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This etext was prepared by Rebecca Trump
and Sue Asscher

THE LETTERS OF THE YOUNGER PLINY. WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY BY JOHN B.
FIRTH.

FIRST SERIES.

THE WALTER SCOTT PUBLISHING CO., LTD,
LONDON AND FELLING-ON-TYNE.
NEW YORK: 3 EAST 14TH STREET.

NOTE.--In the following translation the Teubner text, edited by Keil,
has been followed.

INTRODUCTION.

Some slight memoir and critical estimate of the author of this
collection of Letters may perhaps be acceptable to those who are
unfamiliar with the circumstances of the times in which he lived.
Moreover, few have studied the Letters themselves without feeling a warm
affection for the writer of them. He discloses his character therein so
completely, and, in spite of his glaring fault of vanity and his endless
love of adulation, that character is in the main so charming, that one
can easily understand the high esteem in which Pliny was held by the
wide circle of his friends, by the Emperor Trajan, and by the public at
large. The correspondence of Pliny the Younger depicts for us the
everyday life of a Roman gentleman in the best sense of the term. We
see him practising at the Bar; we see him engaged in the civil
magistracies at Rome, and in the governorship of the important province
of Bithynia; we see him consulted by the Emperor on affairs of state,
and occupying a definite place among the "Amici Caesaris." Best of all,
perhaps, we see him in his daily life, a devoted scholar, never so happy
as when he is in his study, laboriously seeking to perfect his style,
whether in verse or prose, by the models of the great writers of the
past and the criticisms of the friends whom he has summoned, in a
friendly way, to hear his compositions read or recited. Or again we
find him at one of his country villas, enjoying a well-earned leisure
after the courts have risen at Rome and all the best society has betaken
itself into the country to escape the heats and fevers of the capital.
We see him managing his estates, listening to the complaints of his
tenants, making abatements of rent, and grumbling at the agricultural
depression and the havoc that the bad seasons have made with his crops.
Or he spends a day in the open air hunting, yet never omits to take with
him a book to read or tablets on which to write, in case the scent is
cold and game is not plentiful. In short, the Letters of Pliny the
Younger give us a picture of social life as it was in the closing years
of the first, and the opening years of the second century of the
Christian era, which is as fascinating as it is absolutely unique.

Pliny was born either in 61 or 62 A.D. at Comum on Lake Larius. His
father, Lucius Caecilius Cilo, had been aedile of the colony, and, dying
young, left a widow, who with her two sons, sought protection with her
brother, Caius Plinius Secundus, the famous author of the Natural
History. The elder Pliny in his will adopted the younger of the two
boys, and so Publius Caecilius Secundus--as he was originally called--
took thenceforth the name of Caius Plinius, L.F. Caecilius Secundus.
Though later usage has assigned him the name of Pliny the Younger, he
was known to his contemporaries and usually addressed as Secundus. But
in his early years Pliny was placed under the guardianship of Virginius
Rufus, one of the most distinguished Romans of his day, a successful and
brilliant general who had twice refused the purple, when offered to him
by his legionaries, and who lived to a ripe old age--the Wellington of
his generation. So it was at Comum that he spent his early boyhood, and
his affection for his birthplace led him in later years to provide for
the educational needs of the youth of the district, who had previously
been obliged to go to Mediolanum (Milan) to obtain their schooling.
What can be better, he asks, than for children to be educated where they
are born, so that they may grow to love their native place by residing
in it? Pliny was fortunate in having so distinguished an uncle. On the
accession of Vespasian, the elder Pliny was called to Rome by the
Emperor, and when his nephew--vixdum adolescentus--joined him in the
capital, he took charge of his studies. At the age of fourteen the
young student had composed a Greek tragedy, to which he playfully refers
in one of his letters, and in Rome he had the benefit of attending the
lectures of the great Quintilian and Nicetes Sacerdos, and of making
literary friendships which were to prove of the utmost value to him in
after years. Pliny tells us that his uncle looked to him for assistance
in his literary work, and he was thus engaged when his uncle lost his
life in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79, so graphically described in the
two famous letters to Tacitus. That Pliny deeply felt the loss of his
relative and patron is shown by the eloquent tribute he paid to his
memory, and doubtless, as his death occurred just at his own entry into
public life, he was deprived of an influence which might have helped him
greatly in his career. Domitian was on the throne, when, in 82, Pliny
joined the 3rd Gallic legion, stationed in Syria, as military tribune.
Service in the field, however, was not to his liking, and, as soon as
his period of soldiering was over, he hurried back to Rome to win his
spurs at the Bar and climb the ladder of civic distinction. He became
Quaestor in 89 on the recommendation of the Emperor, Tribune in 91, and
Praetor in 93.

