Pliny the Younger & Pliny the Elder · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
1.0| Pliny to his wife's grandfather Calpurnius Fabatus
1.1| You long to see your granddaughter, and me with her, after so long a time. Your longing is welcome to us both, and, upon my word, it is mutual.
1.2| For we in turn are gripped by an incredible longing for you both, and we will not put it off any further. In fact we are already tying up our bags, and we mean to hurry as fast as the conditions of the road allow.
1.3| There will be one delay, but a short one: we shall turn aside into Tuscany, not to cast an eye over our lands and estate — that can be put off — but to perform a duty that cannot be avoided.
1.4| There is a town near our properties, called Tifernum Tiberinum, which chose me as its patron when I was hardly more than a boy, with all the more enthusiasm the less judgment it had. It celebrates my arrivals, is distressed at my departures, and rejoices in my honors.
1.5| In this town, to repay its kindness — for to be outdone in affection is most disgraceful — I have built a temple at my own expense, and since it is ready, it would be irreverent to put off its dedication any longer.
1.6| We shall be there, then, on the day of the dedication, which I have decided to celebrate with a public banquet. We may perhaps stay on the following day as well, but we shall make all the more haste on the road itself.
1.7| I only hope we find you and your daughter strong and well! For we shall certainly find you cheerful, if you receive us safe and sound. Farewell.
2.0| Pliny to his friend Attius Clemens
2.1| Regulus has lost his son — the one misfortune he did not deserve, because I do not know whether he counts it a misfortune. The boy had a keen but unsettled character, though he might have followed the right path if he had not taken after his father.
2.2| Regulus emancipated him so that he could become his mother's heir; and once he was emancipated — or "sold off," as people commonly put it, knowing the man's character — Regulus courted him for his money with a foul pretense of indulgence, strange in a parent. It is incredible, but think of Regulus.
2.3| Yet now that he has lost him, he mourns him like a madman. The boy had many ponies, both in harness and unbroken; he had dogs, large and small; he had nightingales, parrots and blackbirds: Regulus slaughtered them all around the pyre.
2.4| That was not grief, but a display of grief. People flock to him in astonishing numbers. They all loathe and hate him, and yet, as if they approved of him, as if they loved him, they run to him and crowd his house; and, to put what I feel in a few words, in currying favor with Regulus they imitate Regulus.
2.5| He keeps himself across the Tiber in his gardens, where he has filled an enormous stretch of ground with huge colonnades and the riverbank with statues of himself — for he is as extravagant in the midst of the greatest greed as he is vainglorious in the midst of the greatest infamy.
2.6| So he is plaguing the city at the unhealthiest time of year, and he thinks the plague he causes is a consolation. He says he wants to marry — this too, like everything else, perversely.
2.7| You will soon hear of the wedding of a mourner, the wedding of an old man; the one is too early, the other too late. Do you ask how I can predict this?
2.8| Not because he says so himself — nothing is more of a lie than that — but because it is certain that Regulus will do anything that should not be done. Farewell.
3.0| Pliny to his friend Arrius Antoninus
3.1| That you have been consul twice, like the men of old; that you were proconsul of Asia as hardly one or two have been before you or after you — your modesty does not allow me to say "no one"; that in integrity, in authority, and in age too you are the first citizen of the state — all this is indeed venerable and splendid; yet it is in your hours of relaxation that I admire you even more.
3.2| For to season that austerity with equal charm, and to join so much good humor to the utmost dignity, is as difficult as it is great. You achieve this not only by the incredible sweetness of your conversation but even more, above all, by your pen.
3.3| For when you speak, the honey of Homer's old man seems to flow from your lips, and what you write seems to be filled and woven together by bees with flowers. That, at any rate, is how I felt myself when I had lately been reading your Greek epigrams, and your mimiambi.
3.4| What refinement there is in them, what grace; how sweet they are, how loving, how witty, how correct! I thought I was holding Callimachus or Herodes, or something even better than these — though neither of them perfected, or even attempted, both forms.
3.5| That a Roman should speak such Greek! I swear I would not say that Athens itself is so Attic. In short, I envy the Greeks because you chose to write in their language. For it needs no guessing what you could express in your native speech, when you have produced such brilliant works in this grafted and imported one. Farewell.
4.0| Pliny to his friend Sosius Senecio
4.1| I love Varisidius Nepos very dearly: he is a hard-working, upright and eloquent man, which with me counts for most of all. He is also closely related to Gaius Calvisius, my close companion and your friend; for he is his sister's son.
4.2| I ask you to give him greater distinction, both for himself and for his uncle, with a six-month tribunate. You will oblige me, you will oblige our Calvisius, you will oblige the man himself — a debtor no less reliable than you think us.
4.3| You have conferred many benefits on many people; I would venture to maintain that you have placed none better, and only one or two equally well. Farewell.
5.0| Pliny to his friend Julius Sparsus
5.1| They say that, when the Rhodians asked him, Aeschines read out his own speech and then that of Demosthenes, and that both were received with the loudest applause.
5.2| I am not surprised that this happened to the writings of such great men, since a speech of mine was recently heard by the most learned people with such interest, such approval, and even such effort over two days, although no comparison of one side with the other, no contest so to speak, sharpened their attention.
5.3| For the Rhodians were roused not only by the merits of the speeches themselves but also by the goad of comparison, whereas my speech won approval without the attraction of rivalry. Whether it deserved to, you will know when you have read the book, whose length does not allow me to preface it with a longer letter.
5.4| For we ought to be brief in this letter at least, where we can be; so that it may be the more excusable that we have extended the book itself, though not beyond the size of the cause. Farewell.
