Pliny the Younger & Pliny the Elder · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
1.0| Pliny to his friend Annius Severus
1.1| A legacy has come my way, a modest one, but more welcome than the largest. Why more welcome than the largest? Pomponia Galla had disinherited her son Asudius Curianus and left me as her heir, naming as my co-heirs Sertorius Severus, who has held praetorian rank, and some other eminent Roman knights.
1.2| Curianus kept begging me to present my share to him as a gift and so help him with a precedent in his favor; at the same time he promised me, by a private understanding, that the share would remain mine all the same.
1.3| I answered that it did not suit my character to do one thing in public and another in secret; besides, it was not quite honorable to make gifts to a man who was both rich and childless; and in short, a gift from me would do him no good, whereas a renunciation would, and I was ready to renounce my share if it became clear to me that he had been unjustly disinherited.
1.4| To this he said, "I ask you to look into it yourself." After a moment's hesitation I said, "I will; I do not see what reason I have to think myself lesser than I seem to you. But remember now, at the outset, that I will not lack the firmness to give judgment for your mother, if that is where honesty leads."
1.5| "As you wish," he said, "for what you wish will be what is fairest." I called in as advisers the two men our city then held in the highest regard, Corellius and Frontinus.
1.6| With them beside me I took my seat in my own room. Curianus said what he thought would help his case. I replied briefly, since no one else was there to defend the dead woman's good name; then I withdrew, and on the advice of my council I said, "Curianus, it is our view that your mother had just reasons to be angry with you." After this he brought a suit before the Centumviral Court against the other heirs, though not against me.
1.7| The day of the trial was approaching. My co-heirs wanted to settle and come to terms, not from any doubt about their case but from fear of the times. They were afraid of what they saw had happened to many others: that they might go into a suit before the Centumviral Court and come out of it on a capital charge.
1.8| And there were some among them who could have been reproached with friendship with Gratilla and with Rusticus.
1.9| They ask me to talk to Curianus. We came together in the temple of Concord. There I said, "If your mother had made you heir to a quarter of her estate, could you complain? What if she had in fact named you sole heir, but had drained the estate with legacies so that no more than a quarter was left to you? So it ought to be enough for you, disinherited by your mother, to receive a quarter from her heirs, and I will add to it myself.
1.10| You know that you did not bring a suit against me, and that two years have now passed and I have acquired everything by prescription. But so that my fellow heirs may find you easier to deal with, and so that your respect for me may not have cost you anything, I offer you as much again for my own share." I reaped the reward not only of a clear conscience but also of a good name.
1.11| So it is this Curianus who has left me a legacy, and he has marked my action, which (unless perhaps I flatter myself) was in the old style, with a notable honor.
1.12| I have written this to you because, about everything that either delights or troubles me, I am used to talking with you no differently than with myself; and also because I thought it hard to cheat you, who love me so much, of the pleasure that I was feeling myself.
1.13| For I am not so much a philosopher as not to care whether the things I believe I have done honorably receive some kind of testimony and, as it were, a reward. Farewell.
2.0| Pliny to his friend Calpurnius Flaccus
2.1| I have received some very fine thrushes, and I cannot match them with an equal reckoning, either from the city's stores while I am at Laurentum or from the sea in such stormy weather.
2.2| So you will get back a letter that is barren and plainly ungrateful, one that does not even imitate the shrewdness Diomedes showed in exchanging gifts. But, kind as you are, you will forgive it all the more readily because it confesses it does not deserve forgiveness. Farewell.
3.0| Pliny to his friend Titius Aristo
3.1| Of your many kindnesses that are welcome and pleasant to me, this one is perhaps the greatest: you did not think you ought to hide from me that there had been a long and full conversation at your house about my light verses, that the difference of opinions had carried it a good way, and that there were even some people who, while they did not find fault with the writings themselves, criticized me, in a friendly and frank way, for writing and reciting such things.
3.2| To them I give this answer, which will only add to my guilt: yes, I do sometimes write verses that are not very serious, I do; for I also listen to comedies, and watch mimes, and read the lyric poets, and understand Sotadeans; besides, I sometimes laugh, joke, play, and, to sum up every kind of harmless relaxation in a word, I am human.
3.3| Nor am I at all annoyed that people hold such an opinion of my character that those who do not know that the most learned, the most serious, the most upright men have often written such things are surprised that I write them.
3.4| But from those who know which authors I follow, and how great they are, I am confident that I can easily obtain leave to go astray, provided it is in the company of men whose playful work, and not only their serious work, it is praiseworthy to imitate.
3.5| Should I be afraid (I will name no one living, so as not to fall into any appearance of flattery), should I be afraid that it does not quite befit me to do what befitted Marcus Tullius, Gaius Calvus, Asinius Pollio, Marcus Messala, Quintus Hortensius, Marcus Brutus, Lucius Sulla, Quintus Catulus, Quintus Scaevola, Servius Sulpicius, Varro, Torquatus (indeed the Torquati), Gaius Memmius, Lentulus Gaetulicus, Annaeus Seneca, and most recently Verginius Rufus, and, if private examples are not enough, the deified Julius, the deified Augustus, the deified Nerva, and Tiberius Caesar?
3.6| For I pass over Nero, although I know that things sometimes done even by bad men are not corrupted by it, but remain honourable because they are more often done by good men. Among these one must count especially Publius Virgil, Cornelius Nepos, and earlier Accius and Ennius. These were not senators, to be sure, but sanctity of character does not differ by ranks.
