SOURCE: Sherwin-White, A. N. “Pliny, the Man and His Letters.” Greece and Rome 16, no. 1 (April 1969): 76-90.

[In the following essay, Sherwin-White examines Pliny's letters and notes that they reveal much about the writer's own personality, including his humanity, generosity, boldness, his weaknesses, and his pleasant nature.]

Pliny lived in the heyday of the Roman empire, being born in a.d. 62 in the middle of the reign of Nero, at Comum by Lake Como in north Italy, and he lived until about a.d. 112. His family were not of the old Roman nobility but belonged to the second grade of the Roman upper classes, the so-called Knights or equites Romani. Pliny trained to become an advocate in the courts of civil law, and partly by his talents and partly through the influence of family friends in the senatorial class he gained promotion to the senior grade of the Roman administration. He became a Roman senator when he was about twenty-eight years old, and eventually climbed to the top rung of the Roman public service. So he was in Roman terms a self-made man, the first senator of his family. But he was also a highly educated man; as a young man he attended the schools of the most famous professors of literature at Rome, and especially that of the great Quintilian, whose book on the art of rhetoric survives to show the sort of education that Pliny received.¹

We know Pliny from a collection of his private letters which he published in a series of nine short volumes when he was about forty to forty-five years old. The letters start in the year a.d. 97, when Pliny was 35 years old and in mid-career as a Roman official, and they continue till 108, after which Pliny left Rome to take up the governorship of the province of Bithynia in north-western Turkey. The letters cover a tremendous variety of topics—themes of public life and politics, anecdotes about high society, family life, business affairs, the literary circles of Rome, descriptions of natural scenery, and portents such as ghosts, floods, and volcanoes. But there is a caution to be made. There are letters and letters. In any age the really revealing letter is the one written white-hot and with no thought of publication, scribbled down on the spot for immediate action, report, or advice. Most of Cicero's letters are like that, and take you straight into the mind and heart of the man without screens and defences. Pliny's letters are different. Though like all good letters they are about affairs of the moment, particular occasions of pleasure and trouble, crisis or success, in the form in which Pliny published them they are not exactly spontaneous.²

Pliny belonged to a society that was wealthy, leisured, and overeducated on the literary side. He and his friends despite their public duties had a great deal of spare time, and they spent much of it in literary exercises of various sorts—writing verses, reciting and polishing their speeches as specimens of oratory, and listening to public readings of other people's efforts. One of their exercises was, very much as in Victorian England, the composition of private letters in a refined and polished style, and the circulation of these letters amongst themselves. Many of Pliny's friends lived not at Rome but scattered through the provincial cities of Italy where they administered their estates, which were the main source of their wealth. So like the rustic Victorians they had a great appetite for letters as a means of getting news, but they expected to have their letters written in the best Latin prose. Such letters were called ‘letters written in style’—litterae curiosius scriptae. Pliny was the first Latin writer to have the idea of developing this kind of letter into an art form, written with great concentration and according to a set of rules apparently invented by himself. Pliny had a flair for this kind of writing and succeeded in producing a series of miniature masterpieces, perhaps of craftsmanship rather than art. He succeeds because the basic framework, the hard core, was a genuine news-letter, and because the really was a master of language so long as he worked in a small compass.

Pliny was a professional advocate, a pleader in the courts, trained in all the artifices of Roman rhetoric. We have a long speech of his, a formal address to the emperor Trajan, describing and praising the first two years of his reign. The speech is terrible—because Pliny took all the space he could, elaborated everything, repeated everything. But in his letters he proceeded on the opposite principle, that of compression. The basic rule was that each letter deal only with a single subject or event, and that it must be short. Most of the letters are from a third of a page of twenty-eight lines to two or three such pages long. Greater length is allowed only when the subject is genuinely big, like the eruption of Vesuvius, or a court trial. Such subjects get only six or seven pages at most, and the matter is squeezed into what for them is a short space. So Pliny practised compression, but at the same time used the sharp, emotive, powerful, or colourful language of the Roman rhetorical schools, according to the needs of each topic, as in this account of the murder of a Roman magnate.³ ‘Something terrible has happened to the senator Larcius Macedo. His slaves did it. He was a proud and cruel master—he never could forget that his own father had been a slave. Macedo was taking his bath, when his slaves poured round him. They hit him in the throat, in the face, chest and belly too. When they thought he was done for they threw him on top of the furnace casing, to see if he was still alive. He either did not feel it or pretended not to, and shammed dead. Then they carried him out, as if finished off by the heat. Some loyal slaves took him over, and the palace women came howling and shrieking round him. The noise and the cool air revived him, his eyes flickered, and he stirred. Realizing that he was safe, he admitted that he was alive. The other slaves all fled, but most of them were caught, and the rest are being hunted down. So Macedo survived long enough to see his own murder punished.’⁴

That is a good piece of reporting. Just the right details are briefly picked out, and just the right amount of explanatory comment is provided. We see it happening and understand why. The man was a brute to his servants, and had it coming to him. It is Pliny's narrative style at its best. The particular effect depends on the side comments, which here are mildly satirical.