6.0| Pliny to his friend Julius Naso.
6.1| My Tuscan estate, I am told, has been battered by hail; in the region beyond the Po there is the greatest abundance, but an equal cheapness: only my Laurentine estate is bringing me income.
6.2| I own nothing there except a house and a garden and straightaway sands, yet it alone is bringing me income. For there I write most, and I cultivate not a field, which I do not have, but myself, by my studies; and already I can show you there, as in other places a full granary, a full bookcase.
6.3| So you too, if you covet sure and fruitful estates, acquire something on this shore. Farewell.
7.0| Pliny to his friend Catius Lepidus.
7.1| I often tell you that Regulus has force in him. It is wonderful how he accomplishes whatever he sets himself to. He decided to mourn his son: he mourns as no one does. He decided to make as many statues and images of him as possible: he drives all the workshops at this; he fashions that boy in colours and wax, in bronze, silver, gold, ivory and marble.
7.2| He himself, indeed, not long ago, having gathered a huge audience, recited a book on his life; on the life of a boy, but he recited it. He had it copied in a thousand copies and sent it through the whole of Italy and the provinces. He wrote officially that the town councillors should choose from their own number the one with the best voice to read it to the people: it was done.
7.3| This force of his, or by whatever other name the determination to obtain whatever you want is to be called, if he had turned it to better ends, how much good it could have accomplished! Although there is less force in good men than in bad, and as "ignorance brings boldness, but reasoning brings hesitation," so modesty weakens upright characters and boldness strengthens perverse ones.
7.4| Regulus is the example. A weak chest, an indistinct utterance, a stammering tongue, a very slow invention, no memory, nothing in short but a deranged talent, and yet by impudence and that very frenzy he has arrived at being thought an orator.
7.5| So Herennius Senecio turned that saying of Cato's about the orator wonderfully the other way against him: "An orator is a bad man unskilled in speaking." By Hercules, Cato himself did not so well express the true orator as this man has expressed Regulus.
7.6| Have you anything with which to repay such a letter in kind? You have, if you write whether any of my companions in your town, or even you yourself, have read this mournful book of Regulus's like a hawker in the forum, "raising the voice, of course, as Demosthenes says, and exulting and bawling."
7.7| For he is so inept that he can draw laughter from us sooner than groans: you would believe the piece had been composed by a boy, not about one. Farewell.
8.0| Pliny to his friend Maturus Arrianus.
8.1| You congratulate me because I have received the augurate: you do so rightly, first because it is fine to gain the judgment of a most weighty emperor even in lesser matters, then because the priesthood itself is both ancient and sacred, and this too is plainly holy and distinguished about it, that it is not taken from a man while he lives.
8.2| For other priesthoods, though almost equal in dignity, are taken away as they are bestowed; in this one fortune is allowed only as far as to give it.
8.3| To me this also seems worthy of congratulation, that I have succeeded Julius Frontinus, a leading man, who on the day of nomination through these successive years used to name me among the priests, as though co-opting me into his own place; which the outcome has now so confirmed that it did not seem to be chance.
8.4| You, as you write, are especially delighted by my augurate for this reason, that Marcus Tullius was an augur. For you rejoice that I am following in the honours of the man I long to rival in my studies.
8.5| But would that, as I have obtained the same priesthood, and the consulship at a much younger age than he did, so in old age at least I could attain his genius in some part!
8.6| But doubtless what lies in the hands of men has fallen to me and to many; that other thing, as it is hard to obtain, so it is too much even to hope for, since it can be given only by the gods. Farewell.
9.0| Pliny to his friend Cornelius Ursus.
9.1| In these days Julius Bassus has pleaded his cause, a man of toil and made famous by his misfortunes. He was accused under Vespasian by two private persons; sent back to the senate, he hung long in suspense, and was at last acquitted and vindicated.
9.2| He feared Titus as a friend of Domitian; he was banished by Domitian; recalled by Nerva, and having drawn Bithynia by lot, he returned as a defendant, accused no less sharply than he was faithfully defended. There were various opinions, but most of them the more lenient, so to speak.
9.3| Pomponius Rufus spoke against him, a man ready and vehement; Rufus was followed by Theophanes, one of the delegates, the firebrand and origin of the accusation.
9.4| I replied. For Bassus had charged me to lay the foundations of the whole defence, to speak of his distinctions, which were great for him both from the renown of his family and from the very dangers he had undergone,
9.5| to speak of the conspiracy of informers, which they kept up for profit, to speak of the causes through which he had offended every most factious man, such as Theophanes himself. He had also wished me to meet the charge by which he was most pressed. For on the others, though graver to hear, he deserved not only acquittal but even praise;
9.6| this weighed against him, that, a simple and incautious man, he had accepted certain things from provincials as a friend - for he had been quaestor in the same province -. The accusers called these thefts and plunderings, he himself called them gifts. But the law forbids even gifts to be accepted.
9.7| Here what was I to do, what road of defence was I to enter on? Should I deny it? I feared it would plainly look like theft, if I was afraid to confess it. Besides, to deny a manifest fact is the part of one who aggravates a charge, not one who dissolves it, especially since the defendant himself had left his advocates no room to manoeuvre. For he had said to many, and even to the emperor, that he had accepted only little presents, and only on his birthday or at the Saturnalia, and had sent them to very many.
9.8| Should I then ask pardon? I would have cut the defendant's throat, if I conceded that he had offended in such a way that he could be saved only by pardon. Should I defend it as rightly done? I should not have helped him, but should myself have shown impudence.