3.7| I recite, however, though whether they did so I do not know. Yes: but they could be content with their own judgment; my steadiness is too modest for me to think a thing sufficiently finished merely because I approve it.
3.8| So I follow these reasons for reciting: first, that the man who recites himself strains rather more keenly at his writings through respect for his hearers; then, that on points he doubts he decides as if by the opinion of a council.
3.9| He is also advised in many things by many people, and if he is not advised, he sees what each one thinks from face, eyes, nod, hand, murmur, silence; and these, by signs plain enough, distinguish judgment from courtesy.
3.10| And so if any of those who were present should happen to care to read those same pieces, he will understand that I have changed or omitted some things, perhaps even on his own judgment, although he himself said nothing to me.
3.11| And I argue all this as if I had summoned the people into a lecture hall, not friends into a bedroom; to have many such friends has been a glory to many and a reproach to no one. Farewell.
4.0| Pliny to his friend Julius Valerianus.
4.1| A small matter, but the beginning of a not small one. Sollers, a man of praetorian rank, asked the senate to be permitted to set up a market on his lands. The envoys of the Vicetini spoke against it; Tuscilius Nominatus appeared for them.
4.2| The case was adjourned. At a later session of the senate the Vicetini entered without an advocate and said they had been deceived, whether by a slip of the word or because they so thought. Questioned by Nepos the praetor whom they had instructed, they answered, the same as before. Asked whether he had then appeared free of charge, they answered, for six thousand sesterces; asked whether they had given anything again, they said a thousand denarii. Nepos demanded that Nominatus be brought in.
4.3| So far on that day. But as I augur, the matter will go farther. For most things merely touched and stirred at all creep very widely. I have pricked up your ears.
4.4| How long you must now, how coaxingly you must ask, to learn the rest! unless you come to Rome before, because of this very matter, and prefer to be a spectator rather than a reader. Farewell.
5.0| Pliny to his friend Novius Maximus.
5.1| I have been told that Gaius Fannius has died; this news threw me into heavy grief, first because I loved the man, polished and eloquent, then because I was accustomed to use his judgment. For he was keen by nature, practised by experience, and most ready in truth.
5.2| Besides that, his own fate torments me: he died under an old will, he omitted those he loved most, and favoured those he was more offended by. But this is somehow tolerable; heavier is this, that he left a most beautiful work unfinished.
5.3| For although he was drawn away by pleading cases, he was writing the ends of those killed or banished by Nero, and had already finished three books, subtle and careful and in pure Latin and midway between conversation and history; and he longed to complete the rest the more eagerly the oftener these were read again and again.
5.4| To me, though, the death of those who are preparing something immortal always seems bitter and untimely. For those given to pleasures, who live as it were from day to day, end the causes of living every day; but for those who think of posterity and extend their memory by their works, no death is not sudden, since it always breaks off something begun.
5.5| Gaius Fannius, indeed, foresaw what happened long before. It seemed to him in the quiet of night that he was lying on his couch arranged in the posture of a student, with his writing-case before him - as he was accustomed; soon he imagined that Nero had come, sat down on the bed, taken out the first book which he had published about his crimes, and rolled it through to the end; that with the second and third he did likewise, then went away.
5.6| He was terrified and interpreted it thus, that the end of writing would be the same for himself as the end of reading had been for Nero: and it was the same.
5.7| When I recall this, pity comes over me, at how much watching and how much labour he spent in vain. My own mortality and my own writings run through my mind. And I do not doubt that you too are frightened by the same thought, for those things you have in hand.
5.8| So, while life holds out, let us strive that death find as few things as possible that it can destroy. Farewell.
6.0| Pliny to his friend Domitius Apollinaris.
6.1| I loved your care and anxiety, in that when you heard I was going to my Tuscan estate in summer, you advised me not to, thinking it unhealthy.
6.2| The Tuscan coast, which stretches along the shore, is certainly heavy and pestilential; but my estates have drawn back far from the sea, and indeed lie under the Apennine, the healthiest of mountains.
6.3| And so, that you may lay aside all fear for me, hear the temper of the climate, the position of the region, the pleasantness of the villa, which will be pleasing for you to hear and for me to relate.
6.4| The climate in winter is cold and frozen; myrtles, olives, and whatever else delights in constant warmth, it scorns and rejects; yet it tolerates the laurel, and even produces it most glossy, though sometimes, but not oftener than near our city, it kills it.
6.5| The mildness of summer is wonderful: the air is always stirred by some breath, though it has breezes more often than winds.
6.6| Hence many old men: you may see grandfathers and great-grandfathers of men already young, hear old tales and the talk of ancestors, and when you have come there you might think you were born in another age.
6.7| The form of the region is most beautiful. Imagine some immense amphitheatre, such as nature alone could fashion. A wide, spreading plain is ringed by mountains, and the mountains at their topmost part have tall and ancient groves.
6.8| There the hunting is plentiful and varied. From there coppice woods come down with the mountain itself. Among these are rich and earthy hills - for hardly anywhere does a stone turn up, even if sought - which yield nothing in fertility to the flattest plains, and ripen a plentiful harvest, only later, but no less fully.
