is lost. What remains are the letters of the boy from Misenum.

That summer Rome has a new emperor. Since June, Titus, son of Vespasian and conqueror of Jerusalem, has been in power. He is thirty-nine. The admiral now sailing toward the cloud dedicated his greatest work to him. And Rome, instead of rejoicing, is afraid of its new emperor.

Why did Rome fear Titus?