So far his advancement had been rapid, but evil times succeeded.
Domitian went from bad to worse. Always moody, suspicious, and
revengeful, he began to imitate the worst vices of his predecessors of
the line of Augustus. His hand fell heavily upon the Senatorial order,
and another era of proscription began, in which the dreaded delatores
again became the "terror" of Rome. It was a time of spoliation and
murder, and Pliny writes of it with a shudder. Contrasting with the
happy regime of Trajan that which prevailed in his youth and early
manhood, he declares that virtue was regarded with suspicion and a
premium set upon idleness, that in the camps the generals lacked
authority and the soldiers had no sense of obedience, while, when he
entered the Senate, he found it a craven and tongueless assembly (Curiam
trepidam et elinguem), only convened to perpetrate some piece of
villainy for the Emperor, or to humiliate the Senators by the sense of
their own impotence. Pliny was not the man to make a bold stand against
tyranny, and, during those perilous years, one can well believe that he
did his best to avoid compromising himself, though his sympathies were
wholly on the side of his proscribed friends. He was a typical
official, suave and polished in manner, yet without that perilous
enthusiasm which would simply have marked him for destruction. For two
years he was Prefect of the Military Treasury, an office directly in the
gift of the Emperor, and it would seem, therefore, that his character
for uprightness stood him in good stead with the tyrant even in his
worst years. He did not, like so many of the Roman nobles, retire from
public life and enter into the sullen opposition which enraged the
Emperors even more than active and declared antagonism.

In one passage, indeed, Pliny declares that he, too, was on the black
list of the Emperor, but the words must not be taken too literally. He
was given to boasting, and he may easily have represented, when the
danger was past, that the peril in which he had stood was greater than
it really was. No doubt he felt keenly the judicial murder of his
friends Senecio, Rusticus, and Helvidius, and the banishment of
Mauricus, Gratilla, Arria, and Fannia--for women were not spared in the
general proscription; but, after all, the fact that he held office
during the closing years of Domitian's life is ample proof that he knew
how to walk circumspectly, and did not allow his detestation of the
informers to compromise his safety. When at length, in 96, the Emperor
was assassinated in the palace, and the Senate raised Nerva to the
purple, Pliny stepped forward as the champion of the oppressed, and
impeached Publicius Certus for compassing the death of Helvidius
Priscus, though he was only so far successful that he prevented Certus
from enjoying the consulship which had been promised him. Pliny revised
the speech and published it in book form, and Certus died a few days
after it appeared, haunted, so Pliny tells us, by the vision of his
prosecutor pursuing him, sword in hand. Nerva's reign was short, but he
was succeeded by one of the best of the Roman Emperors, Trajan, a prince
under whose just, impartial and strong rule, a man of Pliny's character
was bound to thrive and pass from office to office. In 98 he had been
appointed by Nerva Prefect of the Treasury of Saturn, and in 100 he held
the Consulship for two months, while still retaining his post at the
Treasury, and delivered his well-known Panegyric on the 1st of
September in that year. Either in 103 or 104 he was advanced to the
Augurate, and two years later was appointed Curator of the Tiber. Then
in 111 or 112--according to Mommsen's Chronology--Trajan bestowed upon
him a signal mark of his esteem by selecting him for the Governorship of
the province of Pontus and Bithynia, which he had transferred from the
list of senatorial to that of imperial provinces. Pliny was given the
special title of Legate Propraetor with full Consular powers, and he
remained in his province for at least fifteen months. After that the
curtain falls. Whether he died in Bithynia, or shortly after his return
to Rome, or whether he lived on to enjoy the ripe old age of which he
writes so pleasantly in his letters, we do not know. Certainly the
probabilities are that, if he had lived, he would have continued to
correspond with his friends, and the absence of further letters makes
for the probability that he died in about his fiftieth year.

