SOURCE: Bell, Albert A. “Pliny the Younger: The Kinder, Gentler Roman.” Classical Bulletin 66, no. 1-2 (1990): 37-41.

[In the following essay, Bell argues that Pliny's gentle nature and reputation as a good husband, generous employer, fair master, tender man, and principled public servant—evidence of which is culled from his letters—suggest a kinder side to Roman life than depicted by other, more satiric classical authors.]

If one were to play word association, the mention of “Roman” almost certainly would not evoke responses such as “kind” or “gentle.” Orgies, slaughter in the amphitheatre, exposure of newborn children, brutal treatment of slaves, general indifference to human suffering—these are the associations one might more typically expect. Unfortunately, much of the extant Roman literature and art support that interpretation.

To pick only a handful of the most appalling examples of Roman callousness and inhumanity: Catullus laughs at a man who is so starved he can scarcely defecate (23); several characters in the Satyricon peep through a crack in a door to watch two prepubescent youngsters on their “wedding night” (25, 26); Martial boasts about the tortures inflicted on victims in the amphitheatre (De Spectaculis 5, 7, and 8). Though they had easy access to classical Greek tragedy and comedy, the Romans preferred coarse farces based on “traditional crudity of jest and language”¹ or indecent mimes in which actresses appeared nude.² The combined effect of their entertainment and the harshness of their daily lives could hardly have been other than “demoralizing in the extreme, encouraging a cowardly delight in the sufferings of others and fostering every base passion.”³

And yet one Roman, whom we know best from his correspondence, does not fit this mold at all. Even allowing for some self-serving exaggeration on his part, Pliny the Younger emerges from the pages of his letters as “a man one would like to have known—an affectionate husband, loyal friend, considerate master, and conscientious public servant.”⁴ I will examine this kinder, gentler facet of Pliny's personality and suggest that there was a more admirable side to Roman life than that depicted by Petronius, Martial, Juvenal, and other cynical, satiric Silver Age authors.

This is not to claim that Pliny is more typical of his age than the people of Martial's epigrams. He sees himself as somehow different. He does not enjoy loud, boisterous dinner parties (9.17), though he admits that most of his contemporaries would find his calm, “Socratic” dinners boring. He has no interest in gladiatorial games or chariot races, nor any respect for people who do (4.22, 9.6). He disdains the lower classes, and there is something of the air of a country gentleman about him.⁵ His letters were, in fact, more highly regarded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when his audience was composed of people more like himself.⁶ He intimates that his friends⁷ shared his tastes, but we cannot assume that this circle is representative of the society as a whole. It is, however, a side of the society we cannot ignore if we want to have an accurate picture of the whole.

What is significant is that in Pliny we see a person who operates by a set of values that differ rather markedly from those of his society, as it is depicted by contemporary writers. How he came to believe in those values we may not be able to determine,⁸ but it can be enlightening just to see what they were and how they influenced his daily life.

In the first place, Pliny is a generous man. This is all the more remarkable in a society noted for its stinginess.⁹ Polybius summed up the Roman attitude toward charity: “No Roman willingly gives anything to anyone” (31.25, 9-10). Only in Trajan's reign did the government institute a program (the alimenta) to provide support for destitute children.¹⁰ An example of the era's new spirit of generosity may be the charitable society referred to in Pliny's correspondence with Trajan (10.92, 93). A more traditional sort of gift-giving was common in imperial Rome, but the gifts always had “hooks” in them, as Martial says (5.18, 5.59). Gifts, favors and praise of the giver were expected in return (Martial 4.88, 5.52).

Pliny, however, takes a different view. In 9.30 he admits that he is reluctant to praise the alleged generosity of a man who gives only to “certain people.” The truly generous man, he thinks, is one who gives “to his country, neighbors, relatives, and friends, but by them I mean his friends without means; unlike the people who bestow their gifts on those best able to make a return … so few instances are there even of partial generosity.”¹¹ While this theme occurs in other Latin moralists, “Pliny's own example is more impressive, even if well advertised, because it was realized in hard cash.”¹²

Pliny did give away large sums of money. He built or rebuilt temples for townspeople who lived near his estates (3.4, 4.1, 9.39, 10.8). He established a library for his hometown of Comum (1.8) and paid part of the salary of a teacher so that local children would not have to travel to Milan (4.13). He arranged for income from one of his properties to be used to support Comum's needy children (7.18). In his will he funded public baths and provided money to support a hundred of his freedmen and to give an annual dinner for the city's populace.¹³ The bequest amounted to some two million sesterces, after he had already donated approximately that much to the town during his life.¹⁴

