Chapter I: Pliny the Younger and Minor Contemporaries

Early life—Problems in chronology—Later
career—Poems—Orations—The _Panegyricus_—The
amplified speech—Flattering picture of an ideal
prince—_Epistulae_—Roman success in letter-writing—The
essay-like epistle—Contrast with Cicero’s letters—Plinian
parallels in eighteenth century—Correspondence with
Trajan—Pliny’s gentlemanliness—Passion for literary
pursuits—Naïve vanity—Religion and politics—Composite
style—Neologisms—Influence.

Pliny’s literary circle and minor contemporaries—Verse—History
and Oratory—Jurisprudence—Scholarship—Gromatics.

PLINY THE YOUNGER

The Latin name of the younger Pliny after his adoption under his maternal uncle’s will in A.D. 79 was C. Plinius Caelius Secundus.[1545] Previously he had been called P. Caecilius Secundus, and was one of the sons of L. Caecilius Cilo, a man of substance belonging to the old northern family of the Caecilii at Comum (Como). Pliny thus retained his gentile name instead of changing it to Caecilianus according to the republican mode. He was born at Comum,[1546] in either 61 or 62; for he says he was in his eighteenth year when his famous uncle lost his life in the eruption of Vesuvius, August 24th, A.D. 79.[1547] His father’s early death left him under the guardianship of the distinguished general Verginius Rufus, who twice refused the imperial purple: to him and to his uncle he owed guidance in his studies. There was no public teacher at Comum (a disadvantage which Pliny sought to remedy in later years), so that his education in the north must have been conducted either privately or at Milan. In time, however, he went to Rome and studied under Nicetes Sacerdos and Quintilian.[1548] The elder Pliny’s example and precepts kept his nephew assiduously employed: even a walk was frowned upon, and on the occasion of the fatal eruption the youth was engaged on a literary exercise set him by his uncle, and was also working on Livy.[1549] Such teaching and his own diligence led to his early appearance as a pleader; for he argued his first case in his nineteenth year.[1550] This was in Titus’s reign; thereafter, under Domitian, he filled a round of offices and built up a reputation by speaking, sometimes in the Senate, but mostly in what he calls his special “arena,” the centumviral court for the trial of lawsuits about disputed properties or successions.[1551] The literary works, however, by which he is known belong almost entirely to the time of Nerva and Trajan, and are therefore post-Flavian.

Except Cicero, no Latin author is so well-known to us. We have a full self-revelation in his letters, while a few inscriptions record his _cursus honorum_.[1552] Yet, clearly though his personality stands out, teasing puzzles remain, affecting his life and works. For these problems brief mention must suffice. Ever since Mommsen published his elaborate article _Zur Lebensgeschichte der jüngeren Plinius_ in _Hermes_ in 1869, discussion has continued on the dates when Pliny held certain of his offices and on the interconnected question of the dates when the different books of the epistles were written and issued. Though finality has not been reached, some of Mommsen’s pronouncements have been controverted, and doubts thrown upon his basic conception that Pliny is misleading his readers, with a view to produce a false impression of fine carelessness, when he declares that the letters are not in chronological order. Mommsen used his findings on the chronology of the letters as a foundation for his account of Pliny’s life. It is impossible here to enter into the arguments with which critics have assailed him or each other.[1553] After all, however important such details are in the interests of historical accuracy, it does, from the standpoint of pure literature, make little difference, if, for example, Mommsen was wrong (led wrong perhaps by implications in his own theory)[1554] as to Pliny’s tenure of office at the _aerarium Saturni_, or if he was right in assigning Pliny’s praetorship to 93.[1555]

Nor is there any stagnation in Plinian textual criticism, as the issue of recent editions proves;[1556] and, though a literary history is not directly concerned with an author’s MSS., it is difficult to forget that the sole written copy on which Pliny’s correspondence with Trajan rests has long since been lost, and that the establishment of the text in the other books of letters—not an easy matter—depends on a right assessment of three distinct families of MSS.[1557]

Fortunately, the essential facts of Pliny’s life are beyond dispute. He went through the two preliminary stages of a civil career by performing in the “vigintivirate” the duties of assisting the praetor as _decemuir stlitibus iudicandis_ and by serving in garrison abroad as military tribune in Syria. After his return to Rome, he received the compliment of being appointed _seuir_ of the _equites_; he held the quaestorship 89-90, tribunate of the people 91-92, and praetorship in 93. An imperial dispensation abolished for him the usual interval between tribunate and praetorship. He was, then, praetor in a year signalized by Domitian’s determined endeavour to quell what he considered a “Stoic Opposition.” How far Pliny did or could help his Stoic friends cannot be determined. He is at some pains at a later date to declare that he supported the philosopher Artemidorus with money and a personal call of sympathy outside Rome, and to indicate that he was himself the subject of a secret information;[1558] but Pliny had a hazardous position to fill, especially in 93, as a magistrate, as a recipient of the emperor’s favour, and as a temperamental objector to anything like martyrdom. Further confidence was shown in 94, when Domitian made him one of the three prefects of the military treasury. Discretion and the right sort of silence brought him safely to Nerva’s reign, when his business experience recommended him for nomination early in A.D. 98 to the prefecture of the military treasury. Nerva’s death before the end of January involved his induction into that office by Trajan, who, two years later, in September, 100, promoted Pliny to the suffect consulship. It was on assuming the chair in the Senate that Pliny pronounced before the emperor the _Panegyric_ which was the spoken basis of the over-elaborated oration that survived. A break in magisterial duties ended a few years later, when Trajan granted him a seat in the college of augurs in succession to a revered friend, Julius Frontinus: next came his commission on the Tiber Conservancy Board, involving superintendence of the banks and channel of the river and the drainage of the city. When Trajan, therefore, had taken over from the Senate the badly managed province of Bithynia, he paid a well-deserved compliment to Pliny’s executive and financial ability by letting his choice fall upon him as his special and personal representative. The emperor knew him intimately, and on one occasion summoned him as an assessor in trials heard by his Majesty at Centum Cellae (Civita Vecchia), some forty-seven miles distant from Rome.[1559] The evidence on the whole points to A.D. 111-113 as the period of two years during which Pliny was governor in Bithynia.[1560] It may have been only in his second year of office that he found time to extend his movements beyond Bithynia proper, and to visit the eastern or Pontic part of his province.[1561] Presumably he died in harness: at least the correspondence comes to an abrupt close. In the last letter of his which we have, he mentions having sent his wife back to Italy post-haste on account of her grandfather’s death, and the emperor’s reply ends the collection.[1562] It is not wholly unfitting that this mainly official book should conclude with a domestic touch. Pliny was deeply attached to his third wife, Calpurnia: what he writes of her shows how much he appreciated her interest in his work: what he writes to her when they are separated shows that a love letter was within his capacity.[1563]

