Have you ever felt, you know, guilty about not
being productive enough? Like, you didn't check
enough off your to -do list? Well, wait until
you hear about the guy we're looking at today.
Oh, yeah. It is a story that completely shatters
our modern baseline for what actually constitutes,
like... a hard day's work. Seriously. OK, let's
unpack this. We were looking at a stack of incredibly
rich and frankly just mind blowing source material
for this deep dive. Specifically, we are looking
at translated excerpts from a massive ancient
encyclopedia. Right. The natural history. Exactly.
The natural history. It was written in the first
century AD by a Roman official named Pliny the
Elder. And alongside that text, we have these
deeply personal, highly detailed biographies
graphical accounts written by his nephew who
is, rather conveniently, named Pliny the Younger.
Yeah, and we are incredibly fortunate to have
those letters from the nephew. I mean, without
them, we would have the encyclopedia, which is
this monumental achievement on its own. But we
wouldn't have the behind the scenes documentation
of the agonizing, almost superhuman physical
and mental toll it took to actually create it.
We just wouldn't know the human cost of the text.
Right. And our mission today for you listening
is to explore those mind boggling daily habits
and the incredibly strict time management that
the elder youth to conduct his research. It really
is extreme. It is. We're going to contrast his
relentless hustle with our modern views on productivity.
But I think most importantly, we want to unpack
the immense pressure he faced because he wasn't
just, you know, sitting in a quiet, sunlit library
all day writing. Not at all. He was balancing
high ranking literal life and death imperial
duties for the Roman Empire with this completely
obsessive literary goal. And that tension right
there is the core of his existence. The friction
between his public life and his private obsession
is really the engine of this whole narrative.
So before we look at how he worked, we have to
understand what he was actually juggling because
he wasn't a monk in a quiet cell. Far from it.
He was a highly active, heavily relied upon Roman
official. If you look at the timeline of his
life, his resume reads like an absolute powerhouse
of Roman administration and military service.
Yeah. To give you a sense of the scale, in his
early 20s, he was serving in Germany as the commander.
of an ala. An ala. Yeah, which is a troop of
auxiliary cavalry. Right, which means he isn't
a desk jockey. He is on horseback leading soldiers
in one of the most brutal, freezing, and heavily
contested frontier zones of the entire Roman
Empire. Exactly. He is out there managing logistics,
supply lines, combat readiness, all in the mud
and the snow of the Germanic frontier. And yet,
even then, he was riding. Wait, really? While
on the frontier? Yeah. While commanding this
cavalry unit, he wrote a technical treatise called
On the Use of the Javelin by Cavalry. That is
just so perfectly specific. I mean, you're trying
to keep your men alive in the terrifying German
forest and you just think, you know what I should
do tonight? Write a manual on projectile physics
from horseback. It's wild. And he didn't stop
there. He traveled all over Germany, going as
far as the shores of the North Sea. But, you
know, his career evolved. He eventually returned
to Rome, worked as a lawyer for a while. And
then, well, then we hit the reign of the emperor
Nero. Ah, Nero, which is a crucial period to
understand because Nero's reign was a terrifying
time to be anybody of note in Rome, let alone
a prominent intellectual. Oh, absolutely. It
was an era defined by paranoia. purges, forced
suicides. If the emperor thought you were a threat
or even just annoying, you were gone. And I want
to dig into that survival aspect. Yeah. Because
the source material notes that during Nero's
reign Pliny wisely stepped back from writing
contemporary history. Instead, he wrote a book
on grammar. Yeah, he did. That feels like a very
deliberate, calculated pivot, right? It's an
absolute intellectual survival mechanism. When
you live under an autocrat who might literally
have you executed for implying the wrong thing
in a historical text, you hide your mind in the
mundane. That makes total sense. Grammar is politically
safe. Exactly. It's structural. It's objective.
