Pliny the Younger & Pliny the Elder · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
1.0| Pliny to his friend Geminus
1.1| This illness of yours, so stubborn, alarms me, and although I know that you are the most self-controlled of men, I am still afraid it may be allowed to take liberties with your character as well.
1.2| So I urge you to resist it with patience: that is praiseworthy, that is healthy. What I am advising lies within human nature.
1.3| I myself, at any rate, when I am well, am in the habit of speaking to my household like this: "I hope, if I happen to fall ill, that I will want nothing that would make me ashamed or sorry; but if the illness should get the better of me, I give you notice that you are to give me nothing without the doctors' permission, and you are to know that if you do, I will punish it as other people usually punish what is refused them."
1.4| And indeed, once when I had been burned up by a raging fever and was at last given some relief and rubbed with oil, and the doctor was handing me a drink, I held out my hand and told him to feel my pulse, and I gave back the cup, though it had already touched my lips.
1.5| Later, on the twentieth day of my illness, when I was being got ready for a bath and suddenly saw the doctors muttering, I asked the reason. They answered that I could bathe safely, but still not entirely without some misgiving.
1.6| "What need is there?" I said; and so I gave up, calmly and quietly, the hope of the bath I seemed already to be being carried into, and composed my mind and my face for abstinence again, just as a moment before I had composed them for the bath.
1.7| I have written this to you, first so that my advice would not come without an example, and secondly so that in future I myself would be bound to the same self-control, having pledged myself, as it were, by this letter. Farewell.
2.0| Pliny to his friend Justus
2.1| How does it hang together that you insist you are hindered by constant business, and at the same time ask for my writings, which can barely get anyone at leisure to spend on them some time that would otherwise be wasted?
2.2| So I will let the summer, which is a restless and busy season for you people, run its course, and only in winter, when it is likely that you can be free at least in the evenings, will I look for what to offer you from my trifles.
2.3| In the meantime it is more than enough if my letters are not a nuisance; but they are, and so they will be shorter. Farewell.
3.0| Pliny to his friend Praesens
3.1| Is it to go on so persistently, you now in Lucania, now in Campania? "Well," you say, "I am a Lucanian myself, and my wife is from Campania."
3.2| A fair reason for a longer absence, but not for a permanent one. Why not come back to the city some time, then? Here are your rank, your office, your friendships with those above you as well as those below. How long will you play the king? How long will you stay awake when you like and sleep as long as you like? How long will your shoes go unworn, your toga take a holiday, and the whole day be your own?
3.3| It is time for you to come back and see our vexations, if only so that those pleasures of yours do not grow dull from too much of them. Pay morning calls for a little while, so that you may enjoy receiving them more; get jostled in this crowd, so that solitude may delight you.
3.4| But what am I doing, foolishly holding back the very man I am trying to call out? For perhaps these very words will only urge you to wrap yourself more and more in your leisure; and I do not want it broken off, only interrupted.
3.5| For just as, if I were giving you dinner, I would mix sharp and tangy dishes with the sweet ones, so that a stomach dulled and cloyed by the sweet would be stirred up by the sharp, so now I urge you to season your most pleasant way of life every now and then with some sharpness, as it were. Farewell.
4.0| Pliny to his friend Pontius
4.1| You say you have read my hendecasyllables; you also ask how I came to start writing them, a man who seems to you a serious person, and who, as I admit myself, is no fool.
4.2| I have never been a stranger to poetry (for I will go back a long way); in fact, when I was fourteen years old I wrote a Greek tragedy. "What sort of tragedy?" you ask. I do not know; it was called a tragedy.
4.3| Later, when I was returning from military service and was held up by the winds on the island of Icaria, I wrote Latin elegiacs on that very sea and that very island. I have sometimes tried my hand at heroic verse too, and now for the first time at hendecasyllables, and this is how and why they were born. At my house at Laurentum, the books of Asinius Gallus comparing his father with Cicero were being read to me. I came across an epigram of Cicero's on his Tiro.
4.4| Then, when I had gone off at midday (for it was summer) to sleep, and sleep would not steal over me, I began to reflect that the greatest orators had both found pleasure in this kind of writing and counted it to their credit.
4.5| I set my mind to it and, contrary to my own expectation, after a long time out of practice, I set down in a very short space of time the very thing that had prompted me to write, in these lines:
4.6| As I read the books of Gallus, in which he ventured to award the palm and the glory to his father over Cicero, I found a saucy jest of Cicero's, one worth looking at for the same genius with which he composed his serious works, and with which, in human wit of many sorts and much charm, he showed that the minds of great men take delight. For he complains that Tiro, by a wicked trick, cheated his lover and at night withdrew a few kisses owed him after dinner. When I had read this I said: "Why, after this, do we hide our own loves, and timidly bring none of them out into the open, nor confess that we too know Tiro's tricks, Tiro's fleeting caresses, and the stolen favors that add new flames?"
4.7| I went on to elegiacs, and these too I turned out no less quickly; I added others, spoiled by the ease of it. Then, when I had returned to the city, I read them to my friends; they approved.
4.8| After that I tried more meters, whenever I had any leisure, and above all when traveling. Finally I decided, following the example of many, to complete a separate volume of hendecasyllables on its own, and I do not regret it.
4.9| It is read, it is copied, it is even sung, and is performed now on the cithara, now on the lyre, even by Greeks, whom love of this little book has taught Latin.
4.10| But why do I speak so boastfully? Poets, after all, are allowed to rave. And yet I speak not of my own judgment but of that of others; whether they judge rightly or are mistaken, I am delighted. One thing I pray: that posterity too may either be mistaken in the same way or judge likewise. Farewell.
