Pliny the Younger & Pliny the Elder · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
1.0| Pliny to his friend Septicius Clarus
1.1| You have often urged me to collect and publish any letters I had written with a little more care than usual. I have collected them, without keeping to the order of their dates — after all, I was not writing a history — but just as each one came to hand.
1.2| It remains for neither of us to regret it: you your advice, I my compliance. For the result will be that I shall hunt out the ones that still lie neglected, and if I add any more I shall not suppress them. Farewell.
2.0| Pliny to his friend Maturus Arrianus
2.1| Since I foresee that your arrival will be later than I hoped, I am handing over the book I promised you in my earlier letters. Please read it and correct it, as you usually do — all the more because I do not think I have ever before written anything in quite the same spirit of emulation.
2.2| For I have tried to imitate Demosthenes, always your favorite, and Calvus, lately mine — at least in the figures of speech; for the force of such great men only "the few whom a just…" can attain.
2.3| Nor did the material itself — I am afraid it is immodest to say so — resist this rivalry: it consisted almost entirely of vigorous argument, which roused me from the sleep of a long idleness, if indeed I am the sort of man who can still be roused.
2.4| Yet I have not entirely shunned the paint-pots of our Marcus whenever some pleasant digression, not out of season, invited me to stray a little from the road; for I wanted to be sharp, not grim.
2.5| Do not suppose that I am asking for indulgence with this disclaimer. On the contrary, to make you ply your file all the harder, I will confess that both I and my companions are not averse to publishing it — provided only that you add your white pebble to our error.
2.6| For something certainly has to be published — and if only it might be this above all, since it is ready! You hear the wish of an idle man — and it has to be published for several reasons, chiefly because the little books I have already sent out are said to be still in people's hands, although they have now lost the charm of novelty; unless, that is, the booksellers are flattering my ears. But let them flatter, by all means, so long as this lie makes my studies more welcome to me. Farewell.
3.0| Pliny to his friend Caninius Rufus
3.1| How is Comum, your darling and mine? How is that lovely villa on the edge of town, that colonnade where it is always spring, that densely shaded plane grove, that canal, green and sparkling like a jewel, that lake lying below and at your service, that drive, soft underfoot and yet firm, that bath which the sun floods and circles all day, those dining rooms for the crowd and those for the few, those bedrooms for the day and for the night? Do they have hold of you, and share you among themselves by turns?
3.2| Or are you, as you used to be, called away by constant trips to look after your estate? If they have hold of you, you are a happy and fortunate man; if not, you are "one of the many."
3.3| Why not — for it is time — hand over these low and petty cares to others, and claim yourself for your studies in that deep and fertile retreat of yours? Let this be your business and your leisure, your labor and your rest; let your waking hours, and even your sleep, be given to these.
3.4| Shape something, hammer something out, that will be yours forever. For all the rest of your possessions will fall to one master after another when you are gone; this, once it begins to be yours, will never cease to be yours.
3.5| I know what spirit, what talent I am urging on. Only make the effort to be worth as much in your own eyes as you will seem to others, if you are worth that much to yourself. Farewell.
4.0| Pliny to his mother-in-law Pompeia Celerina
4.1| What abundance there is at your houses at Ocriculum, at Narnia, at Carsulae, at Perusia — and at Narnia a bath besides! You can judge from my letters, for there is no need of yours any longer: that one short, old letter of yours is quite enough.
4.2| Upon my word, what is mine is not so much mine as what is yours; there is this difference, though, that your servants receive me with more care and attention than my own. The same thing will perhaps happen to you, if you ever stop at my places.
4.3| I wish you would, first so that you may enjoy my property just as I enjoy yours, and then so that my servants may wake up at last, for they await me with unconcern and almost carelessly.
4.4| With lenient masters, the servants' fear wears off through sheer familiarity; they are roused by new faces, and they work harder to win their masters' approval through others than through the masters themselves. Farewell.
5.0| Pliny to his friend Voconius Romanus
5.1| Have you ever seen anyone more timid and more abject than Marcus Regulus since Domitian's death? Under him he had committed crimes no smaller than under Nero, only better hidden. He began to dread my anger, and he was right to: I was angry.
5.2| He had fanned the danger of Arulenus Rusticus and exulted at his death, so much so that he gave a public reading of a book, and published it, in which he assails Rusticus, and goes so far as to call him "the Stoics' monkey," adding "branded with the Vitellian scar" — you recognize Regulus' eloquence —
5.3| and he savages Herennius Senecio so immoderately that Mettius Carus said to him, "What business have you with my dead? Do I trouble Crassus or Camerinus?" — men whom Regulus had prosecuted under Nero.
5.4| Regulus believed that I had taken all this badly, and so he had not even invited me when he gave the reading. Besides, he remembered how murderously he had attacked me myself before the Centumviral Court.
5.5| I appeared for Arrionilla, wife of Timo, at the request of Arulenus Rusticus, with Regulus on the other side. In one part of the case we were relying on an opinion of Mettius Modestus, an excellent man; he was then in exile, relegated by Domitian. And here, look, Regulus says to me: "I ask you, Secundus, what you think of Modestus." You see the danger if I had answered "well," the disgrace if "badly." I can only say that on that occasion the gods stood by me. "I will answer," I said, "if the centumviri are going to give judgment on this." Again he said: "I ask what you think of Modestus."
5.6| Again I replied: "Witnesses have been accustomed to be questioned against defendants, not against men already condemned." A third time he said: "I no longer ask what you think of Modestus, but how you judge Modestus' loyalty."