Pliny’s marriages brought him no children, but Trajan conferred upon him the _ius trium liberorum_ in 98. Generous to friends, he showed munificence to his native town during his lifetime by presenting and endowing a library, devoting a sum to the support of freeborn boys and girls, and promising to pay one-third of the salary for a professor of rhetoric. The longest of the inscriptions[1564] concerning him prove his bequests for baths, for the maintenance of a hundred freedmen, and on their death for banqueting the townsfolk.

Of poetry we should scarcely have suspected him, but that he pleads guilty, and is manifestly anxious to be thought capable of composing the lightest of light verse. Pliny endeavouring to be naughty or even frivolous is difficult to conceive. However, he had tried his hand at a variety of forms; at a Greek tragedy, when he was fourteen, and later at Latin elegiac, epic and hendecasyllabic verse.[1565] An epigram by Cicero on Tiro tempted him once to use his midday siesta for poetic composition; and the thirteen hexameters which resulted show that he had much better have slept.[1566] The eight elegiacs of versified advice preserved elsewhere as one of his sportive trifles (_lusus_) are mediocre.[1567] Yet he is proud to have issued a volume of hendecasyllabic poems, which, he says, are read, sung to music, and actually lure Greeks to study Latin. “I simply pray,” is his complacent remark, “that future ages may endorse the mistake or the appreciation of my contemporaries.”[1568] But the ages have not spared the book.

Pliny felt still more pride in his oratory as a basis of fame. Much of his speaking must have been too strictly legal for preservation; but there were occasions in and outside Rome which made his eloquence in his own eyes worthy of permanent record. With some speeches he took enormous pains after delivery: they would be carefully revised, retried upon a small circle of friends, sent in whole or in part to correspondents for criticism, delivered afresh before a large invited audience, and, after final emendation, possibly published.[1569] “I reflect,” he remarks, “what a serious matter it is to put something into the hands of the public.”[1570] He was perfectly conscious of the risk that such a redelivered speech ran of losing its fire, and yet he wonders why he should be criticized for his practice of serving up speeches at a formal _recitatio_.[1571] We know of at least seven speeches of his that reached book-form, though they have not reached us. These include his address at the dedication of the library at Comum; pleadings in defence of Julius Bassus and Rufus Varenus on the two occasions when Pliny acted as counsel against the Bithynians, whom he was one day to govern; a speech for Attia Viriola to show cause why she should not be disinherited; and an attack in the Senate, after Domitian’s death, upon Publicius Certus as responsible for the conviction of the younger Helvidius. This last oration[1572] gave Pliny a safe opportunity of eulogizing a Stoic family, and brought him from a friend the compliment, joyfully accepted, of comparing it to Demosthenes’s speech _Against Meidias_. “In fact,” replies Pliny, “I had that speech in my hands when I composed mine—not to rival it (that would be outrageous or almost insane), but still to imitate and follow as far as difference of genius—a very great and a very small one—or the dissimilarity of the case would permit.”[1573] Among other speeches, which may or may not have circulated afterwards, were those he delivered on the two occasions when, as advocate for the Baetic provincials, he prosecuted ex-governors of theirs, Baebius Massa and Caecilius Classicus; his impeachment of the notorious Marius Priscus as counsel for the Africans along with Tacitus in A.D. 100; and the defence of a group of legatees charged in the criminal court with poisoning.

Nothing has, however, come down to represent his oratorical activity except the re-edited form of the _Panegyricus_ on Trajan, pronounced in the Senate by Pliny on entering with Cornutus Tertullus upon the consulate in the later part of the year 100. One cannot hope to discern how much of the original speech is embedded in what we now have. Soon after its delivery, Pliny sent a copy to Voconius Romanus asking for criticisms, and his letter[1574] makes it clear that he was scrutinizing his own performance under various rhetorical heads. His contention is that the well-known nature of the material (that is, Trajan’s services and qualities) must concentrate the attention unduly on style (_elocutio_), whereas there are other points to consider like arrangement and transitions; also, just as in a picture, one demands high lights and shade. No more illuminating introduction, however, to the _Panegyric_ can be found than in another letter mentioning an amplified form of the speech which Pliny has been reading to a gathering of friends on three successive days.[1575] As they had assembled in spite of bad weather, their interest was a compliment to literature, which, he says, was just reviving after being nearly extinguished: “it is not that there is more style than formerly, but people write with more liking because they have more liberty (_liberius ideoque etiam libentius_).” Exuberance, he submits, must be expected in such a composition: in fact, plain unadorned language might appear out of place in a eulogy, though he hints at hopes that literary taste will yet come to favour austere in preference to sugared writing.[1576] One most important point emerges bearing on the author’s design. Proper as it was that the fuller treatment in book-form (_eadem illa spatiosius et uberius uolumine amplecti_) should do justice to the excellence of the emperor, there was the further aim of drawing the picture of a perfect prince. This is an implicit appeal to posterity. Yet it only relatively makes the _Panegyric_ more endurable: the praises remain excessive, the figures strained, the prolixity wearisome. For us its chief value lies in the historical light shed on the early part of a reign so scantily documented as Trajan’s is, apart from Pliny’s speech and his correspondence.[1577]