Max Beerbohm once said that Pliny's letters were the only writings of antiquity that could be enjoyed without knowing anything about the ancient world. But Beerbohm himself lived in a society of polished ease, wealth, and literary sophistication that was not so very different in its setting from the sort of society in which Pliny lived. It is often more difficult for us than for Max. It is no good reading Pliny if you are looking for modern attitudes of mind. You must allow for the standards and values of his own day. Many people are put off liking Pliny by the tone of a certain letter written about his wife Calpurnia. A year after his marriage he wrote to his wife's aunt like this: ‘As you are devoted to your niece you will, I am sure, be delighted to hear that Calpurnia is turning out to be a regular chip of the old block. She is very quick-witted and not at all extravagant. She is really devoted to me, which shows that she is not a flirt, and out of her liking for me she has taken to literature. She reads my speeches, and even learns them by heart. When I am going to plead in court she arranges for messengers to report how I have done, and how much applause I have received. Altogether she behaves just as I should expect from a girl brought up in your household.’⁵

Not at all the sort of letter a newly-wed is likely to write or to want written about his or her partner in this year of grace. But when you remember that this was a normal Roman marriage between a man of forty-two—who had already buried two wives—and a girl of fifteen or sixteen at most, the tone becomes less surprising. Roman marriages never began as love-affairs between young folk, but were family matches of convenience.⁶ Yet Pliny is much more modern than he sounds at first. He wants to share his chief interests with his young wife, and he looks forward to a genuine life partnership. He adds: ‘I have great hopes that we will build up a growing and enduring bond of unity.’ That was not the normal expectation in Roman society, in which divorce was easy and frequent. But Pliny often refers to long-lasting marriages with warm respect. Thus: ‘My dear Macrinus has had a heavy blow. He has lost a wife who would have been exceptional even in the old days. They lived together for thirty-nine years without any quarrels or bad feeling. It must be a great consolation to Macrinus that he had so fine a wife for so long, but I shall be worried about him until I hear that the wound is healing.’⁷ Pliny writes to his young wife directly in terms of strong affection when she is away from Rome. ‘We are not used to being parted. At night I wake up and think about you, and in the daytime my feet draw me to the boudoir where I used to see you. I turn back at the door of the empty room sick and sad, like a rejected lover. I am only free from these tortures when I am busy in the law-courts.’⁸ That may sound to our ears affected and stilted, or quite ordinary—any nineteenth-century husband to any wife. But in fact it was something new. Pliny was not writing in the conventional language of a Roman marriage, but for the first time in the ancient world a writer was applying the language of lovers to the relationship of marriage. In Ovid and Propertius this kind of talk is reserved for semi-romantic grand passions of a very different sort. Pliny is the first man known to have written a love-letter to his own wife. But you would never have understood that unless you knew something about the social habits of the Roman world.

Pliny could be malicious on occasion. He particularly detested his great rival, the successful lawyer Regulus, who had once been a prosecutor in political trials on the side of the government and had ruined certain friends of Pliny. There are five substantial letters about Regulus, all hostile.¹⁰ No one else receives this treatment in Pliny's letters. Pliny starts by exulting over the great shock that Regulus had when his patron the emperor Domitian died:⁶ ‘Have you seen anyone more frightened and repressed than Regulus since the death of Domitian? The memory of his crimes is troubling him, and he is visiting all my friends with abject pleas to manage a reconciliation between us.’ Pliny was planning a prosecution of Regulus to avenge his friends. But he remarked at the end of a long letter: ‘I won't do anything until I have asked my friend Mauricus for his advice. I know Regulus will be hard to attack. He is rich, and has many political friends, and plenty of people are afraid of him—which is more effective than liking.’¹¹ In the end the cautious Pliny dropped his prosecution and took his revenge in words. Regulus was an old man with a young son. The boy died, and Pliny wrote an unpleasant letter about them: ‘Regulus is mourning his son like a madman. The boy had a number of pets—ponies, dogs, and cage-birds. Regulus had them all slain round the boy's grave. That was not an act of mourning but a kind of showing-off. He is now confining himself to his country-house outside Rome, which has great porticoes filled with statues of himself. He says that he wants to marry again—behaving with his usual bad taste. You will soon hear of the marriage of an old man who is still in formal mourning. Not that Regulus has said as much—but he is bound to do whatever is unbecoming.’¹²