5.0| Pliny to his Calpurnia
5.1| It is incredible how much I am gripped by longing for you. The cause is first love, and then that we are not used to being apart. Hence I spend a great part of the nights awake, picturing you; hence by day, at the times I was accustomed to visit you, my feet themselves (as is most truly said) lead me to your room; and finally, sick and sad, like a man shut out, I turn back from the empty threshold. Only one time is free of these torments, when I am worn out in the forum amid the lawsuits of the Samici.
5.2| Judge for yourself what my life must be, who find rest in toil, and comfort in misery and anxieties. Farewell.
6.0| Pliny to his friend Macrinus
6.1| A rare and remarkable thing has happened to Varenus, though it is still uncertain. The Bithynians are said to have dropped their accusation of him as rashly begun. "Said," do I say? The envoy of the province is here; he has brought the decree of the council to Caesar, he has brought it to many leading men, he has brought it even to us, the advocates of Varenus.
6.2| Yet that same Magnus persists; indeed he presses the excellent Nigrinus most stubbornly. Through him he was asking the consuls to compel Varenus to produce his accounts.
6.3| I was by now standing by Varenus only as a friend and had resolved to keep silent. For nothing would be so contrary as for me, an advocate assigned by the senate, to defend as a defendant one who needed not to appear a defendant.
6.4| When, however, after Nigrinus had finished his request, the consuls turned their eyes to me, I said: "You will learn that the reason for our silence is clear to us when you have heard the true envoys of the province." Nigrinus replied: "To whom were they sent?" I said: "To me also: I have the decree of the province."
6.5| He in turn: "It may be clear to you." To this I said: "If it is clear to you from the other side, it may be clear to me, too, which is better."
6.6| Then the envoy Polyaenus set out the reasons for the abandoned accusation and asked that no prejudice be done to Caesar's hearing. Magnus replied, and Polyaenus again. I myself spoke seldom and briefly, and kept well within silence.
6.7| For I have learned that sometimes keeping silent is no less the orator's part than speaking. Indeed I recall that for certain men on capital charges I helped more by silence than by the most careful speech.
6.8| A mother, having lost her son (for what prevents us from discussing literary matters, though the reason for writing the letter was another?), had denounced to the emperor his freedmen, who were also her own co-heirs, on charges of forgery and poisoning, and had obtained Julius Servianus as judge.
6.9| I had defended the accused before an immense gathering; for the case was very well known, and besides the talents on both sides were most distinguished. The inquiry put an end to the hearing, giving its verdict for the accused.
6.10| Afterwards the mother approached the emperor, declared that she had found new proofs. Suburanus was instructed to find time to reopen the finished case, if she brought anything new.
6.11| Julius Africanus appeared for the mother, grandson of that orator after hearing whom Passienus Crispus said: "Well, by heaven, well; but to what end so well?" His grandson, a talented young man but not a little shrewd, when he had said much and filled the time assigned, said: "Suburanus, I ask you to let me add a single word."
6.12| Then I, when everyone was looking at me as if I would reply at length, said: "I would have answered, had Africanus added that one word, in which I do not doubt everything was new."
6.13| I do not readily recall having won so much approval by pleading as I then did by not pleading. In the same way now, it has been both approved and well received that I have kept silent so far for Varenus.
6.14| The consuls, as Polyaenus asked, kept everything intact for the emperor; I await his hearing in suspense. For that day will give us, for Varenus, either security and leisure, or will lay upon us again the toil that was interrupted, with renewed anxiety. Farewell.
7.0| Pliny to his friend Saturninus
7.1| Both recently to our friend Priscus and again, because you so ordered, I expressed thanks. I did so most gladly: for it is most pleasing to me that you, excellent men and very dear friends of mine, cling together so closely that each of you thinks himself under an obligation to the other.
7.2| For he too declares that he takes special pleasure in your friendship, and he competes with you in the most honourable competition of mutual affection, which time itself will increase. That you are kept occupied by business I take hard for this reason, that you cannot devote yourself to your studies. But if you finish one lawsuit through a judge and the other (as you say) yourself, you will begin first to enjoy leisure there, and then, satisfied, to return to us. Farewell.
8.0| Pliny to his friend Priscus
8.1| I cannot express how pleasant it is to me that our Saturninus renders you the warmest thanks to me in one letter after another.
8.2| Go on as you have begun, and love that excellent man as familiarly as you can, for you will gain great pleasure from his friendship, and not for a short time.
8.3| For although he is rich in every virtue, he is so above all in this, that he has the greatest constancy in affection. Farewell.
9.0| Pliny to his friend Fuscus
9.1| You ask how I think you ought to study in the retreat which you have now long been enjoying.
9.2| Useful above all, and many recommend it, is to render Greek into Latin or Latin into Greek. This sort of practice gives one propriety and splendour of words, an abundance of figures, force of exposition, and, through imitation of the best, the ability to invent things like them; at the same time, what would have escaped the reader cannot escape the translator.
9.3| Understanding and judgment are gained from this. It will do no harm, once you have read a passage, to hold on to its subject and argument and write as if you were a rival, then compare it with what you read and weigh carefully where you or he has put it better. It is a great cause for rejoicing if you have something better in places, a great shame if he is better in everything. At times you may even choose the best-known pieces and compete with the chosen.
9.4| This is bold, yet not shameless, because the contest is private; although we see many who have undertaken contests of this kind to their great praise, and who, content to follow, have outstripped those they followed because they did not despair.
9.5| You can also revise, after forgetting them, what you have spoken, keeping much, passing over more, writing some things in between and others over again.