5.7| "You ask what I think," I said; "but I do not consider it even right to put a question about a man on whom sentence has been pronounced." He fell silent; praise and congratulation followed me, because I had neither damaged my reputation by some answer that was perhaps useful but dishonorable, nor entangled myself in the snares of so treacherous a question.
5.8| So now, terrified by his conscience, he seizes upon Caecilius Celer, and then Fabius Iustus, and begs them to make peace between him and me. Not satisfied, he went on to Spurinna, and said to him in suppliant tones, as the most abject of men is when he is afraid: "I beg you to call on Pliny at his house in the morning, but really early in the morning - for I cannot bear the anxiety any longer - and by whatever means to see that he is not angry with me."
5.9| I had woken up; a message reached me from Spurinna: "I am on my way to you." "No, I am coming to you." We met in the portico of Livia, as each of us was heading toward the other. He lays out Regulus' instructions and adds his own entreaties, sparingly, as befitted an excellent man pleading for one so unlike himself. I said to him: "You must decide for yourself what you think should be reported back to Regulus.
5.10| It is not right that I should deceive you. I await Mauricus" - he had not yet come back from exile - "and therefore I cannot give you any answer one way or the other, since I shall do whatever he decides; for it is fitting that he be the leader in this plan and I the companion."
5.11| A few days later Regulus himself came up to me while I was attending on a praetor; he followed me there and asked for a private word. He said that he feared a remark he had once made in a centumviral trial, when replying to me and Satrius Rufus, remained lodged deep in my mind: "Satrius Rufus, who has no rivalry with Cicero and is content with the eloquence of our age."
5.12| I replied that I now understood it had been said with malice, because he himself admitted it, though it could otherwise have been thought a compliment. "For I do have a rivalry with Cicero," I said, "and I am not satisfied with the eloquence of our own age;
5.13| for I believe it is utterly foolish, when one is imitating, not to set before oneself the very best models. But you, who remember this trial, why have you forgotten the other, in which you put to me the question what I felt about the loyalty of Mettius Modestus?" He turned noticeably pale, although he is always pale, and said hesitantly: "I asked it not to harm you, but to harm Modestus." See the man's cruelty, who does not disguise that he wished to harm an exile.
5.14| He added a splendid reason: "He wrote," he said, "in a certain letter that was read out before Domitian: 'Regulus, the most worthless of all two-footed creatures'"; which Modestus had indeed written most truly.
5.15| This was more or less the end of our conversation; for I did not want to go further, so as to keep everything free for myself until Mauricus comes. Nor does it escape me that Regulus is "hard to pull down"; for he is rich, an intriguer, courted by many and feared by more, which is generally stronger than love.
5.16| Yet it can happen that these things, shaken, totter and fall; for the favor of bad men is as unreliable as they are themselves. But, to repeat myself, I await Mauricus. He is a serious, prudent man, schooled by many trials, and able to foresee the future from the past. With him as my guide I shall settle both what to attempt and when to keep quiet.
5.17| I have written this to you because it was right, given our mutual affection, that you should know not only all that I have done and said, but also my plans. Farewell.
6.0| Pliny to his friend Cornelius Tacitus
6.1| You will laugh, and you may laugh. I, the man you know, have caught three boars, and very fine ones too. "You yourself?" you say. Yes, myself; yet not so as to depart altogether from my idleness and quiet. I sat by the nets; beside me lay not a hunting spear or lance but a stylus and writing tablets; I was thinking something over and jotting it down, so that even if I brought back empty hands I would still bring back full wax tablets.
6.2| You have no reason to despise this kind of study; it is wonderful how the mind is roused by the stir and movement of the body; and all around, the woods and solitude and that very silence that is granted to hunting are great incitements to thought.
6.3| So when you hunt, you may, on my advice, carry tablets along with your bread basket and flask: you will find that Minerva roams the mountains no less than Diana. Farewell.
7.0| Pliny to his friend Octavius Rufus
7.1| See to what height you have raised me, when you have given me the same power and the same kingship that Homer gave to Jupiter Best and Greatest: "To him the father gave one thing, but the other he refused."
7.2| For I too can answer your wish with a like nod and a like refusal. Indeed, just as it is right for me, especially at your demand, to excuse myself from appearing for the Baetici against one man, so it suits neither my good faith nor the steadfastness you value in me to appear against a province which I once bound to me by so many services, so many labors, even so many dangers of my own.
7.3| I shall therefore hold to this compromise: of the two things, one or the other of which you ask, I shall choose the one in which I satisfy not only your eagerness but also your judgment. For I need not consider so much what you, an excellent man, want at the moment, as what you will always approve.
7.4| I hope to be at Rome around the Ides of October, and to confirm these same things in person to Gallus, on your word and mine; but even now you may pledge to him my intention: "He spoke, and nodded with his dark brows."
7.5| For why should I not deal with you everywhere in Homeric verses? Since you will not allow me to deal with you in your own, for which I burn with such desire that I seem to myself able to be corrupted by this reward alone, so that I might even appear against the Baetici.
7.6| I almost passed over what should least of all have been passed over: that I received the excellent careotae, which now have to compete with figs and mushrooms. Farewell.
8.0| Pliny to his friend Pompeius Saturninus
8.1| Your letter was handed to me at a most opportune moment, in which you demanded that I send you something of my writings, when I had myself intended just that. So you have added spurs to a horse already running, and have removed both your excuse for refusing the labor and my shyness in demanding it.
8.2| For it is not fitting that I should use what has been offered with timidity, nor that you should object to what you yourself demanded. Still, you should not expect any new work from an idle man. What I am going to ask is that you give your attention once more to the speech which I delivered before my fellow townsmen when I was about to dedicate a library.
