‘There is a bareness about an age that has neither letter-writers nor biographers.’ Virginia Woolf1 was writing about Dorothy Osborne and the seventeenth century when ‘the bare landscape becomes full of stir and quiver and we can fill in the spaces between the great books with the voices of people talking’. The Romans are the first letter-writers of the Classical world, or, rather, theirs are the letters which chance has preserved to satisfy our curiosity about people as persons, each one unpredictable and full of contradictions and different from his fellows. Greek literature keeps the quality of bareness: the great sweeps of thought are there, and the magnificent power to analyse human capacity and weakness, but there is no one, with the possible exception of Socrates, whose personal idiosyncracies are known. We pick up scraps where we can – from Aristophanes or Xenophon or Plutarch; and there are the pitiably few undisputed letters of Plato or the touching details of humble persons which survive in the occasional papyrus letter, but no one reveals himself as the true letter-writer never fails to do. So the Greek statue stands aloof with his stylized enigmatic smile, while the Roman portrait bust is recognizably someone like ourselves, and its irregular features speak for a single individual at a point of time.
Roman letters can take many forms. Cicero’s poured out freely, without thought of subsequent publication, and the Emperor Marcus Aurelius and his tutor, M. Cornelius Pronto, wrote almost daily to each other letters which are personal and wholly unselfconscious. Horace, Statius and Martial addressed verse letters to their friends; Pliny published his personal letters himself in carefully arranged selections. But it is a fallacy to suppose that only the first type of letter is self-revealing – we come to know Chesterfield and Walpole through their letters, if not as intimately as the Pastons or Charles Lamb. Horace’s form of letter-essay, which reappears in Montaigne and Addison, never loses its personal note, and Pliny’s letters have a wealth of autobiographical detail to capture the imagination and ‘fill in the spaces… with the voices of people talking’.
Cicero is generally thought to be most representative of the great writers of the late Republic, and his letters provide the most revealing information about his times. It is 150 years before the Empire has its letter-writer in Pliny. He has left a more faithful and less prejudiced picture of Rome as he knew it than did any of his contemporaries, and in him we can best see how a Roman of his class lived and thought at the turn of the first century. It is also possible to build up a remarkably complete record of his career and his personal life, for which all the facts come from four inscriptions (the most important of which are translated on pages 303–4) and his letters: there are 247 letters in the nine books of the personal correspondence, and 121 official letters to and from the Emperor Trajan published separately in a tenth book.
He was seventeen at the time of the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D.79 (VI:20), so was born in late 61 or early 62, the son of Lucius Caecilius of Comum. Both the Caecilii and his mother’s family, the Plinii, owned property in the district to which several letters refer. From the fact that he says nothing about his father, and from an inscription recording the latter’s bequests to his two sons and a concubine, Lutulla, it is supposed that his parents were separated and Pliny lived with his mother; after his father’s early death he had Verginius Rufus as guardian, the famous Rufus who had put down the revolt of Vindex against Nero in 68 (VI:10 and IX:19), and whose death at the age of eighty-three is described in an early letter (II:1). As there was no school at Comum (IV:13) he probably had tutors at home; a system he recommends to his friends (II:18 and III:3). He mentions with a touch of amusement the ‘tragedy’ he wrote in Greek at the age of fourteen (VII:4). He came to Rome to continue his education and attended the lectures of Nicetes Sacerdos, a well-known teacher of rhetoric from Smyrna, and those of the great teacher and writer Quintilian, whom Vespasian had appointed as a salaried professor of rhetoric (VI:6). In Rome he came in closer contact with his mother’s brother, the polymath Elder Pliny, who died during the eruption of Vesuvius; Pliny and his mother were then staying at Misenum where the uncle was in command of the fleet (VI:16 and 20).
Under the terms of his uncle’s will he inherited the full estate, and a change of name indicates his adoption by will as a son. Henceforward his official title is Gaius Plinius Luci filius Caecilius Secundus. He began his career at the bar at the age of eighteen (V: 8) and mentions an early success before the Centumviral Court (V: 8) – the Roman Chancery Court which specialized in cases of inheritance and which was to be Pliny’s special sphere throughout his active life in the courts (VI: 12). About this time he married his first wife, and soon after his senatorial career began with his appointment to a minor magistracy as one of the decemviri stlitibus iudicandis who presided over the panels of the Centumviral Court, He was then military tribune of the Third Gallic legion, probably for the minimum six months, and served in Syria as auditor of the auxiliary forces’ accounts (VII: 31). There he met the exiled philosophers Euphrates and Artemidorus (I:10 and III: II). After another minor office (sevir equitum Romanorum) he was one of the quaestors attached to the Emperor’s staff who conveyed his messages to the Senate (VII: 16). This was in 88 or 89.1 In 91 he was tribune of the people and felt it his duty to suspend his practice at the bar (I:23). The Emperor Domitian allowed him to proceed to the praetorship in 93 without waiting for the statutory year’s interval (VII : 16), and in the same year he appeared for the prosecution in the first of the four public trials of provincial governors which were to occupy him at intervals for many years. Baebius Massa was convicted in the case brought by the province of Baetica (VII : 33), but then retaliated by charging Pliny’s colleague, Herennius Senecio, with high treason. Senecio was one of the leaders of the ‘Stoic opposition’ to the Emperors, and his conviction and execution mark the beginning of the reign of terror for which Domitian is remembered, and which is so vividly recalled in Tacitus’s Agricola. The leaders of the opposition were put to death and many of their supporters were exiled, but though Pliny afterwards described himself as surrounded by falling thunderbolts (III: 11) he emerged unscathed. Indeed, he was given a three-year Treasury appointment as one of the officials in charge of the military Treasury.