The complimentary expression of thanks to which senators had listened with secret chafing in Domitian’s day was expanded by Pliny into a _laudatio_ in which he incorporated the two rhetorical prescriptions of detailed fact and psychological study. That is why the speech divides itself broadly between Trajan’s public acts and Trajan’s personal character. The exordium acknowledges a sense of the divine favour which has bestowed upon Rome such an emperor: it disclaims all intention of flattering; for abject obeisance, as if to a deity, is no longer necessary—Trajan is no tyrant, but a fellow-citizen. Then the keynote is struck. One reflects how highly endowed ought that person to be who controls the Empire by sea and land, in peace and war; but imagination can yield none worthier of such authority than the prince in whose presence the orator is speaking. Logically, then, he is the picture of an ideal for future ages. Trajan’s services before his recent arrival in Rome imply bravery, wide military experience, power of discipline and a loyal acceptance of his adoption by Nerva to be a colleague and successor. His triumphant entry into the city and at the same time his modest bearing form a fit prelude to a rehearsal of his public acts, such as liberality to the people, care of poor children, protection of commerce, solicitude for the corn supply that might well make Rome independent of “haughty Egypt,” exhibition of manly games, abolition of espionage, repression of informers, discountenancing of treason-trials, stabilization of finance, guaranteeing of wills, and a wise policy in building. The emperor devotes anxious thought to the provinces, and has a due regard for justice: in fine, he governs as the Creator does—a vicegerent on earth. His personal qualities are commended with allusions to the contrasted inhumanity of Domitian. So far is the emperor from self-assertion that he had long hesitated to accept a third consulship: so zealous is he that change of work is for him a form of relaxation. Unconscious humour lurks in the detailed picture of this indefatigable sportsman and handy seaman, unlike his predecessor (_quantum dissimilis illi_) whom sea-sickness reduced to the condition of a victim led to the slaughter (_piaculum_). Next, his private life in the palace with wife and sister is touched on; then his affability to friends, and, with a glance at Claudius’s court, his control over the freedmen of his household: “You know that greatness in freedmen is the chief mark of littleness in a prince.”[1578] Well does such an emperor deserve to be called _optimus_. After an apostrophe to his late Majesty, Nerva, the formal close comes in acknowledgements uttered to Trajan on behalf of Pliny himself and his colleague, and in deferential remarks to their fellow-senators.

Regarded under the aspect of an admonitory document for future princes, the _Panegyric_ is less offensive to modern taste; because its words are not those of an obsequious toady but of a patriot insistent upon the services rendered by a wise emperor to his country. Its faults, too, such as affectation and long-windedness would certainly have been less present in the spoken form. As it now stands, it wearies the reader by its length, adulation and artifices. Trajan ceases to be interesting as a Sun-god or an earthly Jupiter: he is more effective as a hard-working ruler. The rhetorical element is also overdone: resort is too often had to antitheses,[1579] _sententiae_,[1580] and a subtlety that degenerates into bad taste.[1581] The specious “colores” of rhetoric betray themselves in over-ingenious turns: a mutiny, it is suggested, was the very thing wanted to prove Trajan a true _corrector emendatorque_; and his grey hairs were heaven-ordained to enhance his reverend appearance. What uncomplimentary rhetorical colour would have been given to grey hairs in Domitian’s case may be imagined. Perhaps Trajan felt such elaborate praises as trying as he must have found some of the questions on detail included a dozen years later in Pliny’s letters to him from Bithynia. Finally, the _Panegyric_ contains much to illustrate the invasion of prose by the poetic: here the _egressio_ on Egypt will provide apposite examples. As this epideictic performance, then, is our sole specimen of the author’s oratory, we must beware of judging the lost speeches by it. In other speeches Pliny, though never an austere orator, may have indulged less in the rhetorical faults of his time.

Pliny’s _Letters_, on which he prided himself less than on his poetry and speeches, constitute his real title to fame. The 247 letters of the nine books which precede the last book (containing 121 letters of official correspondence between Trajan and Pliny in A.D. 111-113) were written in the period from about A.D. 97 to about 109. Their chronology, it has been indicated, is a debated and still debateable matter; but there is a growing belief that the letters in the nine books were issued in groups, which one theory at least arranges symmetrically in triads.[1582] Pliny did not adhere to strict chronological order; and his own statement to that effect is confirmed by several instances.[1583] The collection in nine books may be assumed to have been complete before Pliny left Italy for his eastern province, and the so-called tenth book to have been published after Pliny’s death by some friend or possibly by his widow.

To understand Pliny’s significance as letter-writer it is necessary to observe what an _epistula_ from his hand meant. We have nothing quite like it earlier: on the other hand, a long series of prose letters in later times and later literature bear a family resemblance to his. Classical Greece presents in this field relatively slight remains. There are no indisputably genuine Greek letters to represent the best period, partly because inside the small Hellenic communities it was pointless to write to a man whom one might see in an hour or so, and partly because external communication was hampered in many ways. As travel and separation greatly predispose to letter-writing, it is natural to think that the breadth of interest which furnishes the best epistolary equipment came more easily to a Roman in the days of a world-empire: it is therefore natural to feel less surprise that, as the dialogue had become classic in Greece, so the sort of halved dialogue which constitutes a good letter became classic at Rome. Something in the Roman genius favoured this literary form: it is not merely that there is no Greek analogy to the three kinds of epistles written by Cicero, Seneca and Pliny, but in later centuries Latin still holds the supremacy; for Julian the Apostate and Synesios, Bishop of Cyrene, are not in letter-writing the equals of the Gallic Bishop, Sidonius Apollinaris, or the statesman Cassiodor(i)us.