8.3| I remember, indeed, that you have already marked certain places, but in a general way; so now I ask that you attend not only to the whole of it but also go through its small parts with your usual file. For after the correction we shall be free either to publish or to hold it back.
8.4| Indeed, perhaps the method of correction itself will bring this very hesitation of ours down on one side or the other, since it will either find the speech unworthy of publication as it handles it over and over, or make it worthy by that very trial.
8.5| Though the causes of this hesitation of mine lie not so much in the writing as in the very kind of subject: for it is somewhat boastful, as it were, and lofty. This will burden our modesty, even if the style itself is restrained and low, because we are compelled to speak both of the generosity of our ancestors and of our own.
8.6| This is a precarious and slippery ground, even when necessity lends it charm. For if even the praises of others are usually received by ears not quite fair, how hard it is to ensure that a speech of someone discoursing about himself or his own people does not seem tiresome! For we begrudge honorable conduct itself, and rather more its renown and proclamation, and only those good deeds do we twist and carp at less that are laid away in obscurity and silence.
8.7| For this reason I often ask myself whether we ought to have composed this, whatever it is, for ourselves alone, or for others too. That it should be for ourselves, this consideration advises: that most things necessary for getting a matter done do not, once it is done, keep an equal usefulness or favor.
8.8| And, not to look for examples further afield, what was more useful than to follow the plan of a generous gift even with the pen? For by this we achieved, first, that we dwelt on honorable thoughts; next, that we saw their beauty through longer treatment; finally, that we guarded against regret, the companion of a sudden largess. From these there grew a certain training in despising money.
8.9| For while nature has constrained all men to guard it, a love of liberality, weighed at length and for a long time, released us from the common chains of avarice, and our generosity seemed likely to be the more praiseworthy because we were drawn to it not by some impulse but by deliberation.
8.10| To these reasons was added that we were promising not games or gladiators but an annual outlay for the maintenance of freeborn children. Moreover, the pleasures of the eyes and ears so little need recommendation that they ought not so much to be stirred up by a speech as held back;
8.11| but that someone should willingly undertake the weariness and labor of bringing up children must be won not only by rewards but also by carefully chosen exhortations.
8.12| For if doctors accompany healthy foods lacking in pleasure with rather soothing words, how much more fitting it was for one who advises the public to lead them with courteous speech to a most useful gift, though not equally popular? especially as we had to strive that what was given to parents should also be approved by the childless, and that the rest should both patiently wait for and deserve the honor of the few.
8.13| But as at that time we were more concerned for common advantages than for private boasting, since we wished the purpose and effect of our gift to be understood, so now, in the manner of publishing, we fear that we may seem to have served not the interests of others but our own praise.
8.14| Besides, we remember with how much greater spirit the fruit of honorable conduct is laid up in conscience than in reputation. For glory ought to follow, not be pursued, and if by some chance it does not follow, that which has deserved glory is not on that account any less beautiful.
8.15| But those who adorn their good deeds with words are believed to proclaim them not because they have done them but in order to proclaim that they have done them. So what would have been splendid if another reported it fades when the doer himself reviews it; for when men cannot destroy the deed, they attack the boasting about it. Thus, if you do things that should be kept silent, the deed itself is blamed; if you do not keep silent about things that deserve praise, you are blamed yourself.
8.16| But for me a certain particular consideration stands in the way. For I delivered this very speech not before the people but before the town councillors, and not in the open but in the council chamber.
8.17| I therefore fear it may not be quite consistent that, having shunned in speaking the flattery and acclamation of the crowd, I should now chase the same by publishing; and that, having kept the common people themselves, for whom the provision was made, apart by the threshold and walls of the council chamber, lest I fall into any appearance of canvassing, I should now go hunting, as though by open display, even for those whom our gift concerns in nothing except as an example.
8.18| You have the causes of my hesitation; nevertheless I shall follow your advice, whose authority will serve me in place of reason. Farewell.
9.0| Pliny to his friend Minicius Fundanus
9.1| It is a marvel how in the city the account of each single day stands, or seems to stand, but of several days together does not.
9.2| For if you ask someone "What have you done today?", he would answer: "I attended a ceremony of the manly toga, I went to an engagement party or a wedding; this man asked me to witness the sealing of a will, that one to appear for him in court, another to a consultation."
9.3| These things, on the day you do them, seem necessary; the same things, if you reckon that you have done them every day, seem empty, much more so when you have gone away. For then the recollection comes: "How many days I have used up on how frigid a set of affairs!"
9.4| This is what has happened to me since I have been at my Laurentine villa, where I either read something or write something or even give leisure to the body, by whose props the mind is held up.
9.5| I hear nothing that I would regret hearing, I say nothing that I would regret saying; no one at my house tears at anyone with spiteful talk, and I myself blame nobody, except myself when I write too inelegantly; I am troubled by no hope and no fear, disturbed by no rumors: I speak only with myself and with my little books.
9.6| O upright and unspoiled life! O sweet and honorable leisure, and almost more beautiful than any business! O sea, O shore, true and secluded house of the Muses, how much you discover, how much you dictate!
9.7| So you too, as soon as there is an opportunity, leave behind that din and empty running about and those very silly labors, and give yourself to study or to leisure.
9.8| For it is better, as our friend Atilius said most learnedly and wittily at once, to be at leisure than to do nothing. Farewell.
10.0| Pliny to his friend Attius Clemens
10.1| If our city has ever flourished in the liberal studies, it flourishes now most of all.
