Pliny the Younger & Pliny the Elder · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
1.0| Pliny to his friend Calvisius Rufus
1.1| I am not sure I have ever spent a more pleasant time than I did recently at Spurinna's — so much so that there is no one I would rather imitate in old age, if only I am granted the chance to grow old; for nothing is better ordered than that way of life.
1.2| For my part, I take as much delight in a well-arranged human life as in the fixed course of the stars — especially the life of old men. For in the young a certain confusion, and a kind of turbulence as it were, does not ill suit them; whereas to the old, everything calm and orderly is fitting, since for them busy activity comes too late and ambition is disgraceful.
1.3| Spurinna keeps to this rule most faithfully; indeed, even these small matters — small, that is, if they were not done every day — he moves through in a fixed order and, as it were, in a cycle.
1.4| In the morning he stays in bed; at the second hour he asks for his shoes and goes for a walk of three miles, exercising his mind no less than his body. If friends are with him, the most honorable conversations unfold; if not, a book is read aloud — sometimes even when friends are present, provided they do not mind.
1.5| Then he sits down, and there is a book again, or conversation, which is better than a book; next he gets into his carriage and takes with him his wife, a woman of exceptional character, or one of his friends, as he did me lately.
1.6| How fine, how delightful that privacy is! How much of the old days there is in it! What deeds, what men you get to hear about! With what precepts you are steeped! — although he has imposed on his modesty this restraint, that he should not seem to be lecturing.
1.7| After covering seven miles he walks a mile again, sits down again, or betakes himself to his bedroom and his stylus. For he writes lyric poems, very learned ones, and in both languages; they have a wonderful sweetness, a wonderful charm, a wonderful gaiety, and their grace is crowned by the purity of the writer.
1.8| When the hour of the bath is announced — the ninth hour in winter, the eighth in summer — he strolls naked in the sun, provided there is no wind. After that he plays ball vigorously and for a long time; for with this kind of exercise too he fights against old age. Once bathed, he lies down and puts off his meal for a little while; meanwhile he listens to someone reading something lighter and more agreeable. All through this time his friends are free to do the same things or something else, if they prefer.
1.9| Dinner is served, as elegant as it is frugal, on plain, old silver; Corinthian bronzes are also in use, which he enjoys without being obsessed by them. Dinner is often punctuated by comic actors, so that even pleasures may be seasoned with learning. He takes some of the night as well, even in summer; no one finds it long, so genial is the company in which the party is drawn out.
1.10| This is why, past his seventy-seventh year, the strength of his hearing and sight is unimpaired, why his body is nimble and lively, and why the only thing he has from old age is wisdom.
1.11| This is the life that I claim in advance, in my prayers and thoughts, and I shall enter on it most eagerly as soon as the reckoning of my years allows me to sound the retreat. Meanwhile I am worn down by a thousand labors, and for these the same Spurinna is both my comfort and my model;
1.12| for he too, as long as it was honorable, performed his public duties, held magistracies, governed provinces, and earned this leisure with much labor. So I set myself the same course and the same goal, and I sign my name to it now in your presence, so that if you see me carried further, you may summon me to court on the strength of this letter of mine and order me to rest, once I have escaped the charge of idleness. Farewell.
2.0| Pliny to his friend Vibius Maximus
2.1| What I would have offered your friends myself, if I had the same opportunity, I think I may now rightly ask of you for mine.
2.2| Arrianus Maturus is the leading man of Altinum; when I say "leading," I am not speaking of his wealth, of which he has more than enough, but of his purity and justice, his seriousness and good sense.
2.3| I rely on his counsel in business and his judgment in my studies; for he excels above all in loyalty, above all in truthfulness, above all in understanding.
2.4| He loves me — I can say nothing warmer — as you do. He has no ambition; that is why he has kept himself in the equestrian rank, when he could easily rise to the highest. Still, I am bound to advance and honor him.
2.5| So I set great store by adding something to his standing when he does not expect it or know of it — indeed, perhaps, even against his wishes; but adding something that would be distinguished without being burdensome.
2.6| Please confer on him something of this kind at the first opportunity you have; you will have me, and you will have him, as a most grateful debtor. For although he does not seek such things, he receives them as gratefully as if he coveted them. Farewell.
3.0| Pliny to his friend Corellia Hispulla
3.1| Since I am not sure whether I looked up to your father, a man of the greatest dignity and integrity, more than I loved him, and since I have a singular affection for you, both in memory of him and for your own sake, I cannot help wishing, and I will even strive as far as lies in my power, that your son may grow up like his grandfather — his maternal grandfather, I prefer, although his paternal grandfather too was a distinguished and respected man, and his father and his uncle were also conspicuous for their brilliant reputation.
3.2| He will grow up like all of them only if he is steeped in honorable studies, and it matters very much from whom above all he receives them.
3.3| Until now the requirements of boyhood have kept him within your household, and he has had his teachers at home, where there is little or even no occasion for going astray. Now his studies must be carried outside the threshold; now we must look around for a teacher of Latin rhetoric whose school is marked by strictness, modesty, and above all purity.
3.4| For our young man has, along with the other gifts of nature and fortune, exceptional beauty of body, and at this slippery time of life we must look for someone who will be not just his teacher but also his guardian and guide.
3.5| I seem, then, able to point out to you Iulius Genitor. I love him; yet the affection for the man, which was born of judgment, does not stand in the way of my judgment. He is a man of correct character and weight, a little even rough and hard, considering the license of these times.
3.6| How much his eloquence is worth, you can believe from many, for the ability to speak is open and exposed and seen at once; the life of men has deep recesses and great hiding places, and for this take me as surety for Genitor. Your son will hear from this man nothing that will not profit him, will learn nothing it would have been better not to know, and will be reminded by him no less often than by you and me with what portraits he is burdened, what names and how great he bears.