The letter, as published by Pliny, goes far beyond the scope of the simplest private form written to make a request or give information. This simplest form may be no more literature than an official letter is; yet many letters, in the original sense, intended only for an individual receiver may possess the charm of frankness and artlessness united with just as much design as is needed for clear conveyance of the writer’s thoughts. One of the fascinations in Cicero’s letters, especially those to Atticus, is that he speaks to his friend as if to himself, uttering the first thing that comes (_quidquid in buccam_, _Ad Att._, XII. i. 2); so that this immediate committal of thought or experience to paper involves a disregard of academic rules and often a free borrowing of tone and expression from the _sermo cotidianus_. Wherever, in parts of the _Epistulae ad Familiares_, there may cross Cicero’s mind the possibility of publication, he becomes at once less unconstrained and more formal. It makes all the difference whether our letters are to be read by one or by many. With the notion of a collective audience among contemporaries or posterity there begins the quest after artistry: then it is always possible that, on redressing the balance, one may be compensated for the lost spontaneity with new aesthetic effects. This more literary type is represented by Pliny. With him the epistle has overstepped the rigid bounds of a letter: it has become a _causerie_ on paper, and the addressee is in a position comparable to that of the Pisones in Horace’s versified epistle on poetry, or Lucilius in Seneca’s _Epistulae Morales_, or Madame de Sévigné’s daughter in her correspondence. The recipient really represents the great public, while Pliny ranges at will anywhere through the width of human life among themes likely to provide interesting material—a senatorial debate, a trial, an illness, a death, a murder, a mysterious disappearance, floods on the Tiber, a volcanic disaster, ghost stories, a book, a speech, a literary celebrity, questions of style, principles of education, advice about a tutor, social claims, a day in town, a day in the country, scenery, a residence by the sea or in Tuscany or on the Lago di Garda, an offer of a loan, a purchase of property, a mean host, a Corinthian bronze, the duty of forgiveness, greetings to friends or relatives, congratulations, consolations. Elsewhere, in a light vein, he rallies a poor correspondent, or an acquaintance who has forgotten to come to dinner; regrets he has only got thanks to send for a present of thrushes; acknowledges another gift with the information that, though his eyes are troubling him, he can see it is a plump hen; tells another friend that he is busy with the vintage, but will “draw off” fresh verses for him;[1584] or again, much as Burns in one of his letters delightfully told three tales about Alloway Kirk, so Pliny tells three anecdotes about Regulus with the airy introduction: “down with your copper and get a story worth gold; no, three stories!”[1585]

Expression must be manifold to keep pace in pliancy with every swift turn of thought on such a variety of subjects. The general effect is that of a miscellany of miniature studies or _feuilletons_, in the sense that Pliny’s letters, essay-like, weigh some incident, experience, or idea in the scale of the author’s personal mood, or, if “weighing” be too precise a term, the author may be said to play lightly round his theme and put his own spirit into it. This personal impress makes the letters as readable as leaves from a well-written diary, so that they have, some of them, the incidental, intimate, and literary interest which marks a work like the _Journal des Goncourt_. Epistolary literature, even at its most artificial, possesses the attraction of affording a sure insight into the nature of the author. While it may be too much to declare, as Johnson did, that “in a man’s letters, you know, madam, his soul lies naked,” still there must always be in them a biography of the feelings: there will also often be—and perhaps more interesting if undesigned—illumination thrown upon the customs of the day. Since Pliny’s letters do not belong to the kind tossed off in fine careless freedom, one does not look to find in them the rapid conversational and staccato notes of some of Cicero’s, or the open impetuosities of Byron; for Pliny’s letters are more laboriously penned with the thought of eventual publication and the hope of posthumous fame: their sentiments and phrases are so cunningly disciplined and marshalled that what they lose in unsophisticated charm they gain in artistic grace. But with all this clever artificiality Pliny has much sound matter to convey. Studied elegance is not necessarily inimical to sincerity, and his letters remain a true index to his personality and to the life of his times. He realized the contrast between his own letters and Cicero’s. Their circumstances were different, and Cicero’s fertile genius could readily find abundance of material in the stirring times that witnessed the death-throes of the republic. Apologizing, therefore, to a friend who has demanded full letters, Pliny pleads lack of thrilling subjects and fears that his epistles may become too academic (_scholasticae atque umbraticae_).[1586] We may take it for certain that one reason why Cicero’s letters so far outnumber Pliny’s is that Pliny must have excluded from publication such of his letters as in substance could not lay claim to general interest or in form could not serve as patterns of style. It is noteworthy that there are no epistles of the literary type belonging to the period of his governorship, though it is conceivable that, but for his death, the world would have seen another issue of his open letters, adorned, as before, with that _bel esprit_ which Europe has found so attractive.

This Plinian type of letter, where the underlying realities are retouched more or less lightly with literary refinements before publication, is one of the legacies of Rome to modern literature. Epistolography made no advance in the Middle Ages, but with the Renaissance the recovery was well marked among scholars. When we turn to the eighteenth century, the palmiest age for letter-writing in English literature, it is impossible to avoid being struck with a similarity of spirit between Pliny’s letters and those of Horace Walpole, Gray and Cowper. Despite Pliny’s complaints about inroads on his time, and harder worker though he was than our chief letter-writers, he yet enjoyed the comfort and the leisure which seem indispensable to the production of the best literary epistles. Thoughtful, kindly, communicative, he was the very man to give human interest to his writing. Neither in Walpole, that caustic and voluminous man of the world, nor in Gray, largely a recluse with a fund of somewhat baffling restraint, do we discover the amiability which makes this pagan gentleman so winning. Perhaps Cowper, if we neglect his shy melancholy and quiet humour, presents most parallels to Pliny. Scholarly, sensible, well-mannered, free from ill-nature, artistic in expression, he had a turn for reflection which make much in his letters read as if the English would go straight into Plinian Latin. Certainly it is not without significance that one of the best English renderings of Pliny was that composed by Melmoth in the eighteenth century: it is too verbose, but even its generous verbosity suggests the spacious leisure of a period before the rush of modern life mortally wounded the art of letter-writing.

