Pliny, Letters 6.20: Pliny's Escape from Misenum

Flight from Misenum, an AP® Latin escape room on this passage

What happens

Tacitus has been gripped by the first letter and wants to know what happened to Pliny himself, who had stayed behind at Misenum with his mother. Pliny, seventeen at the time, tells the story while insisting it is not fit for history.

After his uncle sails, Pliny studies, bathes and sleeps badly; for days there have been tremors, and that night they grow so violent that everything seems to be turning over. In the morning he is still reading Livy when a friend of his uncle scolds him and his mother for sitting calmly. The buildings are tottering, so they leave the town with a terrified crowd.

Outside, the carts will not stay still, the sea is sucked back from the shore, and a black cloud split by flames comes down over the bay. Pliny's mother begs him to run and leave her, since she is old and heavy; he refuses to be saved without her and takes her hand. A darkness falls, not like a moonless night but like a closed room with the lamp put out. Amid the shrieks of women, the wailing of babies and the shouts of men, Pliny comforts himself that the whole world is dying with him. At last a real daylight returns and they find everything buried in ash as if in snow.

Grammar to look for

Indirect statement in his mother's plea: posse enim iuvenem, sē et annīs et corpore gravem bene moritūram, “a young man could escape; she, weighed down by years and body, would die well”
The future infinitive in indirect statement: salvum mē nisi ūnā nōn futūrum, “that I would not be saved unless we were together”
The potential subjunctive with an indefinite 'you': Audīrēs ululātūs fēminārum, “you could have heard the shrieks of women”
Ablatives absolute: lūmine exstīnctō, “with the lamp put out”

Style

Tricolon with asyndeton: Audīrēs ululātūs fēminārum, īnfantum quirītātūs, clāmōrēs virōrum. Three groups and three different sounds, built into a picture of panic.
Comparison by negation: nōn quālis illūnis aut nūbila, sed quālis in locīs clausīs lūmine exstīnctō. Pliny defines the darkness by saying what it was not.
Simile: tamquam nive obducta. The ending: the landscape covered in ash as if in snow.

Themes to think about

Pliny's portrait of himself at seventeen: calm, studious, loyal, and perhaps a little foolish
Duty to a parent (pietas) and the contrast with the uncle's heroism in 6.16
Crowd behaviour and rumour in a disaster
Why Pliny insists this story is 'not worthy of history'

Practise this passage

Flight from Misenum is a self-grading escape room built from this passage's own vocabulary, with a grammar lock on five tenses of fugiō and videō. It takes about one lesson.

Play the free taster (2 of 7 locks)About the room

More passage guides

AP® and Advanced Placement® are registered trademarks owned by the College Board, which is not affiliated with Locked Lessons and does not endorse it or its escape rooms.