Pliny the Younger & Pliny the Elder · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
1.0| Pliny to his friend Septicius
1.1| I completed the journey comfortably, except that some of my people fell ill in the scorching heat.
1.2| My reader Encolpius, indeed, the one who is both my serious business and my delight, had his throat so irritated by the dust that he coughed up blood. How sad this would be for him, and how bitter for me, if the man to whom literature owes all his charm should be made unfit for literature! Who after that would read my little books like this, or love them like this?
1.3| Whom would my ears follow like this? But the gods promise happier things. The bleeding has stopped, the pain has subsided. Besides, he himself is careful, we are anxious, the doctors are attentive. In addition, the healthiness of the climate, the seclusion and the quiet promise as much recovery as they do leisure. Farewell.
2.0| Pliny to his friend Calvisius
2.1| Other people set off for their estates in order to come back richer; I go in order to come back poorer. I had sold my grape harvest to dealers who were competing to buy it. The price was tempting, both what it was then and what it seemed likely to become.
2.2| Hope was disappointed. It would have been simple to give everyone the same rebate, but not quite fair. And to me it seems an especially fine thing to practise justice at home as well as abroad, in small matters as well as great, in one's own affairs as well as in other people's. For if wrongdoings are equal, so also is the praise.
2.3| So I gave everyone, so that no one "should go away from me without a gift," one eighth of the price he had paid; then I looked after separately those who had laid out the largest sums on their purchases. For they had both helped me more and suffered a greater loss themselves.
2.4| Accordingly, for those who had bought for more than ten thousand, I added to that common and, as it were, public eighth a tenth of the amount by which they had exceeded ten thousand.
2.5| I fear that I have not made this clear enough; I will show it more plainly by a calculation. If any had happened to buy for fifteen thousand, they received both an eighth of fifteen thousand and a tenth of five thousand.
2.6| Besides this, when I reflected that some had paid back a good part of what they owed, some a little, and some nothing, I thought it by no means right that those whom good faith in payment had not made equal should be made equal by the generosity of the rebate.
2.7| So once again I remitted to those who had paid a tenth of what they had paid. For by this means, it seemed, I could most fittingly both show gratitude to each for the past according to his deserts, and also entice everyone for the future not only to buy but also to pay.
2.8| This method, or this good nature, has cost me a great deal, but it was worth it. For throughout the whole district both the novelty of the rebate and its form are praised. And of those very people whom I treated not, as the saying goes, by one measuring rod, but separately and by degrees, the better and more honest each man was, the more obliged to me he went away, having found that with me it is not the case that "in one honour are held both the base man and the noble." Farewell.
3.0| Pliny to his friend Sparsus
3.1| You indicate that the book I sent you most recently pleases you perhaps most of all my works. A certain very learned man is of the same opinion.
3.2| This leads me all the more to think that neither of you is mistaken, because it is not credible that both of you are mistaken, and also because I like to flatter myself. For I want each of my latest pieces to seem the most finished, and so even now, against that book, I favour a speech which I recently made public and which I shall share with you as soon as I find a reliable letter-carrier.
3.3| I have raised your expectations, and I fear the speech, once taken in hand, may disappoint them. Meanwhile, however, wait for it as though it will please you; and perhaps it will. Farewell.
4.0| Pliny to his friend Caninius
4.1| You are doing very well to prepare to write about the Dacian war. For what subject is so fresh, so rich, so lofty, what subject, in short, so poetic and, though dealing with the most real of events, so like a legend?
4.2| You will tell of new rivers let loose over the land, new bridges thrown across rivers, mountain precipices occupied by camps, a king driven from his palace, driven even from life, yet never despairing; on top of this, two triumphs celebrated, one of them the first over a nation until then unconquered, the other the last.
4.3| There is one difficulty, but it is the greatest: to match these things in words is an arduous and immense task, even for your genius, though it soars to the greatest heights and grows with the grandest works. There is some labour too in this, that the barbarous and savage names, above all the name of the king himself, should not jar in Greek verse.
4.4| But there is nothing that cannot be softened by skill and care, even if it cannot be overcome. Besides, if Homer is allowed to contract, lengthen and bend words, even soft and Greek ones, for the smoothness of his verse, why should a similar boldness not be allowed to you, especially when it is not self-indulgent but necessary?
4.5| So, by the right of poets, call upon the gods, and among the gods upon him whose deeds, works and plans you are about to relate; let out the ropes, spread your sails, and, if ever before, be carried along with all your genius. For why should I not also be poetic with a poet?
4.6| I make this bargain with you now: send me each part as soon as you have finished it, or rather even before you finish it, just as it is, fresh and rough and still like things newly born.
4.7| You will answer that pieces cannot please as much as a connected whole, or things begun as much as things completed. I know. And so they will be judged by me as beginnings, looked at as limbs, and they will await your final polish in my desk. Allow me to have this pledge of your love on top of all the others, that I should know even those things which you would wish no one to know.
4.8| In sum, I may perhaps be able to approve and praise your writings the more, the more slowly and carefully you send them out; but I shall love and praise you yourself the more, the more quickly and carelessly you send them. Farewell.
5.0| Pliny to his friend Geminus
5.1| Our Macrinus has received a grievous wound: he has lost a wife of singular example, even if she had lived in an earlier age. He lived with her thirty-nine years without quarrel, without offence. What respect she paid her husband, while herself deserving the highest! How many and how great virtues, taken from different ages, she gathered and blended!