In contrast to the literary epistles, the correspondence with Trajan concerns the business of a provincial governor, some of it urgently demanding for settlement all the haste that the Roman imperial post by road and sea would allow. Here we find petitions for privileges on behalf of Pliny himself and others, reports on his struggles with the impaired finances of municipalities, knotty questions in civil or religious or criminal law, local difficulties in building a theatre or temple or aqueduct or baths, and repeated requests for a trained surveyor or architect from Rome. Most famous of all is the pair consisting of the letter from Pliny on prosecuting Christians and Trajan’s answer. Historically the collection is most valuable, because it lifts the veil from the administration of a province in an abnormal condition; but much non-literary matter has, of necessity, to be introduced, and there is just that element of fussiness which good letters lack. One feels that the special commissioner refers too many minute points to Trajan, and deserves the reminder that some of his reported quandaries were exactly of the sort which he had been sent out to solve on the spot. Trajan’s replies are business-like and brief, the findings of a fair-minded man: though they are friendly to his “dear Secundus,” their very brevity sometimes implies that the governor is causing both the emperor and himself too much worry: once or twice, indeed, they verge on the snappy. That is one reason why it is incredible that they could have been the product of the imperial bureau in Rome—the personal touch is present. Reputations are not likely to be made by propounding theories that these replies came from an office instead of from the emperor, or by starting doubts about the authenticity of this correspondence in general or about the special letters touching the Christians whom Pliny had to judge in Bithynia.[1587]

A personality so manifold deserves fuller examination than has been incidentally possible in a survey of his life and letters. If dignity, self-possession, broad-mindedness, considerateness, courtesy and generosity are qualities that constitute a gentleman, then Pliny was one. He knew how to ensure respect for the high magistracies which he held; he could keep his head in court so as to make the requisite retort to an unfair opponent; his wide experience of life taught him fairness in dealing with others; he was considerate to tenants and servants; treated superiors and inferiors with politeness, and performed notable acts of munificence. Although he devoted much energy to the preparation of cases on the court-roll,[1588] his master-passion was literary study. Enthusiasm forces him to recommend it for others:

Let this be your business, this your idleness; this your toil,
and this your rest; in these pursuits let your vigilance, in
these let your repose too be found.[1589]

Amidst distracting avocations, he pined for retirement away from Rome where he could read and write:

Shall I never break, if I mayn’t untie, these cramping bonds?
Never, I suppose—for the old tasks have new tasks growing on
them before the earlier ones are finished.[1590]

So he writes from town:

What am I doing, you ask. What you wot of. I’m hard pressed
with official duty; I’ve friends to attend to; sometimes I
study, the thing to do which, not “sometimes” but solely and
continually, would be, I don’t dare to say more virtuous, but
surely more welcome.[1591]

Even if he did get away to the lake-country for fishing and hunting, he liked to combine literary composition with his sport; and a saving grace let him see the humour of the situation when he tells Tacitus about waiting for the wild boar with writing material at hand.[1592] What might easily have become mere bookishness was counteracted by duties, official and social, which involved intercourse with his fellow-men. As it happened, his career enabled him to discharge faithfully public and professional tasks, and yet in his leisure do good service to literature. Here his premier attention turned on oratory and poetry. While he knew and esteemed certain philosophers, he apparently shared some of Quintilian’s suspicions about others; and while he once penned a handsome tribute to the divine majesty of history, he disavowed any purpose of competing in that field.[1593] But, if he restricted his own output, he was catholic in his zeal for the production of all forms of literature. This appears in his enthusiasm for _recitationes_: it mattered little whether the reading were from history, comedy, poetry or oratory—Pliny was scrupulous in his attendance,[1594] believing that private perusal was not enough to test a work without the _uiua uox_,[1595] and offering sound reasons in defence of the practice as an aid to criticism.[1596]

Similar zeal stimulates vigorous correspondence about the emendation of his speeches and verses, and repeated exhortations urging others to produce literary work.[1597] His praises of contemporaries, though too lavish and partial, were in a measure due to the same genuine interest.[1598] He may be extravagant in declaring that nothing so perfect had appeared of recent years as Augurinus’s “Poems in Little” (_Poematia_): here he seems naïvely to disclose the reason for his bias as personal liking or the poet’s compliments to himself.[1599] He may also have overstated the case in saying that Fannius’s premature death robbed the world of an immortal work on Nero’s victims.[1600] Naturally some whisper reached him in time that exception had been taken to his excessive commendations: to which his answer, if not wholly valid, is at least candid:

You tell me that some people have condemned me in your hearing
for praising my friends at every opportunity beyond what is
due. I admit the impeachment (_agnosco crimen_)—welcome it, in
fact. For what is nobler than the fault of kindliness? After
all, who are they who know my friends better than I do? Yet
suppose they do, why grudge me a most delightful deception?
For, supposing my friends are not such as I declare they are,
still I am happy in fancying them so. Well, then, they’d
better turn this maladroit activity of theirs (_sinistram
diligentiam_) upon others: there’s no lack of people who call
it “critical judgement” to pull their friends to pieces:
they’ll never persuade me into thinking that I love my friends
too dearly.[1601]