3.7| So with the gods favoring, hand him over to a teacher from whom he may learn first character, then eloquence, which is badly learned without character. Farewell.
4.0| Pliny to his friend Caecilius Macrinus
4.1| Although both the friends whom I had with me and the talk of men seem to have approved what I did, I yet value highly knowing what you think.
4.2| For I have a wonderful longing to know, now the thing is done, the judgment of the man whose counsel I would have wished to seek while the matter was still open. When I was about to begin a public work at my own expense and had hurried off to Tuscany, having obtained leave as prefect of the treasury, envoys of the province of Baetica, about to complain of the proconsulship of Caecilius Classicus, asked the senate for me as their advocate.
4.3| My colleagues, excellent men and most affectionate toward me, spoke first about the requirements of our common office and tried to excuse and release me. A decree of the senate was made, most honorable, that I should be given to the provincials as patron if they obtained it from me.
4.4| The envoys were brought in again and a second time asked for me, now present, as advocate, imploring my good faith which they had tried against Massa Baebius, citing the compact of patronage. A most distinguished assent of the senate followed, such as usually goes ahead of decrees. Then I said: "I cease, Conscript Fathers, to think that I have brought just reasons for excusing myself." Both the modesty of my speech and the reason were approved.
4.5| Now what drove me to this decision was not only the consent of the senate, though this most of all, but also some other considerations, lesser indeed, yet still weighty. It came into my mind that our forebears had pursued even the wrongs of single guests by voluntary prosecutions, so that I thought it the more shameful to neglect the rights of public hospitality.
4.6| Besides, when I recalled how great perils I had undergone for the same Baeticans in my earlier advocacy, it seemed that the merit of the old service should be preserved by a new one. For it is so arranged that you overturn earlier kindnesses unless you heap them up with later ones. For however often men are put under obligation, if you refuse them one thing, they remember only that which was refused.
4.7| I was also influenced by the fact that Classicus had died, and what in cases of this sort is usually most grievous, the danger to a senator, had been removed. I saw, therefore, that my advocacy would bring no less favor than if he were alive, and no ill will.
4.8| In sum I reckoned that, if I discharged this duty now for the third time, my excuse would be easier if a case arose which I ought not to prosecute. For when there is some limit to all duties, then freedom's pardon is best prepared by compliance.
4.9| You have heard the motives of my plan: what remains is your judgment, on one side or the other, in which the plainness of one who disagrees will be as pleasing to me as the authority of one who approves. Farewell.
5.0| Pliny to his friend Baebius Macer
5.1| It is very gratifying to me that you read my uncle's books so diligently as to wish to have them all and to ask which they all are.
5.2| I shall play the part of an index, and even make known to you in what order they were written; for this too is not an unwelcome piece of knowledge to scholars.
5.3| "On Throwing the Javelin from Horseback, one book"; this he composed with equal talent and care while serving as commander of a cavalry wing. "On the Life of Pomponius Secundus, two"; by him he was singularly loved, and discharged this to the memory of his friend as a kind of debt.
5.4| "The Wars of Germany, twenty"; in which he gathered up every war that we have fought against the Germans. He began it while serving in Germany, warned by a dream: as he slept, the image of Drusus Nero stood by him, who, victor over Germany far and wide, died there; he commended his memory to him and begged him to rescue him from the wrong of oblivion.
5.5| "The Students, three," divided into six rolls because of their size, in which he trains the orator from the cradle and perfects him. "Of Doubtful Speech, eight": he wrote it under Nero in the last years, when slavery had made every kind of study dangerous if rather freer and loftier.
5.6| "From the End of Aufidius Bassus, thirty-one." "Histories of Nature, thirty-seven," a copious, learned work, no less varied than nature itself.
5.7| Do you wonder that a busy man finished so many volumes and so many exacting matters in them? You will wonder the more if you learn that he for some time pleaded cases, that he died in the fifty-sixth year of his life, and that the time in between he spent distracted and hindered, partly by very great duties, partly by friendship with emperors.
5.8| But his talent was keen, his zeal incredible, his vigilance the highest. He began to work by lamplight at the Vulcanalia, not for the sake of omens but for study, immediately from deep night, in winter indeed from the seventh hour, or at the latest the eighth, often the sixth. He was, to be sure, a man who fell asleep most readily, a sleep that sometimes came on him and left him even in the midst of his studies.
5.9| Before daylight he went to the Emperor Vespasian - for he too used the nights -, then to the duty assigned him. On returning home he gave what remained of the time to his studies.
5.10| After eating, which by day he took light and easy in the manner of the ancients, in summer, if he had any leisure, he would lie in the sun, a book was read, and he made notes and extracts. For he read nothing without making extracts; he used also to say that no book was so bad that it did not profit in some part.
5.11| After the sun he usually washed in cold water, then took a snack and slept a very little; soon, as if on another day, he studied until dinner time. During dinner a book was read and annotated, and at that, at speed.
5.12| I recall that a friend of his, when the reader had pronounced certain words wrongly, called him back and made him repeat them; my uncle said to him: "Had you understood?" When he nodded, "Why then did you call him back? By this interruption of yours we have lost more than ten lines."
5.13| So great was his thrift of time. In summer he rose from dinner by daylight, in winter within the first hour of night, and as if compelled by some law.
5.14| This was in the midst of his labors and the din of the city. In the country only the time of the bath was taken from his studies - when I say the bath I mean the inner rooms; for while he was being scraped and rubbed, he would hear something read or dictate -.
5.15| On a journey, as though freed from other cares, he gave himself to this one thing: at his side a secretary with a book and tablets, whose hands in winter were protected with sleeves, so that not even the harshness of the weather should rob him of any time for study; for which reason at Rome too he was carried in a chair.
5.16| I recall being scolded by him for walking: "You could," he said, "not lose these hours"; for he thought all time lost that was not spent on studies.