9.9| In this difficulty I decided to hold some middle course: I seem to have held it. My speech, as happens in battles, was broken off by night. I had spoken three and a half hours, and an hour and a half remained. For when by the law the accuser had received six hours and the defendant nine, the defendant had so divided the time between me and the man due to speak after me, so that I should use five hours and he the rest.
9.10| The success of my pleading urged me to silence and an ending; for it is rash not to be content with prosperity. Besides this I feared that my bodily strength might fail me in a repeated labour, which is harder to renew than to continue.
9.11| There was also the danger that the rest of my speech would suffer coldness as laid aside and tedium as resumed. For as torches keep their fire by constant shaking, but recover it with great difficulty once it is let go, so both the speaker's warmth and the hearer's attention are preserved by continuity and languish by an interval and, as it were, a slackening.
9.12| But Bassus begged me with many prayers, almost even with tears, to fill my allotted time. I obeyed and put his advantage before my own. It turned out well: I found the senate's spirits so lifted and so fresh that, by my earlier speech, they seemed more roused than sated.
9.13| Lucceius Albinus followed me, so fittingly that our speeches are believed to have had the variety of two and the continuity of one.
9.14| Herennius Pollio replied urgently and weightily, then Theophanes again. For he did this also, like everything else, most impudently, that after two men, consulars and eloquent, he claimed time for himself, and a rather generous one. He spoke into the night, and even after lamps were brought in at night.
9.15| On the following day Homullus and Fronto pleaded for Bassus wonderfully; the evidence occupied a fourth day.
9.16| Baebius Macer, consul designate, proposed that Bassus was liable under the law on extortion; Caepio Hispo, that judges be given with his rank preserved; both rightly.
9.17| "How can that be," you say, "when they proposed such different things?" Because to Macer, looking to the law, it was consistent to condemn a man who had accepted gifts contrary to the law, and Caepio, thinking it lawful for the senate - as it is - both to mitigate and to tighten laws, not without reason granted pardon to an act forbidden indeed, yet not unusual.
9.18| Caepio's proposal prevailed; indeed, as he rose to give his opinion he was greeted with acclamation, which is usually given to speakers when they sit down. From this you can judge with what agreement it was received when he spoke, since it was so favoured when he was only seen about to speak.
9.19| Yet in the city, as in the senate, men's judgments are divided into two parties. For those who liked Caepio's proposal criticize Macer's as rigid and harsh; those who liked Macer's call the other lax and even self-contradictory, for they deny that it is consistent to keep in the senate a man for whom you have granted judges.
9.20| A third proposal was made as well: Valerius Paulinus, agreeing with Caepio, proposed in addition that a report be made about Theophanes when he had reported on his embassy. For he was charged with having done in the accusation many things which fell under that very law under which he had accused Bassus.
9.21| But the consuls, although it was wonderfully approved by the greatest part of the senate, did not pursue this proposal.
9.22| Paulinus nevertheless gained a reputation for justice and firmness. When the senate was dismissed, Bassus was received by a great crowd of men, with great shouting, with great joy. What made him popular was the renewed old repute of his perils, a name known by dangers, and, in a tall frame, a sorrowful and squalid old age.
9.23| You will have this letter meanwhile as a forerunner; you will await the speech, full and laden. You will await it long; for on so great a matter it must be revised neither lightly nor hastily. Farewell.
10.0| Pliny to his friend Statius Sabinus.
10.1| You write me that Sabina, who left us as her heirs, ordered nowhere that her slave Modestus be free, yet wrote for the same man a legacy thus: "To Modestus, whom I ordered to be free".
10.2| You ask what I think. I have conferred with men learned in the law. All agree that neither freedom is owed, because it was not given, nor the legacy, because she gave it to her own slave. But to me there seems a manifest error, and therefore I think we should act as though Sabina had written what she herself believed she had written.
10.3| I am confident you will come to my opinion, since you are accustomed to guard most scrupulously the wishes of the dead, which for good heirs to have understood is as good as law. For with us honour counts no less than necessity with others.
10.4| Let him therefore remain in freedom with our permission, and enjoy the legacy as if she had provided for everything most carefully. For she did provide, in choosing her heirs well. Farewell.
11.0| Pliny to his friend Cornelius Minicianus.
11.1| Have you heard that Valerius Licinianus is giving lectures in Sicily? I think you have not yet heard: the news is recent. This man, of praetorian rank, was lately counted among the most eloquent pleaders of causes; now he has fallen so far as to become an exile from a senator, a teacher of rhetoric from an orator.
11.2| So he himself said in his preface, with grief and gravity: "What sport you make for yourself, Fortune! For you make professors out of senators, and senators out of professors." There is in this remark so much bile, so much bitterness, that he seems to me to have taken up teaching in order to say it.
11.3| When he had entered wrapped in a Greek cloak - for those who are barred from water and fire lack the right to the toga - after he had composed himself and looked round at his dress, he said: "I am going to declaim in Latin."
11.4| You will say these things are sad and pitiable, yet that he deserved it, who stained these very studies with the crime of incest.
11.5| He did confess to incest, but it is uncertain whether because it was true, or because he feared worse if he denied it. For Domitian raged and seethed, abandoned amid enormous odium.
11.6| For when he had set his heart on burying alive Cornelia, the chief of the Vestals, as one who thought his age made illustrious by examples of this kind, by the right of pontifex maximus, or rather by the savagery of a tyrant and the licence of a master, he summoned the other pontiffs not to the Regia but to his villa at Alba. And with no less crime than that which he seemed to avenge, he condemned her, absent and unheard, of incest, when he himself had not only defiled his brother's daughter by incest but had even killed her; for as a widow she died of an abortion.