6.9| Below these along the whole slope vineyards stretch, and weave a single appearance far and wide; at their edge and bottom, as at a margin, orchard trees grow.
6.10| Then meadows and fields, fields which only huge oxen and the stoutest ploughs break up: the very tenacious soil, when first cut, rises in such great clods that it is mastered only by the ninth furrow.
6.11| The flowery, jewelled meadows nourish trefoil and other herbs, ever tender and soft and, so to speak, fresh. For all things are fed by never-failing streams; but where there is most water there is no marsh, because the land slopes, and whatever moisture it has received and not absorbed it pours out into the Tiber.
6.12| That river cuts through the middle of the fields, bearing ships, and carries down all the crops to the city, in winter and spring only; in summer it sinks, and leaves the name of a great river to a dry bed, and resumes it in autumn.
6.13| You will take great pleasure if you look out on this position of the region from the mountain. For you will seem to see not lands but some picture painted for exceptional beauty: with such variety, with such arrangement, wherever your eyes fall, they will be refreshed.
6.14| The villa, set at the foot of a hill, looks out as if from the top: the slope rises so gently and gradually, the incline deceiving, that when you do not think you are ascending, you feel you have ascended. Behind it has the Apennine, but at a greater distance; from it it receives breezes even on the clearest and calmest day, not sharp and immoderate, but weary and broken by the very distance.
6.15| With a large part of itself it faces south and invites the summer sun from the sixth hour, the winter sun somewhat earlier, into a portico broad and long in proportion. In this there are many rooms, an atrium too in the manner of the ancients.
6.16| In front of the portico is a xystus, divided into many shapes and cut up with box; from it a sloping, downward-lying bed, on which box has traced the figures of beasts facing one another; acanthus on the level, soft and I might almost say liquid.
6.17| Round this runs a walk enclosed by closely clipped greens of various shapes; beyond these a riding-track in the manner of a circus, going round the many-shaped box and the low little trees kept in check by the hand. Everything is fenced by a wall: this the stepped box covers and hides.
6.18| Then a meadow, no less to be seen for nature than those parts above for art; then fields further on and many other meadows and orchards.
6.19| At the head of the portico a dining-room runs out; through its folding doors it sees the end of the xystus and straightaway the meadow and much country, through its windows on this side the flank of the xystus and the part of the villa that juts out, on that side the grove and foliage of the adjoining hippodrome.
6.20| Opposite nearly the middle of the portico a garden-suite withdraws a little; it surrounds a little court which four plane trees overshadow. Between these water overflows from a marble basin and with gentle spray cherishes the plane trees around and the ground beneath the planes.
6.21| In this suite is a bedroom that shuts out daylight, noise and sound, and joined to it a dining-room for daily use and for friends: it looks on that little court, the wing of the portico, and everything the portico looks upon.
6.22| There is also another bedroom, green and shady from the nearest plane tree, adorned with marble up to the dado, and a painting imitating branches and birds sitting on the branches does not yield to the charm of the marble.
6.23| In it a little fountain, in the fountain a basin; around it several small pipes blend a most pleasant murmur. In the corner of the portico a very spacious bedroom faces the dining-room; with some windows it looks down on the xystus, with others on the meadow, but in front on a pool, which serves the windows and lies below them, pleasant in sound and sight;
6.24| for the water, leaping down from a height and received in marble, turns white. The same bedroom is very warm in winter, because it is bathed in abundant sun.
6.25| Adjoining is a hypocaust, and if the day is cloudy, steam let in takes the place of the sun. Then the roomy and cheerful dressing-room of the bath is followed by the cold room, in which there is a wide, shaded bathing-pool. If you want to swim more widely or more warmly, in the courtyard there is a pool, nearby a well, from which you can be braced again if you regret the warmth.
6.26| Joined to the cold room is the middle room, to which the sun is very kindly present; to the hot room more so, for it projects. In this there are three descents, two in the sun, the third farther from the sun, not farther from the light.
6.27| Over the dressing-room is placed a ball court, which holds several kinds of exercise and several rings of players. Not far from the bath are stairs which lead to the covered gallery, first to three suites. Of these one overlooks that little court with the four plane trees, another the meadow, another the vineyards, and they have different quarters of the sky as their outlook.
6.28| At the top of the covered gallery is a bedroom cut out of the gallery itself, which looks on the hippodrome, vineyards, mountains. Joined to it is a bedroom exposed to the sun, especially the winter sun. From here rises a suite which attaches the hippodrome to the villa. This is the face, this the use, from the front.
6.29| On the side is a summer covered gallery set on high, which seems not to look at the vineyards but to touch them. In the middle a most healthful dining-room receives a breeze from the Apennine valleys; behind, by very wide windows, it looks on the vineyards, by folding doors likewise on the vineyards but, as it were, admitted through the gallery.
6.30| From the side of the dining-room, which has no windows, stairs bring up what the dinner needs by a more private route. At the end is a bedroom to which the gallery itself offers no less pleasant a prospect than the vineyards. Beneath lies a gallery like an underground one; in summer it is stiff with enclosed cold and, content with its own air, neither desires breezes nor admits them.
6.31| Behind both galleries, where the dining-room ends, begins a portico, wintry before midday, summery as the day declines. By it two suites are reached, in one of which are four bedrooms, in the other three, which, as the sun goes round, enjoy either sun or shade.