5.17| By this intensity he completed all those volumes and left me one hundred and sixty notebooks of selections, written on both sides and in a very small hand; by which reckoning this number is multiplied. He himself used to relate that, while serving as procurator in Spain, he might have sold these notebooks to Larcius Licinus for four hundred thousand sesterces, though at that period there were a good many fewer.
5.18| Does it not seem to you, as you recall how much he read and how much he wrote, that he was never in any duties or in friendship with an emperor; again, when you hear how much labor he spent on his studies, that he neither wrote enough nor read enough? For what is there that those occupations could not hinder, or that this persistence could not accomplish?
5.19| And so I am accustomed to laugh when some call me studious, who, if I am compared with him, am most idle. And what of me, whom partly public duties, partly those of friends pull in all directions? Who of those who sit over letters all their lives, compared with him, would not blush as if given to sleep and inertia?
5.20| I have stretched out the letter when I had intended to write only what you asked, which books he left; yet I trust that these things too will be no less welcome to you than the books themselves, since they can rouse you with the goads of emulation not merely to read them but also to work up something similar of your own. Farewell.
6.0| Pliny to his friend Annius Severus
6.1| From the inheritance that has come to me, I recently bought a Corinthian statuette, small indeed but charming and finely wrought, as far as I understand, who perhaps in everything, in this certainly, understand very little: yet this statuette even I understand.
6.2| For it is nude, and neither hides its faults, if there are any, nor displays its merits too little. It represents an old man standing; the bones, muscles, sinews, veins, even the wrinkles appear as of one breathing; the hair is sparse and receding, the forehead broad, the face drawn, the neck thin; the arms hang, the breasts lie flat, the belly has sunk in;
6.3| from behind too the same age shows as from behind. The bronze itself, as far as its true color indicates, is old and ancient; all in short such that it can hold the eyes of craftsmen and delight those of the unskilled.
6.4| This tempted me to buy, though I am a mere beginner. I bought it not to have it at home - for I have no Corinthian bronze at home so far - but to put it in our native town in a crowded place, and best of all in the temple of Jupiter;
6.5| for it seems a gift worthy of the temple, worthy of the god. You therefore, as you do all that is enjoined on you by me, take up this care, and order a base made at once, of whatever marble you wish, to bear my name and offices, if you think these should be added as well.
6.6| I shall send you the statuette itself as soon as I find someone who will not mind the burden, or bring it with me myself - which you prefer. For I intend, if the reckoning of my duties permits, to run over there.
6.7| You rejoice that I promise to come, yet you will frown when I add "for a few days": for these same things, which do not yet allow me to leave, will not let me be away longer. Farewell.
7.0| Pliny to his friend Caninius Rufus
7.1| Word has just come that Silius Italicus has ended his life by starvation at his place near Naples.
7.2| The cause of death was his health. A growth had formed on him, incurable, and weary of it he ran down to death with unalterable resolve, happy and fortunate to his last day, except that of his two sons he lost the younger, but left the elder and better flourishing and even of consular rank.
7.3| He had damaged his reputation under Nero - he was believed to have accused of his own accord -, but in the friendship of Vitellius he had behaved with wisdom and courtesy, had brought back glory from the proconsulship of Asia, and had washed away the stain of his former activity by an honorable retirement.
7.4| He was among the leading men of the state without power, without envy: he was greeted and courted, and, much lying on his couch in his bedroom, which was always thronged not by reason of his fortune, he spent his days in most learned conversation when he had leisure from writing.
7.5| He wrote poems with more care than talent, and sometimes tested men's judgment by recitations.
7.6| At last, as his years advised, he withdrew from the city and kept himself in Campania, and was not moved from there even by the arrival of the new emperor:
7.7| great credit to Caesar, under whom this was free, great credit to him who dared to use this freedom.
7.8| He was a lover of the beautiful to the point of being blamed for buying too much. He owned several villas in the same places, and loving the new ones, neglected the earlier. Everywhere there were many books, many statues, many portraits, which he not only had but venerated, Virgil's before all, whose birthday he celebrated more religiously than his own, chiefly at Naples, where he used to visit his tomb as a temple.
7.9| In this calm he went past his seventy-fifth year, his body delicate rather than infirm; and just as he was the last man made consul by Nero, so too he was the last to die among all whom Nero had made consuls.
7.10| This too is notable: he died the last of the consulars of Nero's time, under whose consulship Nero perished. When I recall it, pity for human frailty comes over me.
7.11| For what is so cut short, so brief, as the longest life of a man? Does not Nero seem to you to have been only just now, only just now? while meanwhile of those who held the consulship under him, no one now survives.
7.12| Yet why do I wonder at this? Recently Lucius Piso, father of that Piso who was killed in Africa by Valerius Festus by a supreme crime, used to say that he saw in the senate no one whom he himself as consul had asked for an opinion.
7.13| The very vitality of so great a multitude is shut in by such narrow limits that those royal tears seem to me worthy not only of pardon but of praise; for they say that Xerxes, when he had surveyed with his eyes the immense army, wept, because so brief an end hung over so many thousands.
7.14| But so much the more let us extend this time, whatever it is, so futile and perishable, if not by deeds - for the material of these is in another's hand -, then certainly by studies, and since long life is denied to us, let us leave something by which we may testify that we have lived.
7.15| I know that you need no spurs: yet my affection for you calls me out to urge on one who is also running, as you are wont to do me. "Good is the strife" when friends in turn sharpen one another by mutual exhortations to the love of immortality. Farewell.
8.0| Pliny to his friend Suetonius Tranquillus
8.1| You act, in keeping with the rest of the respect you show me, in asking so anxiously that I transfer to your kinsman Caesennius Silvanus the tribuneship that I secured for you from Neratius Marcellus, a most distinguished man.