9.6| That is laborious and full of tedium, but fruitful by its very difficulty: to grow warm afresh and take up again the impulse that was broken off and dropped, and finally to weave new limbs, as it were, into the finished body without disturbing what came before.
9.7| I know that your chief study now is speaking in court; but for that reason I would not advise always this combative and, so to say, warlike style. For as lands are renewed by varied and changed seeds, so our talents are tilled by now this, now that exercise.
9.8| I want you at times to take up some passage from history, I want you to write a letter with more care. For often even in a speech the need for descriptions arises, not only of the historical but almost of the poetic kind, and a concise and pure style is sought from letters.
9.9| It is right also to relax in verse, I do not say continuous and long (for that cannot be completed except in leisure), but this sharp and short kind, which fittingly punctuates any amount of business and care.
9.10| They are called trifles; but these trifles sometimes win no less glory than serious works. And indeed (for why should I not urge you to verses in verses?)
9.11| as wax is praised when, soft and yielding, it follows learned fingers and, at their bidding, becomes a work, and now shapes Mars or chaste Minerva, now fashions Venus, now Venus' boy; and as sacred springs not only put out fires but often also refresh flowers and spring meadows, so it befits the human mind to be bent and led through arts that are not rigid, by a learned pliancy.
9.12| So the greatest orators, and the greatest men too, either exercised or delighted themselves in this way, or rather delighted and exercised themselves.
9.13| For it is wonderful how by these little works the mind is strained and relaxed. They admit loves, hatreds, angers, pity, wit, in short everything that is dealt with in life and even in the forum and in lawsuits.
9.14| They have the same usefulness as other poems, that bound by the necessity of metre we rejoice in free prose, and that we write more gladly what the comparison shows to be easier.
9.15| You have more perhaps than you asked; yet one thing I have omitted. For I have not said what I think should be read: although I did say it when I said what should be written. Remember to choose carefully authors of each kind. For they say that one should read much, not many things.
9.16| Who these are is so well known and approved that it needs no pointing out; and besides, I have stretched the letter so immoderately that while I advise you how you should study, I have taken away your time for studying. Why then do you not take up your tablets again, and write something of this, or that very thing you had begun? Farewell.
10.0| Pliny to his friend Macrinus
10.1| Because I myself, when I have learned the first part, long to join the last parts that have been torn from it, I think you too want to learn the rest about Varenus and the Bithynians. The case was pleaded, on one side by Polyaenus, on the other by Magnus.
10.2| When the pleadings were finished, Caesar said: "Neither party will complain of delay; I shall take care to ascertain the province's wishes."
10.3| Meanwhile Varenus has gained much. For how doubtful it is whether he is deservedly accused, when it is uncertain whether he is accused at all! What remains is that the province may not again approve what it is said to have condemned, and may repent of its repentance. Farewell.
11.0| Pliny to his wife's grandfather Fabatus
11.1| You wonder that my freedman Hermes, without waiting for the auction, sold to Corellia the inherited lands which I had ordered to be advertised, for my five-twelfths share out of 700,000 sesterces. You add that these could be sold for 900,000, and so you ask all the more whether I will hold to what he has done.
11.2| I do hold to it: hear on what grounds. For I wish it to be approved by you, and excused by my co-heirs, that I separate myself from them under the bidding of a greater duty.
11.3| I love Corellia with the highest respect, first as the sister of Corellius Rufus, a man whose memory is sacred to me, then as a close friend of my mother.
11.4| I also have old ties with her husband Minicius Justus, an excellent man; and with her son I had very great ones, so much so that when I was praetor he presided at my games.
11.5| She, when I was last there, told me that she wished to possess something around our Lake Como. I offered her out of my estates whatever she wished and at whatever price she wished, except those from my mother and father; for these I cannot give up even to Corellia.
11.6| When, therefore, an inheritance had fallen to me in which those estates lay, I wrote to her that they would be for sale. Hermes carried these letters, and when she demanded that he assign my portion to her at once, he complied. You see how firmly I ought to hold to what my freedman did in keeping with my own ways.
11.7| It remains that my co-heirs bear it with an even mind that I have sold separately what I was entirely free not to sell.
11.8| Nor are they forced to imitate my example: for they do not have the same ties with Corellia. They can therefore look to their own advantage, for which in my case friendship stood. Farewell.
12.0| Pliny to his friend Minicius
12.1| I have sent you the petition drawn up by me, as you demanded, for your friend (or rather ours, for what is not common to us?) to use if the case should require it; I sent it rather late so that you should not have time to correct it, that is, to ruin it.
12.2| You will have the time, however, I do not know to correct it, but certainly to ruin it. For you, the zealous ones, strip away all the best parts.
12.3| If you do this, I shall take it in good part. For later, on some occasion, I shall use those parts as mine, and I myself shall be praised thanks to your fastidiousness, as in the passage where you will find a note, and something explained differently written above it.
12.4| For since I suspected that it would seem to you rather swollen, because it is more sonorous and lofty, I thought it not out of place, so that you would not torment yourself, to add straight away something more compressed and thin, or rather humbler and worse, but more correct in your judgment.
12.5| For why should I not follow up and harry your thinness on every side? I say this so that amid those occupations of yours you may sometimes laugh at something; this I say in earnest:
12.6| see that you pay me back my travelling money, which I spent by sending off a courier on purpose. For you, when you have read this, will condemn not parts of the petition but the whole petition, and will deny that it is worth anything, when you are asked for its price back. Farewell.
13.0| Pliny to his friend Ferox
13.1| The same letter says both that you are not studying and that you are studying. Am I speaking in riddles? Quite so, until I state my meaning more distinctly.