You can't really be accused of treason for debating
the conjugation of a Latin verb. So he kept his
head down, focused on syntax and survived the
purges. Smart guy. And once Nero is gone and
the political climate finally stabilizes under
the new emperor, the Spasian, Pliny's career
absolutely skyrockets. It really takes off. The
sources say he became a procurator in nearer
Spain. What does that actually look like on a
day -to -day basis in the Roman world? Well,
a procurator in this era was a high -ranking
financial and administrative official appointed
directly by the emperor. Nearer Spain, which
is roughly modern -day Eastern and southern Spain
was this massive wealthy province. He's not just
doing some light account No, no, he was overseeing
the tax collection of millions of people He was
managing the imperial estates the incredibly
lucrative silver and gold mines of the region
and he was the chief financial magistrate Wow
Yeah, if there was a dispute over land taxes
or trade it landed on his desk It was a crushing
bureaucratic weight and remember there were no
spreadsheets. No instantaneous communication
Right, no email. Exactly. It's entirely managed
through couriers on horseback, wax tablets, and
just sheer administrative force. And later, he's
appointed as the prefect of the Roman fleet at
Mezzinum, which means he is the admiral in command
of the most important naval base on the western
coast of Italy. Which is a huge deal. Yeah. He's
tasked with protecting the grain ships that literally
kept the population of Rome from starving and
rioting. Yes, he is the logistical anchor of
the empire's food supply. And to top it all off,
he was deeply embedded in the inner circle of
imperial power. He was personal friends with
the emperor Vespasian and Vespasian's son Titus.
The same Titus he dedicates the encyclopedia
to, right? The very same. In fact, he dedicates
the natural history to Titus explicitly. So just
to put this in perspective for you listening,
imagine you are a modern cabinet member. Let's
say you're the secretary of defense or maybe
the CEO of a massive global logistics company.
OK, I'm picturing it. You are actively managing
international crises, anti -piracy operations,
multi -billion dollar budgets. And while doing
that, you decide you are going to write all of
Wikipedia. All of it. From scratch, during your
commute. That analogy actually works perfectly
provided we add the caveat that you don't have
the internet. And every single piece of information
you need requires someone to physically carry
a fragile scroll to you from across the Mediterranean.
It's just, how is this humanly possible? Looking
at the source material, I kept asking myself,
was his imperial career just a side hustle to
his writing? Or was the writing a side hustle
to the empire? Well, what is so striking about
the nephew's letters that they seem to be entirely
parallel, fully realized lives. He didn't sacrifice
his public duty for his private study, and he
absolutely refused to sacrifice his private study
for his public duty. But something has to give,
right? Exactly. And the pressure he operated
under is palpable in the text. In his dedication
to Titus, he explicitly acknowledges this friction.
He tells Titus that he composed this massive
work at interrupted intervals, indeed during
the night. Wow, during the night. Yeah. Since
he was managing the Empire's finances and Navy's
during the day, the only place he could steal
the hours required for his true passion was from
his own sleep. Which brings us to the output
itself. We have to quantify what he actually
produced during those stolen night hours, because
the sheer volume defies belief. It really does.
Despite this incredibly demanding day job, he
wrote a 37 -book encyclopedia. It contained 20
,000 distinct topics. And he curated this information
by reading and extracting from 2 ,000 separate
volumes written by 100 select authors. We really
have to pause and consider the physical logistics
of that research. Yeah. Because ancient Roman
scrolls which were made of papyrus, were incredibly
unwieldy. Right. It's not like opening a paperback.
Not at all. They didn't have pages you could
flip through. They didn't have an index at the
back. They didn't have a table of contents or
page numbers. So how do you even find anything?
That's the thing. To find a specific fact about,
say, a random species of bird, you had to physically
unroll feet of fragile papyrus, scanning these
dense blocks of handwritten text with your eyes
until you finally found the reference. That sounds
exhausting. Doing that across 2 ,000 volumes,
without a search function, in a world lit only
by fire, it is a staggering feat of physical
endurance, not just mental acuity. So because
his days were entirely owned by the Roman Empire,
Pliny had to conquer the night, which leads us
directly to this letter from his nephew written
to a friend named Macer. Ah yes, the famous Macer
letter. This letter details his uncle's daily
routine, and here's where it gets really interesting.
And honestly, for anyone listening who likes
their sleep, a little terrifying. It is the ultimate,
unfiltered blueprint of ancient hustle culture.