That is Pliny in his most malicious mood. Elsewhere his touch is usually lighter, and combines well with his gift for catching the essence of the social scene. Consider this account of a well-born lady, who had long outlived the days of her glory at the imperial court: ‘Ummidia Quadratilla has died at the age of nearly eighty. She was a lively old lady until her last illness, and much more powerfully built than is normal with our society beauties. She had rather naughty tastes for an old woman. She kept a troupe of opera singers, and was much too lavish with them for a lady of her station. But she would not let her young grandson Quadratus watch them, either at home or in the public theatre. I have heard her say when she was questioning me about her grandson's education, that it was her habit as a woman of unfettered leisure to relax by playing dice and watching her actors, but when she was going to do this she always told Quadratus to go away and study.’ This letter is the more interesting when you realize that Ummidia was a relict of the gay, pleasure-loving court of the emperor Nero. It was now fifty years later, social attitudes were becoming stricter, and Ummidia, though she does not change her own ways, yet brings her grandson up according to the new conventions.¹³

Pliny preferred the sober young Quadratus to the gay old grandmother. He was one of several young men whose training for the career of advocate was supervised by Pliny, who was a great encourager of young talent. He writes with enthusiasm about their first successes in court: ‘What a happy day for me! I sat on the bench of the metropolitan magistrate and heard two brilliant young men speaking on opposite sides in a case, Salinator and Quadratus. They will be a glory to our times and to Latin literature itself. They have all the good qualities wanted in orators—and they regard me as their tutor: all the people knew that they were my pupils and following in my footsteps.’ There is a certain mixture of simplicity and conceit in this.¹⁴ Pliny was a man well pleased with himself and with his successful career. Many moderns don't like this, but his self-satisfaction is ever redeemed by a touch of naiveté. Once he wrote a short letter about an unusual incident in the courts. ‘Rejoice on my account,’ he said. ‘Rejoice for the common cause. There is still respect for the art of oratory. Yesterday when I was going to speak in the inheritance court, the hall was so crowded that I could only get in through the judges' dais. What is more, a well-dressed young fellow lost his tunic in the struggle for a place, and stood wearing only his toga for seven hours while listening to me speaking. What a glorious tribute! There really is an audience for good oratory.’ It is hardly possible not to like a man who could be as simple as that, even if one quails at the thought of his seven-hour speech.¹⁵

This simplicity appears in Pliny's friendly and generous attitude towards his slaves and freedmen. This was far from the rule in Roman society, which was normally harsh and utilitarian in dealing with servile workers. Once Pliny was worried by the sickness of his favourite trained reader, the freedman Zosimus. The professional reader was the ancient equivalent of TV, cinema, and radiogram. Pliny explains: ‘Zosimus is a trained comedy actor. He has a first-class voice and recites with intelligence and taste. But he is equally good at reading oratory, history, and poetry. You can see how many of my interests he caters for. Besides, I am fond of the man, and his dangerous condition makes me fonder. A few years ago after an exhausting performance he showed symptoms of tuberculosis. So I sent him on a voyage to Egypt from which he returned much better. Recently when he was giving a long series of recitations the cough came back again. So, my dear Paulinus, I should like to send him to your country-house in Provence. I have often heard you say the climate and the local milk are very good for these cases. Please write to your steward to prepare a room for Zosimus, and to look after him in every way.’¹⁶