Domitian was assassinated in September 96, and Pliny took the opportunity to vindicate the Stoic Helvidius Priscus by charging his prosecutor Publicius Certus (IX: 13). But the spirit of Nerva’s reign was against raking up the misdeeds of his predecessor, and Pliny had to be content with the tact that, though Certus was one of the officials of the Treasury of Saturn, and this usually led to the consulate, he was passed over; and when he died soon after, Pliny succeeded to his Treasury post along with his friend Cornutus Tertullus. This too was a three-year appointment; in Pliny’s case from 98 to 100. There had been changes in his personal life; his first wife had died and he had married again at some date unknown; his second wife died just before the trial of Certus. He remained on friendly terms with her mother, Pompeia Celerina, and appears to have managed her investments for her (III : 19). His guardian Verginius Rufus and his old friend and advisor Corellius Rufus had also died at the beginning of Nerva’s reign (I:12 and II:1).
In a letter written to Trajan soon after his accession in January 98 (X: 3a), Pliny seeks official permission to conduct the case against the governor of Africa, Marius Priscus, while still in his Treasury post, and elsewhere describes the trial in detail (II:11 and 12). Priscus was found guilty in January 100, and soon afterwards Pliny agreed to conduct a similar .prosecution of Caecilius Classicus on behalf of the province of Baetica (III: 4). He was working on this when he and Cornutus Tertullus were consuls together for two months (September to October 100) and Pliny moved the official vote of thanks to the Emperor which he subsequently elaborated and published as ‘the Panegyricus (III: 13 and 18). Classicus was convicted in the following year, but Pliny had to wait until 103 before receiving a priesthood, the usual decoration for merit in his day. He was duly elected augur to fill the vacancy left by the death of Frontinus (IV: 8). Trajan’s answer to his earlier petition for a priesthood (X: 13) is not preserved. (In a short inscription found in a village near Como, Pliny’s official titles include that of priest of the deified Emperor Titus; this must have been an honour bestowed by his native town.) He married his third wife Calpurnia, orphaned granddaughter of Calpurnius Fabatus, a wealthy citizen of Comum who evidently supervised the management of Pliny’s estates in the district (VI:30). Pliny writes a touching account of this new marriage (IV:19), and his devotion to his young wife and grief at her miscarriage and subsequent sterility are undisguised (VII:5 and VIII:IO). Trajan’s conferment of the privileges of parents of three children can have been only poor consolation.
At the end of his Treasury duties Pliny was again active in the Centumviral Court, though he looked forward increasingly to honourable retirement (II:14). He also acted frequently as assessor, either in the City prefect’s court (VI:II) or to Trajan himself (IV:22). Two more big cases involving governors of Bithynia occupied him; he defended Julius Bassus during the winter of 102–3 (IV:9), and Varenus Rufus in that of 106–7 (V:20). He accepted another three-year office in 104 when he was elected president of the Tiber Conservancy Board (Curator alvei Tiberis et riparum et cloacarum urbis; V: 14) and so was responsible for keeping the river banks in repair to prevent flooding and for maintaining Rome’s sewers. Pliny must have enjoyed this; practical problems of water supply and drainage had always interested him and he probably knew the works on civil engineering of his friend Frontinus.
Finally came his appointment to a special commission as the Emperor’s representative in the province of Bithynia and Pontus, a post similar to that held in Greece by the Maximus to whom Pliny addresses a famous letter of advice (VIII:24). The mere fact that the province had brought charges against two successive governors indicated that something was very wrong with its affairs, both political and financial, and Pliny was to tour the towns, write reports on his findings, and settle lesser problems on the spot. Trajan doubtless chose him because of his knowledge of Bithynian interests gained through his thorough handling of the defence of Bassus and Varenus; he was also a recognized expert on finance. He arrived in time to celebrate the Emperor’s birthday on 18 September in (X: 17b), and he was on tour in Pontus when he conducted the annual ceremony for Trajan’s accession on 28 January 113; but as there is no mention of birthday celebrations for 113, presumably he died before September 113, and evidently with his work unfinished. (His colleague in the consulship, Cornotus Tertullus, was sent out later in Trajan’s reign with the same powers, and Tiberius Julius Severus was similarly sent there by Hadrian.) Calpurnia travelled out with Pliny; the letters break off with Trajan’s authorizing her return to Italy by the Imperial Post service, so that she could be with her aunt as soon as possible after her grandfather’s death. She and Pliny could not have seen each other again.
This was a successful career. It was very rare to hold the consulship at the early age of thirty-nine; Pliny’s colleague Tertullus was twenty years older. It was also rare to hold two Treasury posts in succession. It is interesting that none of the letters mentions the first of these, when the only other appointments not recalled are the local priesthood at Comum and the two minor offices held at the onset of his career and scarcely worth a mention after twenty years. It is in fact only from the Como inscription that we know that Domitian chose Pliny to fill the post in the military Treasury, and it may be that he wished his readers to forget that he owed anything to an Emperor whom he presents as a monster of tyranny and caprice. He was friendly with a great many people who suffered death or exile for their political views, and though he says more than once that he took risks on their behalf (III:II and IV: 24) perhaps he felt some embarrassment when the exiles of 93 returned to find him prosperous and unscathed. This is not to suggest that Puny was a time-server; but his interests were not really political, and his professional experience was financial and legal, with the law of property as his special sphere. In a famous outburst in the Agricola (Chapter 42) Tacitus quotes his father-in-law’s career as an example to prove that ‘even under bad Emperors there can be great men’; Pliny too is a witness to the fact that competence and honesty can survive a corrupt régime. Someone must keep the civil administrative machine working, and it is the Plinys of all times and places who form a civil bureaucracy to carry on while governments come and go.