Listen to this schedule. His nephew writes that
Pliny began his intense studying at the festival
of Vulcanalia. For context, that's August 23rd
in the Roman calendar, and he would start late
at night. But in the winter, when the nights
were longer, he would start at 1 a .m. or at
the absolute latest, 2 a .m. And the nephew actually
notes that he would often begin by midnight.
Let that sink in for a second. He is waking up
at midnight, or 1 AM, in the freezing Roman winter.
There's no central heating. And he is reading
these massive scrolls by the dim, flickering,
probably really smoky light of an oil lamp. Just
brutal conditions for your eyes, too. Yeah. Then,
before daybreak, while it is still pitch black
outside, he leaves his house and goes to the
Emperor of Vespasian, because apparently the
Emperor also worked nights. It's such a fascinating
detail. You really have to wonder why the Emperor
of Rome is holding meetings in the dark. Right.
Why not just wait until 9 a .m.? Well, it's because
the daytime in Rome for person of power was completely
consumed by the salutatio, which is this endless
line of clients, petitioners, senators, and citizens
demanding favors, legal rulings, and money. So
the emperor was basically in back -to -back meetings
all day. Exactly. The only time Vespasian could
actually run the structural logistics of the
empire, the real work, was before the city woke
up. So you have these two insomniac workaholics
running the Roman Empire by lamplight. That is
quite an image. They conduct state business before
the sun even comes up. Then Pliny returns home.
He eats a light, old -fashioned repast, which
his nephew notes to emphasize his austerity.
Right, he's not indulging in those decadent Roman
banquets you always hear about. No dormice and
honey for Pliny. Then, if he had any so -called
leisure time, he would lie in the sun. But he's
not relaxing. Of course not. In Rome, lying in
the sun was often a prescribed medical or relaxation
therapy, but Pliny corrupts it with work. While
he's lying there, a book is being read aloud
to him by a secretary, and Pliny's constantly
taking notes and making extracts. And this is
where the nephew shares Pliny's absolute guiding
maxim. His uncle used to say, there is no book
so bad, but that so good maybe got out of it.
No book so bad. That single sentence is really
the skeleton key to his entire methodology, isn't
it? He wasn't a curator. He was a vacuum cleaner.
That's exactly it. He was an absolute glutton
for information. He didn't care if the text was
widely considered low quality or dubious or even
just badly written. His goal wasn't to read only
the masterpieces. His goal was to extract every
solitary data point that existed in the world.
But looking at this from a modern perspective,
it sounds like a toxic tech bro morning routine
taken to an absurd almost pathological extreme.
Oh, for sure. You know those videos where a guy
says, I wake up at 3 a .m., take an ice bath,
read a book on stoicism, trade crypto, and visualize
my goals before the sun rises? The optimization
videos, yeah. Exactly. Pliny was waking up at
1 a .m. to read by candlelight before a literal
board meeting with the emperor. It sounds profoundly
unhealthy. It does. It sounds awful. And if we
want to understand why he did this, we really
have to look past modern concepts of productivity.
He wasn't trying to optimize his workflow or
get a promotion. Right, he already had the top
job. Exactly. He had a deeply philosophical,
almost existential reason for this self -inflicted
torture. In his own dedication to the natural
history, he gives us the key. He writes, life
properly consists in being awake. Life properly
consists in being awake. Man, that is a heavy
statement. It's the core of his worldview. To
Pliny, sleep wasn't rest. Sleep was not a biological
necessity to be respected. Sleep was a necessary
evil, a physical weakness. Like a glitch in the
human body. Yeah. He viewed it as a theft of
conscious existence. He basically thought of
sleep as a localized death. Every hour he spent
sleeping was an hour he was not truly alive because
he was not actively consuming or recording information
about the universe. Which is such a massive contract
with how we view high performance today. Right
now, if you listen to the best productivity experts,
neuroscientists, athletes, they all prioritize
rest. Absolutely. It's all about recovery now.