8.2| For me, as it is most pleasant that you yourself should be tribune, so it is no less welcome to see another made one through you. For I do not think it fitting that you should begrudge the titles of family affection, which are more beautiful than all offices, to one whom you wish to increase in honors.
8.3| I also see that, since it is admirable both to earn kindnesses and to give them, you will win both praises at once if you bestow on another what you yourself earned. Besides, I understand that it will be to my glory too, if from this act of yours it is not unknown that my friends can not only hold tribunates but give them.
8.4| Therefore I obey your most honorable wish. For the name has not yet been entered in the lists, and so we are free to put Silvanus in your place; and I hope your gift will please him as much as mine pleases you. Farewell.
9.0| Pliny to his friend Cornelius Minicianus
9.1| I can now write out to you how much labor I have drained in the public cause of the province of Baetica.
9.2| For it was manifold, and was pleaded repeatedly with great variety. Whence the variety, whence the several pleadings? Caecilius Classicus, a foul and openly wicked man, had conducted his proconsulship in that province no less violently than sordidly, in the same year as Marius Priscus in Africa.
9.3| Now Priscus was from Baetica, Classicus from Africa. Hence a saying of the Baeticans was current, not without charm, as grief often makes men witty: "I gave a bad one and I received one."
9.4| But Marius was prosecuted to the end by a single city in its public capacity and by many private persons; on Classicus the whole province bore down. He forestalled the accusation by a death either chance or voluntary. For his death was infamous, yet ambiguous: for as it seemed credible that he wished to leave life when he could not be defended, so it was strange that he should have fled by death the shame of condemnation, who had not been ashamed to commit what deserved condemnation.
9.6| None the less Baetica persisted in accusing even the dead man. This was provided for by the laws, but it had lapsed, and after a long interval was then revived. The Baeticans added that they at the same time denounced the partners and agents of Classicus, and demanded an inquiry against them by name.
9.7| I appeared for the Baeticans, and with me Lucceius Albinus, a man copious and ornate in speaking; whom, though I had long loved him in return, I began from this partnership in duty to love more ardently.
9.8| Glory, especially in studies, has in it something that cannot be shared; yet between us there was no rivalry, no contention, since each strained under an equal yoke, not for himself but for the cause, whose greatness and usefulness seemed to demand that we should not take on so great a load in single pleadings.
9.9| We feared that day, voice and lungs might fail us if we embraced so many charges and so many defendants in a single bundle, as it were; next, that the attention of the judges might not only be wearied by many names and many causes but even confused; then, that the influence of individuals, brought together and mixed, might receive even for single defendants the strength of all; finally, that the most powerful might slip out by penalties on others, a sacrifice of atonement as it were, once the most worthless of them had been handed over.
9.10| For favor and canvassing hold sway most of all when they can lie hidden under some show of severity.
9.11| In our council there was in mind that Sertorian example, who ordered the strongest and the weakest soldier to take the horse's tail - the rest you know. For we too saw that so numerous a column of defendants could be overcome only if it were plucked at one by one.
9.12| It was agreed to show first Classicus himself guilty: this was the most suitable passage to his partners and agents, because partners and agents could not be proved guilty unless he were guilty. Of these we at once linked two men with Classicus, Baebius Probus and Fabius Hispanus, each strong in influence, Hispanus also in eloquence. And so far as Classicus is concerned the labor was brief and quick.
9.13| He had left in his own hand a written record of what he had received from each matter and each cause; he had also sent letters to Rome to a certain little mistress, boastful and exultant, in these very words: "Hurrah, hurrah, I am coming to you a free man; I have already realized four million sesterces by selling part of the Baeticans."
9.14| With Hispanus and Probus there was much sweat. Before I entered upon the charges against them, I held it necessary to take pains to establish that service was a crime: for had I not done so, I would have proved the agents in vain.
9.15| For they were not defended in such a way as to deny it, but so as to ask pardon for necessity; they said they were provincials and compelled by fear to obey every command of proconsuls.
9.16| Claudius Restitutus, who answered me, a practiced, watchful man and ready for any sudden event, is accustomed to say that never had so much darkness, so much confusion been poured over him as when he saw snatched away and wrested from his defense the very things in which he placed all his confidence.
9.17| The outcome of our plan was this: the senate decided that the goods of Classicus which he had before the province should be separated from the rest, those to be left to his daughter, these to the despoiled. It was added that the sums he had paid to creditors be recalled. Hispanus and Probus were relegated for five years; so grave did that seem which at the start was doubted to be a crime at all.
9.18| A few days later we prosecuted Claudius Fuscus, the son-in-law of Classicus, together with Stilonius Priscus, who had been tribune of a cohort under Classicus, with unequal outcome: Priscus was excluded from Italy for two years, while Fuscus was acquitted.
9.19| In the third pleading we thought it most convenient to bring several together, lest, if the hearing were drawn out longer, the justice and strictness of the judges should flag through a kind of satiety and weariness; and besides, there remained lesser defendants, reserved for this place on purpose, except the wife of Classicus, who, as she seemed implicated in suspicions, so seemed not sufficiently convicted by proofs;
9.20| for the daughter of Classicus, who herself was also among the defendants, did not even cling to suspicions. And so, when in the last pleading I came to her name - for it was not to be feared at the end, as it had been at the start, that thereby the authority of the whole accusation might be diminished -, I thought it most honorable not to press one who did not deserve it, and I said this very thing both freely and variously.
9.21| For now I asked the envoys whether they had shown me anything which they were confident could be proved in fact; now I asked advice of the senate, whether it thought I ought, if I had any ability in speaking, to direct it at the throat of an innocent person like some weapon; finally I closed the whole passage with this end: "Someone will say: do you then judge? I do not judge, yet I remember that I was given as an advocate from among the judges."
9.22| This was the end of a most numerous case, some being acquitted, more condemned and even relegated, some for a time, others forever.