10.2| There are many famous examples; one would be enough, the philosopher Euphrates. I observed him closely, even in his home, in Syria, when I was a very young man serving in the army, and I took pains to be loved by him, although there was no need for pains. For he is easy to meet and open, and full of the kindness which he teaches.
10.3| And would that I had fulfilled the hope he then conceived of me as much as he has added to his own virtues! or else it is that I now admire them more because I understand them better.
10.4| Yet even now I do not understand them well enough; for just as only a craftsman can judge a painter, a sculptor or a modeler, so only a wise man can see through a wise man.
10.5| Still, as far as I am allowed to discern, many things in Euphrates stand out and shine so that they catch and move even moderately learned people. He argues with subtlety, weight and ornament, and often even reproduces that famous Platonic loftiness and breadth. His speech is copious and varied, sweet above all, and such as to lead and drive even those who resist.
10.6| In addition there is his tall frame, his handsome face, his long hair, his great white beard; which, though they may be thought accidental and empty, nevertheless win him the greatest reverence.
10.7| No roughness in his dress, no gloom, much severity; you would respect meeting him, not dread it. The holiness of his life is of the highest; his courtesy is equal: he attacks vices, not men, and does not chastise those who err but corrects them. You would follow him as he advises, attentive and hanging on his words, and you would long to be persuaded even after he had persuaded you.
10.8| Then he has three children, two of them boys, whom he has brought up with the greatest diligence. His father-in-law is Pompeius Iulianus, great and distinguished in the rest of his life as well as in this one thing, that though himself the leading man of his province, among the highest possible matches he chose a son-in-law who was foremost not in office but in wisdom.
10.9| Yet why should I say more about a man whom I may not enjoy? Is it that I may be the more tormented that I may not? For I am pulled apart by a duty as great as it is troublesome: I sit on the tribunal, I annotate petitions, I draw up accounts, I write very many letters, and very unliterary ones.
10.10| Now and then I complain to Euphrates of these occupations - for even that, when it happens, how rarely! He consoles me, and asserts that this too is part of philosophy, and indeed its most beautiful part: to conduct public business, to hear and judge cases, to bring forth and practice justice, and to put into use what philosophers themselves teach.
10.11| But one thing he does not persuade me of: that it is better to do these things than to spend whole days with him listening and learning. So the more I urge you, who have the leisure, when you next come to the city - and you should come the earlier for this reason - to entrust yourself to him to be polished and filed.
10.12| For I do not, like many, begrudge others a good which I lack myself; on the contrary, I feel a certain sense and pleasure if I see that what is denied to me remains abundant for my friends. Farewell.
11.0| Pliny to his friend Fabius Iustus
11.1| For a long time you have sent me no letters. "There is nothing," you say, "to write." Then write just that, that there is nothing to write, or only that with which the men of old used to begin: "If you are well, it is good; I am well."
11.2| That is enough for me; for it is the greatest thing. Do you think I am joking? I ask in earnest. Tell me how you are; I cannot remain ignorant of it without the greatest anxiety. Farewell.
12.0| Pliny to his friend Calestrius Tiro
12.1| I have suffered a very heavy loss, if the loss of so great a man should be called a loss. Corellius Rufus has died, and by his own will, which rubs my grief raw. For it is the most sorrowful kind of death, one that seems neither natural nor fated.
12.2| For in the case of those who are ended by disease, there is at any rate great consolation in the very necessity; but in the case of those whom a summoned death carries off, this grief is incurable, that they are believed to have been able to live long.
12.3| Corellius, indeed, was driven to this resolution by the highest reason, which for the wise stands in place of necessity, though he had very many reasons for living: a most excellent conscience, a most excellent reputation, the greatest authority, and besides a daughter, a wife, a grandson, sisters, and, among so many pledges, true friends.
12.4| But he was struggling with so long and so unjust a sickness that these great prizes of living were outweighed by the reasons for death. In his thirty-third year, as I used to hear from him, he was seized by pain in his feet. This was inherited by him from his father; for diseases, like other things, are commonly handed down by a kind of succession.
12.5| This he conquered and broke by abstinence and holy living, so long as he was in the green of life; at last, when it grew worse with old age, he sustained it by the strength of his spirit, though he suffered incredible torments and the most undeserved agonies.
12.6| For by now the pain no longer settled in his feet alone, as before, but roamed through all his limbs. I came to him in the days of Domitian as he lay at his country house near the city.
12.7| The slaves withdrew from the bedroom - it was his custom whenever a more trusted friend came in -; even his wife, though most capable of every secret, would go away.
12.8| He looked around and said: "Why do you think I bear these great pains for so long? - in order, of course, to outlive that brigand, if only by one day." Had you given this spirit a body to match, he would have done what he wished. Yet a god was present at his vow, and he, having gained it, now about to die free and without care, broke the many but lesser ties of life.
12.9| His sickness had grown worse, and he tried to mitigate it by temperance; when it persisted, he fled it by firmness. Now a second, a third, a fourth day: he was abstaining from food. His wife Hispulla dispatched to me Gaius Geminius, a friend we shared, with the saddest of messages, that Corellius had resolved to die and could not be turned by the entreaties either of his family or of his daughter; I alone remained, by whom he might be called back to life.
12.10| I ran. I had nearly arrived when Iulius Atticus brings word from the same Hispulla that not even I would now achieve anything: so obstinately had he hardened more and more. He had said, indeed, to the doctor who was bringing him food: "I have decided" - a phrase that left as much admiration in my mind as longing.