13.2| For it says you are not studying, yet it is so polished that it could not have been written except by one who studies; or you are happy beyond all men, if you produce such things through idleness and leisure. Farewell.
14.0| Pliny to his Corellia
14.1| You act most honourably in asking and demanding so earnestly that I should order the price of the lands to be received from you not out of 700,000 sesterces, what you bought them for from my freedman, but out of 900,000, what you paid the tax-farmers for the twentieth part.
14.2| In return I both ask and demand that you consider not only what befits you but also what befits me, and that you allow me in this one matter to resist you in the same spirit in which I am accustomed to yield to you in everything. Farewell.
15.0| Pliny to his friend Saturninus
15.1| You ask what I am doing. What you know: I am pulled apart by duty, I serve my friends, I study at times, which to do not at times but only and always I dare not say was more right, but certainly it was happier.
15.2| I would take it ill that you do everything other than what you wish, were it not that what you do is most honourable. For to look after the business of one's own state and to arbitrate between friends is most worthy of praise.
15.3| I knew that the companionship of our Priscus would be pleasant to you. I had known his simplicity, I had known his courtesy; that he is the same (which I knew less) most grateful, I find by experience, since you write that he remembers our services so pleasantly. Farewell.
16.0| Pliny to his wife's grandfather Fabatus
16.1| I love Calestrius Tiro very warmly; he is bound to me by ties both private and public.
16.2| We served in the army together, we were quaestors of Caesar together. He preceded me in the tribunate by the right of children, and I followed him in the praetorship, when Caesar had remitted a year to me. I have often retired to his villas, he has often recovered his health in my house.
16.3| He is now about to go to the province of Baetica as proconsul, by way of Ticinum.
16.4| I hope, or rather I am confident, that I shall easily secure that he turn aside from his journey to you, if you wish to free by the rod those whom you recently manumitted among your friends. You need not fear that this will be a trouble to him, to whom going round the whole world will not be long for my sake.
16.5| So put away that excessive diffidence of yours, and consult what you wish. What I ask is as pleasant to him as what you bid is to me. Farewell.
17.0| Pliny to his friend Celer
17.1| Everyone has his own reason for reading aloud; mine, as I have often said already, is that if something escapes me (as certainly something does) I may be told of it.
17.2| All the more I wonder that you write that there were some who found fault with my reading speeches aloud at all; unless indeed they think these alone need no correction.
17.3| I would gladly ask them why they allow (if they do allow) that history should be read aloud, which is composed not for display but for trustworthiness and truth; why tragedy, which demands not an audience but a stage and actors; why lyrics, which require a chorus and a lyre, not a reader. But the reciting of these has by now been accepted by custom.
17.4| Is the man who began it, then, to be blamed? Although both certain of our own and Greeks too have read speeches aloud often.
17.5| Yet it is superfluous to recite what you have spoken. Granted, if it is all the same, to the same audience, and at once; but if you insert much and change much, if you take up some things new and some the same but after an interval, why should the reason for reciting what you have spoken be less acceptable than that for publishing it?
17.6| But it is hard for a speech to satisfy while it is being recited. That pertains to the labour of the reciter, not to a reason for not reciting.
17.7| Nor do I wish to be praised while I recite, but while I am read. And so I leave out no kind of correction. First I go through what I have written by myself; next I read to two or three; soon I hand it to others to annotate, and their notes, if I am in doubt, I weigh again with one or two; last of all I recite it to several, and, if you believe me at all, then I correct most sharply;
17.8| for I am the more careful the more anxiously I attend. And respect, shame and fear are the best judges, and indeed take it so: if you are going to speak with someone, however learned, but only one, are you not less shaken than if it were with many, even unlearned?
17.9| When you rise to plead, do you not then most distrust yourself, then wish to change, I do not say very many things, but everything? especially if the stage is wider and the ring of listeners more spread out; for even those shabby, dark-cloaked folk we revere.
17.10| If you think that each earliest passage is disapproved, are you not weakened and do you not collapse? I think it is because in the very number there is a certain great and pooled judgment, and what is of little weight in each single person is of very great weight in all.
17.11| And so Pomponius Secundus, the writer of tragedies, if a rather intimate friend happened to think something should be removed and he himself thought it should be kept, would say: "To the people I appeal," and so, from the people's silence or assent, followed either his own view or his friend's.
17.12| So much did he give to the people; rightly or otherwise, it is nothing to me. For I am accustomed to call not the people but certain chosen persons, whom I may look at, whom I may trust, whom, in short, I may both observe as individuals and fear as not individuals.
17.13| For what Marcus Cicero thought of the stylus, I think of fear: it is fear, fear is the harshest corrector. The very fact that we think we shall recite corrects; that we enter the hall corrects; that we grow pale, shudder, look around corrects.
17.14| And so I do not regret my custom, which I find most useful, and I am so little deterred by those petty remarks of theirs that I even ask you to point out something I may add to them.
17.15| For nothing is enough for my care. I think how great a thing it is to put something into the hands of men, and I cannot persuade myself that what one wishes to please always and everyone is not to be handled with many people and often. Farewell.
18.0| Pliny to his friend Caninius
18.1| You are deliberating with me how the money you offered our townsfolk for a banquet may remain safe after you as well. An honourable consultation, but the opinion is not easy. If you count out the sum to the state, it is to be feared that it will melt away. If you give lands, that they will be neglected as public property.
18.2| For my part I find nothing more suitable than what I did myself. For in place of 500,000 sesterces which I had promised for the maintenance of freeborn boys and girls, I conveyed to the public agent an estate from my own worth far more; I took the same back with a rent charge imposed, to pay 30,000 a year.