This letter shows the kindliness in Pliny, but it also shows the compressed and crystalline self-explanatory style of a first-rate letter-writer. It is the sort of thing Beerbohm admired in Pliny. Never a word too many, though all the necessary information about Pliny's feelings and the state of the patient is given. There is no unnecessary repetition, no rhetorical expansion. This is the general quality of the letters. The insistence on brevity saved Pliny from the fearful faults of his grand rhetorical style as revealed in his Panegyric of Trajan, where every fact and point, every adjective and adverb, is swollen and multiplied in a series of turgid restatements. Only twice did Pliny write a letter in that style, and each time the result was a disastrously bad letter.¹⁷ In each he was pleading a case to which he was personally committed, and wrote a speech instead of a letter of description. They were both about the status of freedmen, and in one he pours out his indignation at the insolent behaviour of a notorious imperial secretary who was too big for his boots. These two were among the longest of Pliny's letters. ‘I set aside the fact that the honour of a Roman magistrate was being offered to the servile personage of Pallas. I set aside the fact that the Roman senate proposed that the creature Pallas should be induced, nay compelled, to wear the official trappings of a Roman senator. These were transient monstrosities. The worst of it was that the Roman senate humbly thanked the emperor in the name of Pallas—in the name of Pallas if you please—and no ceremony of purification was thought necessary.’ That is the kind of thing. Good ranting perhaps—but not delicate writing.¹⁸

Pliny in fact uses many devices of Roman rhetoric throughout the letters, but so economically that one is hardly conscious of them. The piling up of adjectives, for example, does not offend our ears because each one is saying something different. The freedman Zosimus is described as ‘homo probus officiosus litteratus’—personally honest, scrupulous in his professional duties, and a man of wide reading. The three words are packed with meaning—a complete testimonial in thirteen syllables. Colourful and poetic language was another characteristic of the Panegyric. But in the letters it is reserved for the right subject at the right moment—scenes of terror or of beauty in life and nature, such as the famous description of the eruption of Vesuvius, and the destruction of the surrounding district.¹⁹ ‘Ashes were falling, and a thick fog poured over us like a river. It was utterly dark, not like a moonless or cloudy night, but as if we were caught in a shuttered room with all lights extinguished. You could hear women shrieking, children crying, and men shouting. In their extreme fear some prayed for death, many raised their hands in supplication to the gods, and many others cried out that the gods were gone and that this was the final and unending night of the world's destruction.’ That is powerful writing, but the rhetorician's skill can be detected in the crescendo describing the different cries of the human sufferers: ‘ululatus feminarum infantum quiritatus, clamores virorum.’²⁰ These verbal plays, especially in word order, do not I think, bother us much, and incidentally for good or ill they mostly disappear in translation, so that Pliny translated appears a simpler writer than he really is. Play with word order is going on all the time.²¹ Pliny is very fond of inverting the word order in parallel phrases. Speaking of a prisoner under trial who had already been sentenced on another count, he says, ‘It was difficult to speak against one who was crushed by the appalling nature of the charge, but protected by pity for his previous sentence.’ Do you notice the arrangement? In Latin it comes out much more clearly. ‘Erat ergo perquam onerosum accusare damnatum, quem ut premebat atrocitas criminis, ita quasi peractae damnationis miseratio tuebatur.’²²

What does bother the English reader is Pliny's habit of introducing little critical asides, usually in the form of a brief moral epigram. In the Zosimus letter Pliny adds a rather chilling comment to his warm outpouring of feeling: ‘Nature has so fashioned us that nothing stirs up our affection for a person so much as the fear of losing him.’ In the account of the Vesuvius eruption he curiously notes: ‘it was a great comfort against the threat of death that I was perishing with the universe and the universe with me.’²³ Comments of this sort, known as sententiae, were one of the great devices of prose style in Pliny's day, successfully managed by the historian Tacitus. They were the height of fashion, and Pliny also felt bound to introduce them.²⁴ But his weak epigrams are apt to deflate his effects and to check the rapidity of his narrative.

His use of them gives a somewhat misleading expression of Pliny's character. When Pliny ends an account of a criminal trial with the remark that: ‘the pleasure of securing revenge is not so great as the misery of being swindled’, one is bound to feel for a moment that the man is a sententious ass.²⁵ Now careful analysis of the Letters shows that many of them were revised and rewritten for publication from an earlier and simpler version.²⁶ It is at this revision stage that the sententia was added. Pliny himself explains his own passion for rewriting everything that he composed, often with the help of an audience of literary friends.²⁷ He does not say that he followed this system in composing his letters, but he certainly rewrote them, not always to their advantage. The adverse impression they sometimes convey about Pliny himself would be much less strong if he could have brought himself to omit those unnecessary epigrams. Anyone who writes moral epigrams that don't come off is bound to appear a prig.