12.11| I think what a friend, what a man I lack. He filled out his sixty-seventh year, a span long enough even for the strongest; I know. He escaped lifelong sickness; I know. He died with his own people surviving, with the commonwealth flourishing, which was dearer to him than everything; this too I know.
12.12| Yet I grieve for his death as though he were both young and of the sturdiest health, and I grieve - you may think me weak - on my own account. For I have lost, I have lost the witness, the guide, the teacher of my life. In sum, I shall say what I said to my close companion Calvisius in my fresh grief: "I fear I shall live more carelessly."
12.13| So bring me consolations, but not these: "He was old, he was infirm" - for those I know -, but some new ones, some great ones, which I have never heard, never read. For what I have heard and read comes to mind of its own accord, but is overcome by so great a grief. Farewell.
13.0| Pliny to his friend Sosius Senecio
13.1| This year has brought a great crop of poets: in the whole month of April there was hardly a day on which someone was not giving a recitation. It pleases me that the studies thrive, that men's talents put themselves forward and show themselves, although people gather slowly to listen.
13.2| Most sit about in the lounges and wear out the time for listening with chatter, and from time to time order word to be brought whether the reciter has come in yet, whether he has delivered his preface, whether he has unrolled a large part of the book; then at last, and even then slowly and hesitantly, they come, and yet do not stay but leave before the end, some covertly and by stealth, others openly and freely.
13.3| But, by Hercules, in our parents' memory they say that Claudius Caesar, when he was walking on the Palatine and heard a shout, asked the cause, and when it was said that Nonianus was reciting, suddenly and unexpectedly came in upon the reciter.
13.4| Now even the idlest of men, though invited long beforehand and repeatedly reminded, either does not come or, if he comes, complains that he has wasted a day - because he has not wasted it.
13.5| But so much the more are they to be praised and approved who are not held back from the zeal of writing and reciting by this idleness or arrogance of listeners. For my part, I have failed almost no one. Most of them, to be sure, were friends;
13.6| for there is hardly anyone who loves our studies without also loving us. For these reasons I have spent more time in the city than I had intended. I can now go back to my retreat and write something which I shall not recite, lest I seem to have been not a listener but a creditor to those whose recitations I attended. For as in other matters so in the duty of listening, the favor is lost if it is demanded back. Farewell.
14.0| Pliny to his friend Iunius Mauricus
14.1| You ask that I find a husband for your brother's daughter; and rightly you lay this chiefly on me. For you know how greatly I looked up to and loved that supreme man, with what exhortations he nurtured my youth, and with what praises he brought it about that I seemed worth praising.
14.2| There is nothing you could entrust to me that is greater or more welcome, nothing more honorable for me to undertake, than to choose a young man from whom grandchildren worthy of Arulenus Rusticus may be born.
14.3| Such a man would have had to be sought for a long time, had Minicius Acilianus not been ready and, as it were, provided in advance; he loves me most intimately as a young man loves a young man - for he is younger by a few years - and respects me as an elder.
14.4| For he wishes to be shaped and trained by me as I used to be by you. His country is Brixia, from that Italy of ours which still keeps and preserves much modesty, frugality, and even the rusticity of old.
14.5| His father is Minicius Macrinus, foremost of the equestrian order, because he aimed at nothing higher; for though enrolled by the deified Vespasian among the men of praetorian rank, he most steadfastly preferred an honorable quiet to this ambition of ours - shall I call it ambition or dignity?
14.6| He has a maternal grandmother, Serrana Procula, from the town of Patavium. You know the manners of that place: yet Serrana is an example of strictness even to the people of Patavium. He also has the good fortune of an uncle, Publius Acilius, of almost unmatched seriousness, prudence and good faith. In sum, there will be nothing in the whole household that will not please you as if it were in your own.
14.7| Acilianus himself has great vigor and industry, though joined with the greatest modesty. He has run through quaestorship, tribunate and praetorship most honorably, and has already, on his own account, spared you the necessity of canvassing.
14.8| He has a gentleman's face, suffused with abundant blood and abundant color, he has a freeborn beauty of the whole body and a certain senatorial grace. These things I by no means think should be neglected; for this ought to be given to the chastity of girls as a kind of reward.
14.9| I am unsure whether to add that his father has large resources. For when I imagine you, for whom we are seeking a son-in-law, I think nothing should be said of means; when I look at the customs of the public and even the laws of the state, which judge that men's property is to be looked at among the first things, even this does not seem something to pass over. And indeed, for one thinking about descendants, and several of them, in choosing a match this too must be put in the reckoning.
14.10| You may perhaps think that I have indulged my affection and raised him above what the facts allow. But I pledge my good faith that you will find everything far larger than I proclaim. I do love the young man most ardently, as he deserves; but this very thing is the mark of a lover, not to burden him with praises. Farewell.
15.0| Pliny to his friend Septicius Clarus
15.1| Hey, you! You promise to come to dinner, and you do not come? Judgment is pronounced: you will repay the outlay to the last as, and it is no small sum.
15.2| There were ready a lettuce apiece, three snails each, two eggs each, halica with honeyed wine and snow - for this too you will count, indeed this above all, since it perishes on the dish -, olives, beets, gourds, bulbs, a thousand other things no less elegant. You would have heard comic actors, or a reader, or a lyre player, or - such is my generosity - all of them.
15.3| But you, at I do not know whose house, preferred oysters, sows' wombs, sea urchins, Gaditanian dancers. You will pay the penalty, I do not say what. You acted harshly: you grudged, I do not know whether to yourself, certainly to me, yet to yourself as well. How much we would have played, laughed, studied!