They talk about REM sleep, circadian rhythms,
establishing boundaries, and the dangers of cognitive
burnout. For Pliny, the very concept of a boundary
was offensive. His view was pure, unadulterated
volume. The more hours your eyes are open, the
more life you have lived. And because he viewed
time as his most precious, rapidly depleting
commodity, he didn't just wake up early. He micromanaged
the minutes. He squeezed every single drop of
utility out of every waking second. Let's walk
through the rest of his day to prove that point
because the intensity never drops. Never. After
this sun reading session we just talked about,
the nephew says he would take a cold bath, again
with the cold plunges. Then another slight meal,
a very short nap. Presumably because his biological
hardware was literally crashing. Right. He was
probably passing out. Yeah. And then he would
wake up as if a new day had started and study
relentlessly right up until dinner. And we shouldn't
assume dinner was a break either. Definitely
not. During dinner, yet another book was read
aloud to him. And there's this incredible anecdote
his nephew shares that just perfectly illustrates
how intense and frankly exhausting it must have
been to be around this guy. Oh, the pronunciation
story. It tells you everything you need to know
about his mental state. Yes. So there at dinner,
a book is being read aloud. by a slave or secretary.
The reader mispronounces a word. A friend of
Pliny's, who is a guest at the dinner table,
stops the reader, corrects the mispronunciation,
and makes the poor guy repeat the word correctly.
Which is pretty normal. Yeah, maybe a little
pedantic, but a normal interaction. But Pliny
turns to his friend and absolutely scolds him.
He asks, you understood him, didn't you? The
friend says, yes, I understood the meaning. Pliny
replies, why then did you make him go over it
again? Through this interruption of yours, we
have lost more than 10 lines. He was literally
auditing his minutes. Think about the mindset
required to calculate the opportunity cost of
a dinner table correction in terms of lost lines
of text. It's obsessed. Completely. Ten lines
of text lost to a pronunciation correction was
an unacceptable deficit in his daily ledger of
knowledge. I try to imagine being his friend
at that dinner party. You're just trying to enjoy
your olives and your wine after a long day in
Rome and the host is furious at you because you
cost him ten sentences of a scroll. You'd never
accept a dinner invitation from him again. Exactly.
But honestly, it gets crazier. The nephew writes
that when he retired to the country, the only
time he wasn't actively studying was when he
was physically submerged in the bathwater. And
the nephew makes a very specific distinction
here. He does. He says that while Pliny was out
of the water being scraped with Ostrichil, which,
for those who don't know, was this curved metal
tool the Romans used with scented oil to scrape
sweat and dead skin off their bodies. Right,
instead of soap. Yeah. So even during that physical
scraping, he was having a book read to him, or
he was actively dictating notes to a secretary.
It's important to understand that the Roman bath
was the ultimate social and leisure space. It's
where you gossiped, relaxed, networked, and unwound.
Pliny turned it into a hostile work environment.
He brought the office to the spa. Exactly. There
was no dead time. None. Even travel was optimized.
He absolutely refused to walk when he was in
Rome. He would only take a litter, which is a
covered chair or carriage carried by enslaved
people, so that he could continue reading. Because
walking requires looking where you're going.
Right. Walking was a waste of time because the
physical act of navigating the streets required
your eyes, meaning you couldn't read. His secretary
sat right by his side in the litter with a book
and writing tablets. And there's this one detail
about the litter that I just can't stop thinking
about. Gloves. Yes. In the winter, the secretary
actually wore gloves so that the freezing cold
wouldn't stop the note -taking. That is wild.
That detail about the gloves is so evocative
because it really highlights the mechanical reality
of his work. Roman dictation was usually done
on wooden tablets coated in wax using a sharp
metal stylus. Okay, so you're carving into wax.
Yeah, and if you are bouncing around in a litter...
In the freezing Roman winter, your hands get
stiff, and the wax itself gets hard and difficult
to carve into. Oh, man. You can just picture
this poor Roman scribe shivering in a litter,
his hands wrapped in crude winter gloves, desperately
pressing the stylus into cold wax to keep up
with Planey's relentless machine gun dictation
as they bump along the noisy cobblestones. I
feel so bad for that secretary. And what was
the result of all this? The nephew says that,
aside from the natural history itself, When Planey
died, he left behind 160 volumes of notes written
extremely small on both sides of the parchment.