6.32| Far, far surpassing this arrangement and the charm of the buildings is the hippodrome. It opens out in the middle and is at once offered whole to the eyes of those entering; it is surrounded by plane trees; these are clothed in ivy, so that the topmost are green with their own leaves and the lowest with another's. The ivy runs over trunk and branches and joins the neighbouring planes by its passing. Between these lies box; the outer box is surrounded by laurel, which adds its shade to that of the planes.
6.33| This straight boundary of the hippodrome is broken at the far end into a semicircle and changes its look: it is surrounded and covered by cypresses, darker and blacker with their denser shade; in the inner rings - for there are several - it receives the purest daylight.
6.34| From there it even brings out roses, and tempers the chill of the shades with a not unwelcome sun. When that varied and manifold curve is finished, it is returned to the straight boundary, and not to this one only, for several paths are separated by box coming between.
6.35| In one place a little meadow, in another the box itself, cut into a thousand shapes, sometimes letters, which tell now the master's name, now the craftsman's: small cones rise alternately, fruit trees are set in alternately, and in a most refined work there is a sudden imitation of country brought in. The middle space is adorned on either side with shorter plane trees.
6.36| After these, acanthus, smooth and winding on either hand, then more figures and more names. At the head is a semicircular couch of white marble, sheltered by a vine; four little columns of Carystian marble stand under the vine. From the couch water flows out through small pipes, as if pressed out by the weight of those reclining; it is received in a hollowed stone, held by a slender marble rim, and so secretly regulated that it fills and does not overflow.
6.37| The appetizer and the heavier part of the dinner are set on the rim; the lighter floats round in the shapes of little boats and birds. Opposite, a fountain sends out water and takes it back; for water thrown up high falls back into itself, and through joined openings is both swallowed and raised again. Facing the couch, a bedroom gives back to the couch as much adornment as it receives from it.
6.38| It shines with marble, with its folding doors it projects and opens onto greenery, and with upper and lower windows it looks up to and down on other greenery. Next a little alcove draws back, as if into the same bedroom and another. Here is a bed and windows on every side, and yet the light is dim, the shade pressing on it.
6.39| For a most luxuriant vine climbs over the whole roof to its peak. You would lie there no differently than in a grove, only that, unlike in a grove, you would not feel the rain.
6.40| Here too a fountain rises and is drawn off at once. Marble seats are placed at several spots, which help those wearied by walking as the bedroom itself does. Little springs lie beside the seats; through the whole hippodrome channelled streams murmur, and follow where the hand has led them: with these now this greenery, now that, sometimes all at once, is watered.
6.41| I should have avoided this long since, lest I seem too fine-spun, had I not proposed to go round every corner with you by letter. For I was not afraid it would be laborious for you to read what would not have been laborious to visit, especially as you could, if you liked, rest in between and, laying the letter aside, sit down, as it were, quite often. Besides, I have indulged my love; for I love what for the most part I began myself, or, begun, brought to perfection.
6.42| In sum - for why should I not reveal to you either my judgment or my error? - I think the writer's first duty is to read his title and ask himself again and again what he has begun to write, and to know that if he lingers on his subject he is not long, but is very long if he brings in and drags in something else.
6.43| You see in how many verses Homer, in how many Virgil, describes the arms, here of Aeneas, there of Achilles; yet each is brief because he does what he has set out to do. You see how Aratus pursues and gathers even the smallest stars; yet he keeps measure. For this is not a digression of his, but the work itself.
6.44| In like manner, we, "small things with great", when we try to set the whole villa before your eyes, if we say nothing brought in and as it were off the road, it is not the letter that describes but the villa that is described which is large. But back to the point from which I began, lest I be rightly reproved by my own law, if I am longer in this that I have strayed into.
6.45| You have the reasons why I prefer my Tuscan estates to my Tusculan, Tiburtine and Praenestine ones. For besides what I have related, the leisure there is deeper and richer and therefore more secure: no necessity of the toga, nobody nearby to summon you, everything placid and quiet, which itself adds to the healthiness of the region, as the sky is purer and the air clearer.
6.46| There I am best in mind, there best in body. For I exercise my mind with studies, my body with hunting. My household too nowhere live more healthily; until now at least I have lost none there - pardon the saying - of those I had brought with me. May the gods only preserve for me in future this joy, this credit for the place! Farewell.
7.0| Pliny to his friend Calvisius Rufus.
7.1| It is agreed that the state can neither be instituted heir nor take a prelegacy; but Saturninus, who left us as his heirs, gave a fourth part to our commonwealth, and then in place of the fourth part a prelegacy of four hundred thousand. If you look to the law, this is void; if to the dead man's wish, it is valid and firm.
7.2| But to me the wish of the dead man - I am afraid in what way the jurists will take what I am about to say - counts for more than the law, at any rate in what he wished to reach our common country.
7.3| Am I to deny the town to which I contributed sixteen hundred thousand sesterces of my own slightly more than a third of four hundred thousand from an unexpected inheritance? I know that you too are not averse to my judgment, since as an excellent citizen you love the same commonwealth.
7.4| I should like you therefore, when the town councillors are next convened, to indicate what the law is, sparingly however and modestly; then to add that we offer the four hundred thousand, as Saturninus directed. This is his gift, his generosity; let ours be called only compliance.