9.23| By the same decree of the senate our industry, good faith and steadfastness were approved by the fullest testimony, a worthy and the only equal reward for so great a labor.
9.24| You can conceive in your mind how tired we are, who had to plead so often, so often dispute, and question, support and refute so many witnesses.
9.25| Then how arduous, how troublesome it was to say no to the friends of so many defendants who asked in private, and to resist openly those who opposed! I shall relate one of the things that I said. When some of the very judges cried out against me on behalf of a most influential defendant, I said: "He will be no less innocent if I say everything."
9.26| From this you will guess what contentions, even what offenses, we underwent, if only for a short time; for good faith for the moment offends those whom it resists, then is looked up to and praised by those very men. I could not have brought you more into the present business.
9.27| You will say: "It was not worth it; what have I to do with so long a letter?" Then do not keep asking over and over what is going on at Rome. And yet remember that a letter is not long which has embraced so many days, so many hearings, in short so many defendants and causes.
9.28| All of which I seem to myself to have followed up no less briefly than carefully. I said "carefully" rashly: it comes to mind that I had passed over something, and indeed late, but though out of order it shall be given. Homer does this and many after his example; it is besides most becoming, but that is not why I am doing it.
9.29| One of the witnesses, either angry that he had been summoned against his will, or suborned by one of the defendants to disarm the prosecution, demanded that Norbanus Licinianus, envoy and investigator, be put on trial, on the ground that he was colluding in the case of Casta - she is the wife of Classicus.
9.30| It is provided by law that the defendant be finished first, and then an inquiry be made about the colluder, evidently because the good faith of an accuser is best judged from the accusation itself.
9.31| Yet for Norbanus neither the order of the law, nor the name of envoy, nor the duty of investigation was a protection; such a blaze of ill will rose against him, a man otherwise infamous who had used Domitian's times as many did, and who was then chosen by the province for the inquiry not as a good and faithful man but as an enemy of Classicus - he had been relegated by him -.
9.32| He demanded that a day be given him and the charges set out; he obtained neither, and was forced to answer at once. He answered; the man's evil and perverse nature makes me doubt whether confidently or steadfastly, certainly most readily.
9.33| Many things were charged against him which hurt him more than the collusion; indeed two consulars, Pomponius Rufus and Libo Frugi, damaged him by testimony, to the effect that under Domitian he had assisted the accusers of Salvius Liberalis before a judge.
9.34| He was condemned and relegated to an island. So when I accused Casta, I pressed nothing more than that her accuser had fallen by the charge of collusion; I pressed in vain, however; for a contrary and novel thing happened, that with the accuser condemned for collusion the defendant was acquitted.
9.35| You ask, what did we do while this was going on? We informed the senate that we had learned the public case from Norbanus and must learn it again from the beginning, if he were proved a colluder, and so, while he was being finished as a defendant, we sat. Afterward Norbanus attended on all the days of the hearing and carried the same steadfastness or boldness to the end.
9.36| I ask myself whether I have again omitted something, and again I have almost omitted it. On the last day Salvius Liberalis sharply rebuked the remaining envoys, as though they had not finished off all the defendants whom the province had entrusted to them, and, being vehement and eloquent, brought them into peril. I shielded excellent men and the same most grateful ones: they at any rate declare that they owe it to me that they escaped that whirlwind.
9.37| This will be the end of the letter, truly the end; I shall not add a single letter more, even if I perceive that I have still passed something over. Farewell.
10.0| Pliny to his friends Vestricius Spurinna and Cottia
10.1| That I had composed something about your son I did not tell you when I was last at your house, first because I had not written it in order to tell of it, but to satisfy my love and my grief; then because you, Spurinna, when you heard, as you yourself told me, that I had recited, I believed had heard at the same time what I recited.
10.2| Besides, I feared to disturb you on feast days, if I brought back the memory of a most grievous loss. Even now I hesitated a little whether, at your demand, to send only what I recited or to add what I think of reserving for another volume.
10.3| For it is not enough for my feelings to follow with a single little book a memory most dear and most sacred to me, whose fame will be better provided for more widely if it is parceled out and arranged.
10.4| But as I hesitated whether to show you everything I have already composed or to put off some part, it seemed more straightforward and friendly to send everything, especially as you assure me it will remain among yourselves until you are pleased to let it go.
10.5| For the rest, I ask that with equal frankness you indicate to me anything you think should be added, changed or omitted.
10.6| It is hard to bend the mind so far in grief; hard, but yet, as you would advise a sculptor, a painter making the likeness of your son, what to express, what to correct, so form and guide me too, who am trying to make not a fragile and perishable but, as you think, an immortal likeness: which will be the more lasting the truer, the better, the more finished it is. Farewell.
11.0| Pliny to his friend Iulius Genitor
11.1| Our friend Artemidorus is altogether of so kindly a nature that he exalts the services of his friends to something greater. Hence he also carries about my merit, true as it is, in a praise above the merit.
11.2| For my part, when the philosophers had been expelled from the city, I stayed with him at his suburban estate, and to make it the more noticeable - that is, more dangerous - I was praetor. Money too, of which he then had need in a larger amount, to pay off debt contracted for most honorable causes, while certain great and wealthy friends were muttering, I borrowed myself and gave to him free of interest.
11.3| And this I did when seven of my friends had been either killed or relegated, killed Senecio, Rusticus, Helvidius, relegated Mauricus, Gratilla, Arria, Fannia, so many thunderbolts hurled around me that, as if scorched, I foretold by certain signs that the same destruction hung over me too.
11.4| Yet I do not believe that I thereby earned the exceptional glory he proclaims, but only escaped disgrace.
11.5| For I loved Gaius Musonius, his father-in-law, with admiration, as far as my age allowed, and Artemidorus himself, even then, during my time as military tribune in Syria, I embraced in close intimacy, and this was the first proof of some natural ability that I gave, that I seemed to understand him as a man either wise or next to and most like a wise man.