An unbelievable amount of data. But I have to
push back on this entire methodology. I mean,
I have to ask. If you are so obsessed with speed
that you get angry about losing 10 lines of text
to a pronunciation error, are you actually synthesizing
knowledge? Or are you just hoarding data? That
is the big question. It feels like having 500
browser tabs open. You tell yourself you're doing
deep research, but really you're just skimming
and aggressively bookmarking things you'll never
truly process. I see the temptation to use the
browser tab analogy, but I actually think it
doesn't go far enough in explaining his situation.
Having browser tabs open implies you can easily
click back and search through them later. That's
true. He couldn't just control F his notes. Exactly.
Pliny's situation was more like trying to download
the entire internet onto a physical hard drive
while someone is actively chasing you and there
is no search function. It wasn't just skimming.
It was an archival panic. Archival panic. I like
that phrase. But your critique is exactly right.
And it is the exact critique that modern historians
have of Pliny. This manic unfiltered high -speed
consumption explains the precise nature of the
natural history itself. Because he couldn't filter
it. Right. Because of how he worked, Plani was
essentially a compiler. He was a human search
engine. He was not a critical evaluator of the
information he was consuming. His time management
system entirely prioritized breadth and speed
over deep skeptical vetting. Right. So, if you
read 2000 Scrolls, while writing in litters,
waking up at midnight, and being scraped in the
baths, what exactly does your final product look
like? Let's actually look at the source text
of the natural history itself, because the text
is wild. Oh, it's all over the place. It is a
total rollercoaster of profound scientific observation
right next to absolute unhinged nonsense. It
is the ultimate mixed bag of antiquity. Let's
start with the brilliant stuff, because we have
to give the man his due. When he is right, he
is astonishingly right. His astronomical observations
are incredibly accurate for the time. Very impressive
stuff. He correctly explains the mechanics of
eclipses. He writes that the eclipse of the Moon
is caused by the Earth coming between the Sun
and the Moon, and he specifically notes that
the shadow of the Earth forms a pyramid or a
cone shape, which is why it covers the Moon the
way it does. And he understands the phases of
the Moon perfectly. Yes. He even notes that the
planet Venus is called Lucifer when it appears
in the morning, and Vesper when it appears in
the evening, recognizing that they are not two
different stars, but the exact same celestial
body. And what's crucial there is how he frames
that knowledge. He takes a very strong philosophically
advanced stance for science over superstition.
Because eclipses were scary back then, right?
In the ancient world an eclipse was terrifying.
People thought it was the end of the world. But
he explicitly mocks people who believe that an
eclipse is a sign of witchcraft. Or those who
beat pots and pans in the streets to save the
moon from being swallowed by a monster. He's
just rolling his eyes at them in the text. Exactly.
He champions a rational, mechanical, predictable
universe in those passages. He is acting as a
beacon of enlightenment. He is. But then, we
turn the page. Because of his cardinal rule that
no book is too bad, he includes some of the most
bizarre folklore imaginable. and he reports it
with the exact same straight -faced academic
tone he used for the eclipse. There we go. We're
talking about elephants that can trace Greek
letters. Ah, yes. The highly literate elephants.
He rates that an elephant was taught to write
Greek words in the sand. I mean, come on. He
also records stories of people living for impossible
lengths of time, like a king of the lupiae who
supposedly lived to be 800 years old. Just casually
dropping an 800 -year lifespan into a history
book. Yeah. And my absolute favorite. He writes
about a giant octopus at Cartilla, which was
a town in Spain that used to climb out of the
sea, walk on land, and steal salted fish out
of open pickling tubs. We have to give some context
to the octopus story because it's so vivid. Please
do. The Romans produced massive amounts of garum,
which was a fermented fish sauce that was an
absolute staple of their diet. They put it on
everything. Like ancient ketchup. Exactly. and
they would leave these huge vats of salted fish
out in the sun to ferment. So the visual of a
giant ancient octopus hauling itself out of the
ocean, slithering into a Roman fish sauce factory,
and raiding the vats in the dead of night is
just incredible. It's hilarious. Imagine reading
an encyclopedia today. And between the entry
on thermodynamics and the entry on plate tectonics,
there is a totally serious article about a fish
-stealing octopus. It's definitely jarring. And
alongside the brilliant and the bizarre, you
have these obsessively minute details where he
suddenly focuses in like a laser. He spends an
extraordinary amount of time breaking down the
exact process of harvesting the Murex snail,
which the Romans used to make Tyrion purple dye.