In judging these letters for their literary value, the first thing which
strikes the reader is that Pliny did not write for his friends alone.
Whatever the subject of the epistle, whether it was an invitation to
dinner, a description of the charms of the country, an account of a
visit to a friend, or an expression of condolence with some one in his
or her bereavement, he never allowed his pen to run on carelessly. He
scarcely ever prattles in his letters or lets himself go. One always
sees in the writer the literary man, who knows that his correspondence
is being passed round from hand to hand, and who hopes that it will find
readers among posterity. Consequently there is an air of studied
artificiality about many of the letters, which was more to the taste of
the eighteenth than the nineteenth century. They remind one in many
ways of Richardson and Mackenzie, and Pliny would have been recognised
by those two writers, and by the latter in particular, as a thorough
"man of sentiment." Herein they differ greatly from the other important
collection which has come down to us from classical times, the Letters
of Cicero. Pliny, indeed,--and in this he was a true disciple of his
old teacher Quintilian,--took the great Roman orator as his model.
Nothing pleased him more than for his friends to tell him that he was
the Cicero of his time. Like Marcus Tullius, he was the foremost
pleader of his day; like him again he dabbled in poetry, and his verses,
so far as we know them, were sorry stuff. Yet again like his master, he
fondly believed that he enjoyed the special inspiration of the Muses.
Pliny, unfortunately for his reputation, gives us a few samples, which
are quite as lame and jingling as the famous "O fortunatam natam, me
Consule, Romam!" which had made generations of Romans smile. And so, as
Cicero was in all things his master, Pliny too wrote letters, excellent
in their way, but lacking the vivacity and directness of his model, and,
of course, wholly deficient in the political interest which makes
Cicero's correspondence one of the most important authorities for the
history of his troublous time. Pliny's Letters cover the period from
the accession of Nerva down to 113 A.D. None precede the death of
Domitian in September 96. That is to say, they were written in an era
of profound political peace, and most of them in the reign of Trajan,
whose rule Pliny accepted with enthusiastic admiration. One certainly
could have wished that he had written freely to his friends during the
last years of Domitian's tyranny, for the value of such contemporary
documents would have been enormous. But he would only have risked his
life by so doing, and that he had no desire to do. It was not until the
tyrant had fallen under the sword of Stephanus that he felt it safe to
trust his thoughts to paper. The new era which was inaugurated loosened
his tongue and made him breathe more freely. He exulted that at last an
honest man could venture to hold his head high without drawing down upon
himself the vengeance of the vile informers who throve upon the
misfortunes of the State.

Two of Pliny's correspondents and friends were Cornelius Tacitus and
Suetonius Tranquillus. Yet no one can read either the Histories and
Annals of Tacitus or the Lives of the Caesars and then pass to a reading
of Pliny's Letters without being struck by the enormous difference in
their tone and spirit. It is almost impossible to believe that their
respective authors were contemporaries. When turning over the pages of
Tacitus one feels that the vices and despotism of the Emperors and the
Empire had crushed all spirit out of the world, had made quiet family
life impossible, and had stamped out every trace of justice and clean
living. It is a remarkable fact that the great writers of the first
century, as soon as the Augustan era had closed, should have been
masters of a merciless satire, which has rarely been equaled in the
history of the world, and never excelled. When we think of Roman
society, as it was in the early Empire, our thoughts recur to the lurid
canvases which have been painted for us by Juvenal, by Tacitus, by
Lucan, by Seneca, and by Petronius--pictures which have made the world
shudder, and have led even careful historians astray. Pliny supplies
the needful corrective and gives us the reverse side of the medal. Like
the authors we have mentioned, he too writes of the evil days which he
himself has passed through, as of a horrid nightmare from which he has
just awakened; but from his letters, artificial and stilted as they are
in some respects, we learn that there were still to be found those who
had not bowed the knee to Baal.