This somewhat accidental appearance of priggishness ties up most unfortunately with the undoubted fact that Pliny was a cautious and conservative person, who politically was an undeviating supporter of the imperial government, and took care never to criticize a reigning emperor until he was dead. His early promotion as a senator was due to the unpleasant and despotic emperor Domitian. Instead of admitting this fact, as others did, as something unavoidable, Pliny tries to give the impression, in certain political anecdotes, that he had been a secret sympathizer with the few brave men who had criticized Domitian during his lifetime, and who paid the penalty. He hints darkly that an accusation had been laid against himself which was stopped only by the emperor's death.²⁸ All this is unadmirable. Pliny was no hero, but perhaps he is rather likeable or forgiveable just because he was uneasy or ashamed of his cosy time under Domitian. Some of Pliny's circle had been among the victims of Domitian, and Pliny felt that he had let them down. To make some atonement Pliny published a letter describing the heroic behaviour of the lady Fannia at her trial for treason. She was sent into exile, while Pliny watched, and all he could do was to look after her interests at Rome. But he admits ‘non feci paria’—‘I did not pay my score’. It is a cri de cœur.²⁹

Pliny was a political trimmer—no doubt of that—but so were nearly all his contemporaries. Let us observe him trimming on rather a grand scale. One of the most famous events at Rome under Domitian was a great scandal involving the Vestal Virgins—the sacred order of six dedicated ladies responsible for maintaining the holy fire on which the domestic health of the Roman state was, in ancient belief, thought to depend. Four of these ladies, including the very Abbess of the order, the Vestalis Maxima, were proved to have been no better than they ought to have been. This was a very serious matter. There was no alternative but punishment with death—properly it should have been in the horrid traditional form of inhumation. Domitian in fact applied this only to the Vestalis Maxima. Now this affair has been described by another contemporary—the biographer Suetonius. Though Suetonius was generally critical of Domitian he approved the punishment of the Vestals, as did every other writer who referred to it.³⁰ But Pliny turns all his skill as an advocate to the job of representing the now dead emperor as a bestial tyrant sentencing an innocent lady to horrible punishment for his own satisfaction: ‘Domitian, who thought such examples glorified his reign, wanted to have the lady Vestal buried alive. He pretended to act as high priest of the Roman state, but really it was the unbridled licence of a despotic tyrant. As she walked off, the Vestal stretched out her hands to the gods and exclaimed “Does he think me guilty though I presided over the divine ceremonies when he marched in triumph through the streets of Rome after his victories?” Whether this was flattery or mockery due to her confidence or her contempt I cannot tell. But she maintained her plea until she was led to execution.’ Then Pliny adds the revealing comment ‘she went to her death, perhaps not an innocent woman, but as if she were’. Pliny knew perfectly well that the Vestal was guilty, but for his own purpose he works the story up so that all our sympathy is on the prisoner's side, and we boil with hatred of Domitian—but Pliny pulls back just at the end and avoids committing himself in a published letter to what everyone knew was a falsehood. That is what we mean when we speak of the rhetorical element and an advocate's skill in Pliny's letters.

Let us now look at Pliny as a man of business. His wealth was in land, and he frequently writes in his letters about the management of his estates. On one occasion he shows the land-hunger of a true capitalist. ‘My dear Calvisius, I need your private advice. There is an estate for sale next to my estate in Tuscany. The lands interlock, and I am keen to buy, but there is a disturbing factor. Yet I am urged on by the beauty of adding to my lands. Besides, it would be economical as well as pleasant to manage two estates with the same office staff, though it is a bit unwise to invest a great sum at the same risks in the same district. It is safer to scatter one's holdings. Yet this estate is rich, fertile, and well watered. The farming is mixed—cornland, vineyards, and productive woodlands. But the working peasantry who form the tenant farmers are a poor lot. The previous owner undermined their economic position by selling up their working equipment to secure the payment of overdue rents, but they are still in arrears. I shall have to re-equip the farms with tools. What is the price, you will ask? Three millions—a reduction of two millions on its former price, which has been cut because of the bad times and the bad state of the peasants.’ Pliny reveals a nice mixture of shrewdness, and financial caution, tempered by the passion of acquisition and the belief that he was on to a good thing.³¹

This shrewdness comes out again when Pliny set up a system of children's allowances for needy families at Comum. The usual way of establishing a foundation of this sort was by the gift of land or of a lump sum, since there were no stocks and shares in antiquity. Pliny first thought of handing over a group of farms to the city, which would use the rents to pay for the allowances. But then he had doubts. ‘If a sum of money is paid over to the city, it will be frittered away. Give them land and they will neglect it because it is common property. So I invented a new device.’ This was a complicated legal dodge. Pliny kept the farms as private property, but saddled them with a fixed charge well below the market rental value, and payable to the city. He reckoned the land would always find a tenant, and the tenant would always be able to pay, so that the children would always get their money.³²