11.6| For out of all who now call themselves philosophers, you will hardly find one or two of such sincerity, such truth. I pass over with what endurance of body he bears winters and summers alike, how he yields to no labors, how he grants nothing in food or drink to pleasures, how he keeps his eyes and mind in check.
11.7| These are great things, but in another man; in him they are the least, if compared with his other virtues, by which he earned the honor of being chosen as son-in-law by Gaius Musonius out of all the followers of all ranks.
11.8| When I recall this it is indeed pleasing that he heaps me with such praises, both among others and with you; yet I fear lest he exceed the measure, which his kindliness - for I return to the point from which I began - is wont not to keep.
11.9| For in this one thing the man, otherwise most prudent, is at times caught in an error, honorable indeed but still an error, that he thinks his friends worth more than they are. Farewell.
12.0| Pliny to his friend Catilius Severus
12.1| I will come to dinner, but I bargain at once now: let it be quick, let it be frugal, let it overflow only with Socratic conversations, and in these too keep measure.
12.2| There will be duties before dawn, which not even Cato was allowed to meet with impunity, though Gaius Caesar so reproaches him as to praise him.
12.3| For he describes how those who met him blushed when they uncovered the head of a drunken man; then he adds: "You would think that it was not Cato who had been caught by them, but they by Cato." Could more authority be given to Cato than if even drunk he was so venerable?
12.4| Let our dinners, however, have a fixed measure of time, as of preparation and expense. For we are not men whom not even enemies could blame, unless they praised at the same time. Farewell.
13.0| Pliny to his friend Voconius Romanus
13.1| The book in which I lately, as consul, gave thanks to the best of emperors I have sent at your demand, and would have sent even had you not demanded it.
13.2| In this I would have you consider the difficulty as well as the beauty of the subject. In other speeches the novelty itself keeps the reader attentive; in this one everything said is well known and commonplace; so the reader, as if at leisure and carefree, attends only to the diction, in which it is harder to satisfy when it alone is judged.
13.3| And would that at least the order, the transitions and the figures were looked at together! For to find things admirably and to express them grandly even barbarians sometimes do, but to arrange aptly and to vary the figures is denied except to the learned.
13.4| Nor must one always strive after the lofty and sublime. For as in a painting nothing recommends the light more than shadow, so it befits a speech to lower itself as much as to raise itself.
13.5| But why do I say this to a most learned man? Rather this: mark whatever you judge needs correcting. For I shall believe the rest pleases you the more if I learn that some things displeased. Farewell.
14.0| Pliny to his friend Acilius
14.1| An atrocity, not worthy merely of a letter, was suffered by Larcius Macedo, a man of praetorian rank, from his own slaves; he was otherwise a proud and cruel master, and one who remembered too little, or rather too much, how his own father had been in slavery.
14.2| He was bathing at his villa at Formiae. Suddenly the slaves stand around him. One seizes his throat, another strikes his face, another his chest and belly, and even - foul to say - batters his private parts; and when they thought him lifeless, they throw him onto the hot pavement, to test whether he was alive. He, whether because he did not feel it, or because he pretended not to feel it, lay motionless and stretched out and gave full credence to a death completed.
14.3| Only then, as if relaxed by the heat, is he carried out; the more faithful slaves receive him, the concubines run together with wailing and shouting. So, roused by the voices and revived by the coolness of the place, with his eyes lifted and his body moved, he declares that he lives - and now it was safe.
14.4| The slaves scatter; a great part of them were seized, the rest are sought. He himself, barely restored over a few days, died not without the consolation of revenge, avenged while alive as the slain are wont to be.
14.5| You see to how many dangers, how many insults, how many mockeries we are exposed; and there is no reason for anyone to be secure because he is indulgent and gentle; for masters are killed not by any judgment on them but by crime.
14.6| But so much for that. What else is new? What? Nothing, otherwise I would add it; for the paper still remains, and the holiday allows more to be woven in. I shall add what occurs to me opportunely about the same Macedo. When he was bathing in a public bath at Rome, a notable and even, as the outcome taught, ominous thing happened.
14.7| A Roman knight, lightly nudged by a slave of his with the hand, to give passage, turned round, and struck not the slave by whom he had been touched but Macedo himself with the palm so hard that he almost fell.
14.8| So the bath was for him, as if by certain steps, first the place of insult, then of destruction. Farewell.
15.0| Pliny to his friend Silius Proculus
15.1| You ask that I read your little books in my retreat and examine whether they are worthy of publication; you use prayers, you allege an example: you ask that I take some spare time away from my own studies and bestow it on yours, and you add that Marcus Tullius fostered the talents of poets with wonderful kindness.
15.2| But I need neither to be asked nor urged; for I revere poetry itself most religiously and I love you very much. I shall therefore do what you desire as carefully as willingly.
15.3| I think I can already reply that the work is a fine one and should not be kept back, so far as I could judge from the parts you read in my presence, provided your recitation did not deceive me; for you read most charmingly and with the greatest skill.
15.4| Yet I trust I am not so led by my ears that all the points of my judgment are snapped off by their enchantments: they may perhaps be dulled and a little blunted, but they cannot be torn out or wrenched away.
15.5| So I do not rashly pronounce on the whole work at this moment; on the parts I shall make trial by reading. Farewell.
16.0| Pliny to his friend Nepos.
16.1| I believe I have noticed that among the deeds and sayings of men and women some are more famous and others greater. My opinion was confirmed by yesterday's conversation with Fannia. She is the granddaughter of that Arria who was both a comfort to her husband in death and an example to him. She told me many things about her grandmother no less great than this one, but more obscure; I think you will find them as marvellous to read as I did to hear.