18.3| By this the capital of the state is in safety and the income is not uncertain, and the land itself, because the rent is amply exceeded by its yield, will always find an owner by whom it is worked.
18.4| Nor am I unaware that I have spent somewhat more than I seem to have given, since the necessity of the rent-charge has broken the price of a very beautiful estate.
18.5| But one ought to put public advantages before private, eternal before mortal, and to look much more carefully to one's duty than to one's means. Farewell.
19.0| Pliny to his friend Priscus
19.1| Fannia's health torments me. She caught it while attending the Vestal Junia, first of her own accord (for she is a relation), then also by the authority of the pontiffs.
19.2| For when the virgins are forced by the violence of illness to leave the atrium of Vesta, they are entrusted to the care and keeping of matrons. While Fannia diligently fulfils this duty, she has been caught in this danger.
19.3| Fevers have settled on her, the cough grows; extreme emaciation, extreme exhaustion. Only her spirit and courage are vigorous, most worthy of her husband Helvidius and her father Thrasea; the rest is slipping away, and wears me out not only with fear but with grief.
19.4| For I grieve that a very great woman is being torn from the eyes of the state, which I do not know whether it will see the like of again. What chastity she has, what sanctity, what gravity, what constancy! Twice she followed her husband into exile, a third time she was herself banished on account of her husband.
19.5| For when Senecio was on trial because he had composed books on the life of Helvidius and had said in his defence that he had been asked by Fannia, and Mettius Carus asked threateningly whether she had asked him, she replied: "I asked"; whether she had given him notes while he was writing: "I gave them"; whether with her mother's knowledge: "Without it"; finally she let fall no word yielding to the danger.
19.6| Indeed those very books, although destroyed by decree of the senate out of necessity and the fear of the times, she kept and held on to despite the confiscation of her property, and carried into exile the cause of her exile.
19.7| She is likewise so agreeable, so kindly, and finally (a gift to few) no less lovable than venerable! Will there be anyone whom afterwards we can point out to our wives? Will there be one from whom even we men may take examples of courage, whom, seeing and hearing her thus, we may admire as we do those women of whom we read?
19.8| To me the house itself seems to totter, and, wrenched from its foundations, to be about to fall in ruin, though it still has descendants. For with what virtues and what deeds will they manage that it should not fall as the last of its line?
19.9| What afflicts and torments me besides is that I seem to be losing again her mother, that woman (I can say nothing more illustrious) mother of so great a woman, whom she, as she gives her back and recalls her to us, will carry off with herself, and she will strike me with a wound both new and reopened at once.
19.10| I honoured both, I loved both: which more I do not know, and they did not wish to be distinguished. They had my services in prosperity, they had them in adversity. I was the comfort of them when banished, the avenger of them when returned; yet I did not make the account even, and I long all the more for this one to be preserved, that time may be left me to repay.
19.11| I was in these anxieties when I wrote to you; if some god turns them to joy, I shall not complain of the fear. Farewell.
20.0| Pliny to his friend Tacitus
20.1| I have read your book and, as carefully as I could, I noted what I thought should be changed and what removed. For I am accustomed to say what is true, and you to hear it gladly. And no people bear reproof more patiently than those who most deserve to be praised.
20.2| Now I await from you my book with your annotations. O pleasant, O fair exchange! How it delights me that, if posterity takes any care of us, it will be told everywhere in what harmony, simplicity and good faith we lived!
20.3| It will be a rare and notable thing that two men, nearly equal in age and standing, with some name in letters (for I am obliged to speak rather sparingly of you too, because I speak of myself at the same time), the one fostered the studies of the other.
20.4| For my part, as a very young man, when you were already flourishing in fame and glory, I longed to follow you, and both to be and to be thought "next, though by a long interval." And there were many very brilliant talents; but to me you seemed (so the likeness of nature carried it) the most imitable and the one most to be imitated.
20.5| So I rejoice the more that if there is any talk of studies, we are named together, and that to those speaking of you I come up at once. Nor are there lacking those who are preferred to each of us.
20.6| But we are joined, and it makes no difference to me in what place; for to me the first is the one who comes next after you. Indeed you must have noticed in wills: unless someone happens to be a very close friend of one or other of us, we receive the same legacies, and equally.
20.7| All of which looks to this, that we should love each other the more ardently, since so many bonds bind us: studies, character, reputation, and finally the last judgments of men. Farewell.
21.0| Pliny to his friend Cornutus
21.1| I obey, dearest colleague, and I take care of the weakness of my eyes as you bid. For I came here in a covered carriage shut in on every side as if in a bedroom, and here I abstain not only from the stylus but also, with difficulty, from reading, and I study with my ears alone.
21.2| I make my bedrooms dark with the curtains drawn, yet not gloomy. The covered walk too, with the lower windows shut, has as much shade as light. So little by little I am learning to bear the light.
21.3| I take the bath because it helps, wine because it does no harm, yet very sparingly. So I have been used, and now there is a guardian at hand.
21.4| The hen I received gladly as sent by you; I saw that it was very fat with eyes keen enough, although still bleary. Farewell.
22.0| Pliny to his friend Falco
22.1| You will wonder less that I asked so urgently that you confer a tribunate on my friend, when you know who he is and what sort of man. I can now both name him to you and describe him, since you promise.
22.2| He is Cornelius Minicianus, an ornament of my region by either his standing or his character. Splendidly born, he has an abundance of means, and loves letters as the poor usually do. He is also a most upright judge, a most courageous advocate, a most faithful friend.
22.3| You will believe you have received a favour when you have looked at the man more closely, a man equal to all offices, all titles (I do not wish to say anything more elevated of so modest a man). Farewell.