5.2| Macrinus has indeed a great consolation, that he held so great a good for so long, but from this he is the more embittered that he has lost it; for with the enjoyment of pleasures the pain of lacking them grows.
5.3| I shall therefore be anxious for my dearest friend until he can admit distractions and bear the scar, which nothing brings on so well as necessity itself, long time and the satiety of grief. Farewell.
6.0| Pliny to his friend Montanus
6.1| You must already have learned from my letter that I recently noticed the monument of Pallas under this inscription: "To him the senate, for his loyalty and dutifulness toward his patrons, decreed the insignia of a praetor and fifteen million sesterces, being content with the honour of it."
6.2| Afterwards it seemed to me worth the trouble to look for the decree of the senate itself. I found it so copious and lavish that that most arrogant inscription seemed modest and even lowly. Let them come together and mingle, I do not say those ancients, the Africani, Achaici, Numantini, but these nearest, Marius, Sulla, Pompey (I do not wish to go further): they will lie below the praises of Pallas.
6.3| Am I to think that those who voted that were refined or wretched? I would say refined, if refinement became a senate; wretched, but no one is so wretched as to be forced to that. Was it ambition then and the lust to advance? But who is so mad as to wish to advance through his own and the public disgrace in a state in which the benefit of the most flourishing rank was that one might be the first in the senate to praise Pallas?
6.4| I pass over that the praetorian insignia are offered to Pallas, a slave (offered, of course, by slaves); I pass over that they vote that he should be not only urged but compelled to the use of gold rings; for it would be against the majesty of the senate if a praetorian used iron ones.
6.5| These are slight things and to be passed over; this is to be recorded, that in the name of Pallas the senate (and the senate-house has not been purified since) in the name of Pallas the senate gives thanks to Caesar because he himself had honoured him with the most honourable mention and had given the senate the power to testify its goodwill toward him.
6.6| For what is fairer for the senate than to seem sufficiently grateful to Pallas? It is added: "That Pallas, to whom all confess themselves obliged each to his own share, may receive the fruit of his singular loyalty and singular industry, most deservedly." You would believe that the bounds of empire had been extended and armies restored to the state.
6.7| To this is added: "Since no occasion of generosity could be presented to the senate and people of Rome more welcome than if it should fall to them to increase the means of the most abstinent and most faithful guardian of the emperor's wealth." This, then, was the wish of the senate, this the special joy of the people, this the most welcome occasion of generosity, if it should fall to them to increase the means of Pallas by draining the public wealth.
6.8| Now what follows? That the senate had indeed wished to decree that fifteen million sesterces be given from the treasury, and that the further his mind was from desires of that kind, the more earnestly they begged the parent of the state to compel him to yield to the senate.
6.9| This alone was lacking, that the matter should be dealt with Pallas by public authority, that Pallas should be asked to give way to the senate, that Caesar himself, as patron, should be called in to that most arrogant abstinence, that he should not scorn fifteen million sesterces. He scorned them, which was the only thing he could do, when such wealth was publicly offered, more arrogantly than if he had accepted.
6.10| Yet the senate bore even this, like one complaining, with praises, in these words: but since the best of emperors and parent of the state, asked by Pallas, had wished that part of the motion which concerned giving him fifteen million sesterces from the treasury to be dropped, the senate testified that it had gladly and deservedly begun to decree this sum among the other honours to Pallas for his loyalty and diligence, but that in this matter too it yielded to the will of its emperor, whom it thought it a sin to oppose in anything.
6.11| Picture Pallas as it were interposing a veto on the decree of the senate and moderating his honours, and refusing fifteen million sesterces as too much, while he had accepted the praetorian insignia as less;
6.12| picture Caesar obeying the prayers, or rather the command, of a freedman before the senate (for a freedman commands his patron, whom he asks in the senate); picture the senate testifying on every side that it had deservedly and gladly begun to decree this sum among the other honours to Pallas and would have gone on, had it not been obeying the will of the emperor, whom it was a sin to oppose in anything. So that Pallas should not draw fifteen million sesterces from the treasury, there was need of his own modesty and the senate's compliance, which in this matter above all would not have complied had it thought it a sin in any matter not to comply.
6.13| Do you think this is the end? Wait, and hear greater things: "In particular, since it is useful that the emperor's most ready kindness toward the praise and rewards of the deserving be made known everywhere, and above all in those places where the officials in charge of his affairs might be spurred to imitation, and since the most approved loyalty and blamelessness of Pallas could by example rouse the zeal for so honourable a rivalry, that what the best of emperors had read out in the most distinguished order on the 10th day before the Kalends of February just past, and the decrees of the senate made on those matters, be engraved in bronze, and that this bronze be fixed beside the statue of the deified Julius in armour."
6.14| It seemed too little that the senate-house should witness such disgraces: a most frequented place was chosen, in which things to be read by those present and by those to come might be set forth. It was resolved to record in bronze all the honours of a most fastidious slave, both those he refused and those he accepted so far as it concerned the decreers. The praetorian insignia of Pallas were incised and carved on public and eternal monuments, like ancient treaties, like sacred laws.
6.15| Such was the (what shall I call it? I do not know) of the emperor, of the senate, of Pallas himself, that they wished Pallas's insolence, Caesar's endurance, the senate's abasement to be fixed before the eyes of all. Nor were they ashamed to put forward a reason for the disgrace, an excellent and fine reason, that by the example of Pallas the rest might be roused by rewards to a zeal of rivalry.