It is futile to argue that he was not severe enough, and might have raised the literary standard by indulging, like Boileau, in outspoken attacks.[1602] What looks more likely is that the example and praise of a man of Pliny’s ability and reputation stirred contemporaries to do the utmost of which they were capable. However that may be, the freedom from envy implied in such praises must be set to his credit, and a good deal should be forgiven to a benevolence which showed itself in many other ways—in his charitable use of wealth, his willingness to help in misfortune, his ready emotion over the death of friend or slave.[1603] None but a considerate master would have chosen a room for study so as to avoid any temptation to interfere with the festive rowdiness of his slaves when celebrating the Saturnalia,[1604] or have taken pains to arrange that his freedman Zosimus, who had been spitting blood, should go to the Riviera and benefit by a prescription which medicine neglected for centuries in the treatment of consumption—excellent fresh air and properly handled milk.[1605] The tolerance which marked him as a governor made him companionable for very diverse types of men—a brooder like Tacitus or an airy mocker like Martial. It was rare for him to loathe anyone as he did Regulus; for he recognized the inhumanity of being too fierce a hater, and the virtue of forgiveness.[1606] Temperate though rich, Pliny followed a rule of life as commendable as the Stoic, yet without Stoic rigidity; and if at times he appeared a little prim and priggish, let it be remembered how anxious he was at other times to show that he could unbend into frivolities.[1607]

His greatest weakness lies so patently on the surface that it amuses more than it offends. The passion for fame turned into an amiable vanity when he was convinced that the coveted fame had been attained. With a perfectly naïve egoism that disarms severe censure, he chronicles his own good deeds or desires a place in Tacitus’s immortal works.[1608] Can one wonder that he liked to have his name coupled with that of the historian?[1609] He writes:

I never experienced greater pleasure than from a talk with
Cornelius Tacitus recently. He told me that he had sitting next
him at last circus-games a Roman knight. After conversation on
a wide range of learning, the latter asked, “Are you from Italy
or the provinces?” “You know me,” was the reply, “and from my
literary works to be sure.” Whereupon the other asked, “Are you
Tacitus or Pliny?”[1610]

The letter proceeds to recount another incident in which a stranger guessed Pliny’s identity, and concludes: “I’m not afraid to appear too boastful in quoting not my own but other people’s opinion about me.” Still, it is his own golden opinion that he quotes about his speech for Attia Viriola as an inspired performance.[1611] No wonder, then, that he should mention his delight when the judges in court could not help rising from their seats to show appreciation of his speaking,[1612] or that he thought it a “white pebble day” when he heard two young men (_egregium par_) pleading on opposite sides in the urban prefect’s council, both exhibiting an excellent style which they had based on Pliny as their pattern (_exemplar_),[1613] or that he should honestly confess that he enjoyed reading poetry which praised himself.[1614]

But he was not without traits of modesty: he owned there was something beyond him in the virtues of a good philosopher, in the eminence of Cicero, and in the genius of Tacitus.[1615] There is also something fine in his avowal that the attainment of glory is not all: it is the inner quality that counts, and to deserve success is no less honourable than to command it:

Besides I have in mind how much finer a spirit it shows to set
the rewards of honour in one’s conscience rather than in men’s
applause. Glory should follow, not be sought after; and if by
some chance or other it does not follow, a deed is no less
excellent for having failed to win glory.[1616]

A natural piety, flecked with superstition in the matter of omens and dreams, prompted him to build temples in Italy and to hesitate in the East over disturbing a consecrated site.[1617] However much he might feel officially opposed to the non-conformity of Christians in the observance of such public sacrifices as tested loyalty, against the principles of the Christian life he found nothing to say.[1618] As to his own religious beliefs, he accepted a Divine Power as having vouchsafed Trajan to Rome, and recognized the obligation of prayer to the Providence sustaining the emperor.[1619] On a bed of sickness, he knows the invalid discovers the vanity of worldly pursuits, and “in that hour remembers there are gods, in that hour remembers he is man.”[1620] Sincerity of feeling enabled him, like Persius, to penetrate the inmost meaning of worship in the doctrine that “the gods find pleasure not so much in exact petitions by their votaries as in innocency and holiness, and he who has brought to their shrines a clean and pure heart is found more acceptable than he who has brought a premeditated form of words.”[1621]

His views on the Empire were those of acquiescence in the system of control by one ruler working for the general weal.[1622] He had been able to keep to the path of prudence under a bad emperor, though even he claims to have been in danger from Domitian. After the dawn of better days, there came the raptures of the _Panegyric_, where the constitutional change is paradoxically summarized in his words to Trajan _iubes esse liberos: erimus_.[1623] Admirers of the great past of Rome might take comfort in the fancy that a good _princeps_ was a restorer of the olden times. Broadly, Pliny’s political attitude is that difficulties in the state must be left to the higher powers to face: that is what an emperor is for.[1624] On this principle he certainly acted when Bithynia was under his charge.

Interrogated on his style, Pliny might have called himself Ciceronian. For his letters he employs a rhythmic prose of a a light type, decorating it with poetic quotations and allusions. If he cannot be said to be periodic in structure, he does largely follow the Ciceronian type of sentence-endings.[1625] Yet in reality his prose was the resultant of different forces. It is true that he went back in his orations to Cicero as a master; but, in addition, he acknowledges his debt to Demosthenes in Greek and to Calvus in Latin. It is also true that, like his master Quintilian, he decries the oratory of the day,[1626] and, like Quintilian again, holds that the best models (_optima quaeque_) should be imitated:[1627] at the same time, it does not follow that Pliny was unaffected by the rhetoric of his own era. On the contrary, the reader soon discovers in the letters that he was an offspring of the age in his studied use of the paraphernalia of rhetoric such as antithesis, oxymoron, the emphatic anaphora,[1628] and _sententiae_, like “many respect gossip, few conscience” (_multi famam, conscientiam pauci uerentur_), or “The favour of scoundrels is as untrustworthy as the scoundrels themselves” (_gratia malorum tam infida est quam ipsi_). The rhetorical ring due to artificial devices may be noted even in the English dress of a representative letter to an official friend:

Consider that you are sent to the province of Achaia, the true,
the genuine Greece, where civilization, literature, and even
agriculture are believed to have originated. Consider that you
are sent to regulate the affairs of free states; that is to
say, men in the highest degree men, free men in the highest
sense free, who have maintained the right which nature granted
them by courage, by services, by friendliness, finally by
compact and the sanctions of religion. Let your feelings be
those of reverence for their antiquity, their marvellous deeds,
even for their myths.... Keep before your eyes that this is
the land which sent us our legal code; the land which gave us
laws, not after a victory, but at our own request. Remember
it is Athens you approach, it is Lacedaemon you govern. To
snatch from them the shadow that is left, the surviving name
of freedom, would be harsh, cruel, barbarous.... Recollect the
past greatness of each state, but not so as to despise her
for having lost it. Let there be no arrogance, no harshness.
You need not fear contempt: can contempt be shown for the
magistrate invested with power and the insignia of office,
unless he is a low, mean creature who has already a contempt
for himself? Authority makes a poor test of its own force if
it flouts others: it is a poor sort of homage that is won by
terror: affection gives a far stronger guarantee for holding
what you want than fear does. For fear vanishes, if one quits
the scene, while affection remains; and just as the former
turns into hatred, so does the latter turn into respect.[1629]

Yet Pliny was not a mere scholastic rhetorician: he was habitually versed in business affairs and actual lawsuits: he had, therefore, to be more practical in offence and defence than an academic professor had need to be. In fact, he realizes the weakness inherent in the rhetoric of the schools when he draws a picture of the rhetor Isaeus as a simple-minded teacher in contrast with the keen practised lawyer who necessarily learns guile from close contact with the real disputes of men.[1630] As to his Ciceronianism, it is so modified that his style could not be mistaken for Cicero’s. If he had been taught by Quintilian to eschew Seneca’s brevity, he did not keep the rotundity of the Ciceronian manner. Rather he is a compromise between the two styles. In one of his eleven surviving letters to Tacitus, he raises an interesting question on the relative merits of the terse and the profuse.[1631] True, at least, to theory, he favours the latter; and it may be imagined how illuminating it would have been to read the answer from the master of the condensed style. Pliny’s own illustration of brevity has a delightfully vague freedom about it: Homer, though like Virgil he takes many lines to describe the armour of his hero, is brief, he maintains, because he accomplishes his literary design (_quia facit quod instituit_), and so Pliny’s letter on his Tuscan villa must not be called big—it is the villa that is big! No single label indeed can fairly denote Pliny’s style: if he could be so labelled, he would not have made such attractive reading. The great variety of his subjects met with corresponding variety of treatment from him, so that he is justified when he claims that in literature, as in life, the ideal effect is produced by a blend of the grave and the gay.[1632]

In Pliny’s choice of words alone there are characteristics, such as his liking for frequentative verbs, that mark him off from the Golden Age.[1633] He is individual enough to invent words, _e.g._ the nouns _abactus_, _praelusio_, _renutus_, _socialitas_, _sinisteritas_, _arcessitor_, _reformator_, or to give fresh meanings to old words, _e.g._ _descensio_, _dispensatio_, _egestio_, _nutatio_, _latitudo_, _gestator_. Again, he typically shares words with writers of the Silver Age, _e.g._ _cenatio_, “dining-room” (Sen., Plin. Maj., Col., Petr., Mart., Suet.); _computatio_, “account” (Sen., Plin. Maj., Quint., Front.); _captiuitas_, “slavery” (Sen., Petr., Tac., Flor.); _diuersitas_, “difference” (Plin. Maj., Quint., Tac.); _circulator_, “hawker” (Cels., Sen., Petr.). His locutions and syntax also present noteworthy features. One may find a Livian and poetic turn in _pietatis est totus_ or _ne grauare_ or _permitto facere_, and a Virgilian base for constructions like _certus fugae_ or _liberum discriminis_ or _securus magnitudinis_. That Pliny based his Latin not strictly on Cicero but on the Latin of his own century is shown by much in the structure of the sentence, such as the general relinquishment of the period, and reduction of relative words; the new sense attached to conjunctions or adverbs like _alioqui_, _quatenus_, _quoque_; the use of participles in bold ways; much too in the use of moods,[1634] like _quotiens intrasset_ or _quocumque me contulissem_ or _quamquam nouerim_.

Fronto’s educational correspondence shows no knowledge of Pliny’s epistles; but Tertullian’s acquaintance with the two letters on the Christians is evident from his angry objections to them.[1635] Macrobius[1636] couples Pliny and Symmachus, the scholarly statesman of the late fourth century, as examples of the rich and luxuriant (_pingue et floridum_) style in oratory; but this does not convincingly prove that Symmachus’s _Epistulae_ were inspired by the Plinian collection. Cassiodor(i)us mentions Plinius Secundus as _orator et historicus cuius ingenii plurima opera exstant_. It is natural to suppose that letter-writers in Latin should have used Pliny as a model, and that, as Pliny’s books were sold at Lyon during his lifetime, they would still be remembered when Roman studies flourished in Gaul during the fifth century A.D. But it is doubtful whether there is absolute proof of his influence between Sidonius Apollinaris,[1637] who was an admiring follower, and the tenth century.[1638] In the Middle Ages the Fathers and Seneca eclipsed Pliny in favour, but from the time of Politian and Erasmus his influence was re-established, and his literary heirs have been many, especially in England and France.