Pliny had a certain instinct for ingenious financial devices. Like all the landlords of his day in Italy he was faced by a drop in farming prosperity. After ten years during which he was perpetually reducing rents without any improvement in the general situation he suddenly produced a brand-new solution to the problem. He writes: ‘I must make new arrangements for the letting of my farms. For the past five years despite my reductions of rent the tenants have been piling up arrears. They now quite despair of paying off their debts, and are carrying off the crops, eating everything, and storing nothing. They won't save just to benefit the owner. The only cure is to change the rental system from a fixed rent in cash to a rent in kind based on a percentage of the harvest. I shall have to form a staff of collectors and storekeepers, but there is no fairer charge than one based on the yield of each season determined by weather and soil conditions.’³³

Pliny evidently had sharp insight and long vision in matters of business. These qualities are reflected in his career as an imperial official: three successive emperors—Domitian, Nerva, and Trajan—regarded him as an expert in financial and practical administration. As a young man, when he served as an officer in the Roman army, his commander gave him the job of checking the accounts of the provincial regiments. Back at Rome in the nineties a.d. he was appointed head of the two principal Roman treasuries in turn—the Army Bank and the Bank of Rome. Later he is found administering the drainage and sewerage system of the capital. Finally the Emperor Trajan picked him about a.d. 109 for a special mission.³⁴

The prosperous Greek cities of Bithynia-with-Pontus, in north-west Turkey, had been indulging in an orgy of extravagant expenditure which threatened to ruin the economy of the province. Pliny was commissioned to examine the situation, and to set things to rights.³⁵ The task suited his talents, and as a literary man he would be sympathetic to the civilized but touchy Greek inhabitants. We have the record of his work in a collection of his reports to the Emperor Trajan, the only complete dossier of the activity of a Roman governor that survives. Pliny referred problems back to Rome when the solution which he preferred was contrary to the original instructions that he had been given, or when his solution conflicted with normal provincial usage.³⁶ One problem concerned the treatment of certain convicts. He wrote: ‘In many cities convicts who were sentenced years ago to hard labour in the mines are actually serving their sentences as municipal clerks in the local civic offices, and are even receiving a regular salary. I am not at all sure what to do about this. It seems very harsh to restore to their proper sentences a pack of old men who are living quiet and useful lives, and yet it is not right to treat convicts as public servants. It would be very silly to maintain them at the cities' expense if they do no work, but perhaps dangerous not to allow them subsistence.’ Pliny reveals what we would call a ‘social conscience’. He does not react sharply as a disciplinarian to a somewhat scandalous situation, and he consults the emperor because he did not want to carry out the strict letter of the law. But the emperor was less kindly, and instructed Pliny to send back to the mines all convicts of less than ten years' standing.³⁷

In this letter Pliny is applying the same principles and values as we find in his private letters about servants and tenants. It is not that he is a soft man. He had no hesitation, as he reveals in his famous letter about the Christians of Pontus, in chopping off the heads of the first batch of adult Christians hauled before him. But he is both a merciful and a practical man. When he found that the Christians were a large community, and that women and children were involved, he wrote to Rome for fresh instructions. He did not want to alter the official policy towards Christians, but he was keen to apply age differentiations in his punishments, and to follow a line that would encourage the Christians to abandon their illegal activities by releasing those who could prove that they had ceased to practise actively as Christians. Once again he was more open-minded than the emperor, who agreed to the acquittal of the lapsed Christians, but insisted on the execution of all the rest without respect for age or sex.³⁸

The practicality of Pliny is seen in the affair of the fire-brigades. There had been devastating fires in the great cities of Nicaea and Nicomedia. Pliny discovered that there were no fire-brigades and no fire-fighting equipment. So he proposed that a brigade should be formed in each city on the model with which he was familiar in Italy, where it was the custom to license the guilds of city craftsmen to form an amateur brigade or fire-fighting club as a regular social service. But the emperor turned down this request flat, on the surprising ground that such arrangements were politically dangerous in the eastern provinces: the fire-brigades would become subversive associations. This was a fixed principle with the central government, which regarded the popular masses in the east with considerable suspicion. Pliny noted in his report that the proletarian crowds stood and watched the palaces of the rich burning, without lifting a finger to help.³⁹