15.4| You can dine more lavishly at many houses, but nowhere more merrily, more simply, more unguardedly. In sum, try it, and unless afterward you make your excuses to others rather than to me, always make them to me. Farewell.
16.0| Pliny to his friend Erucius
16.1| I loved Pompeius Saturninus - I mean our friend - and praised his talent even before I knew how varied, how supple, how many-sided it was; but now he holds, has, and possesses me altogether.
16.2| I have heard him plead cases, keenly and ardently, and no less polished and ornate, whether he delivered a prepared or an extemporaneous speech. There are apt and frequent sentiments, a weighty and graceful structure, sonorous and old-fashioned words. All this pleases wonderfully when it is carried along with a certain rush and flood, and it pleases if it is gone over again.
16.3| You will feel what I felt when you take his speeches in your hands, which you will readily compare to those of any of the ancients whose rival he is.
16.4| Yet the same man will satisfy more in history, whether by brevity or clarity or sweetness or even splendor and loftiness of narration. For in the speeches set in assemblies there is the same force as in his orations, only tighter and more confined and more compressed.
16.5| Besides, he makes verses, such as my Catullus or Calvus would make, in truth such as Catullus or Calvus did. What charm, what sweetness, what bitterness, what love they have! He inserts, to be sure, but on purpose, some rather harsh ones among the soft and smooth; and this too like Catullus or Calvus.
16.6| Recently he read me some letters; he said they were his wife's. I believed I was reading Plautus or Terence released from meter. Whether they are his wife's, as he affirms, or his own, as he denies, he is worthy of equal glory, whether he composes those, or has made the wife he took as a girl so learned and polished.
16.7| He is therefore with me the whole day; the same man before I write, the same when I have written, the same even when I am at rest, I read as though he were not the same.
16.8| I both urge and advise you to do likewise; for it ought not to harm his works that he is alive. Or, if he had flourished among those we have never seen, we would be seeking out not only his books but even his portraits, and does the honor and charm of the same man, now that he is present, languish as if from satiety?
16.9| But it is perverse and spiteful not to admire a man most worthy of admiration, just because it falls to us to see him, converse with him, listen to him, embrace him, and not merely to praise him but to love him. Farewell.
17.0| Pliny to his friend Cornelius Titianus
17.1| Good faith and duty are still a concern to men; there are those who play the friend even to the dead. Titinius Capito has obtained from our emperor permission to set up in the forum a statue of Lucius Silanus.
17.2| It is a fine thing, worthy of great praise, to use the friendship of the emperor for this, and to test how much influence you have in the honors of others.
17.3| It is Capito's custom altogether to honor famous men; it is remarkable with what reverence and zeal he keeps in his house, wherever he can, the portraits of the Bruti, the Cassii, the Catos. The same man adorns the life of each of the most famous with excellent poems.
17.4| You may know that he himself abounds in very many virtues, who so loves those of others. The honor owed to Silanus has been rendered, and Capito has provided for the immortality of Silanus and of his own alike. For it is no more fitting and distinguished to have a statue in the Roman people's forum than to set one up. Farewell.
18.0| Pliny to his friend Suetonius Tranquillus
18.1| You write that, frightened by a dream, you fear that you may suffer some misfortune in the pleading; you ask that I request a postponement and excuse you for a few days, at least the next one. It is difficult, but I shall try, "for a dream too is from Jupiter."
18.2| It matters, however, whether you are accustomed to dream of things that will come true or of their opposite. When I reflect on my own dream, the one you fear, it seems to me to portend an excellent pleading.
18.3| I had taken on the case of Iunius Pastor, when as I slept my mother-in-law seemed to be rolled at my knees, begging me not to plead; and I was about to plead when I was still a very young man, I was to appear in the four-court trial, I was to appear against the most powerful men in the state and even friends of Caesar, each of which could shake my mind after so sad a dream.
18.4| I pleaded nevertheless, reasoning on that line: "One omen is best: to defend one's country." For to me my country, and anything dearer than country, seemed to be good faith. It turned out well, and indeed that pleading opened to me the ears of men, that one opened the door of fame.
18.5| So consider whether you too, following this example, may turn that dream to the good; or if you think safer that precept of all the most cautious people, "What you doubt, do not do," write back just that.
18.6| I shall find some stratagem and plead your case, so that you can plead it when you wish. For your situation is indeed different, and mine was different. A centumviral trial can in no way be deferred; yours can be, though with difficulty. Farewell.
19.0| Pliny to his friend Romatius Firmus
19.1| You are my fellow townsman and fellow student and, from the beginning of our lives, my comrade; your father was a friend to my mother and my uncle, and to me as well, as far as the difference of age allowed: great and weighty reasons why I should undertake to increase your standing.
19.2| That you have a property assessment of a hundred thousand is sufficiently shown by your being a town councillor among us. So that we may enjoy you not only as a councillor but also as a Roman knight, I offer you three hundred thousand sesterces to fill out the equestrian means.
19.3| The length of our friendship guarantees that you will remember this gift: I do not even remind you of what I should remind you, were I not sure you will do it of your own accord, to use the rank given by me as modestly as possible, because given by me.
19.4| For an honor must be guarded the more anxiously when in it the kindness of a friend also has to be protected. Farewell.
20.0| Pliny to his friend Cornelius Tacitus
20.1| I often have a debate with a certain learned and skilled man, who likes nothing so well in pleading cases as brevity.
20.2| I admit that it should be kept, if the case permits: otherwise it is collusion to pass over what should be said, collusion too to touch hastily and briefly what ought to be driven in, fixed and repeated.
20.3| For to most things a certain force and weight is added by a longer treatment, and as iron is pressed into the body, so a speech is pressed into the mind, not more by the blow than by the dwelling upon it.