11.7| The pontiffs were sent at once to see that she was buried and put to death. She, stretching out her hands now to Vesta, now to the other gods, cried out many things, but this most often: "Caesar thinks me unchaste, by whose sacrifices, when I performed them, he conquered and triumphed!"
11.8| Whether she said this flattering or mocking, from confidence in herself or from contempt of the emperor, is doubtful. She went on saying it until she was led to punishment, whether innocent I do not know, but certainly as an innocent woman.
11.9| Indeed, when she was being let down into that underground place and her gown caught as she descended, she turned and gathered it up, and when the executioner held out his hand to her, she shrank away and recoiled, and thrust off the foul touch, as from a body plainly chaste and pure, with a last act of holiness, and in every respect of modesty "she took great care to fall decently".
11.10| Moreover Celer, a Roman knight, with whom Cornelia was charged, while he was being beaten with rods in the comitium, kept to this cry: "What did I do? I did nothing."
11.11| So Domitian burned with the infamy of cruelty and injustice. He seizes Licinianus, because he had hidden Cornelia's freedwoman on his estates. Licinianus was warned in advance by those who cared for him that, if he did not want to suffer the comitium and the rods, he should take refuge in confession as in pardon. He did so.
11.12| In his absence Herennius Senecio spoke on his behalf something like that line: "Patroclus lies dead." For he said: "From an advocate I have become a messenger; Licinianus has withdrawn."
11.13| This was so welcome to Domitian that he betrayed himself by his joy, and said: "Licinianus has acquitted us." He added too that his sense of shame should not be pressed; and he allowed him, if he could, to snatch something from his property before the goods were confiscated, and gave him a mild exile as a kind of reward.
11.14| From which, however, he was afterwards moved to Sicily by the clemency of the deified Nerva, where he now lectures and avenges himself on fortune in his prefaces.
11.15| You see how obediently I comply with you, I who write not only of city affairs but even of foreign ones so carefully that I go back to the beginning. And indeed I thought that you, because you were away at the time, had heard nothing else about Licinianus than that he was banished for incest. For rumour reports the sum of things, not their order.
11.16| I deserve that in turn you write out in full what is going on in your town, what in the neighbourhood - for certain notable events are accustomed to occur - in short whatever you like, provided only you report it in a letter no less long. I shall count not only pages but even lines and syllables. Farewell.
12.0| Pliny to his friend Maturus Arrianus.
12.1| You love Egnatius Marcellinus and often even commend him to me; you will love and commend him more, if you learn his recent act.
12.2| When he had gone out to his province as quaestor, and the secretary who had fallen to him by lot had died before the lawful time of salary, he understood and resolved that what he had received, to give to the secretary, ought not to stay with himself.
12.3| So on his return he consulted Caesar, then, on Caesar's advice, the senate, what it wished done about the salary. A small question, but still a question. The secretary's heirs claimed it for themselves, the prefects of the treasury for the people.
12.4| The case was heard; the heirs' advocate spoke, then the people's, both very ably. Caecilius Strabo gave his opinion that the treasury should receive it, Baebius Macer that the heirs should have it: Strabo prevailed.
12.5| You, praise Marcellinus, as I did at once. For although it amply suffices him that he is approved by both emperor and senate, he will still rejoice in your testimony.
12.6| For all who are led by glory and fame are wonderfully pleased by approval and praise, even when it comes from lesser people. And Marcellinus so reveres you that he attaches the greatest weight to your judgment.
12.7| In addition to this, if he learns that his deed has reached as far as you, he must rejoice in the extent and course and travels of his praise. For somehow or other men are delighted even more by wide glory than by great. Farewell.
13.0| Pliny to his friend Cornelius Tacitus.
13.1| I am glad you have come safe to the city; and you have come, if ever, now especially longed for by me. I shall myself stay a few days yet at Tusculum, to finish the little work I have in hand.
13.2| For I fear that if I relax this exertion now at the very end, I shall hardly resume it. Meanwhile, so that nothing be lost through my haste, I ask in this letter, a kind of forerunner, what I shall ask in person. But first take the reasons for asking, then the very thing I ask.
13.3| When I was lately in my native town, the son of a fellow townsman, still wearing the boy's toga, came to greet me. I said to him, "Are you studying?" He answered, "Yes." "Where?" "At Mediolanum." "Why not here?" And his father - for he was with him, and had even brought the boy himself - said: "Because we have no teachers here."
13.4| "Why none? For it was of the greatest concern to you who are fathers" - and conveniently a good many fathers were listening - "that your children should above all study here. For where would they stay more pleasantly than in their native place, or be kept more chastely than under their parents' eyes, or at less expense than at home?
13.5| How little it is, then, to hire teachers with money pooled, and to add to their fees what you now spend on lodgings, on travelling money, on what is bought abroad - and everything is bought abroad! Indeed I, who have no children yet, am ready, for our commonwealth as for a daughter or a parent, to give a third part of whatever you decide to contribute.
13.6| I would even promise the whole, were I not afraid that this gift of mine might some day be corrupted by canvassing, as I see happen in many places where teachers are hired at public expense.
13.7| This fault can be met by one remedy only, if the right of hiring is left to the parents alone, and to the same parents is added the scruple of judging rightly by the necessity of contributing.
13.8| For men who are perhaps careless about another's money will certainly be careful about their own, and will take pains that no one but a worthy man receives money from me, if he is to receive it from them also.
13.9| So agree, unite, and take greater courage from mine, for I wish the sum I ought to contribute to be as large as possible. You can give your children nothing more honourable, your country nothing more welcome. Let those born here be educated here, and from infancy let them grow used to loving and frequenting their native soil. And would that you might bring in teachers so renowned that studies are sought from here by the neighbouring towns, and that, as now your children flow together to other places, so soon strangers may flow together to this one!"