23.0| Pliny to his wife's grandfather Fabatus
23.1| I am glad indeed that you are so strong that you can go to meet Tiro at Milan, but, so that you may remain so strong, I beg you not to impose on yourself so much labour against the reasonable measure of your age. Indeed I give notice that you should wait for him at home, and inside the house, and even inside the threshold of your bedroom.
23.2| For since he is loved by me as a brother, he ought not to demand from one whom I look up to in the place of a parent a duty which he would have excused his own parent. Farewell.
24.0| Pliny to his friend Geminus
24.1| Ummidia Quadratilla died a little short of her eightieth year, vigorous up to her last illness, and with a frame sturdy and strong even beyond what is usual in a matron.
24.2| She died with a most honourable will: she left as heirs her grandson for two-thirds and her granddaughter for a third. The granddaughter I know little; the grandson I love most warmly, a singular young man, to be loved not only by those whom he touches by blood, among his relatives.
24.3| And first, conspicuous in looks, he came through all the talk of the malicious both as boy and as youth, a husband before his twenty-fourth year, and, had god consented, a father. He lived in the household of a grandmother given to pleasure with the greatest strictness, and yet with the greatest deference.
24.4| She kept pantomime actors and favoured them more lavishly than befits a woman of rank. Quadratus watched these neither in the theatre nor at home, and she did not require it.
24.5| I heard her say herself, when she was commending her grandson's studies to me, that, as a woman with the idle leisure of her sex, she was in the habit of relaxing her mind with a game of draughts, and in the habit of watching her pantomime actors; but whenever she was about to do either, she always told her grandson to go away and study. This seemed to me to come not so much from love for him as from respect.
24.6| You will be surprised, and I was surprised too. At the last priestly games, when the pantomimes had been brought on for the opening contest, and Quadratus and I were leaving the theatre together, he remarked: "Do you know that today is the first time I have seen my grandmother's freedman dance?" That from her grandson.
24.7| But, by Hercules, men who were complete strangers to her, to honour Quadratilla (I blush that I called it honour), would rush about the theatre in the service of flattery, leaping up, clapping, admiring, and afterwards would reproduce for their mistress every gesture, songs and all; and now they will receive the tiniest of legacies, a tip for their theatrical labours, from the heir who never watched.
24.8| I tell you this, first because when anything new happens you are not unwilling to hear it, and then because it is pleasant for me to relive in writing the joy I had felt. For I rejoice in the dutiful affection of the dead woman and in the honour paid to an excellent young man; I am glad too that the house which once belonged to Gaius Cassius, the founder and father of the Cassian school, will serve a master no less great than he.
24.9| For my friend Quadratus will fill it and grace it, and will give back to it its former dignity, renown and glory, since as great an orator will go forth from it as that man was a jurist. Farewell.
25.0| Pliny to his friend Rufus
25.1| Oh, how many learned men are hidden and withdrawn from fame by their own modesty or love of quiet! And yet, when we are about to speak or give a reading, we fear only those who bring their studies out into the open, whereas those who keep silent surpass them in this further respect, that they pay the greatest of works the reverence of silence.
25.2| I write what I write from experience. Terentius Junior, having discharged the equestrian military posts, and also the procuratorship of the province of Narbonensis, with complete integrity, withdrew to his estates and preferred the most tranquil leisure to the offices that lay ready for him.
25.3| When he invited me to be his guest, I regarded him as a good master of a household, as a careful farmer, and I meant to talk about the matters in which I supposed he was occupied; and I had begun, when he called me back to literature with the most learned conversation.
25.4| How polished everything was, how Latin, how Greek! For such is his strength in both languages that he appears to excel most in the one he happens to be speaking just now. How much he has read, how much he remembers! You would think the man lived in Athens, not in a country house.
25.5| In short, he has increased my anxiety, and made me fear these retired and, as it were, rustic men no less than those whom I know to be most learned.
25.6| I advise you to do the same. For as in the camp, so also in our literary world, there are many in civilian dress whom, if you examine them carefully, you will find girded and armed, and indeed with the most ardent talent. Farewell.
26.0| Pliny to his friend Maximus
26.1| Recently the illness of a certain friend reminded me that we are at our best while we are sick. For what sick man is troubled by avarice or by lust?
26.2| He is no slave to love affairs, he does not hunt for offices, he disregards wealth, and however little he has he thinks it enough, as a man who will leave it behind. Then he remembers the gods, then that he is himself only a man; he envies no one, admires no one, despises no one, and does not even listen to malicious talk or feed on it: what he dreams of is baths and springs.
26.3| This is the sum of his cares, the sum of his prayers; and for the future, if he should happen to escape, he plans a soft and easy life, that is, a harmless and happy one.
26.4| So I can give to you and to myself, briefly, the precept which philosophers try to teach in a great many words, and indeed a great many volumes: that in health we should persevere in being the kind of men we promise to be when we are sick. Farewell.
27.0| Pliny to his friend Sura
27.1| Leisure gives me the opportunity to learn and you the opportunity to teach. I would therefore be most eager to know whether you think that phantoms exist, and have a form of their own and some divine power, or whether they are empty and unreal things that take their shape from our fear.
27.2| For my part, I am led to believe that they exist above all by what I hear happened to Curtius Rufus. While he was still poor and unknown, he had attached himself to the governor of Africa as one of his staff. As the day was declining he was walking in a colonnade, when the form of a woman was presented to him, larger and more beautiful than human. He was terrified, and she told him that she was Africa, and that she foretold what was to come: he would go to Rome and hold offices, and would even return to this same province with the supreme command, and would die there.