16.3| Her husband Caecina Paetus was ill, and her son was ill too, both of them, as it seemed, mortally. The son died, a youth of outstanding beauty and equal modesty, dear to his parents no less for other reasons than because he was their son. For him she so arranged the funeral and so conducted the obsequies that her husband knew nothing of it; indeed, whenever she entered his bedroom, she pretended that the boy was alive and even better, and very often, when he asked what the boy was doing, she answered: "He has slept well, he has eaten with appetite." Then, when the tears she had long held back overcame her and burst forth, she went out; then she gave herself to grief; when she was satisfied, she came back with dry eyes and composed face, as though she had left her bereavement outside. That other act of hers was certainly splendid: to draw the sword, to pierce her breast, to pull out the dagger, to hold it out to her husband, and to add the immortal and almost divine words: "Paetus, it does not hurt." Yet when she did and said these things, glory and eternity were before her eyes; so it is greater, without the reward of eternity, without the reward of glory, to hide her tears and cover her grief, and, having lost a son, to go on playing the mother.
16.7| Scribonianus had taken up arms in Illyricum against Claudius; Paetus had been on his side, and when Scribonianus was killed he was being dragged to Rome. He was about to board the ship; Arria begged the soldiers to let her be put aboard with him. "Surely," she said, "you are going to give a man of consular rank some little slaves, from whose hand he may take his food, by whom he may be dressed, by whom he may be shod; I will provide everything alone." She did not obtain it: she hired a small fishing boat and followed the huge vessel in the tiniest of craft. In the presence of Claudius, when the wife of Scribonianus professed to give information, she said: "Am I to listen to you, in whose lap Scribonianus was killed, and you live?" From this it is clear that her plan of a most glorious death was not sudden. Indeed, when Thrasea, her son-in-law, begged her not to persist in dying, and among other things said, "Do you then want your daughter, if I have to die, to die with me?", she answered: "If she shall have lived with you as long and in such harmony as I with Paetus, I do." This answer increased her family's anxiety; she was watched more closely; she noticed it and said: "You accomplish nothing; you can make me die badly, but you cannot make me not die." As she said this, she sprang out of the seat and drove her head against the opposite wall with huge force, and collapsed. When she was revived she said: "I had told you I would find some hard way to death, should you refuse me an easy one." Do these deeds seem to you greater than that "Paetus, it does not hurt," the point these deeds led to? Yet meanwhile that saying is carried about by mighty fame, and these deeds by none. From this one gathers what I said at the beginning, that some deeds are more famous and others greater. Farewell.
17.0| Pliny to his friend Julius Servianus.
17.1| Is all well, that your letters have for so long stopped? Or is all well, but you are busy? Or are you not busy, but the opportunity of writing is either rare or none?
17.2| Relieve me of this scruple, which I cannot bear, and relieve me even by sending a courier on purpose. I will give him his travelling money, I will even give him a reward, if only he reports what I wish.
17.3| I myself am well, if it is being well to live in suspense and anxiety, waiting hour by hour and fearing for a most dear life whatever can happen to a human being. Farewell.
18.0| Pliny to his friend Vibius Severus.
18.1| The office of consul laid on me the duty of giving thanks to the emperor in the state's name. When I had done this in the senate, in accordance with the character of the place and the occasion, as custom required, I thought it most fitting for a good citizen to embrace the same matter more fully and richly in a book,
18.2| first so that our emperor's virtues might be commended to him by true praises, then so that future emperors might be advised in advance, not as by a teacher but yet by an example, by which road above all they might strive to the same glory.
18.3| For to lay down what an emperor ought to be is indeed fine but burdensome and almost arrogant; but to praise the best of emperors, and thereby to show posterity, as from a watchtower, a light to follow, has the same usefulness and no arrogance.
18.4| I took no small pleasure, moreover, in this: when I wished to recite this book to my friends, they were summoned not by notes or by little letters but only told "if convenient" and "if you are quite free" - and in Rome one is never quite free, nor is it ever convenient to hear a recitation - and yet, in the foulest weather besides, they came together for two days, and when my modesty had wished to bring the recitation to an end, they demanded that I add a third day.
18.5| Am I to think this honour was paid to me, or to literary studies? To studies, I prefer, which, almost extinct, are being warmed back to life.
18.6| But for what subject did they show this diligence? The very one which in the senate too, where we had to endure it, we used to find tiresome even for a moment; now people are found who are willing to recite it and to hear it over three days, not because the writing is more eloquent than before, but because it is written more freely and therefore also more gladly.
18.7| So this too will be added to the praises of our emperor, that a thing once as hated as it was false has now become as lovable as it is true.
18.8| But I admired remarkably both the eagerness and the judgment of the listeners: for I observed that the most severe passages satisfied them most of all.
18.9| I remember, to be sure, that I recited to few what I wrote for all; nonetheless, as though everyone's opinion were going to be the same, I rejoice at this severity of ear, and as theatres once taught musicians to sing badly, so now I am led to hope that the same theatres may teach musicians to sing well.
18.10| Everyone who writes in order to please will write such things as they have seen to please. And for my part I trust that in this kind of subject the method of a more cheerful style holds good, since those pieces I wrote more tersely and tightly might rather seem brought in and forced upon the subject than those I wrote more gaily and, as it were, more exultantly. Yet I pray none the less earnestly that some day the day may come - and would that it had come already! - when these sweet and charming pieces give way to those austere and severe ones, even though they hold their place by rightful possession.
18.11| You have my proceedings of three days; having learned them, I wished you to take, though absent, as much pleasure, both on behalf of literary studies and on my own, as you could have received if present. Farewell.
19.0| Pliny to his friend Calvisius Rufus.
19.1| I take you into counsel on my household affairs, as I am accustomed to. Estates neighbouring my lands, and even interspersed among them, are for sale. Many things about them attract me; some, and no less weighty, deter me.