And so, with this volume in our hands, we obtain a personal introduction
to a number of distinguished Romans and Roman matrons, whose names have
been preserved for all time by the Younger Pliny. His circle of friends
was a large one. Let us mention a few of them. We have already spoken
of Virginius Rufus, the grand old soldier and patriot, who, dying at the
age of eighty-four, was awarded a public funeral, while Cornelius
Tacitus, then Consul, delivered the panegyric in his honour. Vestricius
Spurinna was another distinguished general of the old school, and Pliny
relates with enthusiasm how he paid a visit to him in his country-house
when Spurinna was seventy-seven years of age and had retired from public
office. He tells us how his friend spent his day, how he drove and
walked and played tennis to keep himself in health, wrote Greek and
Latin lyrics, and maintained a keen interest in all that went on in the
capital. Corellius Rufus is another of the older men of whom Pliny
writes with sincere affection, and he helped to pay the debt of
gratitude he owed him by numerous acts of kindness to his daughter
Crellia. Voconius Romanus is another of his closest friends, and Pliny
tells us that he wrote such admirable letters that you would think the
Muses themselves must speak in Latin. His literary associates numbered
among them Caius Cornelius Tacitus, Silius Italicus the poet--whose
veneration for Virgil was so great that he kept his master's birthday
with more solemnity than his own, and visited his tomb on the Bay of
Naples with as much respect as worshippers pay to a temple,--Martial the
epigrammatist, Suetonius Tranquillus the historian, and others such as
Passennus Paullus, Caninius Rufus, Virgilius Romanus, and Caius Fannius,
whose works have not survived the wreck of time, though Pliny showers
upon all of them enthusiastic and indiscriminate praise. Again, he
enjoyed the friendship of a number of distinguished foreigners,
professional rhetoricians and philosophers, who came back to Rome after
their sentence of banishment, passed by Domitian, had been revoked by
Nerva and Trajan. Euphrates, Artemidorus, and Isaeus were the three
most famous, and their respective styles are carefully described by
Pliny. Even more interesting perhaps is the gallery of Roman ladies,
whose portraits are limned with so fine and discriminating a touch.
Juvenal again is responsible for much misconception as to the part the
women of Rome played in Roman society. The appalling Sixth Satire, in
which he unhesitatingly declares that most women--if not all--are bad,
and that virtue and chastity are so rare as to be almost unknown, in
which he roundly accuses them of all the vices known to human depravity,
reads like a monstrous and disgraceful libel on the sex when one turns
to Pliny and makes the acquaintance of Arria, Fannia, Corellia, and
Calpurnia. The characters of Arria and Fannia are well known; they are
among the heroines of history. But in Pliny there are numerous
references to women whose names are not even known to us, but the terms
in which they are referred to prove what sweet, womanly lives they led.
For example, he writes to Geminus: "Our friend Macrinus has suffered a
grievous wound. He has lost his wife, who would have been regarded as a
model of all the virtues even if she had lived in the good old days. He
lived with her for thirty-nine years, without so much as a single
quarrel or disagreement." "Vixit cum hac triginta novem annis sine
jurgio, sine offensa. One is reminded of the fine line of Propertius,
in which Cornelia boasts of the blameless union of herself and her
husband, Paullus--

"Viximus insignes inter utramque facem."

This is no isolated example. One of the most pathetic letters is that
in which Pliny writes of the death of the younger daughter of his friend
Fundanus, a girl in her fifteenth year, who had already "the prudence of
age, the gravity of a matron, and all the maidenly modesty and sweetness
of a girl." Pliny tells us how it cut him to the quick to hear her
father give directions that the money he had meant to lay out on dresses
and pearls and jewels for her betrothal should be spent on incense,
unguents, and spices for her bier. What a different picture from
anything we find in Juvenal, who would fain have us believe that
Messalina was the type of the average Roman matron of his day!

