A very literal minded student once asked me to draw this house on the board while she read the letter out. We got as far as the porticoes and I had to stop and rub out the atrium. I have since learned that I was joining a tradition, and that the tradition is at least four hundred years old.
Epistulae 2.17, written to a friend called Gallus, is Pliny the Younger explaining why he is so fond of his place on the coast at Laurentum. It sits seventeen miles from the city, near enough that you can finish the day's business and still sleep there: decem septem milibus passuum ab urbe secessit. Two roads will get you to it, leaving the Laurentine at the fourteenth milestone or the Ostian at the eleventh. The last stretch is sand, heavy going in a carriage, soft and quick on a horse.
Those opening lines contain every measurement in the letter. Once you are inside the villa, Pliny never gives another dimension. Not a foot, not a pace, not a ratio. Rooms are large, small, extremely neat, spacious, ample, cheerful. The two plunge baths in the cold room are abunde capacia si mare in proximo cogites, plenty roomy if you bear in mind the sea is next door, which is a joke rather than a number.
Exactly once, he offers a form:
deinde porticus in D litterae similitudinem circumactae, quibus parvola sed festiva area includitur
Then porticoes swung round in the likeness of the letter D, enclosing a small but cheerful yard. That is the whole of the geometry in the description of a substantial house: a simile borrowed from the alphabet. And a D has a straight side and a bowed one, and he does not say which way round it sits. Turn the flat back towards the entrance and you have one building. Turn it towards the sea and you have a different one. Both readings honour the Latin equally.
Light and wind.
A small bedroom takes the sunrise through one window and holds the sunset with the other (2.17.6). The corner between two rooms catches and concentrates the purest sun, and so hoc hibernaculum, hoc etiam gymnasium meorum est, this is my winter room and also the household's gym, and in it every wind falls silent except the ones that bring cloud (2.17.7). A bedroom curved into an apse follows the sun round with all its windows (2.17.8). In one of the two towers there is a room in which the sun both rises and sets (2.17.13). The covered gallery gets a whole paragraph of solar bookkeeping: it holds the sun and shuts out the north wind, so there is as much warmth in front of it as cold behind, and it breaks the opposing winds on opposite flanks (2.17.17).
This is a man who has lived in a building through a full year. He knows where to sit in February. He either does not know or does not care how wide the room is, and no draughtsman can do anything with that.
Take the sun and the wind away and what is left joining the rooms is a chain of connective verbs, most of them meaning "next to".
| Latin, with section | Literally | What a draughtsman still does not know |
|---|---|---|
| Est contra medias cavaedium hilare (5) | Opposite the middle of them, a cheerful court | Opposite the middle measured from where |
| Huius a laeva retractius paulo cubiculum (6) | To the left of this, set back a little, a room | How little is a little |
| Annectitur angulo cubiculum (8) | A room is attached to the corner | Which of the corner's two faces |
| Adhaeret dormitorium membrum (9) | A sleeping wing adheres | On which side, and at what angle |
| Ex alio latere cubiculum est politissimum (10) | On the other side, a very smart room | The other side of the axis, or of the last room named |
| Inde balinei cella frigidaria (11) | From there, the bath's cold room | Through a door, a passage, or a courtyard |
| cohaeret calida piscina (11) | A hot pool coheres | Shares a wall, or merely touches |
| nec procul sphaeristerium (12) | Not far off, a ball court | Not far |
| Iunctum est cubiculum noctis et somni (22) | Joined to it, the bedroom of night and sleep | Joined how |
| Applicitum est cubiculo hypocauston (23) | A tiny furnace room is applied to the bedroom | Beside it, above it, or under it |
Every one of those is a relation with no magnitude attached. Latin is entirely comfortable with that, because adiacet and cohaeret and annectitur are true of two things that touch anywhere at all. A plan is not comfortable with it. A plan is obliged to choose.
That is the problem, and it is grammatical rather than archaeological. Pliny's prepositions and connectives carry sequence and rough direction. They do not carry distance, and they carry orientation only when the sun is involved. He is not withholding anything. He never had the information in that form, because he was not describing a plan. He was describing a walk.
Félibien des Avaux printed plans and descriptions of two of Pliny's country houses in Paris in 1699. Robert Castell brought out his own reconstruction in The Villas of the Ancients Illustrated, printed for himself in London in 1728. Helen Tanzer gathered up the tradition in The Villas of Pliny the Younger in 1924. Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey published an entire book in 1994, The Villas of Pliny from Antiquity to Posterity, on what posterity has made of these two letters. Every plan I have looked at has been superseded by the next one, and if any of them had settled the question the following one would not have been necessary.
@nullisland/every-projection-is-wrong-here-is-how-much deals with a neighbouring impossibility that has the decency to be measurable: you cannot flatten a sphere without lying, but you can say by how much. Here you cannot even bound the error. The letter has far more in common with @switchback/cape-wrath-trail-eleven-days than with a survey. It is a route, given in the order a guest walks it, with the good bits marked.
The best passage in the letter is not architectural at all. Past the terrace and the gallery and the garden there is a small suite he built himself:
diaeta est amores mei, re vera amores: ipse posui
A suite which is my love, truly my love: I put it up myself. Inside it a sun room, and set back from the middle wall a little alcove that can be added to the bedroom or taken away from it by drawing glazing and curtains across.1 And then:
Lectum et duas cathedras capit; a pedibus mare, a tergo villae, a capite silvae
It holds a couch and two chairs. At your feet the sea, behind you the other villas, at your head the woods.
You cannot draw a house from that. You can, however, sit in it. He has given us a couch, two chairs and three views arranged around a body, and the body is the origin of the whole coordinate system. Everything in the letter is stated from the position of somebody who is already inside, which is why the plans keep failing and why I have stopped filing that under the letter's faults.2
The vocabulary is part of the trouble. Cryptoporticus, the covered gallery, is what Lewis and Short flag as a vox hibrida, half Greek and half Latin, and they can cite it from Pliny's letters and effectively nowhere else. Zotheca, the alcove, is Greek ζωθήκη and their citation is 2.17.21. Heliocaminus, the sun room, is ἡλιοκάμινος and their citations are 2.17.20 and a passage of the Digest. Three of the words for the parts of his house are words we have largely because he used them here. ↩
Gestatio, the drive that rings the garden at 2.17.13, is not a path for walking on. It is from gestare, to be carried: a place where you are conveyed about, on doctor's orders, in a litter or a light carriage. Lewis and Short gloss it as a promenade and send you to this letter and to 5.6.17. Even his outdoor circulation is specified by what a body is doing rather than by what a plan would show. ↩