6.16| Such was the cheapness of honours, even of those which Pallas did not disdain. Yet there were found men born in honourable station who sought and desired what they saw promised to slaves and given to a freedman.
6.17| How glad I am that I did not fall in those times, of which I am so ashamed as if I had lived in them! I do not doubt that you are affected in the same way. I know how lively and free your spirit is: so it is easier that you should feel as I do; although I may have vented my indignation in some places perhaps beyond the measure of a letter, you may believe that I have grieved too little rather than too much. Farewell.
7.0| Pliny to his friend Tacitus
7.1| Neither as master to master nor as pupil to pupil (for so you write), but as master to pupil (for you are the master, I the opposite; and indeed you call me back to school, while I am still stretching out the Saturnalia), you have sent a book.
7.2| Could I have made a longer hyperbaton, and by this very thing prove that I am one who ought to be called not only not your master but not even your pupil? Yet I shall assume the role of master, and exercise on your book the right you gave, all the more freely because I am sending you nothing from myself meanwhile with which you may take your revenge. Farewell.
8.0| Pliny to his friend Romanus
8.1| Have you ever seen the spring of the Clitumnus? If not yet (and I think not yet; otherwise you would have told me), see it; I saw it recently, and I am sorry for my slowness.
8.2| A moderate hill rises, wooded and shady with ancient cypress. Beneath it the spring comes out and is forced forth in several veins, but unequal; and having struggled out, the pool it makes opens in a broad lap, pure and glassy, so that you can count the coins you throw in and the shining pebbles.
8.3| From there it is driven on, not by the slope of the place but by its own abundance and, as it were, weight, still a spring and already a very ample river, even bearing ships; these, meeting it and straining in opposite directions, it lets through and carries over, so strong that where it hurries itself, though over level ground, it is not helped by oars, yet the same stream is overcome with the greatest difficulty by oars and poles when going against it.
8.4| It is pleasant for those drifting for sport and play, as they turn their course, to vary toil with ease and ease with toil. The banks are clothed with much ash, much poplar, which the clear stream counts, as if submerged, in a green image. The chill of the water would rival snows, nor does its colour yield.
8.5| Nearby lies an ancient and sacred temple. Clitumnus himself stands there, clothed and adorned in the bordered toga; the oracular lots show a present and even prophetic divinity. Around are scattered several shrines, and as many gods. Each has his own worship, his own name, and some even their own springs. For besides that one, who is like the parent of the rest, there are smaller ones, distinct in their source; but they mingle with the river, which is crossed by a bridge.
8.6| That is the boundary of the sacred and the profane: in the upper part only sailing is permitted, below swimming too. The people of Hispellum, to whom the deified Augustus gave that place, provide a bath at public cost, and also lodging. Nor are there lacking villas which, following the loveliness of the river, stand at its edge.
8.7| In sum, there will be nothing from which you will not take pleasure. For you will study too: you will read many things by many people inscribed on every column and every wall, by which that spring and god are celebrated. You will praise many, you will laugh at some; though you, with your kindness, will laugh at none. Farewell.
9.0| Pliny to his friend Ursus
9.1| For a long time I have taken neither book nor stylus in hand, for a long time I have not known what leisure is, what rest, what that idle yet pleasant doing nothing and being nothing: so many are the affairs of the Samici that allow me neither to withdraw nor to study.
9.2| For no studies are worth so much that the duty of friendship should be deserted, which the studies themselves teach us to guard most scrupulously. Farewell.
10.0| Pliny to his wife's grandfather Fabatus
10.1| The more you long to see great-grandchildren from us, the sadder you will be to hear that your granddaughter has miscarried, since in her girlish way she did not know she was pregnant, and for that reason omitted certain things that ought to be observed by pregnant women, and did things that ought to be omitted. She has atoned for this error with grave proofs, being brought into the greatest danger.
10.2| So, as you must take it hard that your old age is left, as it were, without descendants prepared, so you ought to give thanks to the gods that for the present they have denied you great-grandchildren in such a way as to preserve your granddaughter, to give them back later; and the hope of those is made more certain for us by this very fruitfulness, though it has been tested with too little success.
10.3| With the same words with which I exhort myself I now exhort, advise and encourage you. For you do not long for great-grandchildren more ardently than I for children, to whom I seem to be about to leave, from my side and yours, an easy road to offices, names widely heard of, and ancestral images that are not newly made. Let them only be born and change this grief of ours into joy. Farewell.
11.0| Pliny to his Hispulla
11.1| When I think of your affection toward your brother's daughter, softer even than a mother's indulgence, I understand that what is later must be announced to you first, so that joy taken in advance may leave no room for anxiety. Yet I fear that even after rejoicing you may fall back into fear, and so rejoice that she is freed from danger as to shudder at once that she was in danger.
11.2| Already cheerful, restored to herself and to me, she begins to recover, and measures the crisis passed by her convalescence. She was otherwise in the greatest danger (it may be said now without harm), through no fault of her own, though partly of her age. Hence a miscarriage, and a sad trial of a womb unknown.
11.3| So although it has not been your lot to console yourself for the loss of your brother by a grandson or granddaughter of his, remember that this is deferred rather than denied, since she is safe from whom it can be hoped. At the same time excuse the mishap to your father; it is one that women are readier to pardon. Farewell.