13.10| I thought I should go back to these things deeper and, as it were, to the source, that you might the better know how welcome it would be to me if you took on what I enjoin. I enjoin it, and in view of the size of the matter I ask, that out of the throng of students that gathers to you from admiration of your talent, you look about for teachers whom we could approach, under this condition, however, that I bind my word to no one. For I keep everything free for the parents: let them judge, let them choose; I claim for myself only the care and the expense.
13.11| So if anyone is found who trusts in his own talent, let him go there on this footing, that he takes from here nothing certain but his own confidence. Farewell.
14.0| Pliny to his friend [Decimus] Paternus.
14.1| You perhaps, as you are accustomed, are both demanding and awaiting a speech; but I, as if from some foreign and dainty merchandise, bring out my trifles for you.
14.2| You will receive with this letter my hendecasyllables, with which I amuse the idle time in a carriage, in the bath, at dinner.
14.3| In these we joke, play, love, grieve, complain, grow angry, describe something now more tersely and now more loftily, and by that very variety try to bring it about that different pieces please different readers, and perhaps some please all.
14.4| If, however, some of them seem to you a little too wanton, it will be part of your learning to remember that those eminent and most weighty men who wrote such things refrained neither from lewdness of subject nor even from plain words; which we shun, not because we are more severe - how could we be? - but because we are more timid.
14.5| We know besides that the truest law of this little kind of work is the one Catullus expressed: "For it is fitting that the dutiful poet himself be chaste, but his little verses have no need of it, which then at last have salt and charm if they are soft and not very modest."
14.6| How much I value your judgment you can estimate even from this, that I preferred to have everything weighed by you rather than a selection praised. And indeed the most pleasing pieces cease to seem so once they begin to be all alike.
14.7| Besides, a wise and discerning reader ought not to compare different things with different, but weigh each one separately, nor think worse than another what is perfect in its own kind.
14.8| But why say more? For to excuse or commend trifles by a long preface is the most trifling thing of all. This one thing seems to need saying beforehand, that I mean to inscribe these trifles of mine "hendecasyllables," a title bound only by the law of the metre.
14.9| So, whether you prefer to term them epigrams or idylls, eclogues or, as many do, little poems or whatever else, you may; I vouch only for hendecasyllables.
14.10| I ask of your candour that what you are going to say to others about my little book, you say to me; nor is what I ask difficult. For if this little work of mine were the chief or the only thing, perhaps it might seem hard to say, "Find something to do"; it is gentle and humane to say, "You have something to do." Farewell.
15.0| Pliny to his friend Minicius Fundanus.
15.1| If I do anything well at all, I surely do this by judgment, that I love Asinius Rufus uniquely. He is an excellent man and a lover of good men. For why should I not number myself too among the good? He has also embraced Cornelius Tacitus - you know what a man - in close intimacy.
15.2| So if you approve us both, you must feel the same about Rufus also, since for forming friendships the closest bond is similarity of character.
15.3| He has several children. For in this too he has performed the duty of an excellent citizen, that he wished to enjoy his wife's fruitfulness abundantly, in an age when the rewards of childlessness make even single sons burdensome to most. Having despised those rewards, he has taken on also the name of grandfather. For he is a grandfather, indeed by Saturius Firmus, whom you will love as much as I do, if you look at him more closely as I have.
15.4| All this tends to this, that you may know how plentiful, how numerous a household you will bind by one favour; to ask which we are led first by a wish, then by a certain good omen.
15.5| For we wish for you, and we presage, the consulship in the coming year: so your virtues, so the emperor's judgments, bid us augur.
15.6| It happens, moreover, that in the same year the eldest of Rufus's children, Asinius Bassus, is quaestor, a young man - I do not know whether I should say what his father wishes me both to feel and to say, the modesty of the youth forbids it - better than his father himself.
15.7| It is hard to expect you to believe me about someone absent - although you are used to believing everything - that there is in him so much industry, uprightness, learning, talent, zeal, and memory too, as you will find by experience.
15.8| I could wish we had an age so fertile in good arts that you ought to prefer some others to Bassus: then I should be the first to urge you and advise you to look round and weigh at length whom to choose above all.
15.9| But as it is - yet I wish to say nothing too boastfully of my friend; I say this alone, that the young man is worthy to be taken, according to the custom of our ancestors, into the place of a son. And wise men, such as you, ought to receive from the commonwealth such children as we are accustomed to wish for from nature.
15.10| He will be an ornament to you as consul, a quaestor whose father is of praetorian rank, with consular kinsmen, to whom, in their own judgment, though he is still a very young man, he is already in turn an ornament.
15.11| So indulge my prayers, follow my advice, and above all, if I seem to hurry, pardon it, first because love for the most part runs ahead of its wishes; then because in a state in which everything is done as if by those who seize first, things that wait for the lawful time are not ripe but late; in sum because the anticipation of things one desires to obtain is itself pleasant.
15.12| Let Bassus already respect you as consul, and do you love him as quaestor, and let us, finally, who are most fond of you both, enjoy a twofold joy.
15.13| For since we love you and Bassus so, that we shall help both him, whoever his consul, and your quaestor, whoever he may be, in seeking office with all our power, toil and influence, it will be exceedingly pleasant for us if the reckoning of my friendship and of your consulship brings our zeal to bear on the same young man, if finally you, above all, come as helper to my prayers, you by whose vote the senate most gladly indulges and by whose testimony it most trusts. Farewell.
16.0| Pliny to his friend Valerius Paulinus.