Such were some of Pliny's friends. His distinguished position at the
Bar drew him a host of clients; his official status and his friendship
with Trajan gave him the entree into any society he liked. He was,
moreover, a man of considerable wealth, generous, even lavish, with his
money, and his disposition was one of the kindest. He was always ready
to believe the best of any one, always prepared to do a friend a
service, devoted to his wife and her relations, and anxious to deal
justly and honourably with all men. We have called him vain, and vain
he undoubtedly was to an extraordinary degree. But Pliny's vanity is
never offensive. The very naivete with which he acknowledges his
failing disarms all criticism and merely renders it amusing. Indeed, it
is doubtful whether he would have admitted that it was a failing at all,
inasmuch as it was his love of praise which spurred him on to literary
endeavour. The Romans, in their grand manner, affected a certain
magniloquence which is alien to the Anglo-Saxon cast of thought, and if
Horace could declare of his own odes that he had erected a monument more
durable than brass, Pliny, who always had the great masters before him,
naturally fell into the same rather vainglorious train of thought. His
frankest confession is to be found in a letter to Titinius Capito, who
had urged him to write history, when he says: "Me autem nihil aeque ac
diuturnitatis amor et cupido sollicitat, res homine dignissima, eo
presertime qui nullius sibi conscius culpae posteritatis memoriam non
reformidet." Or again, he admits that he is not Stoic enough to be
merely content with the consciousness of having done his duty. He
craves for a public testimony thereto, a little applause from the
bystanders, a vote of thanks from those whom he has benefited. Most of
us desire the same--the difference is that Pliny does not mind owning up
to it. But this vanity of his peeps out in curious places. When we
find him speaking of a young Roman of fashion standing for hours in a
crowd to listen to his pleading in the courts, or of his audience
pressing him not to omit a single line of his poems, or of the
deferential way in which certain young barristers of promise hang on his
lips, copy his gestures and bow to his judgment, one cannot resist a
smile. When he tells us that he went on calmly reading and taking notes
during the eruption of Vesuvius, though the hot ashes were threatening
to overwhelm the villa in which he was staying, or when he quotes the
really execrable verses which some scribbler of the day composed in his
honour, with the most exquisite self-complacency, one is tempted to show
a little impatience at such extravagant self-satisfaction. Tacitus
again--that supreme master of irony--must have occasionally curled his
thin lip on reading some of the epistles which were addressed to him by
his friend Pliny. It is a tribute to Pliny's powers of literary
discernment that he appreciated the marvellous ability of Tacitus,
though had he failed to do so, we should have rated him for his
blindness. No cultured Roman could fail to see that Tacitus had brought
a new literary style to a pitch of the highest perfection, and his fame
throughout his lifetime was enormous. So apparently was Pliny's, and
the latter boasts that their names are mentioned together in everyday
conversation, and in the last wills and testaments of people with
literary taste. Tacitus one day was sitting at the games, and got into
conversation with a stranger sitting in the next seat. It took a
literary turn, and the stranger was delighted with the learning that
Tacitus displayed. "Are you a Roman, or from the country" said he.
"You know me quite well," answered Tacitus, "from the books you have
studied." "Then," rejoined the stranger, "you must be either Tacitus or
Pliny." It was Tacitus himself who told Pliny the story, and one can
imagine how it would delight him. He promptly sits down and tells it to
his friend Maximus, and adds another story of a similar character. But
the most extraordinary passage of all occurs in a letter (vii. 20) to
Tacitus himself. In it Pliny says that when he was a young man and
Tacitus was already famous, he determined to make him his model. There
were, he said, many brilliant geniuses, but you--such was the affinity
of our natures--seemed to me to be the most easy to imitate, and the
most worthy of imitation. Maxime imitabilis, maxime imitandus
videbaris. Unconscious conceit could go no farther!

And yet one can pardon this egregious vanity when one thinks of Pliny's
other qualities. Who else is there in Roman literature who so
thoroughly corresponds with our modern ideal of a rich, generous,
cultured public servant? In one place we find him providing for the
educational needs of his birthplace, Comum. In another he renounces his
share of an inheritance, and bestows it upon his old township. Or he
buys a statue for a temple, finds the money for a new shrine, pays the
debts of an acquaintance, gives a friend's daughter a handsome dowry,
opens his purse and enables another deserving friend to acquire the
status of a senator, or finds Martial his travelling expenses. All the
rising young authors and barristers in Rome looked to him for
encouragement and support; he was ready to attend their public readings,
to rise when the reading was over and say a few words of encouragement,
to canvass for them if they were standing for office, and enlist on
their behalf all the influence at his command. And he only asked in
return a little deference and acknowledgment of his kindness! Most
interesting of all, we find him giving a farm to his old nurse, and
asking a friend to look after it for her. He sends a slave of his, who
was troubled with consumption, to Egypt for a change of air, and
afterwards to the colony of Forum Julii, the modern Frejus on the
Riviera. Pliny writes of the slaves of his household just as any kind-
hearted Jamaican planter would have written before the Emancipation Act,
and it is to be noted that the head slaves of a Roman gentleman's
establishment were often Greeks of high literary attainments, and
treated by their masters as intimate and affectionate friends. Pliny
narrates with a shock of uneasiness and horror the story of a Roman
knight who was beaten to death by the servants of his household, and,
though he admits that the knight had been cruel and overbearing, such an
untimely fate brought home to him the insecurity of all masters--that
insecurity which led the Romans to punish with such merciless severity
any attack by a slave upon his owner. Not that Pliny had any cause for
self-reproach! He tells us in a charming letter his rule of conduct
with his dependants, and the theory on which he conducted his household.
According to his view, "Servis respublica quaedam et quasi civitas domus
est." Consequently, he allowed them to make wills and leave their
property as they desired, provided only that the recipients were also
members of the household, and, what was better still, he speaks of his
"facilitas manumittendi"--his readiness to give them their freedom for
faithful service. One can well imagine that Pliny's was a model family,
that it was his pride to be in every sense of the word a just
paterfamilias, and that he showed his slaves great consideration for
their welfare. He complains, indeed, jocularly in one place that too
much kindness is not good for servants, as it leads them to presume upon
the easy-going temperament of their master, but that is only a good-
natured grumble on the perennial servant problem.

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