The Spectators

by Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The news of the fire reached me at the far end of the province on the fourth day after it, in a dining room furnished with couches borrowed from a man who hoped to be made a magistrate. Since I have made a habit of recording such things I must record that my first thought, on hearing it, was not of the houses or of the dead (the messenger said there were few) but of how the thing would go in a letter.

I do not offer this as a confession. A man who has written letters for thirty years thinks in them, as a carpenter's eye measures every doorway he walks through. It does not follow that he cares more for doorways than for the people who pass through them. It follows only that he cannot help it, and he would be a liar, and a dull one, to pretend otherwise.

The messenger was a public slave of the council of Nicomedia, with mud to his knees from the post road. He said that the fire had begun in the lower town after nightfall. It had burned a great many private houses, and the house of the Elders, which the Greeks call the Gerusia, and the temple of Isis on the other side of the street.

"On the other side of the street?"

"Yes, lord. It crossed the street."

I made him say it twice. Then I sent him to be fed, told my host that the governor would leave at first light, and lay awake composing a sentence in which a fire crosses a street. I did not finish it that night. I am not sure I have finished it yet.

---

Nicomedia climbs from its harbour up a slope towards the hills, so that from the upper town you look down on the lower as from the back rows of a theatre. I came in by the upper road on the fifth day of travel, and saw the burned quarter before I reached it: a grey patch on the hillside where the roofs had been red, shaped like a spill of ash from a tipped brazier, broad at the bottom and narrowing upwards.

Asclepiodotus, the first archon of the city, met me at the gate in a clean cloak and a face that had not slept well for nine days. He took me down on foot, because the litter could not pass, and Amyntas, my freedman, came behind with his tablets. Amyntas has written at my dictation since Comum and knows when to write and when not to. On that walk he did not write.

It had rained on the second day after the fire, and the ash had become a paste that clung to the shoes and stank. It is a smell I know, though I had not smelled it for thirty years, since the morning at Misenum when the ash lay on the roads like snow: sour, and sharp at the back of the throat, and slow to leave the clothes. Where the houses had stood there were thresholds and nothing to cross into, cooking pots fused to their tripods, a child's clay horse lying unbroken in the gutter. The lead had run off the roofs and set in the drains in grey tongues. A woman was sifting the floor of what had been her house through a basket, and she did not look up at the governor.

The Gerusia had been a fine building. It is a strange thing to say of the white stumps of columns that peeled when I touched them, the outer skin of the marble flaking off like the crust of a loaf. But one could still read it as a fine building, as one reads a well-made sentence even when half the words have been scratched out. Across from it, the Iseum's bronze doors stood upright in a doorway of blackened stone with nothing behind them.

I paced the street between the two. Eleven paces. Amyntas paced it after me and made it twelve, and I let him write twelve, because his legs are shorter and the true figure was somewhere between.

"The wind," said Asclepiodotus. "It came off the hills in the night, lord, very strongly, as it does in that season. It carried the burning thatch from the stables across the street to the temple roof. No one could have stopped it."

I did not doubt him about the wind. I have seen wind carry fire. But at the corner of the square, perhaps thirty paces from the Gerusia, there was a public fountain, and it was untouched. The water ran into its basin from a bronze lion's mouth as calmly as if nothing had happened within a hundred miles, and the basin was full.

"Was there water in it that night?"

"There is always water in it, lord. It is the best fountain in the lower town."

"Then what did they carry it in?"

He looked at me as if I had asked what the Nicomedians breathe. "Lord, it is a fountain. People bring their own jars."

"And that night?"

He did not answer at once. I have spent enough of my life in the courts to know that a witness who does not answer at once is not looking for the truth; he is deciding which part of it to give. When he answered, it was about the wind.

---

The builder I found the next morning, in the shell of the Gerusia, with a measuring rod and three of his men. The council had already given him the contract to clear the rubble. He was a short broad man called Glycon, grey in the beard, with a lump of red builder's chalk in a pouch at his belt, and he had none of the archon's anxiety, because nobody had yet made him responsible for anything.

"Where were you on the night of the fire?"

"In the street, lord. Watching, like everyone."

"You have men."

"Forty, lord, in the yard, with the apprentices."

"And ladders. And ropes. And mattocks for pulling down a wall to stop a fire spreading."

"All of that, lord."

"Then why did you not bring them?"

He looked past me to Asclepiodotus, who had come with me, and then back.

"To do what, lord? To stand in a line from the lion to the fire and pass along jars that nobody has brought? Somebody has to tell men where to stand. If I march forty men into the street at night in this city, then in the morning someone writes to the governor that Glycon the builder is gathering men." He shrugged. "In Nicomedia, lord, a great many people write to the governor."