20.4| Here he deals with me by authorities and shows me, among the Greeks, the speeches of Lysias, among our own those of the Gracchi and of Cato, very many of which are indeed clipped and short: I set against Lysias, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Hyperides and many besides, against the Gracchi and Cato, Pollio, Caesar, Caelius, and, first of all, Marcus Tullius, of whom it is said that his best speech is the longest. And by Hercules, as with other good things, so any good book is better the bigger it is.
20.5| You see how for statues, images, paintings, and finally the forms of men and of many animals, and of trees too, if only they are handsome, nothing recommends so much as size. The same happens with speeches; indeed greatness adds a certain authority and beauty even to the rolls themselves.
20.6| These things, and many others that I am accustomed to say to the same effect, he, being in debate slippery and impossible to hold, evades in such a way that he maintains that these very men, on whose speeches I rely, spoke fewer words than they published.
20.7| I think the opposite. Witnesses are the many speeches of many men, and Cicero's for Murena and for Varenus, in which a brief and bare sort of note of certain charges is given by their headings alone. From these it is clear that he said a great deal that he omitted when he published.
20.8| The same man says in the speech for Cluentius that he pleaded the whole case alone, by the old custom, and that for Gaius Cornelius he pleaded four days, so that we cannot doubt that what he said at greater length over several days - as was necessary - he afterward cut back and cleaned up and compressed into a single book, large indeed, yet one.
20.9| "But a pleading is one thing, a speech another." I know that some think so, but I - perhaps I am mistaken - am persuaded that it can happen that a pleading is good that is not a good speech, but that a pleading cannot fail to be good which is a good speech. For the speech is the model of the pleading and, as it were, its original pattern.
20.10| For that reason in all the best we find a thousand turns that were spoken off the cuff, even in those which we know were only published, as in the Verrines: "The artist - who? who was it? you rightly remind me; they said it was Polyclitus." It follows therefore that a pleading is most perfect which most closely reproduces the likeness of the speech, provided it receives a proper and due amount of time; if that is denied, the orator is in no way at fault, the judge very greatly so.
20.11| In support of this opinion of mine are the laws, which grant the longest times and urge on those who speak not brevity but fullness - that is, thoroughness - which brevity cannot supply except in the very narrowest cases.
20.12| I shall add what practice has taught me, an excellent teacher. I have often pleaded, often judged, often sat on a council: one thing moves some, another others, and for the most part small things draw the greatest. Men's judgments vary, their inclinations vary. Hence those who have heard the same case together often feel differently, and sometimes the same, but from different movements of the mind.
20.13| Besides, each man favors his own invention, and embraces it as if it were the strongest when another says what he himself foresaw. To all, therefore, something must be given to hold, something to recognize.
20.14| At one time, when we were appearing together, Regulus said to me: "You think everything in the case must be followed out; I see the throat at once, and I press it." What he has chosen he certainly presses, but in choosing he often errs.
20.15| I replied that it could happen that where he thought it the throat it might be a knee or an ankle. But I, I said, who cannot make out the throat, try everything, test everything, in short "move every stone";
20.16| and as in the cultivation of a field I tend and work not vineyards only but also orchards, and not orchards only but also fields, and in the fields themselves sow not spelt or winter wheat alone but barley, bean and the other pulses, so in pleading I scatter more seeds, as it were, more widely, so as to gather in what comes up.
20.17| For the minds of judges are no less obscure, uncertain and deceptive than weather and soils. Nor does it escape me that the supreme orator Pericles is praised by the comic poet Eupolis in this way: "Besides his speed, a certain Persuasion perched on his lips. So he enchanted, and alone of the orators he left the sting in his hearers."
20.18| But to this same Pericles neither that Persuasion nor that charming would have come, by brevity or speed or both - for they differ - without the highest ability. For to delight and persuade requires abundance of speech and room, but only he who not merely pricks but fixes it in can leave a sting in the hearers' minds.
20.19| Add what a second comic poet says about that same Pericles: "He flashed lightning, he thundered, he stirred all Greece into turmoil." For it is not a lopped and cut-off speech, but a broad and magnificent and lofty one, that thunders and lightens, and in the end shakes and mixes everything.
20.20| "Yet the best is moderation": who denies it? But he does not keep moderation any less who falls below the matter than he who goes above it, who speaks more tightly than he who speaks more freely.
20.21| And so you often hear, just as "immoderately and redundantly," so also "meagerly and feebly." One man is said to have exceeded the material, another not to have filled it. Both are equally at fault, but the one errs through weakness, the other through strength; which, though it may not be a fault of a more polished talent, is certainly a fault of a greater one.
20.22| Nor, when I say this, do I approve that Homeric "measureless of speech," but the other: "and words like wintry snowflakes," not because the other too does not please me very much: "few, but very piercingly" - if however a choice is given, I want that speech like winter snows, that is, thick and unceasing but also abundant, in short divine and heavenly.
20.23| "But a short pleading is more welcome to many." It is, but to idle people, and it is ridiculous to look upon their delicacy and sloth as though it were judgment. For if you had these in your council, it would be better not only to speak briefly but not to speak at all.
20.24| This is my opinion so far, which I shall change if you disagree; but I ask that you plainly explain why you disagree. For although I ought to yield to your authority, I nevertheless think it more proper in so great a matter to be overcome by reason than by authority.
20.25| So, if you think I am not mistaken, write and tell me so in as short a letter as you like — but do write, for you will confirm my judgment; if I am mistaken, get ready a very long one. Haven't I bribed you, by laying on you the necessity of a brief letter if you come over to my view, and of a very long one if you dissent? Farewell.
