Pompeii

had crowned in the Natural History as the most courageous man who had ever lived – wounded twenty-three times in the course of his campaigns, left crippled, twice captured by Hannibal and held in chains every day for twenty months; Sergius had ridden into his final battle with a right hand made of iron, a substitute for the one he had lost. He was not as successful as Scipio or Caesar, but what did that matter? 'All other victors truly have conquered men,' Pliny had written, 'but Sergius vanquished fortune also.'
    'To vanquish fortune' – that was what a man should strive to do. Accordingly, as the slaves prepared his dinner, he told an astonished Pomponianus that he would first like to take a bath and he waddled off, escorted by Alexion, to soak in a cold tub. He removed his filthy clothes and clambered into the clear water, submerging his head completely into a silent world. Surfacing, he announced that he wished to dictate a few more observations – like the engineer, he reckoned the dimensions of the manifestation at roughly eight miles by six – then allowed himself to be patted dry by one of Pomponianus's body-slaves, anointed in saffron-oil, and dressed in one of his friend's clean togas.
    Five of them sat down to dinner – Pliny, Pomponianus, Livia, Torquatus and Attilius – not an ideal number from the point of etiquette, and the din of the pumice on the roof made conversation difficult. Still, at least it meant that he had a couch to himself and space to stretch out. The table and the couches had been carried in from the dining room and set up in the sparkling hall. And if the food was not up to much – the fires were out and the best the kitchens could come up with were cold cuts of meat, fowl and fish – then Pomponianus, at Pliny's gentle prompting, had made up for it with the wine. He produced a Falernian, two hundred years old, a vintage from the consulship of Lucius Opimius. It was his final jar ('Not much point in hanging on to it now,' he observed gloomily).
    The liquid in the candlelight was the colour of rough honey and after it was decanted but before it was mixed with a younger wine – for it was too bitter to be drunk undiluted – Pliny took it from the slave and inhaled it, catching in its musty aroma the whiff of the old Republic: of men of the stamp of Cato and Sergius; of a city fighting to become an empire; of the dust of the Campus Martius; of trial by iron and fire.
    The admiral did most of the talking and he tried to keep it light, avoiding all mention, for example, of Rectina and the precious library of the Villa Calpurnia, or the fate of the fleet, which he supposed must be broken up by now and scattered all along the coast. (That alone might be enough to force his suicide, he realised: he had put to sea without waiting for imperial authority; Titus might not be forgiving.) Instead he chose to talk about the wine. He knew a lot about wine. Julia called him 'a wine bore'. But what did he care? To bore was the privilege of age and rank. If it had not been for wine his heart would have packed in years ago.
    'The records tell us that the summer in the consulship of Opimius was very much like this one. Long hot days filled with endless sunshine – "ripe", as the vintners call it.' He swirled the wine in his glass and sniffed it. 'Who knows? Perhaps, two centuries from now, men will be drinking the vintage from this year of ours, and wondering what we were like. Our skill. Our courage.' The thunder of the barrage seemed to be increasing. Somewhere wood splintered. There was a crash of breaking tiles. Pliny looked around the table at his fellow diners – at Pomponianus, who was wincing at the roof and clinging to the hand of his wife; at Livia, who managed to give him a small, tight smile (she always had been twice the man her husband was); at Torquatus, who was frowning at the floor; and finally at the engineer, who had not said a word throughout the meal. He felt warmly towards the aquarius – a man of science, after his own heart, who had sailed in search of knowledge.
    'Let us drink a toast,' he suggested, 'to the genius of Roman engineering – to the Aqua Augusta, which gave us warning of what was to happen, if only we had had the wit to heed it!' He raised his glass towards Attilius. 'The Aqua Augusta!'
    'The Aqua Augusta!'
    They drank, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. And it was a good wine, thought the admiral, smacking his lips. A perfect blend of the old and the