And that detail is invaluable. to historians
because Tyrian purple was the color of the emperors.
It was staggeringly expensive. And gross to make.
He details exactly how the tiny vein in the snail
is extracted, how it's steeped in salt for exactly
three days, no more, no less. And then he explains
the chemistry. It has to be boiled in tin vessels,
specifically tin, by applying a moderate heat
through a pipe connected to a distant furnace.
It really gets into the weeds there. So we have
to ask, what does this bizarre amalgamation of
facts mean for us as readers today? Well, when
we look at this text, we are seeing the direct,
unedited output of his daily routine. When your
secretary is wearing gloves to take notes in
the freezing cold, while you bounce around in
a litter on your way to a meeting with the emperor—
You're not stopping to fact -check. Exactly.
You simply do not have the time to stop and fact
-check whether an elephant can actually write
Greek. You don't pause to ask if an 800 -year
-old king makes biological sense. You just document
it. You write it down, catalog it, and demand
the next scroll. He was a victim of his own ruthless
sufficiency. He really was. It's a testament
to the dangers of information overload without
curation. And that is a profoundly relatable
problem for you listening right now. Oh, totally.
We live in an era where we are bombarded with
data, articles, feeds and hot takes. If we just
consume, consume, consume, if we prioritize the
sheer volume of our inputs without pausing to
evaluate, synthesize or question them, we end
up building our own mental encyclopedias filled
with the modern equivalent of fish stealing octopuses.
That is such a great point. Planey's work is
a monument to human curiosity, but it's also
a glaring warning about the limits of human cognitive
bandwidth. Absolutely. Okay, so we've established
how we worked. The 1 a .m. wakeups, the cold
baths, the relentless dictation in the litter.
And we know what he produced, this massive, chaotic,
brilliant, and bizarre text. Right? But the question
that keeps bothering me as I read this is why?
What was the engine inside this man? What drove
a highly successful, extraordinarily wealthy
Roman official to punish his own body and mind
this way? It's the million -dollar question.
He didn't need the money, he didn't need the
fa - He was already in the emperor's inner circle,
so why do it? To answer that, we have to look
closely at his underlying philosophy, which he
lays out quite explicitly in Book 7 of The Natural
History. And what we find there is surprising
and honestly a little heartbreaking. Plenty had
a deeply pessimistic, almost grim view of human
life. He really did. Reading the opening of Book
7 is actually quite depressing. It is. He begins
by examining the human condition from birth,
and he calls man the only tearful animal. The
tearful animal? Yeah. He looks at human infancy
and sees nothing but frailty and vulnerability.
He points out that other animals are born with
armor like shells or thick fur or claws, and
they knew instinctively how to swim or walk or
hunt. But a human infant is born naked, cast
onto the bare earth, capable of doing absolutely
nothing but crying. He views human existence
as being inherently fraught with disease, vulnerability,
and inescapable sorrow. That's a really bleak
outlook. And crucially, and I think this is the
linchpin to his entire psychological profile,
he entirely rejected the idea of an afterlife.
Yes, completely. He writes very clearly, all
notions of immortality are a mere delusion. He
explicitly states that after death, the soul
has no more existence than it had before birth.
Just nothingness. Right. He thinks the very idea
of a future existence is ridiculous vanity born
of human arrogance. In his words, this delusion
spoils that greatest blessing of nature death.
He actually believed that sudden absolute death
was the greatest blessing nature could grant
to a human being, because it was a release from
the suffering of consciousness. It's a very stark,
stoic, almost nihilistic perspective. This is
where I want to offer an analogy, because this
blew my mind when I was reading it. Is his insane
work ethic the ancient equivalent of existential
FOMO? Existential fear of missing out. I like
that. Think about it. If you truly, deeply believe
that there is absolutely nothing after death,
that your consciousness will just be snuffed
out like a candle flame, forever does that create
an unbearable, crushing pressure to consume every
piece of information, to read every book, to
know every single fact about the world before
the clock runs out. I think you've captured the
psychological mechanism perfectly. Yeah. If we
connect this to the broader picture of his cosmology,
Pliny believed that the world itself, the physical
universe was divine. Nature was God to him. Exactly.