7.5| I have refrained from writing this officially, first because I remembered that, by reason of the closeness of our friendship and by capacity of your prudence, you both ought and can discharge my part as well as your own; then because I feared I might not seem to have kept in a letter the measure which in conversation it is easy for you to keep.
7.6| For conversation is regulated by face, gesture, the voice itself; a letter, stripped of all such recommendations, is exposed to the ill-will of interpreters. Farewell.
8.0| Pliny to his friend Titinius Capito.
8.1| You urge me to write history, and you are not the only one: many have often advised me of this, and I wish it, not because I trust that I shall do it well - one would believe that rashly without trial - but because it seems to me most fine, above all, not to let die those to whom eternity is due, and to extend the fame of others together with one's own.
8.2| Nothing, however, so stirs me as love and desire of lasting, a thing most worthy of a man, especially of one who, conscious of no fault, does not dread the memory of posterity.
8.3| So I think day and night "if in any way I too could lift myself from the ground"; for that suffices for my wish; that other is beyond wish, "and victorious to flit through the mouths of men"; "although, oh -": but this is enough, which history almost alone seems to promise.
8.4| For a speech and a poem have little charm unless eloquence is supreme; history, however written, delights. For men are curious by nature and are caught by knowledge of things however bare, so that they are drawn even by bits of gossip and little tales. And I am driven to this pursuit also by an example at home.
8.5| My uncle, who by adoption was also my father, wrote histories, and most scrupulously. I find among the wise that it is most honourable to follow the footsteps of one's forebears, provided they have led the way on the right road. Why then do I hesitate?
8.6| I have pleaded great and weighty cases. These, even if my hope from them is slight, I intend to revise, lest that great labour of mine perish with me unless I add this remaining effort.
8.7| For if you take account of posterity, whatever is not completed is as if not begun. You will say: "You can at once rewrite your pleadings and compose history." Would that I could! But each is so great that it is more than enough to accomplish one.
8.8| In my nineteenth year I began to speak in the forum, and even now I see only dimly, as through a fog, what an orator should provide.
8.9| What if something new is added to this burden? Oratory and history do have much in common, but more that is different even in those very things which seem common. The one narrates, the other narrates, but differently: for the one most things humble and sordid and drawn from the common stuff are fitting, for the other everything recondite, splendid, lofty;
8.10| the one is more often adorned by bones, muscles, sinews, the other by certain swellings and, as it were, manes; the one pleases above all by force, bitterness, pressing on, the other by flow and sweetness and even softness; finally, the words are different, the sound different, the construction different.
8.11| For it matters a great deal, as Thucydides says, whether it is a "possession" or a "competition piece"; of which oratory is the one, history the other. For these reasons I am not led to confuse and mix two unlike things, different by the very fact that they are greatest, lest, disturbed by so great a kind of mixture, I do in one place what I ought to do in the other; and therefore I ask for the time being leave, not to depart from my own words, to call in advocates.
8.12| You, however, think now which times I should most take up. Old ones, written of by others? The inquiry is ready, but the comparison burdensome. Untouched and new? Heavy offence, slight thanks.
8.13| For besides the fact that among such vices of men there are more things to blame than to praise, then if you praise you will be said to have been sparing, if you blame, excessive, however fully you did the one and however restrainedly the other.
8.14| But these things do not hold me back; for I have courage enough to be trustworthy: I ask you to pave the way for what you urge, and choose the subject, lest for me now ready to write another just reason for hesitation and delay arise again. Farewell.
9.0| Pliny to his friend Sempronius Rufus.
9.1| I had come down into the Basilica Julia, intending to hear those to whom I had to reply at the next adjournment.
9.2| The judges sat, the board of ten had come, the advocates were moving about, there was a long silence; at last a message from the praetor. The centumviri are dismissed, the day is taken off, to my delight, who am never so prepared that I do not rejoice at a delay.
9.3| The cause of the delay is Nepos the praetor, who holds inquiry according to the laws. He had put up a brief edict, warning accusers, warning defendants that he would carry out what was contained in the decree of the senate.
9.4| Beneath the edict lay the decree of the senate: by this all who had any business were ordered to swear, before they pleaded, that they had given, promised or pledged nothing to anyone on account of advocacy. For in these words and a thousand others besides, advocacies were forbidden to be sold or bought; yet when the business was finished, it was permitted to give money only up to ten thousand.
9.5| Moved by this act of Nepos, the praetor who presides over the centumviral court, intending to deliberate whether to follow the example, gave us unexpected leisure.
9.6| Meanwhile throughout the whole city Nepos's edict is carped at and praised. Many say: "We have found one to straighten the crooked! What? Were there no praetors before him? And who is this to mend public morals?" Others on the contrary: "He has acted most rightly; about to enter office, he learned the laws, read the decrees of the senate, represses the foulest bargains, and does not suffer a most beautiful thing to be sold most shamefully."
9.7| Such talk is everywhere, which will nevertheless prevail one way or the other from the outcome. It is altogether unfair, but accepted by custom, that honourable plans, or shameful ones, are approved or censured according as they turn out well or badly. Hence for the most part the same acts get now the name of diligence, now of vanity, now of independence, now of madness. Farewell.
10.0| Pliny to his friend Suetonius Tranquillus.
10.1| Free at last the pledge of my hendecasyllables, which promised your writings to our common friends. They are called upon daily, demanded insistently, and there is already danger that they will be forced to accept a summons to produce them.