12.0| Pliny to his friend Minicianus
12.1| For this one day only I make my excuse: Titinius Capito is to recite, and I do not know whether I am more obliged or more eager to hear him. He is an excellent man and to be counted among the chief ornaments of the age. He cultivates letters, loves, fosters and advances the studious, a harbour, bay and lap of many who compose something, an example to all, and finally, for literature itself, now growing old, the restorer and reformer.
12.2| He offers his house to those who recite, and attends the recitations not only at his own house with wonderful kindness; to me at least, if only I was in the city, he has never failed. Moreover, it is the more shameful not to return the favour, the more honourable the reason for returning it.
12.3| Or, if I were worn out in lawsuits, should I believe myself bound to the man who attends my appearances in court, whereas now, because all my business and all my care is in studies, am I less obliged to one who attends with such diligence, in a matter in which I can be obliged, I will not say alone, but certainly most?
12.4| But if I owed him no return, no mutual services, as it were, I should still be drawn either by the man's talent, most beautiful and, amid extreme severity, most sweet, or by the honourable nature of his subject. He is writing the deaths of famous men, among them of some very dear to me.
12.5| I seem therefore to be performing a dutiful office, and to be present, as it were at funeral eulogies, late indeed but so much the truer, of those whose funerals I was not permitted to attend. Farewell.
13.0| Pliny to his friend Genialis
13.1| I approve that you read my little books with your father. It furthers your progress to learn from a most eloquent man what is to be praised and what blamed, and at the same time to be so trained that you grow accustomed to speaking the truth.
13.2| You see whom to follow, whose footsteps you ought to fill. O happy you, to whom has fallen one and the same model, the best and the closest, who finally have as the man to be imitated the very one to whom nature wished you to be most similar! Farewell.
14.0| Pliny to his friend Aristo
14.1| Since you are most skilled in both private and public law, of which the senatorial part is a portion, I desire to hear from you above all whether I erred recently in the senate or not, not so as to correct the past (for it is late) but so that I may be instructed for the future if anything like it should occur.
14.2| You will say: "Why are you asking what you were bound to know?" The slavery of former times, as of other excellent arts, so too of senatorial law, has brought a kind of forgetfulness and ignorance.
14.3| For how few are so patient as to want to learn what they will not have in use? Add that it is difficult to retain what you have received unless you practise it. And so restored liberty finds us raw and inexperienced; kindled by its sweetness, we are forced to do some things before we know them.
14.4| Yet it was the institution of old that from our elders we learned not only by ear but also by eye what we should ourselves soon do and in turn hand down to those younger.
14.5| Hence young men were at once trained in the camp's service, so that by obeying they would grow accustomed to commanding, and to leading while they followed; hence those about to seek office stood by the doors of the senate-house, spectators of public counsel before they were sharers in it.
14.6| Each had his own father as master, or he who had no father had the foremost and oldest as a father. What power belonged to those moving a motion, what right to those giving an opinion, what force to magistrates, what freedom to the rest, where to yield and where to resist, what the time for silence, what the manner of speaking, what the distinction between opposing opinions, what the follow-up for those adding something to earlier speakers, in short the whole senatorial custom, they were taught by examples, which is the most trustworthy way of learning.
14.7| But we were indeed young men in the camps; but when courage was suspect and idleness in esteem, when leaders had no authority and soldiers no respect, when nowhere was command, nowhere obedience, when all was loose, in confusion, and even turned to the contrary, in short, more to be forgotten than held on to.
14.8| We too looked upon the senate-house, but a senate-house trembling and tongue-tied, when to say what you wished was dangerous, and what you did not wish, wretched. What could be learned then, what did it help to have learned, when the senate was summoned either to the utmost idleness or to the utmost wickedness, and, kept sometimes for mockery, sometimes for grief, never gave judgment on serious matters, often on sad ones?
14.9| The same evils we saw and endured for many years, already as senators, already as sharers in those evils; by them our talents were dulled, broken and bruised for the future as well.
14.10| It is a short time (for all time is the shorter the happier it is) in which we are allowed to know what we are, allowed to practise what we know. For which reason I ask all the more justly, first that you grant pardon to an error, if there is any error, then that you remedy it with your knowledge, since you have always made it your concern to treat public law and private alike, ancient and recent alike, rare and everyday alike.
14.11| And I think that even to those men, to whom the frequent handling of very many matters allowed nothing to be unknown, the kind of question I bring to you was either not well worn or even untried. Hence I am the more excusable if I have perhaps slipped, and you the more worthy of praise, if you can teach even what you may not have learned, since it lies in obscurity.
14.12| The matter before us concerned the freedmen of the consul Afranius Dexter, killed, it was uncertain whether by his own hand or by theirs, in wickedness or in obedience. One speaker (who? I; but it matters not) thought they should be freed from punishment after an examination under torture, another that they should be relegated to an island, another that they should be punished with death. The difference between these opinions was so great that they could not be anything but separate.
14.13| For what has killing in common with banishing? By heaven, no more than banishing with acquitting; although the opinion that acquits is somewhat nearer to the banisher's than the one that kills is (for each of the two leaves life, the latter takes it away), while meanwhile those who punished with death and those who banished were sitting together and putting off the disagreement by a temporary pretence of concord.