27.3| All of it came to pass. It is said, moreover, that as he was approaching Carthage and stepping off his ship, the same figure met him on the shore. Certainly he himself, when he had fallen ill, reading the future from the past and misfortune from his success, abandoned hope of recovery, though none of his household despaired of it.
27.4| Now, is not the story I shall set out, just as I received it, both more terrifying and no less wonderful?
27.5| There was a house at Athens, spacious and capacious, but notorious and pestilential. In the silence of the night a sound of iron could be heard, and, if you listened more closely, the clanking of chains, at first far off, then close at hand. Presently there appeared an apparition: an old man, worn away with leanness and filth, with a long beard and bristling hair; he wore fetters on his legs and chains on his hands, and shook them.
27.6| So those who lived there spent grim and dreadful nights awake through fear; sickness followed the sleeplessness and, as the terror grew, death. For in the daytime too, although the apparition had gone, the memory of the apparition wandered before their eyes, and the fear outlasted the causes of the fear. The house was therefore deserted, condemned to solitude, and left wholly to that monster; it was nevertheless advertised, in case anyone ignorant of so great an evil should wish to buy it or to rent it.
27.7| Athenodorus the philosopher arrived in Athens, read the placard, and on hearing the price, since its cheapness was suspicious, he asked about everything and was told; and nonetheless, or rather all the more, he rented the house. When evening began to come on, he ordered a couch to be made up for him in the first part of the house, called for his writing tablets, a stylus and a lamp, and sent all his people away into the inner rooms; he himself bent his mind, his eyes and his hand to writing, so that an idle mind should not conjure up for itself the phantoms it had heard about and empty fears.
27.8| At first there was the silence of night, as there is everywhere; then iron began to clank and chains to move. He did not raise his eyes or lay down his stylus, but steeled his mind and held it as a screen before his ears. Then the din grew louder and came nearer, and was heard now as if on the threshold, now as if inside the threshold. He looked round, and saw and recognized the figure that had been described to him.
27.9| It stood and beckoned with a finger, like one calling him. He, for his part, signed with his hand for it to hold on a moment, and bent once more over his tablets and stylus. As he wrote, the thing clanked its chains above his head. He looked round and saw it beckoning exactly as before; and without delay he picked up the lamp and followed.
27.10| It went with slow steps, as though weighed down by its chains. After it had turned aside into the house's courtyard, it suddenly melted away and deserted its companion. Left alone, he plucked some grass and leaves and laid them on the spot as a marker.
27.11| The next day he approached the magistrates and urged them to order that spot excavated. Bones were found, inserted in chains and entangled with them, which the body, rotted by time and the earth, had left bare and eaten away in the fetters. They were gathered up and buried at public expense. After that, once the spirit had been laid to rest with due rites, the house was free of it.
27.12| These things, indeed, I believe on the word of those who affirm them; what follows I can affirm to others myself. I have a freedman who is not without education. His younger brother used to sleep in the same bed with him. The boy seemed to see someone sitting on the couch, bringing blades up to his head, and even cutting the hair off the very crown of it. When day dawned, he himself was found shorn around the crown, and the hair was found lying there.
27.13| A short space of time passed, and then a second, similar event made the first believable. A slave boy was sleeping among a number of others in the pages' quarters. Two figures in white tunics came in through the windows (so he tells it), cut his hair as he lay there, and went back the way they had come. Daylight showed that he too had been shorn, with the hair scattered around him.
27.14| Nothing remarkable followed, except perhaps that I was not put on trial, as I would have been if Domitian, under whom these things happened, had lived longer. For in his desk was found an indictment of me submitted by Carus; from which it can be conjectured that, since it is the custom of the accused to let their hair grow long, the cutting of my slaves' hair was a sign that the danger hanging over me had been driven off.
27.15| So I beg you to bring your learning to bear on this. The matter is worthy of long and careful consideration on your part; nor am I myself unworthy to be granted the wealth of your knowledge.
27.16| You may even argue on both sides, as you usually do, but argue more strongly on one of them, so as not to send me away in suspense and uncertainty, since my reason for consulting you was to stop being in doubt. Farewell.
28.0| Pliny to his friend Septicius
28.1| You say that certain people have censured me before you, on the grounds that I praise my friends beyond measure at every opportunity.
28.2| I acknowledge the charge; I even embrace it. For what is more honourable than the fault of kindness? Yet who are these people, who know my friends better than I do? But even granting that they do, why do they begrudge me a most happy mistake? For even if my friends are not such as I proclaim them to be, I am still fortunate in that they seem so to me.
28.3| So let them turn this perverse carefulness on others; there are plenty of people who call finding fault with their friends good judgment. They will never persuade me to think that my friends are loved by me too much. Farewell.
29.0| Pliny to his friend Montanus
29.1| You will laugh, then you will be indignant, then you will laugh again, when you read what you could not believe unless you read it.
29.2| On the Tiburtine Road, within the first milestone (I noticed it very recently), there is a monument to Pallas inscribed as follows: "To him the senate, for his loyalty and devotion towards his patrons, decreed the insignia of a praetor and fifteen million sesterces, and he was content with the honour."
29.3| For my part, I have never admired things that come more often from fortune than from judgment; but this inscription above all reminded me how farcical and absurd are the honours that are sometimes flung away into this mud, into this filth, honours which, to crown it all, that gallows-bird dared both to accept and to refuse, and even to hand down to posterity as an example of moderation.
29.4| But why am I indignant? It is better to laugh, so that those whose good fortune carries them to the point of being laughed at may not think they have achieved something great. Farewell.
