He found the little man full of grievance and eager to talk. Indeed, the swelling on the monkey’s paw resembled the one on Verpa’s mentu—, er that is, membrum virile. What sort of poison produced it, he couldn’t say; he was an anatomist, not a pharmacist. But Diaulus had other information to impart, and no reason now to respect the secrets of his former employer, damn him. Twice in the past few nights, both before and after the reading of Verpa’s will, he had observed the Priest of Anubis together with a thin lady who walked with Scortilla’s unmistakable lurching gait.
Mehercule! thought Pliny as he shouldered his way back through the crowded street. Both his concubine and his son had a crack at the old man on the same night, only she, somehow, got to him first! Still, there were pieces to be filled in. He wanted to know what sort of poison this was and where she could have obtained it. And, most perplexing of all, how she administered it. For the first of these questions anyway, he knew precisely where to look. He collared an urchin in the street and gave him directions to Martial’s house with instructions to meet him without delay at the public library. It was a big job he was undertaking; he’d need the poet’s help. Still carrying the monkey and the needle, he turned his steps toward the Forum of Peace.
The Deified Vespasian had built his beautiful forum after the annihilation of Jerusalem and its inhabitants and had dedicated it, appropriately, to Peace. In one angle of it he built a library, Rome’s largest, where thousands of Greek and Latin manuscripts could be consulted by citizens of sufficient status. A librarian directed Pliny to the shelves which groaned under the enormous bulk of his uncle’s crowning scholarly achievement, an encyclopedia of natural history.
“As a favor to the emperor,” Pliny explained to Martial, who arrived soon afterwards, out of breath, “my uncle, who also became my adoptive father after my own father died, bequeathed his original manuscripts to the library. He was one of the most learned men of this or any other age.” Pliny began to hunt along the honeycombed walls from which the knobs of dusty scrolls protruded. Martial watched him dubiously. “You know, he thought any moment wasted which was not devoted to work. He rose before dawn and began work by lamplight. After his mid-day rest, he would work again until dinner time, only to rise from dinner while it was still light and return to his studies.”
The bookish young Pliny had grown up in the household of that extraordinary man. He began to pull out scrolls now, touching them lovingly, blowing the dust off them and heaping them on a long table while he talked over his shoulder to Martial. “Whether he was bathing, sunning himself, dining, or being carried through the streets in his litter, a secretary was always beside him, reciting from some book, while he himself jotted down excerpts. I remember how he chastised me once for wasting precious hours by walking. He was dictating notes on volcanic eruptions, you know, when Vesuvius engulfed him.”
The heap of scrolls on the table grew dangerously high. “And so, I can’t help smiling when people call me studious,” Pliny grunted as he carried another armload to the table, “when, compared to him, I am the laziest of men. At his death he left the world over fifty volumes of history, nearly a dozen on grammar and oratory, one hundred sixty miscellaneous notebooks for which I’ve been offered a small fortune, and of course, the Historia Naturalis, in thirty-seven volumes, comprising twenty thousand facts gathered from two thousand books by one hundred forty-six Roman and three hundred twenty-seven foreign authors!”
Martial looked on, bemused, and felt that he was, at last, beginning to understand this man. How might it crush a boy’s soul to have been raised in the shadow of that Titan of Tedium!
Pliny sat down and mopped the sweat from his forehead. When he recounted what Diaulus had told him, the poet’s eyebrows shot up and his eyes shone with wicked glee.
“And what would your uncle have thought of your marshalling all his scholarship just to save a gang of slaves from the executioner?”
“I’m sure he would have thought I’d lost my mind. I half agree with him.”
At that moment the mountain of volumes collapsed and scrolls in their cylindrical capsules rolled every-which-way across the floor.
It seemed the librarians had never gotten around to affixing labels to all the capsules. On hands and knees, the two men searched for the index volume, unwinding scroll after scroll. The poet glanced here and there among the yards of unwound papyrus that snaked across the polished floor.
…contact with a menstruating woman will drive a dog mad…a statue of a woman by Praxiteles was so lifelike that a man attempted to have intercourse with it…amber is formed from the urine of lynxes…a man with eyesight so keen he could see the tiniest details at a distance of a hundred and twenty-three miles…the entire Iliad inscribed upon a nutshell…the Arimaspi who have only one eye in the middle of their foreheads…the Megasthenes who, like serpents, have slits in place of nostrils…