His generosity extended to individuals as well. Martial and Juvenal both lament the stinginess of their patrons,¹⁵ but Pliny seems to have been extremely generous by the standards of his, or any, day. He gave Martial money to travel back to Spain. In 2.4 he writes off an apparently large debt which a woman had inherited from her father. He mentions that he had also contributed 100,000 sesterces toward her dowry. Admittedly the tone of the letter is pretentious, but in that Pliny is simply a creature of his age. Other examples of his generosity to individuals are found in 1.19, 5.1, and 6.32. We know of no largess to the mass of the poor and needy of Rome, but to expect such would be to require Pliny to conform to our eleemosynary standards.¹⁶ As M. I. Finley suggests, Pliny's benefactions were “probably unsurpassed in Italy or the western empire.”¹⁷

Another trait that becomes evident from even a casual reading of the letters is the essential humaneness of the man. As already noted, he is repulsed by the gladiatorial games and other amusements of the arena and the circus. His treatment of his slaves provides the best evidence of his humaneness. His kindness toward his reader Zosimus (5.19) may be dismissed as enlightened self-interest, but his refusal to work his slaves in chains (3.19) and his anxiety over the illness of a single slave (8.1) or a group of them (8.16) evidence his genuine concern for these people.¹⁸ He is no radical reformer out to abolish slavery, but not even the early Christian church took that step.¹⁹ As a man of his times Pliny sees no alternative to the institution; he simply tries to make it as tolerable as possible for those whose fate places them in servitude. He is a kind man who condemns harshness in a master (3.14). Such sentiments are not unique in circles imbued with Stoic thought on the subject, but Pliny puts his ideals into practice. He allows his slaves to make wills like free men (8.16), and we do not find him jovially whipping his cook after a poor dinner, as Martial (8.23) pictures himself doing.

Fairness is another of Pliny's appealing traits. This characteristic comes out in his eagerness to observe the spirit of the law rather than the letter. The charge that he is a niggling bureaucrat becomes absurd in the face of a letter like 4.10. A certain Sabina had left a legacy to one of her slaves, using the formula “to Modestus whom I have ordered to be set free.” But there was no specific clause in her will granting Modestus his freedom. Legal experts whom Pliny had consulted felt the man should receive neither his freedom nor his legacy. To Pliny, however, “it seems obvious that it was a mistake on Sabina's part, and I think we ought to act as if she had set out in writing what she believed she had written.” In 5.7 he bends the law again to carry out the intentions of another friend's will, although it costs him 400,000 sesterces to do so. (Remember that that sum of money qualified one for membership in the order of the knights; Pliny is voluntarily forfeiting a small fortune.) In 2.16 he mentions that it is his own private practice to be bound by the wishes of the deceased, even though they might not have been expressed in the best legal form.

This basic fairness comes out in his resolution of an economic problem on one of his estates. The grape harvest had been poor, and people who had contracted to buy at certain prices stood to lose money. Instead of just expecting them to absorb the whole loss, Pliny refunded to each one an eighth of what he had spent (an idea that is hardly likely to gain favor in our own commodity futures markets). Those who had laid out more than 10,000 sesterces were given an additional ten percent of anything above that sum (8.2). It would have been simpler to give everyone the same rebate, “but hardly fair, and I hold the view that one of the most important things in life is to practice justice in private as in public life, in small matters as in great, and apply it to one's own affairs no less than to other people's.”

We see him applying this principle at a dinner party where the guests have been served differing fare depending on their social status.²⁰ Another guest asks Pliny if he approves of the practice. Pliny replies that there are no distinctions at his table: “I serve the same to everyone, for when I invite guests it is for a meal, not to make class distinctions.” It is not overly expensive, he explains, for he serves the same modest fare at all the tables instead of costly meals to some guests and budget-saving scraps to others (2.6).