The nine books of the personal letters, carefully selected and arranged by Pliny himself, were certainly published in his lifetime and before he went out to Bithynia. The order is roughly chronological, but very few letters can be firmly dated by independent evidence, especially as the main dates of Pliny’s career are also in doubt. The theory that the books were published year by year, starting before the death of Verginius Rufus in January 97 (II:1) cannot be proved, and it seems much more likely that when Puny says in his introductory letter ‘I have made a collection…’ that he is writing some time after the date of the letters in Book 1 though he arranges them to give an impression of ‘taking them as they came to my hand’. Perhaps Books I-III appeared together, with the letter on the death of Martial closing this chapter, and the remaining books in pairs or threes: a single book would have been rather a slender volume even for an editor as cautious and painstaking as Pliny. His last important public case (that of Varenus) ends not later than the early part of 107. Between that date and that of his departure for Bithynia in III would seem to be a likely time for Pliny to be dividing his time between Laurentum and Tifernum and spending the retirement he had long anticipated (IV : 23) in sorting, selecting and arranging letters which had accumulated over a period of years.1 Earlier on he is not sufficiently advanced in his career and too busy delivering and revising his speeches for publication (V: 8) to consider publishing anything else. On this theory Books I-III cover the years 97 to 102 but are compiled and published some five years later; Books IV-VII deal with events of 103 to 107; and Books VIII-IX refer to the years 108 to 109 and cannot have been written long before they were made public.
The earlier letters are in fact far fuller of events and show Pliny active in Rome, professionally in the Centumviral Court and the Senate, and personally in many ways; revising his speeches and writing verse, carrying out social engagements and spending long hours at the verse-readings of his many friends, and writing tactfully phrased letters of recommendation for those whose careers he hoped to further. They also contain the tributes to the great men who had influenced his early years, Corellius Rufus, Silius Italicus, Verginius Rufus and his uncle. By the end of Book VII our picture of Pliny’s youth and early career is as complete as he is going to make it, and the last letter expressing his hope to be included in Tacitus’s Histories seems to close a chapter. Books VIII and IX contain only one long letter on a professional subject (IX: 13), and this refers to his vindication of Helvidius Priscus more than ten years earlier. Book ix is almost wholly descriptive, literary, or reflective; Pliny is enjoying his leisure at Tifernum, with plenty of time for reading and contemplation, and for writing literary criticism or philosophic advice to his friends. Twice he writes of his pride and pleasure at being recognized as an author and coupled with Tacitus, with the quiet assurance of one who feels he has reached his goal (IX:13 and 24). There is no indication that the series of letters is ended, though one letter (IX:2) may hint that retirement from professional life in Rome may result in a shortage of letters worthy of publication. But whatever Pliny’s intentions, his appointment to the special commission in Bithynia and Pontus marks the end of the life of cultivated leisure he had planned in one of the earliest letters (II:14). It is greatly to his credit that the new stimulus and responsibility bring out the best in him.
Bithynia lay along the south coast of the Black Sea and had been left to Rome by the will of its last king in 74 B.C. Nine years later Pompey extended the province eastwards by the addition of the western part of the kingdom of Pontus, and laid down its constitution by the lex Pompeia to which Pliny refers in his letters to Trajan (X: 80, 112, and 114). Nicomedia and Amastris were the capital cities of the two halves of the province, but only Chalcedon and Amisus were ‘free and confederate’ cities (X:92), and there were only two coloniae or Roman settlements, in Trajan’s rime: Apamea (X: 47) and Sinope. Though it was on the European side of the Bosporos, Byzantium belonged administratively to Bithynia (X:77). After Augustus’s reorganization of the Empire, Bithynia was governed as a senatorial province by a proconsul. Several of these governors are mentioned by Pliny: Lappius Maximus under Domitian (X:58), Servilius Calvus under Nerva (X:56), and Julius Bassus and Varenus Rufus whom Pliny had defended in their trials for maladministration in 103 and 106.
The problems confronting Pliny were mainly three: political disorder, municipal bankruptcy arising out of unregulated public spending, and irregularities in administration both central and local. That there was a risk of political disturbance in the province is evident from Trajan’s reluctance to permit people to form societies even for such purposes as a fire brigade or mutual benefit, and no less from Pliny’s doubts concerning the Christians. Though they appeared to do no more than support a ‘degenerate sort of cult carried to extravagant lengths’ and had ceased to hold meetings since Trajan’s ban on political societies, Pliny felt there was a risk of their fanaticism spreading from the towns to rural districts. Trajan’s attitude is calm and impartial (see x: 96–7 and note).
Pliny’s reports as he tours the cities have a recurrent theme. Prusa has large debts as a result of bad contracts and still needs public baths; Nicomedia has squandered vast sums on two abandoned attempts at building an aqueduct; Nicaea has thrown away money on a theatre and gymnasium without having the site surveyed; and Claudiopolis is busy with an impracticable plan for a gymnasium. Pliny is indefatigable in his efforts to remedy a bad project, to improve the amenities of the cities, and to ensure that there will be money to cover expenditure. He asks for authority to provide Sinope with a water supply and to cover an open sewer in Amastris in the interests of public health, and he convinces Trajan that communications at Nicomedia can be improved by cutting a canal from a nearby lake to the sea.