16.1| Rejoice on my account, on yours, and on the public's: honour still endures for studies. Lately, when I was to speak before the centumviri, there was no place for me to approach except from the tribunal, except through the judges themselves; so crowded was everything else.
16.2| Besides this, a certain well-dressed young man, his tunic torn, as often happens in a crowd, stood there wrapped only in his toga, and for seven hours.
16.3| For so long I spoke, with great labour, with greater fruit. Let us then work hard and not pretend another's idleness as an excuse for our own. There are those who will listen, there are those who will read; let us only labour at something worthy of ears and worthy of pages. Farewell.
17.0| Pliny to his friend Clusinius Gallus.
17.1| You both advise and ask me to undertake the case of Corellia, who is absent, against Gaius Caecilius, consul designate. For the advice I thank you; for the request I complain. For I ought to be advised, so that I may know, but I ought not to be asked to do what it would be most shameful for me not to do.
17.2| Should I hesitate to defend Corellius's daughter? I have, to be sure, with that man against whom you call me in, not plainly intimacy but yet friendship.
17.3| To this is added the man's rank and this very office for which he is destined, for which we must show the greater reverence in that we have already discharged it ourselves. For it is natural that a man should wish what he has himself attained to be thought as exalted as possible.
17.4| But when I reflect that I shall stand by Corellius's daughter, all those considerations seem cold and empty. Before my eyes stands that man, than whom our age has produced none weightier, more upright, more subtle; whom, having begun to love from admiration, I admired more, contrary to what usually happens, after I had looked into him deeply.
17.5| For I looked into him deeply: he kept no secret from me, neither jesting nor serious, neither sad nor glad.
17.6| I was a very young man, and already he held me in honour, and even - I shall dare to say - in reverence, as an equal. He was my supporter and witness in seeking office, my escort and companion in beginning it, my counsellor and guide in exercising it, and finally in all my duties, although he was both frail and older, he was seen as if young and strong.
17.7| How much he added to my reputation at home, in public, and even with the emperor!
17.8| For when by chance talk had fallen on good young men in the presence of the emperor Nerva, and most were lifting me with praises, he held himself silent for a little while, which added greatly to his authority; then with the gravity you knew he said: "Secundus must be praised rather sparingly, because he does nothing except by my counsel."
17.9| By this remark he granted me what it would have been immoderate to ask in prayer, that I do nothing that is not most wise, since I did everything by the counsel of a most wise man. Indeed, even as he was dying, he said to his daughter - she is accustomed to tell it: "I have provided you with many friends, as far as a rather long life allowed, but chiefly Secundus and Cornutus.
17.10| When I recall this, I understand that I must take pains lest in any part I seem to have failed this trust in me of a most far-sighted man.
17.11| Therefore I shall most readily stand by Corellia and shall not refuse to incur offence; although I think I shall obtain not only pardon but even praise from that very man by whom - as you say - a new suit, perhaps, is being pressed as against a woman, if in the pleading I say these same things, more broadly of course and more richly than the narrowness of a letter allows, either as my excuse or even as my commendation. Farewell.
18.0| Pliny to his friend Arrius Antoninus.
18.1| What stronger proof can I give you of my great admiration for your Greek epigrams than that I have attempted to rival some of them and render them in Latin? Yet for the worse. This happens first through the weakness of my talent, then through the poverty, or rather, as Lucretius says, the beggary of our native speech.
18.2| But if these pieces, which are both Latin and mine, seem to you to have some charm, how much grace do you think is in those that are brought out both by you and in Greek! Farewell.
19.0| Pliny to his dear Calpurnia Hispulla.
19.1| Since you are an example of devotion, and loved your excellent brother, most loving to you, with equal affection, and love his daughter as your own, and show her not only an aunt's feeling but also that of the father she lost, I do not doubt that it will be the greatest joy to you to learn that she is turning out worthy of her father, worthy of you, worthy of her grandfather.
19.2| She has the highest sharpness of mind, the highest thrift; she loves me, which is a sign of chastity. To these is added a zeal for letters, which she has conceived from affection for me. She keeps my little books, reads them again and again, even learns them by heart.
19.3| With what anxiety she is filled when I seem about to plead, with what joy when I have pleaded! She arranges for people to bring her word what assent, what shouts I have roused, what outcome of the trial I have had. And when I give a recitation, she sits nearby, screened by a curtain, and takes in my praises with most eager ears.
19.4| She sings my verses, too, and fits them to the lyre, with no artist teaching her, but love, which is the best master.
19.5| For these reasons I am led to the surest hope that our harmony will be lasting and will grow greater day by day. For she loves not my age or body, which gradually decline and grow old, but my glory.
19.6| Nor would anything else become one brought up by your hands, trained by your precepts, who saw in your company nothing but what was holy and honourable, who finally had grown used to loving me through your praise.
19.7| For as you revered my mother in the place of a parent, you used from my boyhood to shape me, to praise me, and to foretell that I would be such as I now seem to my wife.
19.8| So we vie in thanking you, I because you gave her to me, and she because I was given to her by you, as if you had chosen each for the other. Farewell.
20.0| Pliny to his friend Novius Maximus.
20.1| What I felt about each of your books I told you as I read each through; now hear what I judge about them all in general.
20.2| It is a work fine, strong, keen, lofty, varied, elegant, pure, figured, also spacious and spread out to your great credit, in which you have been carried very widely by the sails of talent and indignation together; and each of these has in turn been an aid to the other.
20.3| For indignation has given loftiness and grandeur to talent, and talent has given force and bitterness to indignation. Farewell.
21.0| Pliny to his friend Velius Cerialis.