The precise observation is characteristic of Pliny. There is a group of private letters in which this gift of observation is applied to natural objects and physical phenomena in the manner of a nineteenth-century naturalist, and is combined with another modern quality—logical speculation about the causes of physical phenomena. I have touched on the letters about the eruption of Vesuvius for their colourful and dramatic effect. But Pliny's description was not vague and romantic in method. It is even quoted by modern volcanologists as a first-rate account of what they call a Vesuvianic type of eruption. Here is his description of the great cloud of dust-laden vapour blown out of the volcano. ‘A cloud of dust had risen from a hill which was afterwards identified as Vesuvius. Its shape most resembled that of a flat-headed pine-tree. The cloud reached up into the sky as a lofty trunk which then spread out into broad horizontal branches. The mass glowed with a white sheen stained with dark blotches where it was laden with soil and ash. It rose in this shape, I believe, because it was carried up by a strong blast of air, and as this lost its force and as the weight of the component particles took effect the cloud spread out sideways.’ You can observe the natural scientist at work, since Pliny gives all this as his own explanation.⁴⁰

Pliny was fascinated by the physical presence of water. In his country villa in Tuscany, described at great length in a very detailed letter, there was water everywhere, in cunningly contrived channels and fountains.⁴¹ Two others of his letters are devoted to descriptions of two springs of unusual character. These letters differ in an interesting manner. One of the springs is the famous fountain of Clitumnus, on the Flaminian Way near Spoleto, which is still a favourite beauty spot for its stretch of water in a parched summer landscape. ‘From under a low hill, mantled by a shady forest of ancient cypress, there issue a number of streams of varying size, which join and spread into a broad pool, clear and glassy. Driven by its sheer volume, the water rolls on as a river of some size, which can now take boats.’ Pliny goes on to describe the merry scene at festivals, when the stream is thronged with boating parties rowing or poling hard upstream and then drifting back at leisure. He mentions the little country shrine and the local oracle that existed, with its scripts on view, like a small Italian Delphi.⁴²

This is Pliny at his pleasantest, at once poetical and precise, but there are here no scientific explanations. The second letter concerns a spring near Pliny's northern home at Como in the Alpine foothills. ‘My dear Sura, here is a problem worth the attention of a learned man. There is a spring in the hills round Comum which has a very strange feature. Three times a day it ebbs and flows with regular alterations in its water level. At specific intervals the water ebbs, sinks down, and floods up. If you put a ring or some other object on the dry edge it is quickly washed over and finally covered, and then in turn uncovered and left high and dry. If you stay long enough you can see this happen three times a day.’ So far the facts. Then Pliny tries to explain them. He offers four different explanations, each being a speculation in terms of physical forces, though they are not all easy to understand. He imagines a current of air hidden in the earth's internal passages, which exerts pressure to open or close what he calls the throat and mouth of the spring—the narrow passage within the earth through which the water is issuing. He compares the behaviour of water in a wide bottle with a long narrow neck, bubbling and struggling against the air pressure to get out. Not a bad effort of thinking. Then Pliny uses the analogy of the tides moved by a regular recurrent force, though he seems unaware of the influence of the moon. Next he draws on the parallel of rivers checked at their mouth by strong winds from flowing out to sea. Finally he applies a difficult analogy from the water works of the Roman aqueducts, which he may have learned from his duties as Commissioner of the Roman sewers at this time. He asks: ‘Is there a sort of natural water-gauge that measures a fixed quantity of water and reduces the volume of the stream, while it is collecting up the amount to make good what it has already let out? or is there some mechanism of levels, hidden inside the earth, which empties and drives out the water and checks its flow when the level is itself empty?’ Pliny seems to be on the verge of inventing the idea of ball-cocks when he gives up the inquiry.⁴³

Pliny was neither a scientist nor a philosopher, but as a man superficially educated in the philosophical disciplines of his own day he was a rationalist, and his rationalism is not perverted or obscured by his devotion as a writer to the cult of style. It is in the balance of these two qualities that his particular excellence lies. He was not a great writer any more than he was a great man, but he did little things well.