There are also irregularities of all kinds to report, some perhaps trivial in themselves, but all indicative of administrative inefficiency or dishonesty. In one town Pliny finds that slaves have found a way into the legions, in another that persons condemned to exile are still at large. He has to seek official rulings to define the legal position of foundlings or the age of entry to a local senate and the legality of admitted senators’ paying an entrance fee. Pliny writes fluently and precisely, and Trajan’s briefer replies are always to the point and explicit on principles for Pliny’s guidance: good administration must be in the interests of the people, tradition must be respected, and nothing is to be gained by retrospective penalties for the deficiencies of the past. Pliny has often been unfairly criticized for consulting Trajan unnecessarily. But only sixty-one letters were addressed to Trajan over a period of not quite two years, and, if the testimonials and formal congratulations on public anniversaries are excepted, Pliny wrote not more than forty times asking for guidance on specific points; and a large proportion of these letters fall into the first year of his appointment. Today, when cables and long-distance telephone calls can pass as freely as official dispatches, it does not seem that Pliny was unduly communicative for a man on a special commission in a disturbed area. There is no direct evidence for all he did on his own initiative, which must have been considerable, especially in his second year. When he obtains instructions to deal with the building problems at Nicomedia and Nicaea, presumably he deals with them, for he does not raise the subject again; and when the state of a city’s finances calls for no comment, evidently he found nothing he could not settle himself. Nor can the letters provide evidence for Trajan’s undue preoccupation with routine detail; his secretariat would acknowledge formal messages and draft some of the briefer replies while passing up to him the more important issues.’ Trajan to Pliny’ is often a Whitehall formula, of the pattern ‘I am directed by the Lords Commissioners of the Board of the Admiralty’ in a clerk’s letter. Sometimes there is no doubt that Trajan is writing himself, and he may be revealed in a trace of impatience or amusement, but the relationship between the two was one of mutual trust and appreciation, with some real warmth of feeling. Here, too, is not the decline and fall of the Empire, but a living indication of why it stood so long.
Book x as we have it was published posthumously; by whom there is no indication – Suetonius, perhaps, or another of Pliny’s literary friends. The correspondence dealing with Bithynia is prefaced by fourteen short letters addressed to Trajan in which Pliny offers congratulations or thanks for honours conferred, or makes requests on behalf of friends and dependants. Most of these seem to date from the early years of Trajan’s reign, and it is surprising that no more letters were to be found in the imperial files or among Pliny’s personal papers to add to this record of the relations between one of the best of Rome’s Emperors and his devoted servant.
More than a hundred persons have letters addressed to them in Books I to IX, and many more are referred to by name. Some are deserving young men, often from provincial Italy, about whom the letters tell no more than that Pliny wished to further their careers, though from other sources we may know that they won distinction. For example, the Fuscus Salinator and Ummidius Quadratus whose early success at the bar gladdened Pliny’s heart (VI: II) both reached the consulship after his death and married into the imperial family; one married Hadrian’s niece and the other the sister of Marcus Aurelius. They receive several letters of advice and appreciation. Other correspondents are better known. There are professional colleagues such as Titius Aristo, the jurist, and Calestrius Tiro and Voconius Romanus, two of Pliny’s closest friends. There are literary men like Tacitus and Suetonius and literary aspirants such as Pompeius Saturninus and Sentius Augurinus (I: 16 and IV: 27) of whom Pliny writes in glowing terms. He is always appreciative of older men like Spurinna, whose life could be enviable in his late seventies (III: 1), and Arrius Antoninus, who retained all his literary gifts (IV: 3); and there are family letters to Calpurnia’s grandfather and the aunt who brought her up, as well as to Pompeia Celerina, the mother of his second wife in whose relatives Pliny continued to take an interest (X: 51).
Several names show that Pliny never lost touch with his birthplace, Lake Como, the town and its people.1 His visits north were rare, but he remains sentimentally attached to the family property (II: 15) and can write wistfully to Caninius Rufus about ‘our darling Comum’ when he sees no chance of escaping there (I: 3 and II: 8). Calvisius Rufus is a town-councillor of Comum and is empowered to act for Pliny (V: 7); Annius Severus (III: 6) is commissioned to have a pedestal made for a statue Pliny wishes to present; Atilius Crescens is a boyhood friend and needs help with his money affairs; and Metilius Crispus owes his promotion to centurion’s rank to Pliny and receives a substantial sum to pay for his outfit and equipment (VI: 8 and 25). There is a Maximus from Verona (VI: 34), and Minicius Acilianus (I:14) comes from Brescia with a mother from Padua. Verginius Rufus is a native of Milan, and Spurinna is probably a north Italian: his wife Cottia has a Celtic name from the region of Turin. These Italians have the virtues which Pliny most admires: hard-working, loyal and responsible, they have a genuine simplicity uncontaminated by the life of a great city, a simplicity which Pliny never lost himself.
It was perhaps through their common background that Pliny came to know several members of what is often called the ‘Stoic opposition’; its leader, Thrasea Paetus, was a native of Padua. This opposition to the imperial règime was not truly Stoic in doctrine, for it opposed rule by a king in any form, whereas the Stoics accepted the principle of monarchy provided it was put into practice by a philosopher-king. Thrasea Paetus’s long campaign against Nero and execution in 66 are described fully by Tacitus in Annals, XVI; more than twenty years previously his father-in-law, Caecina Paetus, had joined in a conspiracy against Claudius and had been compelled to commit suicide.1 Pliny quotes Thrasea with admiration more than once (VI: 29 and VIII : 22) and pays an eloquent tribute to the devoted life and heroic death of Caecina’s wife Arria (III: 16). Thrasea’s daughter Fannia married Helvidius Priscus: he too was executed for seditious opposition by Vespasian, but left a son by his first wife, another Helvidius, to carry on the tradition. This Helvidius was executed by Domitian in 93 along with his supporters Arulenus Rusticus and Herennius Senecio; other members of his party were banished and did not return until after Domitian’s death (III: II). Pliny was then honoured to be asked by Rusticus’s brother to find a tutor for his orphaned nephews (II:18) and a husband for his niece (I:14). Pliny’s natural recommendation for the latter position was the young man from Brescia and Padua. Fannia and her mother he knew well (VII: 19) and from them he learned about the elder Arria’s heroism of more than fifty years back. Pliny was well aware that he himself was not cast for the role of hero and martyr, and this may be why he was attracted to the personalities who championed a cause he did not actively support. As suggested above, his admiration for their courage was perhaps tinged with embarrassment when the exiles returned. But he could recall with pride some years after how he spoke in the Senate in vindication of Helvidius (IX: 13), and the published version of his speech was considered one of his best (VII: 30). When Helvidius’s daughters both die in childbirth and their brother is left alone to continue the line, Pliny repeats that’ my love for their father has remained constant since his death, as my defence of him and my published speeches bear witness’ (IV: 21). This record of four generations of independence and courage certainly influenced him deeply.
