The thing was getting positively sickening, when Trimalchio, now in a state of disgusting intoxication, commanded a new diversion, a company of horn-blowers, to be introduced; and then stretching himself out along the edge of a couch on a pile of pillows, “Make believe I am dead,” he ordered. “Play something fine.” Then the horn blowers struck up a loud funeral dirge. In particular one of these undertaker’s men, the most conscientious of the lot, blew so tremendous a fanfare he roused the whole neighbourhood. Hereupon the watchmen in charge of the surrounding district, thinking Trimalchio’s house was on fire, suddenly burst open the door, and rushing in with water and axes, started the much admired confusion usual under such circumstances. For our part, we seized the excellent opportunity thus offered, snapped our fingers in Agamemnon’s face, and away helter-skelter just as if we were escaping from a real conflagration.

1 The identity of the translator remains a mystery, but suspicion has fallen on one Alfred Richard Allinson – see Rod Boroughs, ‘Oscar Wilde’s Translation of Petronius: The Story of a Literary Hoax’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, Vol 38, No. 1, 1995, pp. 9–49. The sense of mystery and fun that surrounds the origins of this translation feels very much in Petronius’ spirit.

THE ERUPTION OF VESUVIUS

Letters, 6.16

Pliny the Younger

Translated by Daisy Dunn, 2018

Most writers in antiquity believed that Mount Vesuvius was a mountain, or at most an extinct volcano. It had been dormant for around 700 years when, in AD 79, it erupted catastrophically. Thousands of people died at Pompeii, Herculaneum, and across the Bay of Naples. This is the account of a senator and lawyer named Pliny the Younger (AD c. 62–c. 113) who witnessed the eruption at the age of seventeen and survived it. Writing almost thirty years after the disaster, he describes in this letter to the historian Tacitus (see Stories 72 and 73) how his uncle, Pliny the Elder, an admiral and natural historian, launched a rescue operation but died at Stabiae, a town close to the volcano. He later wrote a second letter describing his own experience of the disaster.