He writes that the world is a deity eternal without
bounds. So he doesn't believe in a personal God
who cares about humans, and he doesn't believe
in a personal soul that survives death. Therefore,
his only way to commune with the divine, his
only way to touch eternity, was to understand
the natural world as completely as possible while
he was still breathing. His productivity wasn't
about ambition at all. It was an existential
coping mechanism. Precisely. He was trying to
swallow the universe before the universe swallowed
him. The frantic note -taking, the anger over
the lost ten lines at dinner, the absolute refusal
to sleep. It was all a desperate, unwinnable
race against the void. He was trying to cram
the infinite majesty and detail of nature into
a finite, fragile human life. Which brings us
to the tragic and frankly incredibly cinematic
climax of his life. The final deadline. The ultimate
deadline. Because this relentless drive, this
absolute uncompromising commitment to both his
imperial duty and his scientific curiosity eventually
led him straight into the most famous volcanic
eruption in human history. The eruption of Mount
Vesuvius, August 79 AD. Let's set the scene based
on the letters. Pliny is stationed at Messenum,
commanding the Roman fleet. He is the admiral.
It is early afternoon about 1 p .m. Just a normal
day so far. It's just a normal day. His sister,
who is Pliny the Younger's mother, points out
a strange cloud appearing over the Bay of Naples.
The nephew describes it beautifully in his letters.
He says it looked like a pine tree, a massive
towering trunk of smoke rising up into the sky
and then spreading out at the top into branches.
And it's amazing because modern volcanologists
actually call this a Plinian eruption, based
entirely on this specific accurate description
from the nephew's letter. That's so cool that
his name lives on in the science. But what is
Planey the Elder's first instinct when he sees
this apocalyptic cloud? Scientific curiosity.
Of course it is. She is the guy who wrote the
encyclopedia. He doesn't panic. He immediately
orders a light laburnian vessel, which is a fast
maneuverable ship, to be got ready so he can
sail across the bay and get a closer look at
this geological anomaly. He just wants to go
study it. Yeah. He even asks his nephew if he
wants to come, and the nephew says, basically,
no thanks. gave me homework to do, I'm gonna
stay and study. The decision that undoubtedly
saved the nephew's life, by the way. Definitely.
But as Pliny the Elder is walking out the door
of his villa carrying his writing tablets, because
of course he always has his tablets, the situation
shifts. He receives a message. Right, a courier
arrives. Yes, and his second instinct kicks in,
imperial duty. He gets a desperate written plea
for help from a woman named Retna, whose villa
was at the foot of the mountain. The ash is already
falling, and her only possible escape route is
by sea. She's trapped. She is. So Pliny immediately
changes his plans. He drops the idea of a simple,
fast scientific observation trip. He orders the
large heavy quadrium galleys to be launched.
He is going to sail the Roman fleet directly
into the disaster zone to save the coastal population.
This moment is the synthesis of his entire identity.
It really is. The commander of the Roman fleet
and the obsessive naturalist merge perfectly.
He's going to perform a massive rescue operation
and he's going to study the volcano while doing
it. As they are sailing across the Bay of Naples
toward Vesuvius, the conditions become apocalyptic.
Dense hot ashes are falling on the ships. Pumice
stones blackened and shattered by fire are raining
down onto the wooden decks. It must have been
terrifying. The sea is suddenly retreating due
to the volcanic earthquakes, and the shoreline
is blocked by massive debris. The pilot of his
flagship is terrified and begs Pliny to turn
the ship back to safety. And Pliny gives this
legendary, almost cinematic response. I love
this quote. He looks at the pilot and says, Fortune
favors the bold. Conduct me to Pomponianus. He
sails right past the point of no return. They
manage to land at Stabier a few miles down the
coast where his friend Pomponianus is waiting,
absolutely terrified. And how does Pliny react
to being in the middle of a literal rain of fire?
