‘We’re incredibly lucky we can see any of this at all,’ Jack murmured. ‘The carbonized scrolls found in the villa in the eighteenth century took years to unravel, millimetre by millimetre. But everything we saw in that room was incredibly well preserved, having missed the firestorm in AD 79. There seems to be some kind of resin or wax in the papyrus which means it’s still supple.’ ‘This looks like two paragraphs in one hand, with a section in the middle in a completely different hand,’ Costas said.
Maria nodded. ‘The main text is like the printed page, the practised hand of a copyist, a scribe. The other writing is a little sprawling, more like personal handwriting, legible but certainly not a copyist’s hand.’
‘What are those blotches?’
‘At first I thought they might be blood, but then I sniffed them,’ Jack said. ‘It’s what I saw all over that table in the chamber. They’re wine stains.’
‘Let’s hope it was a good vintage on that final night,’ Maria murmured.
Costas pointed at a slip of papyrus attached to the top of the scroll, like a label. ‘So that’s the title?’
‘The sillybos,’ Jack said, nodding. ‘ Plinius, Naturalis Historia . This scroll must have been taken out from the batch in the basket by the door, undoubtedly one of the volumes of completed text. I can still hardly believe it. Nothing like this has survived anywhere else from antiquity, a first edition by one of the most famous writers of the classical period.’
‘I can see that,’ Costas murmured. ‘But why are we being so secretive about this?’
‘Okay.’ Jack pointed to the upper line in the scroll. ‘The first clue for me was that word, Iudaea. Pliny the Elder mentions Judaea in several places in the Natural History. He tells us about the origin and cultivation of the balsam tree, and about a river that dries up every Sabbath. Typical Pliny, a mix of authoritative natural history and fable. But the main discussion of Judaea is in his geographical chapter, where he tells us everything else he thinks worth knowing about the place. That’s what we’ve got here.’ Jack opened his modern copy of Pliny’s Natural History at a bookmarked page, and pressed it down. They could see the Latin on the left-hand side, the English translation on the right. He read out the first line on the page: ‘ “ Supra Idumaeam et Samariam Iudaea longe lateque funditur. Pars eius Syriae iuncta Galilaea vocatur.” ’
He peered back at the scroll, then at the printed text, reading it again under his breath. ‘It’s identical. Those medieval monks who transcribed this got it right after all.’ He read out the translation. ‘“Beyond Idumaea and Samaria stretches the wide expanse of Judaea. The part of Judaea adjoining Syria is called Galilee.”’ He then began to work his way down the text, his eyes darting from the translation to the scroll and back again, pausing occasionally where the lack of punctuation in the scroll made it difficult to follow. ‘Pliny was fascinated by the Dead Sea,’ he murmured. ‘Here, he tells us how nothing at all can sink in it, how even the bodies of bulls and camels float along. He loved this kind of stuff. That’s the trouble. He was right about the high salinity of the Dead Sea, but there were other wonders he wrote about that were completely fabulous, and he wasn’t great at distinguishing fact from fiction. If he had any kind of guiding principle, it was to include everything he heard. He was almost entirely reliant on second-hand sources.’
‘At least with Claudius he would have had a reliable informant, ’ Maria said. ‘A pretty sound scholar, by all accounts.’
‘Here we go,’ Jack said. ‘This is just before the gap in the scroll text, before the writing style changes. ‘ “ Iordanes amnis oritur e fonte Paniade. The source of the river Jordan is the spring of Panias.” Then there’s a longer description: “ In lacum se fundit quem plures Genesaram vocant, xvi p. longitudinis, vi latitudinis, amoenis circumsaeptum oppidis, ab oriente Iuliade et Hippo, a meridie Tarichea, quo nomine aliqui et lacum appellant, ab occidente Tiberiade aquis calidis salubri. It widens out into a lake usually called the Sea of Gennesareth, 16 miles long and 6 broad, skirted by the agreeable towns of Iulias and Hippo on the east, Tarichae on the south, the name of which place some people also give to the lake, and Tiberias with its salubrious hot springs on the west.” ’
Jack pointed at a map he had laid on the other side of the light table. ‘This time he’s not writing about the Dead Sea but the Sea of Galilee, some eighty miles north at the head of the Jordan Valley. Gennesareth was the Roman name for it, the same as the modern Hebrew name Kinnereth. Tiberias is the main town today on the Sea of Galilee, a popular resort. Tarichae he got wrong, it’s not south but west, a few miles north of Tiberias. Tarichae was the Roman name for Migdal, home of Mary Magdalene.’
‘The place where the Gospels say Jesus began his ministry,’ Maria said.
Jack nodded. ‘Along the western shore of the Sea of Galilee.’ He paused, and sat back. ‘Now we come to the gap in the scroll text. This is where it gets really intriguing. There’s no gap at all in the modern printed text, based on the medieval transcription, which goes straight on to a discussion of bitumen and the Dead Sea.’
‘So our scroll must be a later version, the basis for a new edition that was never published,’ Costas murmured. ‘Maybe it was one he was working on when he died, with updates and changes.’
‘He may have asked his scribe to do him a working copy, leaving gaps where he thought he was likely to make additions,’ Maria said. ‘And that could be the copy he brought with him to Claudius.’
‘Writing the Natural History must have been an organic process, and it’s hard to believe a magpie mind like Pliny’s would ever have been able to leave it alone,’ Jack said. ‘And remember, more places were being conquered and explored by the Romans every year, so there was always plenty to add. Claudius would have been able to tell him much that was new about Britain, especially as we now know that Britain was foremost in Claudius’ mind at the time of the eruption of Vesuvius, with his own history of Britannia in progress. And if Pliny had survived Vesuvius, my guess is we’d have had a whole new chapter on vulcanology.’
‘Can you read what’s in the gap?’ Costas said.
‘I can, just,’ Jack said. ‘It’s in a completely different hand to the main text in the scroll – spidery, precise. I’ve no doubt this is the actual hand of Pliny the Elder.’ As he said the words Jack suddenly felt himself transported back to that hidden room in the villa almost two thousand years ago, beneath the lowering volcano, the ink still freshly blotted and the wine stains still reeking of grapes and alcohol, as if the figures on either side of him were not Maria and Costas but Pliny the Elder and Claudius, urging him to join them in exploring the revelations of their world.
‘Well, fire away,’ Costas said, peering at him quizzically.
Jack snapped back and leaned over the text. ‘Okay. Here goes. This is where those words appear, the ones I saw when we found this scroll in the villa. The reason for all this secrecy.’ He glanced at Costas, then paused, scanning the text to pinpoint the beginning and end of the sentences and to put the Latin into coherent English word order. ‘Here’s the first sentence: “Claudius Caesar visited this place with Herod Agrippa, where they met the fisherman Joshua of Nazareth, he whom the Greeks called Jesus, who my sailors in Misenum now call the Christos.” ’