21.1| A sad and bitter misfortune of the Helvidian sisters! Each died after childbirth, each having brought forth a daughter.
21.2| I am affected with grief, and yet I do not grieve beyond measure: so mournful it seems to me that fruitfulness has carried off most honourable girls in their first flower. I am tormented by the lot of the infants, who are orphaned at once and as they are born, tormented by the lot of the best of husbands, tormented also on my own account.
21.3| For their father, even though dead, I love most steadfastly, as is attested by my pleading and my books; of his three children one now survives, and, left alone, props and sustains a house founded shortly before on many supports.
21.4| Yet my grief finds rest in a great comfort, if only fortune preserves him strong and unharmed, and equal to that father and that grandfather. For his safety and his character I am the more anxious because he has become an only child.
21.5| You know the softness of my heart in love, you know my fears; so you need the less wonder that I fear most for the one in whom I hope most. Farewell.
22.0| Pliny to his friend Sempronius Rufus.
22.1| I sat in the court of the best of emperors, taken into his council. A gymnastic contest is celebrated at Vienna under a certain man's will. Trebonius Rufinus, an excellent man and our friend, during his duumvirate saw to its being done away with and abolished.
22.2| It was said that he had done so without public authority. He pleaded his own case no less happily than eloquently. What recommended his speech was that, as a Roman and a good citizen, he spoke in his own affair with maturity and weight.
22.3| When opinions were being asked, Junius Mauricus, than whom no man is firmer or more truthful, said that the people of Vienna ought not to have the contest given back to them; he added: "I wish it could also be abolished at Rome."
22.4| Steadfastly and bravely, you say; why not? But this is nothing new from Mauricus. He spoke no less bravely before the emperor Nerva. Nerva was at dinner with a small company; Veiento was next to him and even reclined on his bosom: I have said everything when I have named the man.
22.5| Talk fell on Catullus Messalinus, who, deprived of sight, had added to the evils of blindness a savage nature: he feared nothing, blushed at nothing, pitied no one; and so he was hurled by Domitian again and again at the best of men, just as weapons are, which themselves are carried blind and unforeseeing.
22.6| All were speaking together over dinner of this man's wickedness and bloody opinions, when the emperor himself said: "What do we think he would have suffered if he were alive?" And Mauricus said: "He would be dining with us."
22.7| I have wandered rather far, though willingly. It was decided to abolish the contest, which had infected the morals of the people of Vienna, as ours does everyone's. For the vices of the Viennese stay within themselves, ours wander widely, and as in bodies so in an empire the most grievous disease is the one that spreads from the head. Farewell.
23.0| Pliny to his friend Pomponius Bassus.
23.1| I took great pleasure when I learned from our common friends that you, as befits your wisdom, both arrange and bear your leisure, live most agreeably, and exercise your body now by land now by sea, discuss much, hear much, read much, and though you know a great deal, still learn something more every day.
23.2| So ought a man to grow old who has held the highest magistracies, commanded armies, and offered himself wholly to the commonwealth as long as it was fitting.
23.3| For the first and middle times of life we owe to our country, the last to ourselves, as the laws themselves advise, which release one older in years to leisure.
23.4| When will I be allowed, when will it be honourable by reason of age, to imitate that most beautiful example of quiet? When will my retirement receive the name not of idleness but of tranquillity? Farewell.
24.0| Pliny to his friend Fabius Valens.
24.1| Lately, when I had spoken before the centumviri in a court of four panels, the recollection came to me that I had pleaded as a young man likewise in a court of four panels.
24.2| My mind went on farther, as it does: I began to reckon whom I had had as partners of labour in this trial, whom in that. I was the only one who had spoken in both: so great are the changes made either by the frailty of mortality or by the mobility of fortune.
24.3| Some of those who then pleaded have died, others are in exile; for one age and health advised silence, one by choice enjoys a most happy leisure; another commands an army, another has been exempted from civil duties by the emperor's friendship.
24.4| How many things have changed around ourselves! We advanced by our studies, we were endangered by our studies, and again we advanced:
24.5| the friendships of good men helped us, the friendships of good men harmed us, and again they help. If you reckon the years, it is a short time; if the vicissitudes of events, you would think it an age;
24.6| which can be a proof that one should despair of nothing, trust nothing, when we see so many changes carried round in so swift a circle.
24.7| It is my habit to share all my thoughts with you, and to admonish you with the same precepts or examples with which I admonish myself; which was the reason for this letter. Farewell.
25.0| Pliny to his friend Maesius Maximus.
25.1| I had written to you that it was to be feared some fault would arise from the silent ballots. It has happened. At the latest elections, on some ballots there were many jokes and even things foul to tell, and on one, in place of the names of the candidates, the names of their supporters were found.
25.2| The senate flared up and with a great shout called down the emperor's anger on the man who had written it. He, however, escaped notice and lay hidden, perhaps was even among the indignant.
25.3| What do we think this man does at home, who in so great a matter, at so serious a moment, plays so like a buffoon, who in short is altogether witty and urbane and charming in the senate?
25.4| That confidence, "for who will know?", adds so much licence to depraved characters. He called for the ballots, took the stylus, bent his head, fears no one, despises himself.
25.5| Hence those jests, worthy of the stage and the platform. Where can you turn? What remedies can you seek? Everywhere the vices are stronger than the remedies. "But these things will be a care to him who is above us," to whom this idle and yet unbridled wantonness of ours adds every day much watching and much labour. Farewell.
26.0| Pliny to his friend Maecilius Nepos.
26.1| You ask that I see to the revising and correcting of my little books, which you have procured with the greatest zeal. I shall do it. For what ought I to undertake more gladly, you especially demanding it?