There were few people left at the end of the first century who could trace their descent from the old families of the Republican and Augustan nobility, and none of these receives a letter from Pliny. If there was a top set in Rome, evidently his provincial origins and tastes kept him out of it. The absence of certain literary names is more surprising. The last days of Silius Italicus are described (III: 7), but he receives no letter. Statius is never mentioned, though he and Pliny had at least one mutual friend in Vibius Maximus to whom Statius dedicated the seventh poem in the fourth book of his Silvae. Juvenal does not appear at all, and the two men cannot have had anything in common except their uncompromising hatred of Domitian; but Juvenal’s Satire v recalls Pliny’s two letters on snobbery and vulgarity at dinner-parties (II: 6 and IX: 17) and the end of Satire x deplores time wasted at the Races as Pliny does in another letter (IX: 6). Pliny was a patron of Martial, and Martial knew Juvenal well enough to address a verse-letter to him from Spain (Martial, XII: 18), but in Rome the two poets may have moved in different literary circles. It has even been suggested that in his choice of pseudonyms Juvenal satirizes some of Pliny’s correspondents.1 At any rate it is hard to imagine Juvenal being politely appreciative at Pliny’s literary parties.
Pliny was a conscientious friend, indefatigable in his efforts to further the careers of the people in whom he was interested. One may tire of the worthy young men who feature in the letters of recommendation and wonder how many of Pliny’s swans proved to be no more than geese, but the Roman concept of friendship retained something of the relations between patron and client, and Pliny’s sense of duty towards his juniors is the counterpart of his gratitude to his elders who had helped him in their turn. He was generous and without ulterior motive. Several humble people had reason to be grateful to him: his old nurse for a small farm (VI: 3); a school-friend of Comum for a substantial sum to raise his social status (I:19); a friend’s daughter for a dowry (VI: 32); and a valued freedman for holidays abroad in search of better health (V: 19). To criticize Pliny for mentioning such gifts at all is to misunderstand the Roman attitude to these officia and beneficia; for services rendered and kindness bestowed, the giver had every right to expect in return society’s approbation and a suitable gratitude in the recipient.2 He was also a generous public benefactor. Comum had a library built and endowed (I: 8), one third of a resident teacher’s salary paid (IV: 13), and provision for children in need from a rent charge on Pliny’s property (VII: 18). In all, Comum received more than two million sesterces by Pliny’s will and nearly as much in his lifetime. At Tifernum on Tiber a new temple was built to house Pliny’s collection of statues of the Emperors (X: 8) and the temple of Ceres on his own land was restored and enlarged for the use of the public (IX: 39).
He could of course afford to be generous; his tastes were not extravagant and his capital was solidly invested in land. He might complain about the hazards of weather and failure of crops, but he was able to reduce his tenants’ rents when times were bad (IX: 37) and make concessions to the contractors who stood to lose when the grape harvest was a poor one (VIII:2). Though of necessity an absentee landlord for a great deal of the year, Pliny’s practical interest in farm management is apparent in many of the letters: as far as possible he selected tenants and inspected accounts personally, and once seriously considered introducing the experiment of rent payment by share of produce (IX:37). This can still be found as the mezzadria system of Tuscany and north Italy. He certainly was much more than the ‘scholar turned landowner’ at whom he gives a gentle dig in the person of Suetonius (I:24), although he can laugh at himself playing the part of proprietor ‘but only to the extent of riding round part of the estate for exercise’ (IX: 15). In reality he was very practical, missing no opportunity of seeing things for himself and working out his own building plans for his homes in Tifernum or Comum (IX : 7), or for Calpurnius Fabatus’s property in Campania (VI: 30). One wing of the villa at Laurentum near Ostia he designed himself, and at Tifernum he could indulge ‘the love I have for all the places I have largely built myself or where I have perfected an earlier design’ (V:6). The gardens there, where the formal terraces were planned in contrast with the landscape garden outside, were watered by a complicated system of pipes and fountains. Anything to do with water seems to fascinate Pliny, and his only criticism of Laurentum is that it has to depend on wells for lack of running water. If we add the scientific problem of the intermittent spring at Comum (IV:30), the description of the underground streams and floating islands of Lake Vadimon (VIII:20), and the account of the construction of the harbour at Centum Cellae (VI:31), as well as all the letters from Bithynia on drains, aqueducts, and canals, we can see that in different circumstances Pliny might have been a civil engineer. He combined a fair share of his uncle’s tireless energy with a much more scientific approach to natural phenomena and antiquarian anecdote; for example, the ghost stories (VII :27) and the dolphin of Hippo (IX:33) are recounted respectively as a psychic problem and an instance of animal behaviour. He also had an observant eye and a retentive memory, and rightly remarked that we need not travel to ‘Greece, Egypt, or Asia or any other country which advertises its wealth of marvels’ if we use our eyes and shake off the besetting habit of postponing a visit at home to what we know can be seen whenever we feel inclined.