14.14| I demanded that the three opinions should stand each with its own number, and that two should not join in a short truce. I required, therefore, that those who thought they should be put to capital punishment should leave the banisher, and not meanwhile gather against the acquitters only to part from each other soon, since it would matter little whether the same thing displeased those whom the same thing had not pleased.
14.15| This also seemed to me quite amazing: that the one who had proposed that the freedmen be banished and the slaves put to death was obliged to have his opinion divided; whereas the one who would punish the freedmen with death was counted with the banisher. For if the opinion of one man had to be divided because it comprised two things, I could not find how the opinion of two men proposing such different things could be joined.
14.16| And indeed allow me to give you the account of my judgment here as there, now the matter is finished as though it were still open, and to join at leisure what I then said in pieces, with many shouting me down.
14.17| Let us suppose that three judges in all were given for this case; that to one it seemed right that the freedmen perish, to another that they be banished, to a third that they be acquitted. Will two opinions, forces combined, destroy the last, or will each separately be worth as much as the other, and the first be no more able to be joined to the second than the second to the third?
14.18| Therefore in the senate too opinions that are stated as different ought to be counted as opposed. But if one and the same man proposed that they should be put to death and banished, could they, by the opinion of one man, both perish and be banished? Would it in fact be thought a single opinion at all, which joined such different things?
14.19| How then, when one proposes punishment and another banishment, can that seem a single opinion which is stated by two, which would not seem single if stated by one? What? Does the law not plainly teach that the opinions of the one who kills and the one who banishes must be separated, when it orders the division to be made thus: "You who vote for this, go to this side; you who vote for anything else, go to that side where you stand"? Examine and weigh each word: "you who vote for this," that is, who think they should be banished, "to this side," that is, to the one on which sits he who proposed banishment.
14.20| From which it is clear that those who think they should be killed cannot remain on the same side. "Anything else": you note that the law, not content with saying "else," has added "all." Is there then any doubt that those who kill hold quite other views than those who banish? "Go to that side where you stand": does not the law itself seem to summon, force and push those who disagree over to the contrary side? Does the consul not also point out where each man must stay and where he must cross over, showing it not only by the solemn words but by hand and gesture?
14.21| But it will happen, they say, that if the opinions of the killer and the banisher are divided, the one that acquits will prevail. What is that to those voting? They certainly should not fight with every art and every device to prevent what is milder from happening. Yet those who punish and those who banish ought to be compared first with the acquitters, and then with each other. Just as at certain spectacles the lot sets someone aside and keeps him to contend with the victor, so in the senate there are some first contests, some second, and of two opinions the one that has come out higher awaits the third.
14.22| What of the fact that when the first opinion is approved the rest are done away with? By what reasoning, then, can there fail to be one and the same place for opinions, of which none exists afterwards?
14.23| I shall put it more plainly. Unless, when the one who banishes states his opinion, those who punish with death at once go off at the start to the other side, they will afterwards dissent in vain from the one with whom they had agreed a little before.
14.24| But why do I sound like one teaching, when I wish to learn whether opinions ought to be divided or one should go to the several sides? I did indeed obtain what I asked; nonetheless I ask whether I ought to have asked it. How did I obtain it? The man who held that the extreme penalty should be exacted, overcome, I do not know whether by right, but certainly by the fairness of my demand, dropped his own opinion and joined the banisher, fearing, of course, that if the opinions were divided, which otherwise seemed likely, the one that held the men should be acquitted would prevail by numbers. For there were far more in this single one than in either of the two singly.
14.25| Then those too who were drawn by his authority, deserted when he went over, left the opinion abandoned by its very author, and followed as a deserter the man whom they had followed as leader.
14.26| So from three opinions two were made, and of the two one held, the third having been thrown out, which, since it could not beat both, chose by which of them it would be beaten. Farewell.
15.0| Pliny to his friend Junior
15.1| I have burdened you in dispatching so many volumes together, but I burdened you first because you had demanded them, and then because you had written that the vintages there are so thin that I clearly knew you would have time, as the saying is, to read a book.
15.2| The same is reported from my little farms. So I too shall be allowed to write things for you to read, provided only there is wherewithal for paper to be bought; or necessarily whatever we write, good or bad, we shall blot out. Farewell.
16.0| Pliny to his friend Paternus
16.1| The illnesses of my household have worn me out, and deaths too, and of young people. There are two consolations, by no means equal to so great a grief, yet consolations: one the ease of manumitting (for I seem not to have lost them wholly untimely, since I lost them already free), the other that I allow even slaves to make a sort of wills, and I keep them as legal.
16.2| They give instructions and ask what seems good; I obey as though commanded. They divide, give, leave, only within the household; for to slaves the house is a kind of commonwealth and, as it were, a state.
16.3| But although I rest in these consolations, I am weakened and broken by the very same kindliness that led me to allow this. Yet I would not on that account wish to become harder. Nor am I unaware that others call misfortunes of this kind nothing more than a loss, and for that reason seem to themselves great and wise men. I do not know whether they are great and wise; men they are not.
16.4| For it belongs to a man to be affected by grief, to feel it, yet to resist and admit consolations, not to need no consolations.
16.5| But of this I have perhaps said more than I ought; yet fewer than I wished. There is, after all, a certain pleasure in grieving as well, especially if you weep in the bosom of a friend, with whom for your tears either praise or pardon is ready. Farewell.
