No contemporary portrait of Pliny the Elder survives, but his nephew reports that when his body was discovered, it was “still fully clothed and looking more like sleep than death.” When Pompeii was excavated, archaeologists used plaster to fill the voids in layers of ash that once held human bodies, allowing us to see the exact position a person was in when he or she died. This plaster cast is not Pliny but is as close to him in death as we can come.