A great many of the letters deal with literary topics, advice to young friends, requests for opinions on Pliny’s own work, or his views on style and choice of subject. Two at least (I:20 and IX:26) analyse the weaknesses of the pure ‘Attic’ school of oratory with its rather negative ideals of brevity and avoidance of faults. The language of all these critical letters recalls that of Quintilian and shows how the emphasis on rhetoric and style colours the whole system of Roman education. But if Pliny’s preference is for something less arid than the purists allowed, he is none the less aware that speech which is ‘fluent, vigorous, and expansive’ can degenerate into the rhetorical extravagances of Regulus or the volubility which pours out ‘a torrent of long monotonous periods without taking breath’ (V:20). What he values most is the sense of fitness combined with versatility which enables anyone to match his style with the subject and the occasion; a gift which Pliny exhibits to a marked degree himself. He is widely read in Greek and Roman authors and at first sight seems wholly typical of his generation, but a closer study of the authors he knows and quotes reveals his personal tastes. He is not interested in philosophy or political theory; he refers twice to Plato and never mentions Aristotle. (Hix connexion with the theorists of the ‘Stoic opposition’ was purely personal.) He quotes Euripides twice, but never Sophocles or Aeschylus; and there is no reference to Ovid and only one to Horace whose verse letters one would expect him to enjoy. He shows a knowledge of more than ten Greek and fifteen Roman authors, but apart from his detailed study of the Athenian orators (IX:26), most of his verbal quotations are from the Iliad and the Aeneid. His remarks on art are no more than conventional – realism in representation is his ideal – but the really disturbing thing is the poverty of his literary judgement, in poetry at least; he quotes four sets of verses, two by himself, one by Martial, and one by Sentius Augurinus, with approbation for their poetic merit (VII :4 and 9, III :2i, and IV :27). These verses are so embarrassingly banal that it is impossible not to suspect the qualities of unquoted works we are called on to admire. Calpurnius Piso’s Legends of the Stars and the plays and poetry of Vergilius Romanus (V: 17 and VI :21) may well have been no more inspired than Statius’s Thebaid and Silius Italicus’s Punica about which Pliny himself has his doubts (III: 7). It is remarkable that Pliny can recognize the weakness inherent in a majority vote ‘so long as men have the same right to judge, but not the same ability to judge wisely’ (II:12) without seeing that the collective criticism of the sort of discussion-group assembled in letter VIII: 21 was bound to stifle originality. An independent spirit like that of Tacitus or Juvenal could never have submitted itself to the opinion of lesser men.
The letters are the best source of information we have about the social and political history of Rome at the turn of the first century, when the uneasy years of Domitian were followed by what Gibbon called ‘the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous’.1 It has often been remarked that Pliny acts as a foil for his contemporaries; Juvenal’s remorseless castigation of the faults of society, Martial’s malicious thrusts at individuals and their vices, and Tacitus’s searching analysis of corruption in morals and politics are countered by a picture of the times drawn by someone who lives and works in a world’ far removed from that of the idle rich and the irresponsible aristocrat. The letters are not selected to prove a point or teach a lesson: to that extent the evidence they provide is disinterested. Pliny moves among active professional men who take their responsibilities seriously; many of them owe their position in the Senate to the Emperor’s recognition of their merit, and none can afford to squander his capital or neglect his obligations. When Pliny writes sometimes of abuse of privilege in the Senate or improper conduct in a court of justice, it is because he and his correspondents really care about things like right procedure, law and equity, and effective administration. Through him we see both the day-to-day routine of the Chancery Court and something of the work going on behind the scenes, and we learn much about the activities of the Senate at this time: a Senate which may be very different from that of the Republic, but as a deliberative assembly neither sycophantic nor redundant.
But the letters are more than a source-book; they also paint the fullest self-portrait which has survived of any Roman, with the possible exceptions of Cicero and Horace. It has in fact been suggested that Pliny sought ‘to acquire literary fame in an original fashion – not history but autobiography, subtly blended with the depicture of contemporary social life’.1 Like Horace Walpole, Pliny is consciously and unconsciously revealed in his letters until he emerges in the round. He has his faults. He is no more able to criticize his own work than was Wordsworth, and he can be priggish in the same way. The caution and pedantry of the lawyer are sometimes evident, and so is the complacency of die middle-aged; though here he is no worse than Cicero or any other Roman eager to win recognition. It is useless to look to him for any outspoken criticism of the conventions of his day: he accepts without question the employment of slaves and gladiators, the deification on death of the Emperors, and the political necessity of suppressing a fanatical Christian minority. But his qualities are positive and often original. His professional honesty, industry and efficiency are beyond question, and he is totally free from professional jealousy. He may seem self-satisfied, but he is not vain, and he is well aware that his talents are of secondary merit and that Tacitus is his superior (IX: 14). Tolerance in all its forms he always preaches and practises (VIII :22), whether he is defending a spendthrift son or an erring servant, or writing with true imaginative insight into the feelings of a subject people with a glorious past (VIII: 24). A sceptic himself, he is patient with Suetonius and his dreams, and the simple piety of the votive inscriptions in the shrine of Clitumnus calls for a comment which is amused without being unkind. He is glad to escape from the noise of the Saturnalia, and happy to leave his slaves and freedmen to enjoy their celebrations without the restriction of his presence, and, though a temple is to him no more than a gallery for displaying works of art; when one on his property needs restoring he takes die opportunity to provide for the comfort of worshippers. He is a kind and thoughtful master, not only towards the individual members of his household, in whom he feels a special interest, but in his policy of allowing privileges to his slaves in the home and readiness to grant them freedom (VIII: 16). He is also a devoted husband and a considerate son-in-law, and a loyal friend who can appreciate the idiosyncracies of his companions, while remaining wholly genuine and free from affectations. This explains why his tolerance gives place to contempt in the case of his contemporary Regulus, who is everything which Pliny is not: unscrupulous, avaricious, vacillating and superstitious, as well as crudely flamboyant. Pliny dislikes this exhibitionism in Regulus almost as much as his dishonesty; he has sharp words too for the affectations of a rhetorician (IV :II) and for people who court publicity by a show of superiority (VI: 17), while snobbery in all its forms he detests (II:6). Neither has he any use for the childish passion of ‘adult men’ for the Races, because they have no genuine interest in the horses’ speed and the drivers’ skill.