17.0| Pliny to his friend Macrinus
17.1| Is the weather there too harsh and stormy? Here are constant tempests and frequent floods. The Tiber has overflowed its bed and is spread deep over the lower banks;
17.2| although drained by the channel that our most far-sighted emperor made, it presses on the valleys, floats over the fields, and wherever the ground is level, water is seen instead of ground. Then the rivers it is accustomed to receive and carry down mixed with itself it drives back, as though meeting them, and so covers with foreign waters fields which it does not itself touch.
17.3| The Anio, the most delicate of rivers and for that reason, as it were, invited and held by the villas lying beside it, has broken and carried off a great part of the groves that shade it; it has undermined mountains, and, blocked in many places by the mass of falling earth, while seeking the road it lost, it has driven against roofs and cast and lifted itself over ruins.
17.4| Those whom that storm caught on higher ground have seen in one place the furnishings of the rich and heavy household goods, in another the implements of the country, here oxen, ploughs and drivers, there herds loosed and free, and amid these tree trunks or beams and roof-tops of villas floating about in various directions far and wide.
17.5| Nor were even those places free from the evil to which the river did not climb. For in place of the river there was incessant rain and whirlwinds cast down from the clouds, the works by which valuable lands are fenced were thrown down, monuments shaken and even shattered. Many were crippled, buried and crushed by accidents of this kind, and the losses were increased by mourning.
17.6| I fear that something like this may be happening there, in proportion to the danger, and I ask you, if nothing such has happened, to relieve my anxiety as soon as possible, but also, if such has happened, to report that too. For it makes very little difference whether you suffer adversity or expect it; except that there is a measure to grief, but none to fear. For you grieve as much as you know has happened, you fear as much as can happen. Farewell.
18.0| Pliny to his friend Rufinus
18.1| It is plainly false what is commonly believed, that men's wills are a mirror of their character, since Domitius Tullus has appeared far better in death than in life.
18.2| For although he had offered himself to be courted for his legacy, he left as heir his daughter, whom he held in common with his brother, because he had adopted the girl born to his brother. He remembered his grandsons with very many and very pleasant legacies, and his great-granddaughter too. In sum, everything is full of family affection, and so much the more unexpected.
18.3| So there is varied talk throughout the whole city: some call him false, ungrateful, forgetful, and while attacking him betray themselves by most shameful confessions, complaining about a father, a grandfather and a great-grandfather, as if about a childless man; others on the contrary praise him for this very thing, that he has frustrated the wicked hopes of men whom, in keeping with the manners of the times, it is right to see so deceived. They add also that he was not free to die with another will: for he had not left wealth to his daughter but restored it, the wealth by which he had been enriched through his daughter.
18.4| For Curtilius Mancia, loathing his son-in-law Domitius Lucanus (he was the brother of Tullus), had made that man's daughter, his granddaughter, his heir on the condition that she be released from her father's power. Her father had released her, her uncle had adopted her, and so, the will being circumvented, the brother and partner had by the fraud of adoption called back into his brother's power the emancipated daughter, and indeed with very great wealth.
18.5| Moreover, it had been given to those brothers as if by fate to become rich, from men who most unwillingly made them so. Indeed Domitius Afer, who took them into his name, left a will pronounced eighteen years before, and afterwards so disapproved of it that he had the goods of their father advertised for sale.
18.6| Wonderful his harshness, wonderful their good fortune: his harshness, who cut off from the number of citizens a man whom he had also as a partner in his children; their good fortune, in that the man who had taken their father away stepped into their father's place.
18.7| But this inheritance too, from Afer, like the rest acquired with his brother, had to be passed on to the daughter of his brother, by whom Tullus had been made sole heir and preferred to his daughter, so as to be won over. All the more praiseworthy is the will, which family affection, good faith and honour wrote, in which finally thanks were returned to all his connections according to the duty of each, and returned also to his wife.
18.8| She received most charming villas, she received a great sum of money, an excellent and most patient wife, who deserved so much the better of her husband the more she was blamed for marrying. For a woman of famous birth, of approved character, declining in age, long a widow and long since a mother, seemed to have followed, with too little decorum, the marriage of a rich old man so ruined by disease that he could be a loathing to a wife whom he had married young and sound.
18.9| For, twisted and broken in all his limbs, he enjoyed such great wealth only with his eyes, and was not even moved in his little bed except by others; indeed (foul and pitiable to say) he offered his teeth to be washed and rubbed. It was often heard from himself, when he complained of the insults of his helplessness, that every day he licked the fingers of his slaves.
18.10| Yet he lived, and wished to live, chiefly sustained by his wife, who had turned the fault of a marriage begun into glory by her perseverance.
18.11| You have all the talk of the city; for all the talk is Tullus. An auction is awaited: for he was so rich that he furnished very large gardens, on the same day that he bought them, with very many and very ancient statues; so many most beautiful works he had in the storehouses, which he neglected. In return, if there is anything there worthy of a letter, do not hold back.
18.12| For not only are men's ears glad of novelty, but we are also instructed by examples in the plan of life. Farewell.
19.0| Pliny to his friend Maximus
19.1| Literature is both a joy and a solace to me, and nothing is so cheerful that it is not more cheerful through it, nothing so sad that it is not made less sad through it. And so, troubled by my wife's weakness, the danger of my household, and by the death too of certain persons, I have taken refuge in studies as the one relief from grief, which bring it about that I understand misfortunes better but bear them more patiently.
