1.5 millions tons per second

~ Pompeii, by Robert Harris ~

To most of us, the title of this book has only one meaning: the city near Naples that was buried during the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. Indeed, that is the event at the center of Robert Harris’ novel, but the novel starts before the eruption: we know what’s coming, but the characters in the novel do not. This foreknowledge, and the excellent level of detail make for a gripping read.

At the start of the novel, the wealthy Roman citizens along the Mediterranean coast are living luxurious lives, every whim fulfilled by battalions of slaves. One engineer, Marcus Attilius, has just moved to the area as the ‘aquarius’, in charge of the Aqua Augusta, the mightiest of Rome’s aqueducts.

Anyone with the least interest in architecture or engineering cannot fail to be awed by the Roman aqueducts. Commissioned between 30 and 20 BC by Augustus, the Aqua Augusta was a truly remarkable feat of engineering, with much of it underground. It started from the mountains near Serino, and was a 140-km network that carried water to several cities along the Bay of Naples, including Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Somewhere out there, on the opposite side of the bay, high in the pine-forested mountains of the Appeninus, the aqueduct captured the springs of Serinus and bore the water westward — channeled it along sinuous underground passages, carried it over ravines on top of tiered arcades, forced it across valleys through massive siphons — all the way down to the plains of Campania, then around the far side of Mount Vesuvius, then south to the coast at Neapolis, and finally along the spine of the Misenum peninsula to the dusty naval town, a distance of some sixty miles, with a mean drop along her entire length of just two inches every one hundred yards.

She was the longest aqueduct in the world, longer even than the great aqueducts of Rome, and far more complex, for whereas her sisters in the north fed one city only, the Augusta’s serpentine conduit — the matrix, as they called it: the motherline — suckled no fewer than nine towns around the Bay of Neapolis: Pompeii first, at the end of a long spur, then Nola, Acerrae, Atella, Neapolis, Puteoli, Cumae, Baie, and finally Misenum.

Besides the towns, the aqueduct also fed the villas of the wealthy, and here’s where the tale grows darker. The fish in a villa pond have died, and the slave whose job it was to look after them is being fed to the eels as a punishment. As the poor slave is dragged away, he shouts that it was not his fault, it was the water! The daughter of the house fetches Attilius, who examines the source of the fishpond water — a branch of the aqueduct, which has a distinct smell of rotten eggs. Sulfur.

The sulfurous water is one of the first signs. A spring vanishes into the earth instead of flowing down towards the sea. The reservoir level is falling, and for the first time in a century, the Augusta is failing. Attilius calculates the town has water for just two days. And then a rider arrives reporting that the aqueduct has failed, all the way over in Nola! And another report from Neapolis! What is happening, and what is to be done?

This is a brisk novel. It takes place over just four days before the Main Event. Along the way, other characters make an appearance, but without much in the way of character development. Our hero, Attilius, is relentlessly wholesome: ‘a compact muscled figure with cropped brown hair’, helpful to damsels in distress, a dedicated engineer whose only goal is the common good. Corelia, the one young female character, is wealthy, but courageous, kind to slaves, thinks little of her own status, and is beautiful and voluptuous. Ampliatus is our villain: hopelessly evil, enjoys torturing slaves even though he was once a slave himself, and rapes the wife of his former master to show his power.

The Vesuvian eruption, Pompeii, and the aqueducts are really the heart of this novel. The minor plot points are dealt with summarily. Romance? Surprise, surprise, Attilius falls in love with Corelia after a brief meeting or two. Roman brutality? On evidence in multiple places. A little more background about the daily lives of the less wealthy would have added some additional depth to the novel.

That said, the main plot threads are thoroughly entertaining, and the best delineated character is the non-fictional Pliny the Elder, the head of the navy. A learned and thoughtful man, he had over fifty volumes to his name on topics as diverse as the history of the empire, grammar, the war in Germany and natural history. When told of the water problems, suspecting earthquakes, he orders a glass of wine.

[Pliny] set the glass carefully on the table. At first, the engineer did not grasp what point he was trying to make, but as he studied the glass more closely, he saw that the surface of the wine was vibrating slightly. Tiny ripples radiated out from the center, like the quivering of a plucked string.

Harris’ forte is research; all his novels are bursting with informative content. Fascinating bits of information are built into the story:

Everything about this part of Italy was strange, [Attilius] thought. Even the rust-red soil around Puteoli possessed some quality of magic, so that when it was mixed with lime and flung into the sea it turned to rock. This puteolanam, as they called it, in honor of its birthplace, was the discovery that had transformed Rome. And it had also given his family their profession, for what had once needed laborious construction in stone and brick could now be thrown up overnight. With shuttering and cement Agrippa had sunk the great wharves of Misenum, and had irrigated the empire with aqueducts.

The buildup is tense, and the eruption itself is completely riveting: the pumice hail upon the water, the rumble, the dust, the brown cloud fountaining from the mountain… with molten rock, pumice and ash blasted forth at 1.5 million tons per second.

Pompeii was the first of Harris’ novels set in Ancient Rome, to be followed by the Cicero trilogy — Imperium, Lustrum/Conspirata, and Dictator. All are great reads, but the focus on engineering and architecture in Pompeii makes it my favourite.