19.2| First attracting me is the very beauty of joining them; then, what is no less useful than pleasant, that I can visit both with the same trouble and the same travelling expense, have them under the same steward and almost the same managers, cultivate and adorn one villa and merely look after the other.
19.3| Included in this calculation are the cost of furniture, the cost of household stewards, gardeners, workmen, and even hunting equipment; it matters a great deal whether you bring these together in one place or scatter them in different places.
19.4| On the other side I fear it may be unwise to subject so great a property to identical storms and identical accidents; it seems safer to try the uncertainties of fortune with a variety of possessions. The change of soil and climate also holds much pleasure, and so does that very travelling among one's own property.
19.5| Now, the main point of our deliberation: the lands are fertile, rich and well watered; they consist of fields, vines and woods, which furnish timber and from it an income as moderate as it is steady.
19.6| But this prosperity of the land is worn down by feeble cultivators. For the former owner repeatedly sold off the pledged goods of the tenants, and while he reduced the tenants' arrears for the time being, he exhausted their strength for the future, and through the failure of that strength the arrears grew again.
19.7| They therefore need to be stocked with slaves, all the more costly because honest ones; for I myself keep no one in chains anywhere, nor does anyone there. It remains for you to know at what price they seem likely to be bought. Three million sesterces, not because they were not at one time five million, but through this shortage of tenants and the general hardness of the times, as the income of the lands has gone back, so has the price.
19.8| You ask whether we can easily gather this very three million. I am indeed almost wholly in landed estates, yet I lend out a little at interest, and it will not be troublesome to borrow; I shall take it from my mother-in-law, whose strongbox I use no differently from my own.
19.9| So let this not trouble you, if the other points do not stand in the way, which I should like you to examine as carefully as possible. For in all matters, and in the arrangement of resources especially, you have a great surplus of experience and foresight. Farewell.
20.0| Pliny to his friend Maesius Maximus.
20.1| Do you not remember often reading what contentions the law on the ballot stirred up, and how much glory or blame it brought to its proposer himself?
20.2| But now in the senate the same measure has been approved, as the best, without any dissent: all demanded ballots for the day of the elections.
20.3| We had certainly, with those open and manifest votes, exceeded the licence of public assemblies. Neither time for speaking, nor restraint in keeping silent, nor finally the dignity of sitting was observed.
20.4| Great and discordant shouts came from every side; everyone ran forward with his own candidates; there were many throngs in the middle and many knots of people and an unseemly confusion; so far had we departed from the custom of our fathers, among whom everything was arranged, moderate and calm, and kept the majesty and the decorum of the place.
20.5| Old men survive from whom I am used to hear this order of the elections: when the candidate's name was called, there was the deepest silence; he spoke for himself; he set out his life, and produced witnesses and supporters, either the man under whom he had served as a soldier, or the man whose quaestor he had been, or both if he could; he added some of those who backed him; they spoke weightily and briefly. This helped more than entreaties.
20.6| Sometimes the candidate attacked the birth or the age or even the character of a rival. The senate listened with a censor's gravity. So more often the worthy prevailed than the favoured.
20.7| Now, corrupted by immoderate partiality, they have run down to the silent ballot as if to a remedy; which for the time being was plainly a remedy - for it was new and sudden -,
20.8| but I fear that, as time passes, faults may arise from the remedy itself. For there is a danger that shamelessness may creep in with silent votes. How many people care as much about honorable conduct in secret as in public?
20.9| Many fear their reputation; few fear their conscience. But I am running ahead too quickly to the future. Meanwhile, thanks to the ballot tablets, we shall have the magistrates who most deserved to be elected. For just as in trials before recuperators, so in these elections we were caught, as it were, unawares, and proved honest judges.
20.10| I have written you this, first so that I might write you some news, and secondly so that I might sometimes talk about public affairs — a subject which we must neglect all the less, the rarer our opportunity for it is compared with that of the men of old.
20.11| And really, how long must we go on with those commonplaces: "What are you doing? Are you keeping well?" Let our letters, too, have something in them that is not low or petty, nor shut up within private affairs.
20.12| Everything, it is true, is under the control of one man, who for the common good has taken on himself alone the cares and labors of all; yet, by a wholesome balance, certain streams flow down even to us from that most generous fountain, and we can both draw from them ourselves and, by letters, serve them, as it were, to our absent friends. Farewell.
21.1| Pliny to his friend Cornelius Priscus. I hear that Valerius Martial has died, and I am grieved. He was a gifted man, sharp and keen, and in his writing he had a great deal of wit and of gall, and no less sincerity.
21.2| When he was leaving Rome I had sent him on his way with money for the journey; I had given this to our friendship, and I had given it also to the little verses he composed about me.
21.3| It was the custom of old to honor those who had written the praises of individuals or of cities either with honors or with money; but in our times this custom, like other fine and distinguished ones, has been among the first to fall out of use. For since we have stopped doing things worthy of praise, we also think it foolish to be praised.
21.4| Do you ask what the verses were for which I repaid him? I would send you back to the book itself, were it not that I know some of them by heart; if you like these, you will look up the rest in the book.
21.5| He addresses his Muse and bids her look for my house on the Esquiline and go to it with reverence: "But take care you do not, drunk, knock at that eloquent door at a time that is not yours. / He gives his whole days to stern Minerva, / while for the ears of the Hundred he labors at / what the ages and posterity might / set even beside the pages of Arpinum. / You will go more safely when the lamps are late; / that hour is yours, when Lyaeus runs riot, / when the rose reigns, when the hair is drenched. / Then even stern Catos might read me."
21.6| Was I right, then, to send off the man who wrote this about me in the friendliest way at the time, and to grieve now that he has died as my dearest friend? For he gave me all that he was able to, and would have given more had he been able. And yet what greater thing can a person be granted than glory, praise and eternity? "But what he wrote will not be eternal." Perhaps it will not; but he wrote it as though it would be. Farewell.
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