19.2| It is my custom to test by the judgment of friends what I am about to put into men's hands, above all by yours. So now, if ever, give your attention to the book which you will receive with this letter, because I fear that I myself, being sad, have given it too little. For I could force my grief to let me write; to write with a mind free and glad, I was not able. Moreover, as joy comes from studies, so studies come from cheerfulness. Farewell.
20.0| Pliny to his friend Gallus
20.1| We are accustomed to set out on a journey, to cross the sea, to learn things which we neglect when they are placed before our eyes, whether because nature is so arranged that, careless of what is nearest, we pursue the far away, or because desire for all things languishes when the chance is easy, or because we put off, as if we would often see it, what is given us to see whenever we wish to look.
20.2| For whatever reason, there are very many things in our city and beside the city which we know neither by eye nor even by ear, which, if Achaea, Egypt, Asia or any other land fertile in marvels and a good advertiser of them had produced them, we should have heard of, read of and surveyed.
20.3| I myself at least recently heard and saw at once what I had neither heard nor seen before. My wife's grandfather had required me to inspect his estates at Ameria. As I was walking over them, a lake lying below was pointed out to me, called Vadimon; at the same time some incredible things were told.
20.4| I came to the lake itself. It is a lake marked out like a wheel lying flat, equal on all sides: no bay, no slant, everything measured equal, as if hollowed and cut by the hand of a craftsman. Its colour is whiter than blue, greener and deeper; the smell of sulphur, the taste medicinal; it has the power by which broken things are mended. Its extent is moderate, yet it feels the winds and swells with waves.
20.5| On it there is no ship (for it is sacred), but islands float on it, all grassy with reed and rush and whatever else the more fertile marsh and the very edge of the lake bring forth. Each has its own shape and size; all have a rubbed-away margin, because, dashed against the shore or against one another, they often rub and are rubbed. All have the same depth, the same lightness; for they descend with a low root in the manner of a keel.
20.6| This is seen from every side, the same water holding it at once suspended and submerged. At times they are joined and coupled and like a mainland, at times, when the winds disagree, they are scattered, sometimes, left by the calm, they float singly.
20.7| Often the smaller cling to the larger like small boats to cargo ships, often the larger and smaller among themselves take up a kind of race and contest; again, all driven to the same spot, they push forward the land where they have stood, and now here, now there, give the lake back and take it away, and only when they have held the middle do they not make it smaller.
20.8| It is agreed that cattle, following the grass, are accustomed to go onto those islands as onto the farthest bank, and do not perceive the ground to be moving until, carried off from the shore as if brought in and set down, they are frightened at the lake all around; soon, going out where the wind has carried them, they no more feel that they have come down than they felt that they had gone up.
20.9| The same lake is discharged into a river, which, when it has shown itself to the eye for a little way, is swallowed in a cavern and runs hidden deep, and if it received anything before it was drawn under, it keeps it and brings it out.
20.10| I have written you this because I believed it neither less unknown to you than to me nor less welcome. For you too, like me, are delighted by nothing so much as by the works of nature. Farewell.
21.0| Pliny to his friend Arrianus
21.1| As in life, so in studies, I think it most beautiful and most humane to mix severity and good humour, so that the former may not pass into gloom, the latter into wantonness.
21.2| Guided by this principle I punctuate my graver works with sport and jest. To bring these out I chose a most suitable time and place, and so that they might already begin to be accustomed to be heard by idle people and in a dining room, in the month of July, when lawsuits are most at rest, I placed chairs before the couches and seated my friends.
21.3| It happened by chance that on the same morning I was asked to a sudden advocacy, which gave me occasion to speak a preface. For I begged that no one should accuse me of being disrespectful to the work, because, when about to recite, although to friends and a few, that is, to friends twice over, I had not kept away from the forum and business. I added that I follow this order in writing too, putting necessities before pleasures, serious before agreeable, and writing first for friends, then for myself.
21.4| The book was varied both in its little pieces and in its metres. So we are accustomed to do, who put little trust in talent, to avoid the danger of satiety. I recited for two days. The assent of the hearers demanded it; and yet, as others skip some parts and take credit for skipping, I pass over nothing, and even say that I pass over nothing. For I read everything in order to correct everything, which cannot happen for those who recite selections.
21.5| But that is more modest and perhaps more respectful; this, however, more candid and more loving. For he loves who thinks himself so loved that he does not fear boredom; and besides, what do companions offer, if they come together for their own pleasure? He is delicate and like a stranger who prefers to hear a good book of a friend than to make it.
21.6| I do not doubt that you, in keeping with the rest of your affection for me, wish to read as soon as possible this book still new as must. You will read it, but revised, which was the reason for reciting; and yet you already know some parts of it. These, corrected afterwards or, as often happens with a longer delay, made worse, you will recognize again as new and rewritten. For when most things are changed, even those that remain seem changed. Farewell.
22.0| Pliny to his friend Geminus
22.1| Do you know those who, slaves of all passions, are angry at the vices of others as if they envied them, and punish most severely those whom they most imitate? Yet even those who need no one's clemency are befitted by nothing so much as mildness.
22.2| And I think him best and most faultless who pardons others as if he himself sinned every day, and keeps from sin as if he pardoned no one.
22.3| Therefore let us hold this at home, abroad, in every kind of life: to be implacable to ourselves, but placable to those too who know how to grant pardon only to themselves, and let us keep in memory what that gentlest man, and on that account too the greatest, Thrasea, used often to say: "He who hates vices, hates men." You ask perhaps what moved me to write this.