Asclepiodotus did not contradict him. I noticed that, and I noticed that Amyntas, behind me, had begun to write.

"And besides," said Glycon, turning back to his column, "there was nothing to carry it in."

---

On the eighth day after my arrival I was invited to a recitation.

The invitation came on a fine tablet in a fine hand from Demostratus, a sophist of the city, who had been a pupil of someone I had heard of, had pupils of his own, and was known on both sides of the Propontis for his monodies: the laments in prose that the Greeks compose over a city when an earthquake or a war has struck it. He proposed to deliver, in the lecture hall of the gymnasium, a Monody on the Burning of Nicomedia, and he would be honoured if the governor would hear it.

In Rome I attended almost every recitation to which I was invited. I have written as much, and been teased for it by friends who attended fewer. I do not think a man should praise literature in his letters who will not sit through an afternoon of it in a cold hall. So I went, and Amyntas came with me, and we sat in the front row on a cushion that had been brought for me. The hall was full. I looked along the rows and recognised faces from the street of ash: the archon, two of the council, a priest of Isis with his head shaved, the woman with the basket, who had put on a better dress.

Demostratus was a tall man of about fifty with a fine voice and a habit of letting a sentence end in silence before he began the next. He spoke for most of two hours, and I will say plainly, though the rest of this account may seem to argue against it, that it was very good.

He began with the city as it had been at sunset on that day: the harbour gilded, the smoke of supper rising straight up from a thousand roofs, because there was not yet any wind. Then he brought the wind down from the hills, and I felt the hall lean forward. He had the fire begin in a stable and run along the eaves "like a rumour along a portico". He had it stand at the edge of the street before the Gerusia, gathering itself. And then he had it cross. I listened for the sentence I had failed to finish in my borrowed dining room, and he had made a better one: the flame went over the street, he said, as a dancer crosses a stage, so lightly that the paving was not scorched and only the far side burned.

He had the priests carrying the goddess out of the temple with her sistrum rattling in their arms at every step, so that she seemed to be lamenting her own house. He had the light of the fire on the bronze doors. He had the lead running from the gutters of the Gerusia, "and the Elders' house wept grey tears into the drains". He gave the hour when the temple roof fell, a little after midnight, and the sound it made, which he said was less a crash than a long sigh.

Then, near the end, he turned to the hall and said, "And we, men of Nicomedia, stood in the street, and in the doorways, and on our roofs, and we watched, and we were the theatre of our own ruin."

The hall wept. I am not exaggerating. The woman with the basket wept, and the archon wept, and then they applauded, standing, so long and so loudly that Demostratus had to raise both hands before he could deliver his last sentence. I do not remember his last sentence. I remember that one, and I remember thinking, with the honesty I try to keep for small matters, that I should have been glad to have written it.

---

He came to me afterwards, as speakers do, to be praised, and I praised him, which was easy. Then I asked him where he had stood.

"On my roof, lord. My house is across the square from the Gerusia, and the roof is flat, with a parapet. I could see everything."

"All night?"

"Until the temple roof fell. Then I went down and wrote it all, before I slept, while it was still fresh." He smiled, with the particular pleasure of a man about to quote his audience to himself. "Things are remembered most truly when they are new. You wrote as much to Cornelius Tacitus, lord, of your uncle and the mountain. I have read the letter many times. I teach it."

I will not pretend I was not pleased. A man who has published nine books of letters and says he does not care whether a Greek sophist on the Propontis has read them is lying, and probably to himself. But I asked him the question I had come to ask.

"You had no bucket?"

He laughed, not unkindly. "Lord, I am a sophist. What would I have done with a bucket?"

"Carried water to the fire."

"And who," said Demostratus, "would then have described it?"

I did not answer him. There was an answer, and I knew it, and I did not give it, because it was not one I could give without also passing judgment on a young man reading Livy at Misenum while the sky turned black over the bay. I was in my eighteenth year then, which excuses a great deal, and I have never decided whether to call it constancy or imprudence. Demostratus was fifty, and had a flat roof, and wept at his own monody. I thanked him for the afternoon, and went home.

---

I wrote to the emperor that night. It is my custom to refer to him everything about which I am in doubt, and I was in doubt about a great many things, and I had to choose which of them could be put in a letter.