30.0| Pliny to his friend Genitor
30.1| It torments me that you have lost, as you write, a pupil of the highest promise. How could I fail to know that your studies were hindered by his illness and his death, since you are most scrupulous in every duty, and love most lavishly all those of whom you approve?
30.2| Even here the business of the city pursues me; for there is no lack of people who make me their judge or arbitrator.
30.3| Add to this the complaints of the country people, who, after my long absence, use my ears, and misuse them, as their right. There is also the pressing need to let my farms, which is extremely troublesome, so rare is it to find suitable tenants.
30.4| For these reasons my studies are snatched on sufferance, but I do study. For I am writing something and I am reading; but when I read, the comparison shows me how badly I write, though you give me confidence,
30.5| you who compare my little books on the avenging of Helvidius with Demosthenes' speech Against Meidias. I did indeed have that speech in my hands while I was composing them, not in order to rival it (that would be shameless and almost mad), but still to imitate and follow it, as far as the difference between the greatest talent and the least, or the unlikeness of the cases, would allow. Farewell.
31.0| Pliny to his friend Cornutus
31.1| Claudius Pollio longs to be loved by you, and he deserves it, first for this very longing, and then because he himself is devoted to you; for hardly anyone asks for that unless he gives it. He is in other respects an upright man, honest, quiet, and modest almost beyond measure, if anyone can be modest beyond measure.
31.2| When we served in the army together, I observed him not merely as a fellow soldier. He commanded a cavalry wing a thousand strong; and when the consular legate ordered me to go through the accounts of the cavalry wings and the cohorts, just as I found great and shameful greed in some, and negligence to match, so in him I found the highest integrity and anxious care.
31.3| Afterwards, when he was promoted to the most distinguished procuratorships, no opportunity corrupted him or turned him aside from his inborn love of honesty; he was never puffed up by success; he never let the variety of his posts break his unbroken reputation for kindness; and he met his labours with the same firmness of mind with which he now endures his leisure.
31.4| That leisure, indeed, he interrupted and set aside for a little while, greatly to his credit, when he was taken on by our friend Corellius as his assistant in buying and distributing land under the generosity of the Emperor Nerva. And what glory he deserves for having pleased, above all others, so great a man who had so wide a field of choice!
31.5| How respectfully, too, and how faithfully he cherishes his friends you can believe from the last wishes of many of them, among them Annius Bassus, a citizen of the greatest weight, whose memory he prolongs and extends with such grateful praise that he has published a book about his life; for he reveres literature as he does the other good arts.
31.6| That is a fine thing, and one to be approved for its very rarity, since most people remember the dead only so far as to complain about them.
31.7| This man, who is so very eager for your friendship, believe me, embrace him, take hold of him, even invite him, and love him as though you were repaying a favour. For in the duty of love the one who began first is not to be put under obligation but rewarded. Farewell.
32.0| Pliny to his wife's grandfather Fabatus
32.1| I am delighted that my friend Tiro's arrival gave you pleasure; and I am especially glad at what you write, that a great many slaves were set free on the opportunity offered by the proconsul's presence. For I desire our native town to be enlarged in every respect, but above all in the number of its citizens, since that is the surest ornament of towns.
32.2| I am also pleased, not as a seeker after popularity, but still pleased, by your adding that you and I were celebrated with votes of thanks and with praise. For, as Xenophon says, "praise is the sweetest thing to hear," at any rate if you think you deserve it. Farewell.
33.0| Pliny to his friend Tacitus
33.1| I predict, and my prediction does not deceive me, that your histories will be immortal; all the more, I will frankly confess, do I long to be included in them.
33.2| For if we usually take care that our likeness should be portrayed by the best artist available, ought we not to wish that our deeds should find a writer and herald like you?
33.3| So I point it out to you, although it cannot escape your diligence, since it is in the public records; still, I point it out to make you the more ready to believe that it will please me if you will adorn with your genius and your testimony an act of mine whose merit grew through its danger.
33.4| The senate had assigned me, together with Herennius Senecio, as the province of Baetica's advocate against Baebius Massa, and after Massa had been condemned it had decreed that his property should be held in public custody. Senecio, having learned that the consuls would be free to hear applications, came to me and said: "With the same unity with which we carried out the prosecution laid upon us, let us go to the consuls and ask them not to allow the property to be dispersed which it is their duty to hold in custody."
33.5| I answered: "Since we were appointed advocates by the senate, consider whether you think our role has been completed now that the senate's inquiry is over." And he said: "You will set yourself whatever limit you like, since you have no tie with the province except the one created by your own service to it, and that a recent one; I myself was both born there and was quaestor in it."
33.6| Then I said: "If you have fixed and settled on this, I will follow you, so that, if any ill will comes of it, it may not be yours alone."
33.7| We went to the consuls; Senecio said what the matter called for, and I added a few points. We had scarcely fallen silent when Massa complained that Senecio had played the part not of a loyal advocate but of a bitter personal enemy, and demanded that he be charged with impiety.
33.8| Everyone shuddered; but I said: "Most distinguished consuls, I fear that Massa, by his silence, has charged me with collusion, because he has not demanded that I too be charged." These words were taken up at once, and afterwards much talked of and praised.
33.9| Indeed, the deified Nerva (for even as a private citizen he paid attention to whatever was rightly done in public life) sent me a most weighty letter, and congratulated not only me but also the age, which had been granted an example (so he wrote) like those of the ancients.
33.10| These things, whatever they are worth, you will make better known, more famous and greater; and yet I do not ask you to go beyond the measure of what was actually done. For history ought not to overstep the truth, and for honourable deeds the truth is enough. Farewell.
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