10.2| I too am hesitant in publishing, yet you have beaten even my hesitation and slowness. So either break off delays now, or take care lest those same little books, which our hendecasyllables cannot draw out of you by blandishments, be wrung from you by the scolding of limping scazons.
10.3| The work is finished and complete, and the file no longer polishes it but wears it down. Let me see your title, let me hear the volumes of my Tranquillus being copied, read, sold. It is fair that in a love so mutual we should receive from you the same pleasure which you enjoy from us. Farewell.
11.0| Pliny to his wife's grandfather Calpurnius Fabatus.
11.1| I have your letter in hand, and from it I learned that you have dedicated a most handsome portico under your name and your son's, and on the following day promised money for the adornment of the gates, so that the completion of the earlier generosity might be the beginning of a new one.
11.2| I rejoice first at your glory, some part of which flows back to me because of our closeness; then because I see my father-in-law's memory carried forward in most beautiful works; lastly because our native place flourishes, which to have improved by anyone is pleasing to me, by you most joyful.
11.3| For the rest, I pray the gods to grant you that spirit, and that spirit the longest possible time. For it is clear to me that once you have finished what you lately promised, you will begin something else. For generosity once stirred does not know how to stand still, and its beauty is commended by the very practice. Farewell.
12.0| Pliny to his friend Terentius Scaurus.
12.1| About to recite a little speech which I think of publishing, I called together some people so that I might feel awe, a few so that I might hear the truth. For I have a twofold reason for reciting, one that I may be strained by anxiety, the other that I may be admonished if anything by chance escapes me as my own.
12.2| I got what I sought: I found those who gave me the full benefit of their counsel, and I myself besides noted certain things to be mended. I have corrected the book, which I have sent to you.
12.3| You will learn the subject from the title, the book will explain the rest, which ought by now to be so accustomed that it is understood without a preface.
12.4| I should like you to write me what you think of the whole and of the parts. For I shall be either more cautious in holding it back or more resolute in publishing, as your authority comes to one side or the other. Farewell.
13.0| Pliny to his friend Julius Valerianus.
13.1| Both you ask and I promised, if you asked, that I would write to you what outcome Nepos's demand had about Tuscilius Nominatus. Nominatus was brought in; he pleaded for himself with no accuser. For the envoys of the Vicetini not only did not press him but even relieved him.
13.2| The sum of his defence: not good faith in his advocacy but steadfastness had failed him; he had come down as one who would plead, and had even been seen in the senate-house, then, terrified by the talk of his friends, had withdrawn; for he had been warned not to resist so stubbornly, especially in the senate, the wish of a senator, who was now contending not about a market but about favour, reputation and rank, otherwise he would suffer greater ill-will than lately.
13.3| Before this, certainly, but by a few, there had been shouting at him as he went out. He added entreaties and many tears; indeed through the whole pleading, a man practised in speaking took pains to seem rather to beg for mercy - for that is both more favoured and safer - than to be defended.
13.4| He was acquitted by the opinion of the consul designate Afranius Dexter, the sum of which was: Nominatus would indeed have done better if he had carried through the Vicetini's cause in the same spirit in which he had taken it up; yet since he had fallen into this kind of fault not by fraud, and was shown to have committed nothing worthy of censure, he should be released, on condition that he return to the Vicetini what he had received.
13.5| All assented except Fabius Aper. He proposed that he be forbidden advocacy for five years, and although he had drawn no one with his authority, he stayed firmly in his opinion; indeed he even forced Dexter, who had first proposed the opposite, by producing the law on holding the senate, to swear that what he had proposed was for the good of the state.
13.6| Although this was a lawful demand, some cried out against it; for it seemed to reproach the proposer with canvassing. But before the opinions were spoken, Nigrinus, tribune of the plebs, read out a petition, eloquent and weighty, in which he complained that advocacies were sold, that even collusions were sold, that people were banded together for lawsuits, and that it was set down as glory to draw large and fixed incomes from the spoils of citizens.
13.7| He read out the heads of laws, reminded the senate of its decrees, and at the end said the best of emperors must be petitioned, that since the laws and decrees of the senate were despised, he himself should remedy such great vices.
13.8| A few days, and the emperor's letter, severe and yet moderate: read it yourself; it is in the public records. How glad I am that in pleading causes I have always abstained not only from bargain, gift, reward, but even from presents!
13.9| It is right, to be sure, to avoid what is dishonourable not as unlawful but as shameful; yet it is pleasant if you see publicly forbidden what you never allowed yourself.
13.10| There will perhaps, indeed without doubt, be less praise and more obscure fame for this resolution of mine, when all will do from necessity what I did of my own will. Meanwhile I enjoy the pleasure, when some call me a prophet, and others say in sport and jest that a check has been put on my plundering and my greed. Farewell.
14.0| Pliny to his friend Pontius Allifanus.
14.1| I had retired to my town when it was reported to me that Cornutus Tertullus had received the charge of the Aemilian Way.
14.2| I cannot express with what joy I was affected, on his account and on my own: on his, because, although he is - as he is - far removed from all canvassing, an office given unasked should nevertheless be pleasing to him; on my own, because the duty entrusted to me delights me somewhat more now that I see an equal one given to Cornutus.
14.3| For it is not so gratifying to be raised in rank as to be put on a level with the good. And what is better than Cornutus, what more upright, what in every kind of praise more perfectly cast on the model of antiquity? This is known to me not by reputation, which he otherwise enjoys, best and most deserved, but by long and great trials.