Pliny is a man of principle in all things. He refuses to accept gifts for his conduct of court cases (5.13.9). He believes that “one ought to make personal and temporary interests give place to public and permanent advantages” (7.18.3), and his own career is an illustration of his credo. He had no need of public office and often found it burdensome (3.1, 4.23, 7.3, 8.9), but he remained in public service out of a sense of duty, inspired by the example of his uncle and by his reading of Cicero.²¹

Tenderness in a man might not have been a desideratum to the Romans, but Pliny thinks it should be: “A true man is affected by grief and has feelings, though he may fight them” (8.16). His own tenderness shows through in a number of his letters. Even here, though, modern scholars have been slow to admit the obvious. Jerome Carcopino claimed that Pliny's letters about his wife's miscarriage show how aloof and cold he is toward her.²² But those letters (8.10, 11), on a very difficult subject, were written to her grandfather and aunt who raised her. There is a difference in tone between them, the first—to the grandfather—being more formal and restrained, probably because that was the nature of the person to whom he was writing.²³

But these letters are not the place to look for clues to Pliny's relationship with Calpurnia. When he writes directly to her, we see him missing her so much that he rereads her letters (6.4 and 7) and meanders into her room when he should be working (7.5). It is closer to the mark to say that Pliny is “the first man known to have written a love letter to his own wife.”²⁴

There is one element of this picture that might seem at first to argue against my interpretation of Pliny as a man kinder and gentler than his times. In 10.96 he describes to Trajan the steps he has taken to suppress the Christian superstitio in Bithynia. People who were accused and refused to recant he had ordered to be led away to execution, “for, whatever the nature of their admission, I am convinced that their stubbornness and unshakeable obstinacy ought not to go unpunished.” He also ordered two female slaves, members of the group with the title ministrae, to be tortured in order to gain further information.

That bit of bureaucratic brutality does not accord well with the essential humaneness and fairness that Pliny has demonstrated throughout the rest of his letters. Is this the real man and the rest just a literary pose? I think not. As governor, Pliny had the power of coercitio, the power to enforce his will—however arbitrary and unjust—on the populace of his province.²⁵ Under a cruel governor the provincials lived in dread of this prerogative, as Pliny notes in a letter describing a suit against a governor (3.9). The provincials bringing the suit claimed that “as provincials they were terrorized into carrying out any order of the governor.”

We cannot know with what degree of enthusiasm or reluctance Pliny ordered these executions. He had been sent to Bithynia to restore order to a province plagued by maladministration and civil unrest for several years. The primary responsibility of provincial officials was to ensure stability and calm.²⁶ This was why Pilate acceded to Jewish demands to crucify Jesus (Mark 15.15) and why the tribune Claudius Lysias brought in troops to rescue Paul from a mob in Jerusalem (Acts 21.31-36). The magistrate's personal feelings seem to have had little to do with his actions when faced with a threat to social order. The Christians appeared to Pliny a major part of the problem and seemed to require harsh repressive measures.

In other cases, however, he suggests a lenient course of action which Trajan vetoes. In 10.31 he has discovered that some men sentenced years before to work in the mines had evaded their punishment and now, in old age, “by all accounts are quietly leading honest lives.” It seems “too hard” to him to send them back to the mines. But Trajan (10.32) takes the more typically Roman approach. Men who have avoided punishment within the past ten years must be returned to the mines. Older men can be put to work cleaning public baths or repairing roads.²⁷

In 10.33 Pliny suggests to the emperor that a volunteer fire brigade be authorized for Nicomedia, to prevent a repetition of a disastrous fire which had recently struck the town. Its size will be strictly controlled, he promises, and it will not be allowed to diverge from its purpose. Trajan vetoes the idea in no uncertain terms (10.34). Such groups tend to become political clubs. Just provide the equipment, he decrees, and let property owners get help from the crowds who gather to watch a fire.

For too long Pliny has been dismissed as a stuffy, self-important dabbler in literature, “a colorless prig lacking the full Roman charm and the saving sense of humor.”²⁸ Martial and Juvenal may be more colorful, but does that also mean that they embody “the full Roman charm”? Reliance on their work as sources for the study of the social history of imperial Rome has created an impression of Roman society that may overemphasize the shocking, degraded side of life which every civilization produces. Today's readers of tabloid newspapers and viewers of more sensational types of television shows could conclude that our society is not much healthier than the Rome of Martial and Juvenal. (Even serious scholars can compare the women of that era to modern women of less than exemplary virtue.²⁹

Pliny embodies the “kinder, gentler” side of Roman life. More sympathetic study of his letters would restore a balance to our picture of Rome at the height of its power.

Notes

1. W. Beare, The Roman Stage. A Short History of Latin Drama in the Time of the Republic, 3rd ed. (London: Methuen, 1964) 142.

2. Ibid., 151. Mimes remained a scandalous form of entertainment in Pliny's day (9.17).

3. H. Mattingly, Roman Imperial Civilisation (New York: Doubleday, 1959) 195. Cf. R. Auguet, Cruelty and Civilization. The Roman Games (London: Allen and Unwin, 1972).