MINOR CONTEMPORARIES

Pliny was so completely in touch with the literary movements of his day that a survey of his circle gives not only a retrospect upon the Flavian age but an admirable introduction to literature under Trajan, and even, in the case of a slightly junior friend like Suetonius, carries us into Hadrian’s reign. Pliny, we have seen, was fond of writing poetry and fond of poets. It is therefore appropriate here to review his minor contemporaries in general, whether they wrote verse or prose. Some of the chief Flavian authors, such as Silius Italicus, Martial and Frontinus, he knew well; and among his elderly friends was Vestricius Spurinna, already classed among minor Flavian lyric poets. With him may be named, as typical of culture at the time, the grandfather of the Emperor Antoninus Pius, Arrius Antoninus, whose Greek epigrams and mimes caused Pliny to fancy he was reading Callimachus or Herodas.[1639] The information yielded by Pliny’s letters about elegiac and lyric writers indicates a widespread passion for composing short poems; so that the Rome of Trajan may be pictured as a nest of gentlemen singing or trying to sing, and what Pliny called “the crop of poets” accounts for his normally roseate view of the condition of literature. Two at least of his intimates, both of whom he pressed to publish, seem to have had an epic bent: these were Octavius Rufus[1640] and Caninius Rufus.[1641] Several significant letters were addressed to the latter on literary events, such as the death of Silius Italicus and the composition of a comedy by Vergilius Romanus. The story of a tame dolphin is communicated to him as material for a poetic narrative; and Pliny approves of his intention to write a poem in Greek on Trajan’s Dacian War. Calpurnius Piso took an old Greek title, καταστερισμοί,[1642] for his elegiac poem, which may have retold legends about the constellations in the spirit of Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_. Like several contemporaries, Pompeius Saturninus[1643] was an orator and historian as well as a poet. His lyrics and epigrams after the manner of Catullus and Calvus evoke the utmost enthusiasm from Pliny; and to him Pliny’s speech at the inauguration of the Como library went to be revised with his customary acumen (_qua soles lima_). A very notable circumstance was that one day he read to Pliny certain epistles which he said were by his wife. Pliny’s comment is that he could have believed he was listening to Plautus or Terence in prose,[1644] though he is not equally sure that such polished letters could have been written by the lady. The importance of the incident lies in its testimony to the growing practice of writing literary epistles of what we may call a Plinian type. There seems to be here a hint, perhaps not sufficiently grasped, that such letters were considered to contain, as Pliny’s often do, a poetic element; and this is confirmed by the instance of Voconius Romanus, also an orator of ability, who was the author of letters that gave an impression as if “the Muses were speaking Latin.”[1645] Another imitator of Catullus and Calvus was Serius Augurinus, the youthful composer of _Poematia_, which were the best of their sort, we are told, for years. Pliny cites from him a hendecasyllabic piece, which, though it scarcely justifies the commendation in the letter, possessed for the critic the merit of containing the line “Pliny alone is as good as predecessors for me.”[1646] Passennus Paulus wrote Propertian elegies and Horatian odes: the latter, says the complimentary Pliny, might well suggest his descent from Horace, as in blood he was descended from Propertius.[1647] It was the opening of one of his lines, _Prisce iubes_, that gave Javolenus Priscus at a _recitatio_ the chance of pouncing upon it disconcertingly with the rude interruption _Ego uero non iubeo_.[1648] A most fascinating survival from the period, had fate allowed, would have been the comic plays, some in Menander’s style and others based on the old Attic comedy, by Vergilius Romanus.[1649] The nature of the poems by Silius Proculus, which Pliny in one letter agrees to read, is unknown.[1650]

On turning from poetry to prose (though, it will be remembered, some of those already mentioned were prose-writers as well as poets), we are met on the threshold by Pliny’s most famous literary friend, Tacitus, the subject of a later chapter. The orator C. Fannius made some stir as a chronicler of Nero’s victims: before his death three books of his work had appeared and became popular.[1651] Titinius Capito chose for a historical theme “The Ends of Illustrious Men” (_Exitus Inlustrium Virorum_), occupying himself also with a poetic treatment of the lives of the renowned.[1652] He was a shining ornament of the age, a fosterer of learning, and restorer of what Pliny for the moment regards as a decadent literature.[1653] Always willing to lend his house for _recitationes_, he was a regular attender at Pliny’s readings, and a hero-worshipper who kept busts of the great republican champions at home. One of the three correspondents called Maximus in Pliny’s letters directed against a certain Planta a polemic work, which Pliny desired to see published.[1654] Writings by Sardus[1655] so delighted Pliny by praising him that he read and reread them; and Atrius[1656] is thanked for a book of his which he had not so far had time to read—the _liber_ in question was possibly a speech. Julius Avitus is mentioned as having written much in a short life: since Pliny laments the loss of the whole by his premature death, the inference is that he never published his books.[1657] A large number of contemporary orators, besides those just mentioned, appear in Pliny’s pages; but they are too many to record here.[1658]

Jurisprudence under Trajan is represented by Neratius Priscus and Juventius Celsus on the Proculian side, and on the Sabinian side by Javolenus Priscus and probably Titius Aristo, one of Pliny’s friends.

Grammatical and linguistic learning had several representatives. Urbanus, who is plausibly referred to this period, has his comments on Virgil quoted by Servius. Velius Longus was likewise a Virgilian scholar. A student of Ennius, Lucilius, Accius and other early Latin authors, he wrote on archaisms and derivations: as was natural, he used and quoted Varro and Verrius Flaccus. The date of Flavius Caper is not certain, but he also combined an interest in Virgil with studies of old Latin: a good deal of his lore passed into the works of Charisius and Priscian. Caesellius Vindex, who is cited in Aulus Gellius, compiled an alphabetic dictionary of _Antiquae Lectiones_, which seems to have had the alternative title of _Stromateus_.

One of several authors named Hyginus in Latin literature appeared at this period as a gromatic writer in a treatise, now fragmentary, on legal boundaries, _De Limitibus_. It has been disputed whether another work _De Limitibus Constituendis_ is his or not. The _De Munitionibus Castrorum_ ascribed to him must, from internal evidence, be placed much later. A manual of geometry for land-surveyors, which drew upon Euclid among other sources, was composed by the Balbus whom subsequent gromatics often cite. This same department of field-measurement is represented slightly later by Siculus Flaccus and Junius Nipsus.