14.4| Together we love, together we have loved nearly all whom our age has produced for emulation among both sexes; this partnership of friendships has joined us in the closest intimacy.
14.5| A bond of public association was added; for he was, as you know, my colleague, sought almost by prayer, in the prefecture of the treasury, and was so also in the consulship. Then I looked most deeply into what a man and how great he was, when I followed him as a master and revered him as a parent, which he deserved not so much by maturity of age as by his life.
14.6| For these reasons I congratulate myself as I do him, and no more privately than publicly, that at last men reach honours by virtue and not, as before, perils.
14.7| I should stretch the letter without end if I indulged my joy. I turn aside to what this news found me doing here.
14.8| I was with my wife's grandfather, I was with my wife's aunt, I was with friends long missed, I was going round my small farms, hearing many rustic complaints, reading accounts unwillingly and hurriedly - for I was schooled in other papers, in other letters - and I had begun also to prepare myself for the journey. For I am shut in by the narrowness of my leave, and by this very fact, that I hear the office has been entrusted to Cornutus, I am reminded of mine. I wish your Campania too would release you about the same time, so that no day of our companionship may be lost when I return to the city. Farewell.
15.0| Pliny to his friend Arrius Antoninus.
15.1| When I try to rival your verses, then most of all I discover how good they are. For as painters rarely portray a beautiful and perfect face except to its disadvantage, so I slip and fall away from this original.
15.2| Wherefore I urge you the more to put out as many as possible, which all would long to imitate and no one, or very few, could. Farewell.
16.0| Pliny to his friend Aefulanus Marcellinus.
16.1| In the deepest sadness I write this to you, the younger daughter of our friend Fundanus having died. Than that girl I never saw anything more charming or more lovable, nor anyone more worthy not merely of a longer life but almost of immortality.
16.2| She had not yet completed 14 years, and already she had the prudence of an old woman, the gravity of a matron, and yet the sweetness of a girl together with a maiden's modesty.
16.3| How she clung to her father's neck! How lovingly and modestly she embraced us, her father's friends! How she loved her nurses, her attendants, her teachers, each according to his duty! How eagerly, how intelligently she read! How sparingly and under watch she played! With what self-control, with what patience, with what steadiness too she bore her last illness!
16.4| She obeyed the physicians, encouraged her sister and father, and sustained herself, deserted by bodily strength, by vigour of mind.
16.5| This lasted in her to the very end, nor was it broken by the length of her illness or by fear of death, so that she left us the more and the heavier causes of longing and grief.
16.6| O plainly sad and bitter funeral! O time of death more unworthy than death itself! She was already betrothed to an excellent young man, the day of the wedding already chosen, we already invited. What joy was changed to what mourning!
16.7| I cannot express in words how great a wound my heart received when I heard Fundanus himself, as grief finds many mournful things, giving orders that what he had been going to spend on clothes, pearls and gems should be spent on incense and ointments and perfumes.
16.8| He is indeed learned and wise, as one who from the beginning of his life has given himself to higher studies and arts; but now he scorns everything he has heard and often said, and, all other virtues driven out, he is wholly devotion.
16.9| You will pardon him, you will even praise him, if you consider what he has lost. For he has lost a daughter who reproduced his character no less than his mouth and face, and had copied the whole father with marvellous likeness.
16.10| So if you send him any letter about so just a grief, remember to bring consolation not as if rebuking and too strong, but gentle and humane. That he may admit it more easily, a space of time between will do much.
16.11| For as a wound still raw dreads the hands of the healers, then bears them and even seeks them out, so a fresh grief of mind rejects and shuns consolations, soon longs for them, and rests in them when kindly applied. Farewell.
17.0| Pliny to his friend Vestricius Spurinna.
17.1| I know how much you favour the liberal arts, how much joy you take if noble youths do something worthy of their ancestors. All the more hastily I report that I was today in the lecture hall of Calpurnius Piso.
17.2| He was reciting a poem on the transformation of figures into stars, a learned and certainly splendid subject. It was written in elegiacs, flowing and tender and smooth, and also lofty, as the place demanded. For he rose fittingly and variously, now lifting, now settling; he changed high to low, slight to full, severe to pleasing, all with equal talent.
17.3| He recommended these things by a most sweet voice, and his voice by modesty: much blood, much anxiety in his face, a great ornament in a reciter. For somehow or other fear becomes men in their studies more than confidence.
17.4| Not to say more - though I like to say more, the finer the things about a young man, the rarer about a noble - when the recitation was over I kissed the youth much and long, which is the keenest spur of advice, and I urged him with praises to continue along the path he had started, and to carry before posterity himself the light which his ancestors had carried before him.
17.5| I congratulated his excellent mother, I congratulated his brother too, who from that lecture hall brought away no less glory of devotion than the other of eloquence: so remarkably, while he recited, did first the brother's fear, then his joy, stand out.
17.6| May the gods grant that I report such things to you oftener! For I favour our age, that it be not barren and worn out, and wonderfully wish that our nobles may have something beautiful in their houses besides their ancestral images; which now seem to me silently to praise these young men, to exhort them, and, what is enough for the glory of both, to acknowledge them. Farewell.
18.0| Pliny to his friend Calpurnius Macer.
