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Pompeii
by
Robert Harris (Hutchinson). Review / Roger Hainsworth
WHEN we think of Roman engineering we usually
think of roads. Even after centuries of neglect they still conspicuously
trace their way across European landscapes. Robert Harris usefully
reminds us that in terms of skill and engineering achievement the
road system pales beside the water systems. An authority on Roman
aqueducts has written that in the first century AD Rome’s nine
aqueducts supplied substantially more water to its million-plus inhabitants
each day (38 million gallons) than was daily supplied to New York
in 1985. At 38 gallons a head per day it would seem the Romans were
even more extravagant with water than we are. Robert Harris’s
absorbingly interesting novel shows just how extravagant that could
be, especially in a city like Pompeii, where corruption combined with
water theft was on monstrous scale.
Harris has written highly original novels, beginning with Fatherland,
then continuing with Enigma (later filmed) and Archangel. Now he tackles
the destruction of Pompeii in August 79AD but in a characteristically
oblique way. His hero is not a Pompeiian but one of the Emperor’s
water engineers who has been sent to the Campanian (Neapolitan) coast
to replace the mysteriously disappeared engineer in charge of the
Augusta aqueduct.
Marcus Attilius was young and comparatively experienced for such a
great responsibility. The Augusta was the greatest engineering feat
of the Roman world; it carried water from the pine-covered ridges
of the Appennines, tunnelling through spurs, leaping gorges on tiered
arcades and carrying out a task far more complex than any faced by
the aqueducts of Rome. It supplied not one city but nine around what
is now the Bay of Naples; Pompeii first and Neapolis (Naples) among
the others. More than 250,000 people depended on it. Moreover, the
drought in August 79 is intense, land parched, wells failing daily.
Attilius is descended from three generations of Roman water engineers
who had successively built three of Rome’s greatest aqueducts,
and he is the complete professional, confident and devoted to his
duties. He loves the subtlety of water engineering, which demanded
that water should descend no more and no less than a finger width
in a hundred paces; less and it would fall stagnant, more and it would
rupture the walls with its violence.
He arrives to find his predecessor’s fate a mystery, his foreman
appears to hate him, his crew are uneasy, sullen and hostile. Then
the water supply of one of the cities, Misenum – a port and
naval base – falls to a trickle and Attilius has to call on
Pliny, the natural scientist and writer who is also commander of Rome’s
Mediterranean fleet.
An obese, talkative voluptuary, in failing health but still driven
by intense scientific curiosity, Pliny is one of the great characters
of the novel. Backed by the admiral, and with the dangerous support
of the corrupt and villainous Ampliatus (a Pompeian who knows the
value of the Emperor’s water, not least because he has stolen
so much of it), Attilius sets out to find the break and repair the
aqueduct. The social and political consequences of failure are too
terrible to contemplate. Attilius and his team seek out and heroically
repair a collapsed tunnel.
He then begins to investigate what could have caused such a massive
upheaval in the tunnel. Gripped by a frightening suspicion he even
climbs to the top of Vesuvius and for the first time realises the
extent of the disaster which threatens the area. There is very little
time left. He must warn Admiral Pliny at Misenum.
Read on, for Harris provides an astonishingly vivid account of the
impact of the eruption and the helplessness of the Roman authorities,
wonderful in its in detail. (Roman triremes, Pliny and Attilius discover,
cannot row through a sea totally covered in floating pumice!)
The fearless Pliny, dictating observations on the phenomenon to his
last breath, must surely be doomed but Attilius the water engineer
knows a possible escape route. If only he can reach it …
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