But to call Pliny genuine and unaffected is not to say that he is naive. He can laugh at himself as an advocate who welcomes an adjournment ‘for I am never so well prepared as not to be glad of a delay’ (v: 9), or as a practical landowner who gathers in the grape-harvest ‘if you can call it “gathering” to pick an occasional grape, look at the press, taste the fermenting wine in the vat, and pay a surprise visit to the servants I brought from the city-who are now standing over the peasants at work and have abandoned me to my secretaries and readers’ (ix: 20); and while deprecating a friend’s lavish hospitality he adds, ‘I must own I was shameless enough to accept everything.’ These are endearing touches which bring him to life: admirable he may be, but he is not dull. It is refreshing, too, to find in him a champion of the rising generation, when it was a convention to look to the past for a Golden Age. Here Pliny’s sturdy realism shows itself: ‘ It is not true that the world is too tired and exhausted to produce anything worth praising’; nor is it true that the simple virtues of a Golden Age are found in the country life idealized by the poets (Pliny’s farmers are real peasants who grumble and muddle their affairs and are always a worry to landlords). Perhaps Pliny remembers how he came in his own youth from a northern province to find opportunities for a career in the metropolis; at any rate he is always generous in helping others to do the same and delighted when he finds individuals less casual and mannerless than young people in the mass inevitably appear to their elders. Some of his generalizations also go beyond the conventional. Among so many aspirants to fame, of whom he was one, it was Pliny who wrote that ‘I am also well aware that a nobler spirit will seek the reward of virtue in the consciousness of it, rather than in popular opinion’ (I:8); it was Pliny too who saw that the proverbial ‘reflection leads to hesitation’ is true in the sense that ‘diffidence is the weakness of right-thinking minds’ (IV: 7).
There has been no serious attempt at a translation of Pliny’s letters as a whole since the one published by William Melmoth in 1746. This was reprinted in the Loeb series in 1915, after revision and compression by W. M. L. Hutchinson because ‘judged even by the easy canons of his time in regard to translation, his [Melmoth’s] work is extraordinarily loose and inaccurate; a good deal of it is simply paraphrase and in many places the sense is flagrantly wrong’. But enough of Melmoth was left to present Pliny through a cloud of verbiage which was never his, so that the misty figure which emerged was more like an eighteenth-century dilettante than the real man, and the subtle variety of style to match the mood of each letter was lost in the polished phrases of Melmoth’s day. Of course, the personal letters are literary in the sense that they are written with care on selected subjects, and are quite different in style and content from the remarkable series preserved in Book x. They are more to be compared with Horace’s Epistles or Walpole’s letters than with the intensely personal letters of Cicero or of Keats. Pliny draws the contrast himself: ‘You want me to follow Cicero’s example, but my position is very different from his. He was not only richly gifted but was supplied with a wealth of varied and important topics to suit his abilities, but you know without my telling you the narrow limits confining me.’ (IX: 2). There was nothing in Pliny’s life to match Cicero’s experience of revolution and civil war. If, as he tells us, Pliny published this revised selection from a larger number of letters, it is not always easy to see why some of the more trivial notes were chosen; to please the recipient, perhaps, to lower the tone between two more important letters, or possibly to give the reader the pleasure of seeing how the virtuosity of the stylist can find expression in a couple of sentences. These brief notes with their puns and allusions recall the conceits of Catullus and Martial as well as the characteristic Roman delight in epigram. Pliny can be elegantly formal, colloquial and conversational, analytically critical or tersely descriptive. He draws on legal language for his jokes with professional friends, quotes the poets in Greek as well as in Latin, and sets himself to describe a scene or a scientific problem in precise terms. No translation can hope to convey such versatility successfully, but a fresh approach may perhaps give a better idea of Pliny’s gifts of accurate observation and clear description which put him high among the prose writers of any period.
His detached eye-witness account of the eruption of Vesuvius, recorded long after the event but with no trace of false sentiment to blur those terrifying sober facts, is a masterpiece of writing; scarcely less remarkable are the descriptions of natural scenery at the source of the Clitumnus and Lake Vadimon, or his loving account of his country homes at Laurentum and Tifernum. He can bring an animated scene to life, when senators reveal their nervous tension after Domitian’s death or crowds pack the court to hear acause célèbre; the hired claques watch for their cue to applaud a speaker; a brutal master’s slaves conspire to murder him in his bath. Personalities can also stand out clearly – the ravaged dignity of Julius Bassus facing trial or a Vestal Virgin accepting a terrible death with composure, a soldier with a rambling story of his adventures as a prisoner of war and a father mourning the death of a thirteen-year-old daughter. Regulus cringes or blusters his way through the courts, the elder Pliny lights his lamp to work in the long hours before dawn, Spurinna plays ball to keep himself fit, and an old lady of seventy-nine tries to keep boredom at bay by playing draughts and maintaining a private ballet company. Meanwhile Pliny finishes his day’s work before driving out to Laurentum along the Ostia road and then the side-road which is ‘sandy for some distance and rather heavy and slow going if you drive, but soft and easily covered on horseback’.