18.1| It is well with me because it is well with you. You have your wife with you, you have your son; you enjoy the sea, springs, greenery, the field, a most agreeable villa. Nor do I doubt that it is most agreeable, in which a happier man had settled himself before he became the happiest.
18.2| I, on my Tuscan estate, both hunt and study, which I do sometimes in turn, sometimes together; yet I cannot even now declare whether it is harder to catch something or to write it. Farewell.
19.0| Pliny to his friend Valerius Paulinus.
19.1| I see how gently you treat your household; so I shall confess to you the more frankly with what indulgence I treat mine.
19.2| I always have in mind both that Homeric line "he was gentle as a father" and this of ours, "father of a family." But if I were by nature harsher and more hard, the weakness of my freedman Zosimus would still break me, to whom so much the greater kindness must be shown as he now needs it more.
19.3| He is an honest, dutiful, lettered man; and his art, his title as it were, is comic actor, in which he does very much. For he delivers keenly, wisely, fittingly, even gracefully; he also uses the lyre skilfully, beyond what a comic actor needs. The same man reads speeches and histories and poems so agreeably that he seems to have learned this alone.
19.4| I have set this out for you carefully, that you may know the more how many and how pleasant services this one man renders me. To this is added a long affection for the man, which the very dangers increased.
19.5| For it is so arranged by nature that nothing so rouses and kindles love as the fear of losing; and this I have suffered for him more than once.
19.6| For some years ago, while he was delivering intently and urgently, he brought up blood, and for this reason, sent by me to Egypt, after a long sojourn he returned recovered lately; then, while for successive days he put too much strain on his voice, reminded by a little cough of his old weakness he brought up blood again.
19.7| For which reason I have determined to send him to your estates which you hold at Forum Julii. You have told me many times that the climate there is wholesome and that the milk is exceptionally well suited to cures of this sort.
19.8| I ask therefore that you write to your people that the villa and the house be open to him, and that they also contribute to his expenses, if anything is needed.
19.9| He will need but little; for he is so thrifty and self-controlled that by frugality he restrains not only luxuries but even the necessities of health. As he sets out I shall give him as much travelling money as will suffice for one going to your place. Farewell.
20.0| Pliny to his friend Cornelius Ursus.
20.1| The Bithynians again: only a short while after Julius Bassus, they have also denounced Rufus Varenus, proconsul, Varenus whom lately against Bassus they had asked for and received as advocate. Brought into the senate, they demanded an investigation.
20.2| Varenus asked that he too be allowed to summon witnesses for his defense. The Bithynians objected, and the matter was taken up for a hearing. I spoke for Varenus, not without success; whether well or badly, the published speech will show.
20.3| For in actual pleading fortune rules in both directions: memory, voice, gesture, the occasion itself, and finally either liking or dislike for the defendant all take away a great deal of credit and also add it. A book is free of offense, free of favor, free of both lucky and unlucky chances.
20.4| Fonteius Magnus, one of the Bithynians, answered me with a great many words and very little substance. Most Greeks, like him, take glibness for fullness: they whirl out such long and such lifeless periods in a single breath, like a torrent.
20.5| So Julius Candidus has a neat way of saying that eloquence is one thing and talkativeness another. For eloquence has fallen to scarcely one or two people, indeed, if we believe Marcus Antonius, to nobody; but this thing that Candidus calls talkativeness has fallen to many, and most of all to the most shameless.
20.6| The next day Homullus spoke for Varenus, shrewdly, forcefully, elegantly; Nigrinus spoke against him, concisely, weightily, with ornament. Acilius Rufus, the consul-elect, proposed that the Bithynians be granted their inquiry, and passed over Varenus' request in silence.
20.7| That was a way of refusing it. Cornelius Priscus, a former consul, granted both the prosecutors and the defendant what they asked for, and carried the vote. We won something that is neither covered by the law nor very usual, but just all the same.
20.8| Why it is just I am not going to explain in a letter, so that you will want to read the speech. For if that line of Homer is true, "For men praise that song the most / that sounds newest in the ears of those who listen," I must take care not to pluck off, by the chatter of a letter, the charm and bloom of novelty, which is the chief recommendation of that little speech. Farewell.
21.0| Pliny to his friend Pompeius Saturninus
21.1| Your letter affected me in different ways, for it held news partly happy and partly sad. Happy, because it told me that you are being kept in the city ("I wish I weren't," you say; but I wish it), and also because it promised that you would give a reading as soon as I arrived. Thank you for waiting for me.
21.2| The sad news is that Julius Valens is seriously ill; though even this is not sad if it is judged by his own interests, since it is to his advantage to be freed as soon as possible from a disease that cannot be cured.
21.3| But this is not merely sad, it is truly grievous: Julius Avitus has died on his way home from his quaestorship. He died on board ship, far from his most loving brother, far from his mother and his sisters
21.4| (these things mean nothing to the dead, but they meant something while he was dying, and they mean something to those who survive); and what is more, a young man of such great gifts has been cut off in his first bloom, who would have reached the highest things if his virtues had come to maturity.
21.5| How he burned with love for learning! How much he read, and how much he wrote too! And all of it has now passed away with him, with no profit to posterity.
21.6| But why do I give way to grief? If you slacken the reins on it, there is nothing that does not become a vast subject. I will put an end to this letter, so that I can also put an end to the tears the letter has drawn from me. Farewell.
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