There you have him—a Roman of the empire whom we know better than any other Roman of that time, and he is the less admired because of it. We see his weaknesses as a man, and some of his weaknesses are the unpopular ones. He was a conventional man, and a government man—the terrible vice nowadays when it is safe to be ‘agin the government’. But he was a very humane person, and he genuinely admired the few who had stood against the government. There were less courageous men at Rome than Pliny. When it seemed safe to do so he launched an accusation against the great enemy of his dead friends. But even then there were those who drew him to one side and whispered: ‘Be careful what you are up to. No one knows who will succeed to the throne. You are attacking a man with many political friends. The next emperor may be watching you.’⁴⁴ In such a Rome it was not easy to do more or to write more boldly than Pliny did. And few wrote as pleasantly.

Notes

1. For the historical background of Pliny's life and times see Sir R. Syme, Tacitus (Oxford, 1958), chs. iii, vii, viii; for his local setting, G. E. F. Chilver, Cisalpine Gaul, Social and Economic History (Oxford, 1941), ch. vi, 2; and for the details of his career my Letters of Pliny (Oxford, 1966), 72 ff. (cited as Letters). For a shorter account, A. N. Sherwin-White, Fifty Letters of Pliny (Oxford, 1966), ix-xv. The best account of the literary life of his circle is A.-M. Guillemin, Pline et la vie littéraire de son temps (Paris, 1929). The Letters and the Panegyricus are now available in O.C.T., and a modern translation in the ‘Penguin’ series by Mrs. Radice, who is shortly producing a new edition in the Loeb collection.

2. The character of the Letters is discussed at length in Letters, pp. 1-18.

3. My versions of Pliny's letters are throughout compressed and abbreviated translations and paraphrases, intended to reveal the character and flavour of the originals, to those for whom his qualities are still obscured by the formalities of his prose.

4. Pliny, Epp. iii. 14. For brief commentary see my Fifty Letters, no. 14, cited henceforth as FL.

5. Epp. iv. 19 (FL, no. 19).

6. See the account of a Roman engagement in Epp. i. 14. 8.

7. Epp. viii. 5.

8. Epp. vii. 5.

9. Epp. i. 5; ii. 20; iv. 2; vi. 2.

10. Domitian died October 96. He had persecuted senators who criticized his dictatorial methods.

11. From Epp. i. 5. 1, 8, 15.

12. Epp. iv. 7. 1-3.

13. Epp. vii. 24 (FL, no. 29).

14. Epp. vi. 11.

15. Epp. iv. 16.

16. Epp. v. 19 (FL, no. 24). For slaves and freedmen see J. Carcopino, Daily Life in Ancient Rome, 56 ff.

17. Epp. vii. 6 and 14.

18. Epp. viii. 6. Pallas held the financial secretariat (a rationibus) under the emperor Claudius a.d. 41-54. Tacitus recounts this affair in Ann. xii. 53.

19. There are two letters, Epp. vi. 16 and 20. Vesuvius erupted 24 August 79.

20. Epp. vi. 20. 13-15.

21. For a brief discussion see FL xvii.

22. Epp. ii. 11. 13 (FL, no. 10).

23. Epp. v. 19. 5; vi. 20. 17.

24. Quintilian discusses sententiae in Inst. viii. 5.

25. Epp. vi. 22. 8.

26. See Letters, pp. 14-16.

27. Epp. vii. 17 (FL, no. 27); vii. 21 (FL, no. 34).

28. Epp. vii. 27. 14 (FL, no. 30).

29. Epp. vii. 19.

30. Epp. iv. 11. See Letters ad loc. Cf. Suetonius, Dom. 8, 4. The trial took place between a.d. 89 and 91.

31. Epp. iii. 19 (FL, no. 16).

32. Epp. vii. 18. Similar foundations were established throughout Italy by Trajan and his successors.

33. Epp. ix. 37.

34. Cf. FL x-xi.

35. FL xiii-xv.

36. Epp. x, Epistulae ad Traianum, contains some forty major consultations and Trajan's replies, in addition to some minor and formal exchanges. The relative responsibility of Trajan, Pliny, and the Roman secretariat in the formulation of policy has been much discussed. See Letters, 526 ff., and F. Millar, ‘Emperors at Work’, JRS [Journal of Roman Studies] (1967), 9 ff.

37. Epp. x. 31-2 (FL, no. 41-2).

38. Epp. x. 96-7 (FL, no. 47-8).

39. Epp. x. 33-4 (FL, no. 43-4).

40. Epp. vi. 16. 5-6 (FL, no. 25).

41. Epp. v. 6, 20, 23, 36, 37, 40.

42. Epp. viii. 8 (FL, no. 37).

43. Epp. iv. 30 (FL, no. 21).

44. Epp. ix. 13. 10.