This is the craziest part to me. I want you to
picture this scene because it is the ultimate
final manifestation of his daily routine. The
earth is rocking violently. Flaming stones are
falling from the sky. The sky is pitch black
with ash. even though it's daytime, people are
shrieking. Total ca - What does Pliny do? He
asks for a bath. Of course he does. He eats a
meal. And then, he calmly goes to sleep. And
his nephew makes a point to note that the servants
waiting outside the door could hear his loud
snoring because he was a heavy, asthmatic man.
It's an astonishing display of stoicism. Or,
well... Perhaps sheer exhaustion. I mean he is
treating the apocalypse with the exact same Scheduled
rigor he applied to a normal Tuesday in Rome
bath Dinner sleep He refuses to let the exploding
mountain disrupt his routine. But the ashes and
pumice are piling up so fast in the courtyard
outside his door that his friends realize if
he sleeps much longer, he'll be physically buried
in the room. He won't be able to open the door.
Exactly. So they wake him up, they hold a council,
and decide they have to leave the house because
it's collapsing from the earthquakes. They tie
pillows to their heads with towels to protect
themselves from the falling rocks, and they make
a run for the shore to see if the sea has calmed
enough to sail. The sea is still too violent.
It is. The waves are too huge. Pliny lies down
on a sail that was spread out for him on the
beach. He asks for cold water twice and drinks
it. And then the flames and the overwhelming
smell of sulfur approach them. The toxic gases
from the volcano. Yes. His friends scatter. Pliny
tries to stand up with the help of two enslaved
servants, but he instantly collapses and dies.
His nephew attributes it to suffocating from
the dense sulfurous vapor, noting he always had
a weak chest and a narrow throat. His death perfectly
encapsulates the two overriding pressures of
his life. He was on that beach because of his
duty to the Roman people, the rescue mission.
But he stayed, he observed, and he died because
of his insatiable need to be present with nature,
even in its most terrifying destructive form.
He really did. He died exactly as he lived, actively
engaging with the world. pushing his physical
limits to the breaking point and absolutely refusing
to retreat. He was literally sailing into an
exploding volcano. And the sources suggest that
up until the very end, he was dictating notes
about the changing shape of the ash cloud to
his secretary. It's just breathtaking. It really
is. So let's briefly recap the awe -inspiring
and honestly slightly terrifying work ethic of
Kleine the Elder. Here was a man who viewed sleep
as a failure of the human condition. A man who
slipped in fractions, read while being scraped
in the bath, rode in a litter just to avoid wasting
walking time, scolded his friends for costing
him ten lines of text, and ultimately wrote a
foundational text of human history. A text that,
for all its flaws and, you know, riding elephants
and fish -stealing octopuses, served as the primary
scientific authority for Europe for over a thousand
years. It was the blueprint for how humanity
organized knowledge. Exactly. So, to you listening.
The next time you feel overwhelmed by your endless
to -do list or the next time you feel a pang
of guilt for taking a 20 -minute nap on a Sunday
afternoon, just remember Pliny. Remember the
crushing weight of his existence. Yeah. Remember
that even the guy who tried to read literally
everything ended up including a story about an
800 -year -old king because he was moving too
fast to critically think about what he was consuming.
It is okay to log off. It is okay to put the
book down. It is okay to just sit in the bath
and relax without a scribe reading to you. You
are allowed to rest. Very well said. But I want
to leave you with one final provocative thought.
All right, let's hear it. Pliny firmly, passionately
believed that there was no afterlife. He wrote
that the immortal soul was a delusion. He thought
that death was the absolute final end of consciousness.
The lights go out and you return to the void.
Right. And yet... Because he sacrificed his sleep,
his leisure, and ultimately his very life to
document the world, because he aggressively squeezed
every drop of utility out of his nights, we are
sitting here, 2 ,000 years later, intimately
discussing his daily routine. That's true. We
know about his uncle, his friends, his annoyance
at dinner parties, his snoring, his thoughts
on eclipses. Did his extreme, arguably toxic
obsession with productivity actually grant him
the exact immortality he insisted didn't exist?
Wow. He built a monument out of words and sheer
source of will, and he basically engineered his
own eternity. Something for you to ponder. Let
that sit with you, catch up on your sleep, and
we'll see you next time on The Deep Dive.