22.4| Recently a certain man (but it is better face to face; although not even then. For I fear that to pursue, to carp at and to relate what I disapprove may conflict with what I am just now advising). Whoever he was, of whatever sort, let him be passed over in silence; to mark him out would serve no purpose as an example, while not marking him out is very much a matter of kindness. Farewell.
23.0| Pliny to his friend Marcellinus
23.1| All studies, all cares, all distractions grief has removed, shaken out and torn from me, the grief which I have taken most heavily from the death of Junius Avitus.
23.2| He had put on the broad stripe in my house, he had been helped by my support in seeking offices; besides, he loved me so, and so respected me, that he used me as a moulder of his character, as a sort of master.
23.3| This is rare among our young men. For how many of them defer, as juniors, to another's age or authority? They are wise at once, they know everything at once, they respect no one, they imitate no one, and they are their own models. But not Avitus, whose chief wisdom was that he thought others wiser than himself, and whose chief learning was that he wanted to learn.
23.4| He was always asking advice about something, either about literature or about the duties of life, and he always went away as though he had been made better; and he had been made better, either by what he had heard or simply by having asked.
23.5| What deference he showed to Servianus, a man of the most exacting standards! As a military tribune he so understood and so won over Servianus, then legate, that when Servianus was moving from Germany to Pannonia he followed him not as a fellow soldier but as a companion and attendant. With what industry, with what modesty he served as quaestor, no less pleasant and agreeable to his consuls (and he served several) than useful to them! With what running about, with what watchfulness he sought this very aedileship of which he has been robbed! It is this, above all, that makes my grief fester.
23.6| His wasted labours rise before my eyes, his fruitless entreaties, and the office he only deserved; there comes back to my mind that broad stripe he assumed in my house, and there come back those first and those last votes of mine for him, those talks, those consultations.
23.7| I am moved by his youth, I am moved by the misfortune of his family. He had an aged mother, he had a wife whom he had married as a girl a year before, he had a daughter whom he had acknowledged only a little while ago. One day has turned so many hopes, so many joys into their opposites.
23.8| Only just designated aedile, a new husband, a new father, he has left behind an office never entered upon, a mother bereaved of her son, a widowed wife, and a daughter who is an orphan and never knew her father. It adds to my tears that I was absent and unaware of the disaster hanging over him, and learned in a single stroke that he had been ill and that he had died, so that I had no fear to accustom me to this heaviest of griefs. I was in such torment as I wrote this that this is all I wrote; for just now I am able neither to think of anything else nor to speak of anything else. Farewell.
24.0| Pliny to his friend Maximus
24.1| My love for you compels me, not to instruct you (for you have no need of an instructor), but still to remind you to hold to what you know and to observe it, or else it would be better not to know it.
24.2| Consider that it is to the province of Achaia that you have been dispatched, that true and pure Greece, where civilization and literature, and even agriculture, are believed to have been first discovered; that you have been sent to set in order the condition of free cities, that is, to men who are most truly men, to free men who are most truly free, who have kept the rights given them by nature through their courage, their merits and their friendship, and finally through treaty and religion.
24.3| Revere the gods their founders and the names of the gods; revere their ancient glory and this very old age, which in a man is venerable and in cities sacred. Pay honour to their antiquity, to their mighty deeds, and to their legends too. Take nothing away from anyone's dignity, nothing from anyone's liberty, nothing even from anyone's boasting.
24.4| Keep before your eyes that this is the land from which our laws were sent to us, which gave us laws not as a conquered people but at our request; that it is Athens you are visiting, Lacedaemon you are governing; and to snatch from them the shadow that remains and the name of liberty that is left to them would be harsh, savage and barbarous.
24.5| You see that doctors, although in sickness there is no difference between slave and free, nevertheless treat the free more gently and more mildly. Remember what each city once was, not so as to look down on it because it has ceased to be so; let there be no arrogance and no harshness.
24.6| And do not be afraid of contempt. Is anyone who holds military command and the rods of office held in contempt, unless he is mean and base, and the first to hold himself in contempt? Power does badly to test its strength by insulting others; respect is badly won by terror; and love is far more effective than fear at gaining what you want. For fear departs if you go away, but love remains; and just as fear turns into hatred, love turns into reverence.
24.7| You, above all, must remember again and again (for I shall repeat it) the title of your office, and interpret to yourself what and how great a thing it is to set in order the condition of free cities. For what is more fitting to a citizen than setting things in order, what more precious than liberty?
24.8| And then, how shameful if order should be turned into overthrow and liberty into slavery! Besides, you are in competition with yourself: you are weighed down by the reputation of your quaestorship, an excellent one, which you brought back with you from Bithynia; you are weighed down by the testimonial of the emperor; you are weighed down by your tribunate, your praetorship, and this very appointment, given you as a kind of reward.
24.9| All the more, then, must you strive not to seem to have been more humane, better and more skilful in a distant province than in one near the city, among slaves than among free men, when sent by lot than when chosen by judgment, when raw and unknown than when tried and approved; since, besides, as you have often heard and often read, it is far more disgraceful to lose praise than not to win it.
24.10| I would like you to believe that I have written this, as I said at the beginning, by way of reminding you, not of instructing you; although by way of instructing you too. For I am not afraid of having exceeded due measure in love; for there is no danger that what ought to be greatest should be too great. Farewell.
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