26.2| For when a man of the greatest dignity, learning and eloquence — and, on top of all this, a very busy man, about to govern a very great province — judges it worthwhile to take my writings around with him, how carefully must I see to it that this part of your baggage does not annoy you as superfluous!
26.3| So I will make every effort, first that you may find these companions as agreeable as possible, and second that on your return you may find others you would like to add to them. For you, as my reader, give me no small encouragement to new works. Farewell.
27.0| Pliny to his friend Pompeius Falco
27.1| It is now the third day since I heard Sentius Augurinus giving a reading, with the greatest pleasure on my part, and indeed even admiration. He calls them "little poems." Much of it is delicate, much of it lofty, much of it graceful, much of it tender, much of it sweet, much of it full of bile.
27.2| I think nothing more polished in this genre has been written for some years — unless perhaps I am misled either by my affection for him or by the fact that he has praised me.
27.3| For he took as a theme the fact that I sometimes amuse myself with verse. And indeed I will make you the judge of my judgment, if the second line of this very piece comes back to me; for I remember the rest, and have now got them clear.
27.4| "I sing my songs in little verses, / the kind in which my Catullus once sang, / and Calvus, and the poets of old. But what is that to me? / Pliny alone is all the earlier poets to me: / he leaves the Forum and prefers little verses, / and looks for something to love, and thinks he is loved. / That Pliny — oh, how many Catos he is! / Go now, whoever you are who love, and refuse to love!"
27.5| You see how sharp it all is, how apt, how finely expressed. I promise you the whole book will be up to this sample, and I will hand it to you as soon as he has published it. Meanwhile, love the young man, and congratulate our age on such a talent, which he adorns with his character. He spends his time with Spurinna, he spends his time with Antoninus; he is related by marriage to the one and a close companion of both.
27.6| From this you can guess how faultless a young man he must be, to be loved like this by such dignified old men. For the saying is very true: "knowing that a man is like those whose company he enjoys." Farewell.
28.0| Pliny to his friend Vibius Severus
28.1| Herennius Severus, a man of great learning, values highly the placing in his library of likenesses of two men from your town, Cornelius Nepos and Titus Catius, and asks me, if there are any in your place, as is credible, to arrange for them to be copied and painted.
28.2| I am entrusting this task to you above anyone else: first, because you comply with my wishes in the friendliest way; second, because you have the greatest reverence for literature and the greatest love for men of letters; and finally, because you revere and love your native town, and everyone who has added to its name, as much as the town itself.
28.3| I ask you to take on the most painstaking painter you can find. For although it is hard to produce a likeness from life, the imitation of an imitation is by far the most difficult of all; and I ask you not to let the artist you choose stray from it, not even to improve on it. Farewell.
29.0| Pliny to his friend Romatius Firmus
29.1| Come on, you! The next time the courts are sitting, come to serve as a juror by any means you can. There is no reason for you to sleep on your right ear, trusting in me. Absence does not go unpunished.
29.2| Look — Licinius Nepos, the praetor! A keen and resolute man, and a praetor too, he has imposed a fine even on a senator. The senator argued his own cause in the senate, but argued it in the manner of one begging pardon. The fine was remitted; but he was frightened, he had to beg, he needed indulgence.
29.3| You will say, "Not all praetors are so strict." You are mistaken; for only strict ones can introduce or revive a precedent of this kind, but once it has been introduced or revived even the most lenient can enforce it. Farewell.
30.0| Pliny to his friend Licinius Sura
30.1| I have brought you from my home country, as a little present, a problem entirely worthy of that profound learning of yours.
30.2| A spring rises in a mountain, runs down over the rocks, and is caught in a little dining room built by hand; held there for a little while, it falls into Lake Como. Its nature is remarkable: three times a day, with regular risings and fallings, it grows and diminishes.
30.3| This can be seen openly and observed with the greatest pleasure. You recline beside it and eat, and you even drink from the spring itself, for it is very cold; meanwhile, at fixed and measured intervals, it either recedes or rises.
30.4| You put a ring or anything else on the dry ground; the water gradually laps around it and finally covers it, then uncovers it again and little by little leaves it. If you watch for long enough, you can see both happen a second and a third time.
30.5| Is there some hidden current of air that now opens and now closes the mouth and throat of the spring, according as it meets the water when it is driven in, or withdraws when it is expelled?
30.6| We see this happen with bottles and other vessels of the same kind, whose outlet is not wide or immediately open. For they too, though tilted and pointing downward, hold back what they pour out in a series of gulps, as it were, because of the resistance of the air struggling against it.
30.7| Or is the nature of the ocean also the nature of this spring, and is this small body of water held back and let out by turns on the same principle by which the ocean is driven forward or sucked back?
30.8| Or, just as rivers that flow down into the sea are turned back by contrary winds and an opposing tide, is there something that drives back the outflow of this spring?
30.9| Or is there a fixed amount in the hidden channels, so that while they are gathering up what they have drained away, the stream is smaller and more sluggish, and when they have gathered it, it comes out livelier and larger?
30.10| Or is there some kind of balance, concealed and unseen, which, when it has been emptied, stirs up the spring and draws it out, and when it has been filled, checks and chokes it?
30.11| Search out for yourself the causes — for you can — that produce so great a marvel; for me it is quite enough if I have described clearly enough what it produces. Farewell.
Cite a passage by its number: every paragraph here has its own anchor (for example https://openscriptorium.com/read/pliny/004-letters-book-iv#p1), and the bracketed reference numbers link the same way.
← All of Pliny the Younger & Pliny the Elder: Letters, Panegyricus & Natural History