Amyntas sat with the lamp and the wax and I walked. I began, as one must, with where I had been: While I was going round a distant part of the province, a very great fire at Nicomedia destroyed many private houses and two public buildings, the Gerusia and the Iseum, although a street lay between them. I stopped there, and Amyntas waited, and I said, "Read it back." He read it back. It is a good sentence. It begins with the governor's absence, as a sentence in a governor's letter should, and it ends with the street, as I had wanted since the dining room.

"It spread," I dictated, "first by the violence of the wind, and then by the inertia of the people, who, it is well established, stood by idle and unmoving, spectators of so great an evil."

Amyntas wrote it, and then held the stylus over the wax.

"Satis constat, lord? Well established by whom?"

"By the whole city," I said. "They established it this afternoon, in the gymnasium, with applause."

He wrote nothing more for a moment, which is his way of saying something.

I went on. And there is not anywhere in public a pump, not a bucket, not a single tool for putting out fires. "These things," I said, "as I have already ordered, will be provided." That was true; I had ordered them on the second day after my arrival, from the bronzesmiths and the leatherworkers. Then I came to the part that was in doubt.

Consider, lord, whether you think a guild of builders should be established, of no more than a hundred and fifty men. I shall see to it that no one is admitted who is not a builder, and that they do not use the right granted them for any other purpose.

"A hundred and fifty," said Amyntas. "Glycon has forty."

"There are other yards."

"And what he said about the men who write to the governor?"

"The emperor knows what is said of men who gather in this province. That is why I have asked for a hundred and fifty and not five hundred, and why I have said builders and nothing else." I stopped walking. "Read me the part about the spectators again."

He read it. Otiosos et immobiles tanti mali spectatores. I listened to it as I had listened to Demostratus: idle and unmoving, spectators of so great an evil. It was true of the hall in the gymnasium. It was true of the roof across the square. It was true, in its most respectable form, of a governor who had been at the far end of the province when the fire began, and who would put that first, in the place of honour, at the head of his letter. I considered whether it was fair to write it of the woman with the basket, and decided that a letter to the emperor is not the place to be fair to everyone, only to be accurate about what must be done.

"Leave it," I said.

Amyntas sealed it in the third hour of the night, and the post took it in the morning.

---

The emperor's reply came in the second month, in his own plain Latin, which I admire more than I can imitate. He thanked me. He said that it had occurred to me, following the example of many, that a guild of builders might be established at Nicomedia. But let us remember that your province, and those cities above all, have been troubled by associations of this kind. Whatever name we give them, for whatever reason, men who are brought together for one purpose will soon become clubs. It would be better, he wrote, to provide the means of fighting fires, to warn the owners of property to check fires themselves, and, if the matter demanded it, to make use of the people who run to the scene.

The people who run to the scene. I had seen the people who run to the scene. They run to it, and then they stand.

I do not say this against the emperor. He was right about the province. Before I left the province I had reason to write to him about clubs and societies in other cities, and every time I found him better informed than I was, which is not a comfortable thing for a governor to discover and a very comfortable thing for a province. He had seen the faction in the guild, which I had not. I had seen the bucket missing from the monody, which Demostratus had not. And Glycon, who had seen both, had been asked about neither, except by me, in a burned building, with the archon listening.

---

The buckets were delivered in the spring: sixty of leather, sewn double and pitched inside, with rope handles, and two bronze pumps with their pipes, which the smith demonstrated in the square by soaking a councillor who had come too close. Asclepiodotus had pegs set in the back wall of the new portico by the agora, under the roof, where the buckets could hang in two rows and be seen by everyone. On the day they were hung, he invited the governor to inspect them.

I walked the rows with him. The leather smelled of pitch and new rope. Each bucket was branded on the side with the city's mark, and I lifted one down and weighed it in my hand and found it heavier than I expected, and hung it back.

Under the lowest row of pegs, on the fresh plaster, someone had written in chalk. The archon saw it at the same moment I did, and made a small sound of distress.

It was a list of names in a builder's square capitals, two to a line, and beside each pair, the name of a place: the lion; the harbour cistern; the well behind the baths; the fuller's well; the lion; the lion. Forty names, in twenty pairs. At the foot, in the same hand but smaller, as one writes the thing that does not need to be read by everyone: the yard bell, three strokes.

"It is not permitted, lord," said Asclepiodotus. "I will have it washed off before evening."

I read the names through once more. I did not know any of them, and I knew whose they were.

"It is under the portico roof," I said. "Leave it until it rains."

He looked up at the roof, and then at me, and then he called his slave away from the wall, and Amyntas, beside me, put his tablets back in his satchel without writing anything at all.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ā Gaiō Plīniō Caeciliō Secundō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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