21.0| Pliny to his friend Plinius Paternus
21.1| I value the judgment of your eyes as highly as that of your mind — not because you have a great deal of sense (don't flatter yourself), but because you have as much as I have; though that too is a great deal.
21.2| Joking aside, I think the slaves who were bought for me on your advice look well. What remains is that they be honest, and with slaves for sale that is better judged by the ears than by the eyes. Farewell.
22.0| Pliny to his friend Catilius Severus
22.1| I have been stuck in the city for a long time now, and in a state of shock. I am deeply troubled by the long and stubborn illness of Titius Aristo, a man I admire and love above all others. There is no one weightier, purer or more learned than he, so that it seems to me that not just one man, but literature itself and all the liberal arts are in the gravest danger in the person of one man.
22.2| How expert he is in private and public law alike! What a store of facts, of precedents, of antiquity he holds! There is nothing you could wish to learn that he cannot teach; certainly for me, whenever I am looking for something obscure, he is a treasure-house.
22.3| And then, what trust his words command, what authority, what restrained and becoming deliberation! Is there anything that he does not know straightaway? And yet he often hesitates and doubts, because of the conflict of arguments, which with keen and powerful judgment he traces back to their origin and first causes, distinguishes and weighs.
22.4| Besides this, how sparing he is in his diet, how modest in his dress! I am in the habit of looking at his very bedroom and his very bed as a sort of image of the old-time frugality.
22.5| All this is crowned by a greatness of soul that refers nothing to show and everything to conscience, and looks for the reward of a good deed not from popular talk but from the deed itself.
22.6| In short, you will not easily compare with this man any of those who parade their pursuit of wisdom by their bodily dress. He does not, it is true, frequent the gymnasia or the colonnades, nor does he entertain his own leisure and that of others with long disputations; instead he lives in the toga and in public business, and helps many people as their advocate and more as their adviser.
22.7| Yet he would not yield first place to any of those philosophers in purity, in devotion, in justice, or even in courage. You would marvel, if you were there, at the patience with which he bears this very illness — how he resists the pain, how he puts off his thirst, how he lies through the incredible burning of his fevers without moving and with his covers kept on.
22.8| Recently he called me and a few others, those he loves most, to his side and asked us to consult the doctors about the outcome of his illness, so that if it were incurable he might leave life of his own accord, but if it were only difficult and long, he might resist and stay;
22.9| for, he said, he owed it to his wife's prayers, he owed it to his daughter's tears, he owed it also to us his friends, not to desert our hopes, provided they were not empty, by a voluntary death.
22.10| This I consider an especially hard thing and worthy of the highest praise. For to rush to death on a sort of impulse and instinct is something shared with many; but to deliberate and weigh its reasons, and, as reason advises, either to take up or to lay aside the decision for life or death — that belongs to a mighty soul.
22.11| And the doctors do promise us a good outcome. It remains for the god to nod assent to their promises and at last to release me from this anxiety; once freed from it, I shall go back to my Laurentine villa — that is, to my books and writing tablets and my studious leisure. For as things are, sitting at his bedside I have no time to read or write anything, and in my anxiety no wish to.
22.12| There you have what I fear, what I hope for, and even what I plan for the future. In return, send me word of what you did, what you are doing, and what you intend to do — but in happier letters than mine. It will be no small comfort in my distress if you have nothing to complain of. Farewell.
23.0| Pliny to his friend Pompeius Falco
23.1| You ask whether I think you ought to plead cases while you are tribune. It matters very much what you think the tribunate is: an empty shadow and a title without honor, or a sacrosanct power, which it is fitting that no one should humble — not even its holder.
23.2| When I was tribune myself, I may have been wrong to think I was something; but acting as if I were, I refrained from pleading cases. First, because I considered it unseemly that the man for whom everyone ought to rise and to whom everyone ought to give way should stand while all the rest were seated; that the man who could order anyone at all to be silent should have silence imposed on him by the water-clock; that the man whom it was sacrilege to interrupt should even have to listen to abuse, and should seem spineless if he let it go unpunished and arrogant if he punished it.
23.3| There was also this dilemma before my eyes: if by chance either the party I was assisting or the one I was opposing appealed to me, should I intervene and give help, or keep quiet and silent, and so turn myself into a private citizen as if I had resigned my office?
23.4| Moved by these reasons, I preferred to show myself a tribune to everyone rather than an advocate to a few.
23.5| But as for you — I will say it again — it matters very much what you think the tribunate is, and what role you take on yourself; and a wise man must fit a role to himself in such a way that he can carry it through to the end. Farewell.
24.0| Pliny to his friend Baebius Hispanus
24.1| My close companion Tranquillus wants to buy a little farm that a friend of yours is said to be trying to sell.
24.2| Please see to it that he buys it at a fair price; that way he will be glad he bought it. For a bad purchase is always unwelcome, most of all because it seems to reproach the owner with his own folly.
24.3| In this little farm, provided the price smiles on him, there are many things to tempt my Tranquillus' appetite: the nearness of the city, the convenience of the road, the moderate size of the house, and the extent of the land, enough to distract him rather than to tie him down.
24.4| For owners who are scholars, as he is, it is more than enough to have just so much ground that they can rest their heads, refresh their eyes, stroll along the boundary path and wear down a single track, and know every one of their little vines and count their little trees. I have set all this out for you so that you may better understand how much he will owe me, and I you, if he buys this little property, which is recommended by such advantages, on terms so sound that it leaves no room for regret. Farewell.
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