4. B. Radice, “Introduction,” Pliny: Letters and Panegyricus (London: Heinemann, 1969) Vol. I, xvii.

5. F. S. Dunham, “The Younger Pliny—Gentleman and Citizen,” CJ [Classical Journal] 40 (1944-45) 417-426.

6. M. Johnston, “John Adams and Pliny the Younger,” CW [Classical World] 27 (1933) 46.

7. R. Syme, “People in Pliny,” JRS [Journal of Roman Studies] 58 (1968) 135-151, and “Pliny's Less Successful Friends,” Historia 9 (1960) 362-379.

8. One unmistakable influence is the Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus, whom Pliny “greatly admired” and “loved” (3.11). Musonius' thought had close parallels to early Christian teaching at certain points; cf. P. W. van der Horst, “Musonius Rufus and the New Testament: A Contribution to the Corpus Hellenisticum,” NT [New Testament] 16 (1974) 306-315.

9. J. B. Skemp, “Service to the Needy in the Graeco-Roman World,” in Parresia. Karl Barth zum 80. Geburtstag am 10. Mai 1966, ed. E. Busch et al. (Zurich: EVZ-Verlag, 1966) 17-26. A.R. Hands, Charities and Social Aid in Greece and Rome (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968).

10. F. C. Bourne, “The Roman Alimentary Program and Italian Agriculture,” TAPhA [Transactions of the American Philological Association] 91 (1960) 47-75; R.P. Duncan-Jones, “The Purpose and Organization of the Alimenta,” PBSR [Papers, British School at Rome] 32 (1964) 123-146; P. Garnsey, “Trajan's Alimenta. Some Problems,” Historia 17 (1968) 367-381.

11. This and all subsequent quotations from Pliny are from B. Radice's translation, published in two forms: in the Loeb Library edition (cf. above, n. 4) and in The Letters of the Younger Pliny (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963).

12. A.N. Sherwin-White, The Letters of Pliny: A Historical and Social Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966) 513.

13. J. Nichols, “Pliny and the Patronage of Communities,” Hermes 108 (1980) 365-385.

14. Radice (above, n. 4) 24.

15. Martial 1.59, 1.108, 2.5, 2.43, 2.46, 3.14, 3.36, 3.60, 5.19; Juvenal 5.107-113, 7.36-97.

16. Pliny was in fact an unabashed snob, declaring in 9.6,3 that the plebs were worth no more than a dirty tunic. Such an attitude was unexceptional among his peers.

17. The Ancient Economy (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973) 39.

18. Slaves on country estates routinely suffered brutal treatment and were often worked in chain gangs. Cf. Columella, De re rustica 1.3; Pliny, Hist. nat. 18.35, and R.H. Barrow, Slavery in the Roman Empire (London: Methuen, 1928) 65-97.

19. Ephesians 6.5 and Titus 2.9 both urge slaves to be obedient to their masters. Whether these letters were actually written by Paul is immaterial; they certainly represent Christian attitudes in Pliny's lifetime.

20. Evidently a common practice; cf. Martial 1.20, 3.60, 4.68, 6.11.

21. W. C. Korfmacher, “Pliny and the Gentleman of Cicero's Offices,” CW 40 (1946) 50-53.

22. Daily Life in Ancient Rome (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1940) 89-90.

23. E. S. Dobson, “Pliny the Younger's Depiction of Women,” CB [Classical Bulletin] 58 (1982) 84-85.

24. A. N. Sherwin-White, “Pliny, the Man and His Letters,” G&R [Greece & Rome] 16 (1969) 79.

25. A. N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963) 1-23; P. Garnsey, “The Criminal Jurisdiction of Governors,” JRS 58 (1968) 51-59; D. Liebs, “Das ius gladii der römischen Provinzgouverneure in der Kaiserzeit,” ZPE [Zeitschrift fuer Papyrologie und Epigraphik] 43 (1981) 217-223.

26. G. Downey, “‘Un-Roman Activities’: The Ruling Race and the Minorities,” Anglican Theological Rev. 58 (1976) 432-443.

27. F. Millar, “Condemnation to Hard Labour in the Roman Empire, from the Julio-Claudians to Constantine,” PBSR 52 (1984) 124-147.

28. Korfmacher, (above, n. 21) 53.

29. S. Treggiari, “Libertine Ladies,” CW 64 (1971) 196-198; J. P. Sullivan, “Lady Chatterly in Rome,” Pacific Coast Philology 15 (1980) 53-62.