There are still sandy side-roads in Italy, and some of the unchanging features of the country bear witness to Pliny’s pleasure in them and his gift for expressing it. The foothills of the Apennines behind his Tuscan home are still much as he saw them, where ‘the vineyards spreading down every slope weave their uniform pattern’ as far as the cornfields ‘where the land can be broken up only by heavy oxen and the strongest ploughs’, and the water meadows, bright with flowers. North and south of Rome stretches the sandy, harbourless coast, and along it are the umbrella-pines which gave him an unforgettable simile for the ominous cloud rising from Vesuvius. Pliny can bridge the gulf between the past and present; some of the excavated houses at Pompeii, an estate like the one uncovered at Boscoreale, or the frescoes depicting magnificent villas to be seen in the Naples museum1 may bring us nearest to his world, for here we can actually see a courtyard where fountains play and a dining-room with ‘a fresco of birds perched on the branches of trees’, and can picture the life of cultivated leisure where friends meet to discuss the details of a new poem or the fine points of a Corinthian bronze. The great Italian palazzi still have the gardens he would recognize – the colonnades and terraces, marble seats and fountains, the cypresses and vine pergolas, and the beds of acanthus, and. ‘the box shrubs clipped into innumerable shapes’. The shores of the northern lakes are fringed today with villas situated like Pliny’s, either high up with wide views or ‘on the very edge of the water’ where the waves break and you can fish,’ casting your line from your bedroom window and practically from your bed, as if you were in a boat’. Flooded rivers after heavy rain, the dried-up beds of streams in summer, and the hot, dusty roads, the stormy winds of the west coast, and the winter frosts and summer breezes of the Apennines, where the view from a hill-top is like ‘a painted scene of unusual beauty rather than a real landscape’: these are all in the letters and familiar in Italy today.
Some sites are closely associated with Pliny. The intermittent spring at Comum, which fascinated him as a scientific problem, is to be seen in the grounds of the sixteenth-century Villa Pliniana; Leonardo da Vinci recorded it in his Notebooks and Stendhal has left an account of his visit in 1816. Lake Vadimon, round ‘like a wheel lying on its side’, with its floating islands and sulphurous water which was ‘pale blue with a tinge of green’ interested him for those very features, and not because it had been the scene of two early Roman victories over the Etruscans; it is sad that the text is corrupt at the very point where Pliny attempts a precise description of colour, so rare in a classical writer. At Lago di Bassano, near Orte, the small lake has shrunk to a marshy pool with reeds instead of islands, but it still has its outlet which disappears underground, and the modem Guida d’Italia describes its waters as ‘biancastre e sulfuree’. The source of the Clitumnus, known to Virgil and Propertius,1 is the subject of one of Pliny’s best letters. The little temple is in ruins, but the water continues to rise miraculously from level ground very much as Pliny saw it; Corot was to paint it, and Byron to pay his tribute,2 and it inspired Carducci’s patriotic ode Alle fonti del Clitunno, where the line ‘Ride sepolta all’ imo una foresta’ is an echo of Pliny’s words: “The banks are clothed with ash trees and poplars, whose green reflections can be counted in the clear stream as if they were planted there.’ It is described and illustrated in a recent study of the Latin poets,3 and more than anything, perhaps, it brings Pliny near us. The gift of feeling visual and immediate delight in a natural scene for its own sake is something which is outside time and place, but tends to be taken for granted since the Romantic and Impressionist movements. Yet it is so rare in the ancient world, where everything seen was bound up with religious, mythological and historical associations, that Pliny’s unconscious possession of it is one of the strongest reasons why he should be remembered. ‘Whether posterity will give us a thought I don’t know,’ wrote Pliny to Tacitus, ‘but surely we deserve one….’ The verses he wrote are probably better forgotten and only one of the much-revised speeches survives: but the letters are there to be read and justify his claim.
*
This translation was originally made from the 1958 edition of Schuster’s text in the Teubner series, but has been revised as far as possible to follow the new Oxford Classical Text of Professor R. A. B. Mynors. Most alterations have been made in Book x where there is very fragmentary MS. authority. Professor Mynors has given me generous help in advance of publication of his text, for which I am most grateful. I must also thank Mr A. N. Sherwin-White for his help in interpreting Pliny and for giving me access to his Commentary before publication, my husband for constructive criticism, and many friends for their interest; notably Miss Marion Pick and Mr T. L. Zinn for advice on special points, and not least Dr E. V. Rieu for his help and encouragement. The members of my family have lived perforce with Pliny in their midst for longer than they may have bargained for, and I am grateful for their support and forbearance.
In translating the personal letters I have consistently omitted the formal beginning and ending, to avoid repetition and artificiality. I have translated geographical features (names of rivers and mountains) into English, but left most towns in the Latin form with the modern name in footnote. Official terms have been left in Latin or given an accepted English form, whichever seemed more natural, and a Key in an Appendix explains the less familiar of these. After long consideration, I have left sums of money in sesterces, but have included a note on purchasing power. Pliny’s many Greek quotations appear in English, but all quotations have a footnote giving the source where this is known. Pliny’s estate near Tifernum, to which he generally refers as mei Tusci, I have spoken of as if it was in Tuscany; in fact it is just over the boundary in Umbria. The ruins of a large villa have been discovered a few miles north of the town (Città di Castello), and tiles stamped with Pliny’s initials. Five books of the letters have manuscript authority for a single name only for each recipient; where-ever possible I have supplied a second name from information given by Mr Sherwin-White, but where the subject is too complex (there are several individuals addressed only as Maximus) I have left a single name and must refer readers to his researches.
Highgate, 1962 B.R.